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Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) | |
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Palestinian novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist. Main themes in his writings are uprootedness, exile, and national struggle. He often used in his stories the desert and its heat as a symbol for the plight of the Palestinian people. Kuwait provides the background for his short story 'The Slave Fort', an adaptation of King Lear. The narrator visits his friend, a half-mad old man. He is the father of four sons who have become the richest people in the desert. The sons quarrel about who should provide a home for him. The old man settles in a humble hut of wood and earns his living by selling oyster shells. The narrator and his friend give the man two loaves and start to open the shells to find pearls. They find nothing, but the old man says: "'Were these shells your life - I mean, were each shell to represent a year of your life and you opened them one by one and found them empty, would you have been as sad as you are about losing a couple of loaves?'" Ghassan Kanafani's life and career as a writer was closely connected to the situation of the Palestinians, and his intense involvement in Palestinian affairs gave him a unique vantage point. Kanafani's two first novels, which experimented with language and form, rank among the most complex in all of Arabic fiction of that time. Kanafani was born in Acre, Palestine. In 1947 Palestine was partitioned into Arab and Jewish zones by the United Nations. Israel's wars of independence drove 780 000 Palestinians from their homeland. When the Arab-Israeli war started, Kanafani fled with his family first to Lebanon and then to Syria, where they settled as Palestinian refugees. After finishing his secondary education he studied Arabic literature at the University of Damascus. Kanafani was expelled from the university before receiving a degree. He moved to Kuwait, where he worked as a teacher and journalist, and then Beirut, where he was amongst other things the editor of the pro-Nasser paper al-Muharrir. During these years Kanafani's political activities increased. The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. Kanafani was a member of the Arab Nationalist Movement. In 1969 he became spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the editor-in-chief of its weekly Al-Hadaf. Arab-Israeli wars continued in 1956 and 1967. Kanafani's first novel, Men in the Sun, appeared in 1963. The book was adapted by the Egyptian director Tawfiq Salim into a film, called al-Makhduun. The film was banned in some Arab countries for its criticism of Arab regimes. Men in the Sun is the story of three Palestinians, who attempt to escape to Kuwait in the tank of a water truck. The characters represent three different generations. In the gloomy ending, they perish in their journey across the desert, referring to the end of the Palestinian people. While the refugees are dying under the heat of the sun, they knock continuously on the wall of the tank, crying, "We are here, we are dying, let us out, let us free." His ambitious and experimental second novel, All That's Left to You (1966), is considered one of the earliest and most successful modernist experiments in Arabic fiction. Kanafani used multiple narrators - two of them, the clock and the desert, were inanimate. The protagonist of the story is a young man named Hamid. He dreams of being reunited with his mother from whom he was separated in 1948. Hamid had fled to Gaza while his mother left for the West Bank. He tries to find her but becomes lost in the desert, crossing paths with an Israeli soldier. He is forced to eschew his original plan and turn to confront his enemy. Although he dies before locating his mother, he is in death reunited with his lost land. The thematic development reflects the change in political climate, and the initiation of the Palestinian armed struggle. Umm Sad (1969) reflects the situation of the Palestinians following the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967 and the rise of the Palestinian Resistance Movement. One of the central characters is a woman, Umm Sad, whose son joins the resistance. Kanafani's last published novel, Aid ila Hayfa (1970), had also a direct political message. In these books Kanafani abandoned interior monologues, flashbacks, and other complex techniques, and used straightforward narrative and dialogue. The novels marked the shift from nationalist ideals to a more pronounced Marxist ideology. "All thinking must set forth from the point of death, whether it be, as you say, that of a man who dies contemplating the charms of the body of a wonderfully beautiful girl, or whether he dies staring into a newly shaven face which frightens him because of an old wooden box tied round with string. The unsolved question remains that of the end; the question of non-existence, of eternal life - or what? Or what, my dear Ahmed?" (from 'The Death of Bed Number 12', 1961) Kanafani was assassinated on July 8, 1972, by a car bomb planted by Israeli agents. He was posthumously awarded the Lotus Prize for Literature by the Conference of Afro-Asian Writers. He left fragments of three novels that were published posthumously. Beside novels, Kanafani published four collections of short stories, literary criticism, plays, and historical expositions. He also tried his hand as a painter. For further reading: Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, vol. 2, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing by Barbara Harlow (1996); Ghassan Kanafani: A Study of his Novels and Short Stories by Fayha Abdul Hadi (1990); Man Is A Cause: Political Consciousness and the Fiction of Ghassan Kanafani by Muhammad Siddiq (1984); The Arabic Novel by Roger Allen (1982, 2nd ed. 1995); Al-Tariq ila al-khaymah al-ukhra by Radwa Ashur (1977); Ghassan Kanafani: The Life of an Palestinian by Stefan Wild (1975); Ghassan Kanafani by A. Kanafani (1973) Selected works:
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