LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returnof failure he slides as if down the comma itself, into the unexpected abyss. Werehe to have crossed it, he would have had to take his body, unquestionably malebut marked by historical loss, with him.That leap, and the acknowledgement that masculinity is implicated innational identity, is not taken by Kanafani’s protagonist, whose attempt tocounter his sense of loss as a man through bravado leads to a tragedy he cannotfully understand. As a sort of retrospective footnote to what cannot be said inthe context of the early 1960s, Yahya Yakhlif’s 1991 novel A Lake Beyond theWind, about the life of a village on the edge of Lake Tiberias (often referred to asthe Sea of Galilee in English), presents a nuanced portrait of male bravadocomprised of fear, idealism and anxiety. Set in the muddled months of theBritish withdrawal from Palestine and the first Arab–Israeli war, the novelexplores the feelings of young men from Iraq, Syria and Palestine who join thevolunteer army in 1948. They are all poorly armed and manipulated by theircommanders’ own political objectives.Yakhlif returns to the scene to critique these internal politics, and in theprocess he portrays the flimsy construction of masculinity in the context of thefirst Arab-Israeli war. He does this in large part through stories of objects whosepower lies in their symbolism. Like the heroic but fruitless dreams of the novel’smost powerless characters, these objects appear to promise victory, but do not.The novel’s several narratives are threaded by the story of a bulletproof vestpurchased by one of Samakh’s residents from a passing British. The vest ispassed on as a gift to a local army commander, and eventually plays a large rolein constructing a lie: the local commander tells someone higher up that thebulletproof vest was war booty, when in fact the battle to which he refers hadbeen a definitive defeat. When Najib, a young soldier from Samakh, is orderedto give the vest to the inspector general, he chooses instead to walk away fromthe camp with it. In much the same way, the most prominent romance in thenovel, between a Syrian volunteer and a neighbour of his family in Damascus, ismarked by objects, most prominently an amulet that she has made up for himand which he draws out periodically to look at. Both the bulletproof vest andthe amulet have an equivalent use in the novel: each has a nearly magicalreference to an unrealisable dream, military victory and romantic union with afar-away woman. The novel appropriately ends with the contemplations of ademobilised Iraqi soldier walking, with Najib, to the north end of Lake Tiberiasas refugees stream northwards and eastwards from the region: ‘I realized thenthat everything had been lost, and that all paths led to exile and dispersion.Such a melancholy prospect. Such a lonely road’ (214). This is the road thatAbul Khaizuran travels, too.By 1966, when All That’s Left to You was published, the concept of return wasemerging as the dominant motif in nationalist thought in conjunction with— 63 —www.taq.ir