LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmanby a series of disconnected lines which fuse in different combinations. Speakingin turns (shifts in the speaking voice are indicated by different typefaces) thevoices of the five characters interdependently weave a narrative from whichnone can be extracted if the narrative as a whole is to make sense. Voicesinterrupt one another, finish each others’ sentences and thoughts, and extendverbal images sown in the text by characters far away in time or space. Not onlyare there no clear distinctions between places and times, there are not alwaysdistinctions between Maryam and Hamid as speaking subjects, who share andinterpenetrate each other’s consciousness. In overall effect, the novel’s formalcharacteristics highlight the collective and interdependent relations betweenpeople, and how time and space can seem to be themselves agents in creating acollective reality.Kanafani explains in his introduction that the reason for writing the novel inthis way is so that its story can be told ‘in a single burst’. That ‘single burst’ is themoment in which the murder of Zakaria by Maryam, in hearing distance of thewall clock, and the confrontation in the Desert between the soldier and Hamidsimultaneously occur, thereby drawing on all the characters at once. AsKanafani renders them, these are not merely parallel events, each made moreemphatic by its structural likeness to the other. It is actually one event – Maryam’sdecisive act recovers Hamid, lost in the womblike Desert, and ensures him arebirth as her future child. Whether or not this is seen as a real event in theworld of the novel, or a metaphor, the point is that Maryam’s shame is absolvedby her wilful and partisan violence, in which she herself de-emphasises hervarious roles as a woman to highlight, at the end, her heroic role as a mother.Both the tangled interweave of language and the knotted structures of desirewhich are resolved through the odd resurrection of Maryam’s brother as her sonultimately refer to the traumatic moment in 1948 in which they were forged.Edward Said has contended that the construction of a scene is the definingproblem of Arabic literature after 1948. Unable to draw on an establishedpresent as the backdrop against which the mutable human personality expressesitself, the writer is constrained to construct a new present. As he puts it withspecific regard to Kanafani’s style: ‘The paradox of contemporaneity for thePalestinian is very sharp indeed … If the present cannot be “given” simply (thatis, if time will not allow him either to differentiate clearly between the past andhis present or to connect them because the 1948 disaster, unmentioned exceptas an episode hidden within episodes, prevents continuity), it is intelligible onlyas achievement’ (1980: 153). Like Said’s own expository framing of ‘the 1948disaster’, as a parenthetical linguistic event around which a sentence distends inorder to achieve continuous sense, All That’s Left to You lays out the lives Hamidand Maryam as repetitive circlings of a parenthesised trauma. The bracketedepisode in which the children’s parents – the representatives of law and object— 68 —www.taq.ir