LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of return(Fathiyya and her brother Fathi share the same name; Fathiyya is the sister of aman meant to become her friend’s wife, but in her offer to give her brotheraway, Fathiyya also acts the parent to her own brother; and in a third instance,Fathiyya is the wife of a man to whom Maryam is also married.) In the compressedspace of the post-1948 world, it makes little difference which comes first: allrelationships collapse into structural similarity in which sisters, wives andmothers, and brothers, husbands and fathers play substituting roles, making anyerotic pairing a potentially polluted one. In the end, Maryam in her kitchen,and Hamid in the Desert (and inside the Desert) will combine forces to excise athird party who threatens their existence, and in that moment gender roles willcongeal for the foreseeable future. With the Desert and Maryam already interchangeablyfixed as ‘fertile land’, Hamid is reborn as a son of the motherlandwhen Maryam kills Zakaria. Through rebirth on the land, Hamid is given a wayout of the inverted terms of the castration complex with which his father lefthim. For, if the desire for incest is resolved by the fear of certain punishment inthe form of castration, Hamid finds that the punishment for national castrationis illicit desire. Hamid’s illegitimate yearning for his mother and his sister ispurified by its transformation into revolutionary desire to return to the land.However, unlike Maryam’s capacity to effect her desire by giving birth, Hamidcannot achieve revolutionary return by himself.All That’s Left to You leaves the focus on male virility intact by going aroundit; since nothing is to be done, at least yet, about the male shame of nationalcastration, focus shifts to the female body. As a primarily maternal geographywhich in its own fertile potential lacks nothing, the female body becomes thesign of an imminent male virility, which will be achieved through return to, andcontrol of, the land. Motherhood itself was held in high esteem by Kanafani,who when asked by a friend to name his highest ideal, replied (in a letter) thatit was his mother, who although semi-literate, was highly intelligent, taughthim in indirect ways, and was a ‘genuine person – ethical … and withoutpretension’ (Habib 1990: 13). He would go on to write Um Saad (1969), a novelwhich celebrates just such a mother.At the same time, the problem of female desire posed by Kawkab, flickeringin the distance in Men in the Sun, is brought into sharp focus in All That’s Left toYou. Feminine desire, constructed as inherently indiscriminate, voracious andgoverned by passion more than reason, must be curtailed and brought into linewith the contours of the masculine return. Femininity must be trained to wait, itmust be re-domesticated and reminded that its objective is partisan and reproductive.It must not assert desire independently, as Kawkab appeared to, lest itthreaten the extremely tenuous, only imminent, assertion of masculine presence.In All That’s Left to You, the degree to which, from a male perspective, femininepresence appears to threaten the possibility of masculine presence is demonstrated— 71 —www.taq.ir