LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmansexuality that give these interactions credence play important roles in constructinga viable Palestinian masculine identity.Kanafani’s novels are also usefully read in light of the recognition unfoldingacross the social sciences and humanities that nations are gendered, and thatgender shapes politics ‘through men and their interests, their notions of manliness,and masculine micro and macro cultures’ (Nagel 1998: 243). InKanafani’s literary elaboration of national identity, the limited economy of thenation is given expression on both a geographical and a psychic landscape.Conscious action and unconscious desires are mutually constituted. A close lookat the interactions in Men in the Sun and All That’s Left to You reveals stories ofcharacters whose humanity is given concrete physical expression in time andplace, as men and women, and as members of national communities. Theyusefully elaborate the insight that the ‘discovery’ of the boundaries of the modernnation and the modern unconscious, History and psychoanalysis, unfolded intandem, 17 and of the particular resonance of these nineteenth-century claims inspecific national settings.The 1967 war decisively ended the triumphal masculine return proposed byAll That’s Left to You. It also punctured the romantic vision of women whosedangerous desires could be subordinated to a masculine national will. In post-1967 literature, women as authors and heroes critiqued the masculine narrativeof return for its failure to achieve results, and carved out narrative spaces thatpermitted the entry of feminine narratives as nationalist narratives. 18 Nearly ageneration after the men in the sun first set off for Kuwait, another fictionalscene at the crossroads of masculinity and national identity takes place. Thistime, in Sahar Khalifeh’s 1974 novel, Wild Thorns, their paths cross at theborder between Jordan and the West Bank occupied by Israel in 1967. A youngPalestinian man, Usama, is returning from his work as a translator in anunnamed ‘oil country’ of the Gulf region to his family home in Jerusalem. Enroute to the border he chats with an older man, Abu Muhammad, who displaysan expensive watch with pride to Usama, explaining that several of his sons aresuccessfully working in Kuwait. The gift, he tells Usama, is a present for hisyoungest son, Khalid, ‘the last of the line’ (Khalifeh 1994: 7). Khalid, his fatherreports, is ‘the only one who’s been a problem. He got out of prison on bail.They’d tortured him in every part of his body, even down there. 19 They loosed adog on him that went for his genitals. He may be infertile [Æaqir, a term thatusually refers to a woman].’ Usama corrects the older man: ‘You mean impotent[Æaqim, which usually refers to a man].’ 20 Abu Muhammad shrugs at the differenceand says he’s an uneducated man.The linguistic correction, if slight, is nevertheless telling. It enfolds a narrativerelating masculinity to national identity that spans the uncertain generation ofAbul Khaizuran and Abu Muhammad to their descendants in the next— 74 —www.taq.ir