LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returntheir ensuing argument threatens Maryam with the choice of either divorce orabortion of the baby Maryam has already decided to name Hamid. In thekitchen, as in the Desert, the survival of someone named Hamid hangs in thebalance. At exactly the moment that Zakaria demands that Maryam abort herchild, Maryam hears another voice, ‘welling up in my body, echoing there,screaming into my head … “We can’t dispose of him now, we can’t get rid ofhim now.”’ The voice, coming from inside her but not quite her own, suggeststhe impulses for survival of the fetus itself, but refers ambiguously to both thefetus and Zakaria. In both scenes, the female figure – the Desert and Maryam,respectively – mediates a male contest, and holds the power to decide thevictor. Maryam, having betrayed her brother once by having become pregnantby Zakaria, redeems herself and her brother by making the choice to kill Zakariaand save the unborn Hamid. Separated, but sharing the same consciousness,Maryam and Hamid finally act in harmonious tandem to throw off enemiesfrom within and without, while a formerly threatening incestuous link betweenbrother and sister is now expressed as one between mother and son. What is left,in Kanafani’s novel, is Hamid lost in the belly of a feminine Desert, andMaryam, in her kitchen in Gaza, pregnant with a child she has already decidedto name Hamid. The novel closes with the image of the clock on the wall,beating out the same cyclical time it always has, and beneath which Maryam sitsover the corpse of her husband. Hamid may have thrown his watch away, but hewill be reborn into a new time, the time of return. But while it is Maryam’smilitant decisiveness that ensures Hamid’s return, she is not offered rebirth orthe chance to toss away the clock that ticks out her waiting. Rather, her statusand her body are newly yoked to the cyclical time of reproduction. The vignettethat closes the novel, of Maryam between murder and reproductive labour, ormore starkly as a figure with power over both death and life, displays theambivalent position she will occupy for the foreseeable future. Her power overmen is tremendous, and it is constructed in equally tremendous terms, for sheboth imperils and delivers life itself. The dull repetitiousness of the clock takeson an ideological force; it sounds a refusal to admit Maryam’s presence intohistory.The few events of the novel are related through a complex structure veinedby flashback and repetition. The causal logic that normally drives a chronologicalnarrative ceases to operate at moments of historical trauma. In additionto the human characters, Maryam, Hamid and Zakaria, there are two metaphoricalones, Time and Space (in the figure of the Desert) who also narrate.As the author explains to the reader in an introduction to the formalcharacteristics of his novel: ‘the five characters in this novel, Hamid, Maryam,Zakaria, Time and the Desert, do not move along parallel or conflicting lines’(Kanafani 1990: xxi/159). 15 Rather, as Kanafani clarifies, the novel progresses— 67 —www.taq.ir