LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returnnecessary for Oedipal socialisation – were lost, and around which the novel’sevents implode, gives the novel its particular form as much as its story.Maryam and Hamid were in effect orphaned in 1948. Their father died fightingfor the national cause, and the children were separated from their mother onthe evening of their flight from their hometown of Jaffa. Maryam and Hamidwent with their aging aunt to Gaza, while their mother ended up in Jordan incircumstances that remain unelaborated. Separated from their mother by twonational borders, Maryam and Hamid raise each other. Hamid spends his youthhell-bent on trying to enforce his father’s last dictate, ‘Do not talk about marriagebefore our national cause has been decided’ (Kanafani 1990: 19/189), by avoidingromantic interests himself, and hoping to steer Maryam clear of erotic entanglementtoo. Maryam, aware of the prohibition’s import, nevertheless finds herselfplagued by its implications, since she knows she faces ‘a trivial world unpreparedto accommodate another spinster’ (Kanafani 1990: 18/187). Beset by yearningfor their mother, and prohibited by their father from pursuing relationshipsbeyond the family, the brother and sister have little choice but to coerce theiradolescent desires onto the circumscribed circuit of their relationship with eachother. In the absence of parents behind them, or a known future before them,they flood the small space of the family with substitute longings for each other,both as parents and as symbolic lovers.Like Hamid, who sees Maryam as a substitute mother/lover, 16 Maryam lovesher brother with a longing that borders on the illicit. For Maryam, however, itstops at that border as she matures. The elder of the two siblings, Maryam findsthe paradox of their relationship increasingly difficult to bear: ‘How can Hamidpossibly understand? For all his wonderful manhood, he was my brother’(Kanafani 1990: 18/187). Maryam eventually breaks the family rule when shegets involved with Zakaria, but every time she gets into bed (the bed itself isHamid’s) with Zakaria, she is overcome by the memory of her brother. UntilMaryam’s disobedient act, there seems to be no way out of this constraint for thechildren, suspended in the liminal space of their father’s until, the undecidednational cause before which there can be no marriage. But the consequence ofMaryam’s entanglement with the traitor Zakaria has the tinge of miscegenationabout it, highlighting the particular nature of the crisis into which her father’slogic pitches her. Ungoverned by father or nation, Maryam’s desire is dangerousbecause it may lead her to reproduce for an enemy, whether internal or external.At the same time, if there will be no marriage in the absence of a state, therewill soon be no nation if there is no marriage, or reproduction, at least.The claustrophobic psychic constraints under which Maryam and Hamid growup are mimicked by the similarly confined verbal operations permitted in thenovel. Events and their narration are not so much caused in All That’s Left toYou as triggered by their structural similitude to something else. Words and— 69 —www.taq.ir