LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmanby Hamid’s encounter with the Desert, who is arguably the most powerfulcharacter in the novel.The Desert is powerful because she belongs to no nation, and because shetranscends the historical sequence of male claims to her vast territory, whetherPalestinian or Israeli, by rendering all men helpless. She threatens ‘death, night’ssolitary song that parades my body’ (Kanafani 1990: 8/172) and offers ‘a breastthat … holds nothing but terror’ (Kanafani 1990: 8/172), but upon whichHamid has no choice but to throw himself when he hears a car passing in thedesert. Indiscriminate in her appetites, the Desert’s threat lies in her capacity toassimilate any man who wanders into her. As Hamid ruminates:There isn’t a steel blade in the world which wouldn’t be shattered if it were to grazeyour naked yellow breast … Mine and theirs … All the steel blades of the worldcould never hack down one root of your surface, but would shatter … in the face ofyour firm harvest which grows bigger and bigger as a man strides further and furtherinto your depth, step-by-step, until he himself turns into a nameless, deep-rootedstem that thrives erect on your juices. (Kanafani 1990: 14/179–80)From the perspective of Hamid, the potency of the Desert is paradoxical. TheDesert’s presence guarantees his survival, because it can nourish him, but in theprocess of nourishing she also threatens to erase his own autonomy, making hisreturn also a form of subjugation to her. It is here, in the space between theopposing values placed on feminine desire, that the mechanics of masculinereturn are enacted. As Hamid struggles with the Israeli soldier, he begins toproject nationalist sentiment onto the Desert. He subjugates the threat that hervoraciousness and presence embody by imagining them as directed against thesoldier. He emerges victorious over the Israeli soldier by re-ascribing the Desert’scapacity to nourish in relation to himself only.When it is viewed from within the specific contours of the return narrative,the paradoxical characterisation of femininity in the trope of land-as-womanappears much more dynamic than it might otherwise. Women are often characterisedas both aggressive and passive, sexually voracious and sexually submissive,redemptive and shameful, threateningly present and positively absent as a figureof maternal potential (an emptiness that signifies future presence). But, althoughthese contradictory attributions may coexist, they can also be seen as traces of anarrative process in which different projections of femininity as dominating andsubjugated are used as levers to facilitate masculine return. Masculine return isinstigated through an encounter with a dominating feminine presence, andachieved by fantasising its subjugation to masculine desire. In the process of thisnarrative, masculine absence is exchanged for presence, and feminine presencecommuted to feminine assistance in the task of masculine return.One of the striking characteristics of All That’s Left to You is the author’sattentiveness to the consequences of this process for its female protagonist,— 72 —www.taq.ir