LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmana narrative of exile, concludes with the triumphant return of a young manpoised at its end to liberate his homeland. In the process of telling this story,Kanafani rendered both the female body and Palestine as interchangeablemetaphors of a ‘fertile land’, whose fecundity must be yoked to the nationalcause. In proffering the female body as a national symbol, Kanafani dramaticallyshifted the meaning he attached to bodies in Men in the Sun, which emphasisedthe castrated male body as the sign of permanent national loss.The formal complexity of Kanafani’s novel makes extracting its plot a trickymatter. Only a few events happen in the narrative time of the novel, which isabout a brother and sister living in Gaza. Maryam, the sister, becomes pregnantby and marries Zakaria, a traitor twice over. Zakaria already has a wife and fivechildren, and also once betrayed an underground resistance member to theIsraeli army, causing the man’s death. Hamid, furious at the shame his sister hasbrought on their family, decides to walk across the Negev Desert to his motherin Jordan. Maryam sits anxiously in her house in Gaza, listening to the repetitiveticking of Hamid’s wall clock, hearing in them his footsteps. Hamid in theDesert throws his watch away, a gesture which may be read as a step out ofcalendar time. In keeping with the consistent characterisation of the Desert as amaternal and eroticised female character (who has a speaking part) and Hamid’sstated goal of reaching his mother, the tossing of his watch suggests a step intosomething like fetal time, from which he will be reborn. 13 Like Jonson’s braveinfant of Saguntum, so horrified by a world under siege that he refuses to beborn, Hamid too nurses the hope that he can simply turn around and go back.Events take a turn for both brother and sister simultaneously. Hamid comesupon an Israeli soldier who has lost his own way in the Desert and lit flares toannounce his presence. Hamid does not know who it is that lights the flares, buthe treats him as an intruder. A struggle involving all three actors – Desert,soldier and Hamid – ensues: ‘Suddenly he was on me; I felt the ground hurl meup towards him and we fell together … and at once I was sure I was the strongerof the two. Carefully and precisely I raised my knee and put it between histhighs. He began moaning faintly and said something I couldn’t understand’(Kanafani 1990: 32/205). 14 The land takes sides, or at least Hamid perceives theland as actively assisting his struggle. Hamid relieves the soldier of his flare gunand machine gun, and takes the soldier’s long knife. The soldier leaps up toattack Hamid. Hamid, in possession of the knife, holds it against the soldier’sstomach and the man retreats. But the cycle of psychic combat is not yet over.The soldier tries to crawl on his backside towards a water flask, but Hamidthrows the flask even further away, underlining the infantile position of thesoldier, who is now dependent on him.At the same time, in Gaza, Maryam senses that her brother is in danger andwakes up from a fitful sleep. Shortly afterwards, Zakaria awakens as well, and in— 66 —www.taq.ir