LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returnderisive modification of his name. The affair itself, as they recount withsalacious zeal, has made Abul Khaizuran a feminine figure. They report thatthey have heard that Kawkab loves Abul Khaizuran so much that she writes himcheques for the pleasure of his company. In other words, Abul Khaizuran is thereal prostitute. The (not very) veiled challenge to his manhood reveals theminuteness of the conceptual economy in which sexuality can be expressed for,in this scene, if a man is not a man he is by definition – in the matrix of socialrelations, and in language – a woman. The competitive play of the jockeyingbetween men is reminiscent of the verbal jousting Michael Gilsenan observedof the North Lebanese community he studied in the 1970s where, as in manyparts of the Arab world, manhood was composed as importantly of word as ofdeed: ‘A “real man” was always alive to the occasions he might seize to provokea contest; looking for opportunities to develop an argument, to close offanother’s rhetorical alternatives and to drive him … to the broken, incoherentlanguage that signified helpless exasperation and loss of self-control’ (Gilsenan1996: 206). Abu Baqir’s apparently giddy celebration of virility, and his requestthat Abul Khaizuran ‘tell … how she has shown her love’ masks a hostile verbalchallenge. Abul Khaizuran participates because he knows the rules of theconventional challenge. That he loses the game is less significant than the factthat ultimately he decides he must play it.Finally, testily, with no time to waste, Abul Khaizuran replies to Abu Baqir’schallenge in a straightforward way: ‘Idha rawaha al-hajj lakum … fa-limadhaturiduni Æan arwiha marra ukhra?’ [If the Haj told it to you, why do you want meto tell it again?] The narrative fragments exactly here, exposing several faultlines at once. The more time Abul Khaizuran spends talking, the more likely itis the men in the tank will die. This emergency in the plot, related to time,artfully embeds a narrative crisis, related to History. Haj Rida has told a storyabout Abul Khaizuran that celebrates virility and prowess among men. It is notthe story’s truth (it isn’t true, as we and Abul Khaizuran know), but its repetitionthat gives it currency. Indeed, it has already been several times repeated. AbuBaqir ‘had thought about it day and night, endowing it with all the obscenitycreated by his long, tormenting deprivation’ (Kanafani 1995: 51). AbulKhaizuran asks the right question when he inquires with irritation why he shouldtell it again; he acknowledges with a nascent consciousness that to repeat thenarrative as it has already been told would not acknowledge the historical shiftsthat gave it meaning, because the world has changed. There has been a war, andan injury, and a loss to which Abul Khaizuran’s body irrevocably testifies.But Abul Khaizuran does not have a new story to tell yet. The rhetoricalperformance of masculinity as it exists does not admit his tale of nationalcommunity and national suffering. To borrow Massad’s terminology, the rhetoricof masculinity is not nationalised. Rather, masculinity is entirely severed from— 61 —www.taq.ir