LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returnthe recognition and restitution of Palestinian rights might lead us to expect thathis novels and short stories would be no more than a vehicle for the preaching ofthese principles, albeit in an indirect form. Part of Kanafani’s achievement lies inthe fact that he avoided this pitfall, for rather than transfer experience directly tothe page he reworked it to give it a profounder, universal meaning. (HilaryKilpatrick, p. 2)Notwithstanding its excellent intentions, this kind of preface has a bleachingfunction. It promises the reader a clean, safe reading experience by assuring him/herno unsettling or difficult-to-digest specifics about a different culture appear in thepages to follow, and that the work is in effect safe to consume.8. In Jordan, Palestinians were given Jordanian citizenship. Palestinians in Israel weregiven Israeli citizenship.9. For a variety of treatments of the relationship between gender and national identity,see the collection Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker et al. (eds), (NewYork: Routledge, 1992). For specific discussions of the construction of masculinity inMiddle Eastern communities, see Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture inthe Modern Middle East, Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (eds), (London:Saqi Books, 2000). Almost all of the essays in Imagined Masculinities deal directly ortouch significantly on the relationship of gender to nationalism.10. Joseph Massad, ‘Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism’,in Middle East Journal 49 (1995), pp. 468–83.11. The woman that the errant father marries makes a striking female counterpoint toAbul Khaizuran, as she lost a leg at the thigh when Jaffa was bombed. The injurymakes her an unappealing marriage partner to most men; Marwan’s father acceptsthe marriage in order to secure the house that comes with her. In Tawfiq Salih’sfilmed version of the narrative, the woman’s prosthetic leg is shown as an eeriesilhouette on a wall as she undresses for her wedding night, making the associationbetween her injury and presumably compromised sexual function as unmistakable asAbul Khaizuran’s. The rather unsubtle rendition of specifically male castrationimagined onto a female body suggests the depth at which the image of the intactmale body serves as a template for imagining the communal body. At the same time,the ease with which this template is relayed in female terms and references the waya national crisis rebounds on women (by disrupting marriage) indicates how flexibleand essentially indeterminate the collective psychic imagination is in relation to thebodies on which it is projected.12. For further discussion, see Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization:People, Power, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).13. Muhammad Siddiq’s reading takes account of these same characteristics of Hamid’strek, and fruitfully suggests that these ‘illustrate the transfer of Hamid’s sexual energyfrom the images of his real sister and mother to the Desert.’ Siddiq sees the throwingaway of the watch as the beginning of an initiation rite, in which the initiate mustbe isolated from the world of normal time (Siddiq, p. 32). Radwa ÆAshur viewsHamid’s disposal of his watch as an act which frees him from the past, and allowshim to begin to confront the present.14. All quotations are from Jayyusi and Reed’s translation, All That’s Left to You: ANovella and Other Stories (Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of— 77 —www.taq.ir