What I Talk About When I Talk About Ghassan Kanafani
ALIA ALGHURAIR
Illustration by Sasha Haddad
“Do you know what the homeland is, Safiyya?
The homeland is where none of this can happen.”
During quarantine, I had to write a 4,000-word Extended Essay in Arabic analyzing a freely-chosen Arabic literary text, or texts, to submit to the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO). Those familiar with the IBO know that each student has the liberty to choose what subject they want to write their academic essay on. Although embarrassing to admit, I had no interest in Arabic or Arabic literature outside of my Arabic B class. The only reason I chose to write it in Arabic is that I wanted to cling to my first language and embrace it in an era where not many would prefer to do so. Desperate, I begged my supervisor to recommend a few Arabic novels to me, so I can quickly make a decision on which literary texts to analyze. Kindly enough, my supervisor recommended the novella Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani. I agreed to it simply because it was less than a 100-page read. In retrospect, choosing to write an analysis on it and documenting the Palestinian struggle was one of the best decisions I ever made in academia.
Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian author and illustrator born in 1937. Kanafani’s works are deeply rooted in Arabian culture, Palestinian in particular. His works are not only creative but are also a mirror-reflection of his activism. Returning to Haifa is considered to be one of the most prominent novellas in Palestinian literature. Although fictional, it is a biographical depiction of many Palestinian experiences. The novella allows the reader to create a link between what is read and the reality of Palestinians subjected to displacement and exile. Also, it persuades the reader that humans are always the primary cause, and humans are the sole creators of homelands.
Returning to Haifa captures the suffering of Said and Safiyya, two parents displaced from Haifa after the 1948 calamity, only to find themselves on the shores of another Palestinian city, Ramallah. At only five months old, their firstborn son was forgotten in their Haifa home. The grief continued to live with Said and Safiyya for many years, but despite that, there was still hope for them to return to Haifa and find their son.
After twenty years, they decided to return to Haifa, only to learn that their lost son, Khaldoun, became Dov, the adoptive son of a Jewish family that took over Said and Safiyya’s home. Khaldoun imbibed Zionist beliefs to the point of intoxication and became one of Israel’s loyal soldiers.
The novella starts with Said and Safiyya arriving at the outskirts of Haifa. Said was overwhelmed with a deep melancholy that he even thought of driving back to Ramallah. Although Said and Safiyya spent the entire drive talking about the war and all its details, Safiyya’s silence upon reaching Haifa served as a confirmation to Said’s emotions. Through that, Kanafani prepares the reader for a great event, as if returning to Haifa is not like returning to any other city.
Upon reaching Haifa, Kanafani reveals to the reader the identity of the Zionist society that sees itself as the chosen people of God. Referring to the reopening of Haifa’s borders, Said exclaims, “Why this? Just for our sakes alone? No! This is part of the war. They’re saying to us, ‘Help yourselves, look and see how much better we are than you, how much more developed. You should accept being our servants. You should admire us.’” Kanafani portrays Said as someone who smelt nothing but the scent of war since his return to Haifa to prove that Zionist beliefs are just an illusion. Through this, Kanafani convinces the reader of the necessity of resistance and activism. In addition, Kanafani creates a metaphorical vehicle allowing the reader to be transported alongside Said and Safiyya to the day of the calamity, and to the present, where the couple was reminded of their lost homeland.
Said’s memories were personified to a large extent. Kanafani treats Said’s memories as if they were the main character full of nostalgia, who attacked Said’s mentality fiercely. When Said remembered the details of Haifa, it seemed as if he still claimed it as his homeland and denounced the enemy by knowing a lot more about Haifa than they did, despite them declaring Haifa as their own land after the war. Said did not neglect to mention the name of any street, district, or person who passed by him and Safiyya in Haifa at a time when details and small sentiments were much more significant than material things. Kanafani exposes a Palestinian stereotype, in which some Palestinians preferred “the search for material security over the fight to regain their land,” as Hilary Kilpatrick, the English translator of many of Kanafani’s short stories and novellas, writes. Essentially, Kanafani reveals to the reader that Palestine is much more than memories; Palestine is a cause, an affair, and a homeland that goes beyond the search for memories.
When Said and Safiyya entered their former Haifa home, shock had bewitched them, as its new owners had completely transformed their Arab son. Khaldoun’s truth was a disappointment that made Said change his convictions and question Khaldoun—or Dov—about whether or not he was genuinely Said’s and Safiyya’s son. At that moment, Said was unable to notice any physical similarities between Dov and Khalid, Said’s and Safiyya’s second son. Perhaps this was a defense mechanism to rid himself of the guilt he carried for twenty years, and to rid himself of Dov, who wanted nothing to do with his biological parents. Within these lines, Kanafani shifts the hopeful mood to a dark one by comparing Said’s memories of Khaldoun to melted ice. The reader denotes that Said’s memories of Khaldoun have melted by a blazing sun that represents the harsh truth.
Just like Said, Kanafani fed his characters with in-depth personas and paradoxical convictions to draw out the true essence of the novella: activism. When it comes to Safiyya, the emotion-filled woman full of sorrows, she represents a maternal woman missing her son and her homeland to which she returns after a long time of uncertain hope. She appeared to be susceptible to breakage and in the midst of collapsing, but, through her weakness, Kanafani aims to show the reader the extent of the guilt that bears her. As for Miriam, Dov’s adoptive mother, she was a character whose humanity and innate instinct caused internal conflict. When she first arrived at Haifa from Poland, her husband was able to convince her to stay as soon as he brought her an expensive gift, Khaldoun.
Throughout the novella, Miriam tried to make up for all the years Said and Safiyya lost to the war. Kanafani gave Miriam a unique personality, as she treated Said and Safiyya as her own extended family. Miriam gave the impression that the war was not her fault, but no matter how warm and welcoming she was, and although she was not solely responsible for Said and Safiyya’s twenty years of loss, she belittled their pain thinking she could compensate all those years with the bare minimum of humanity.
The novella ended with Said and Safiyya deciding to focus on Khalid, their resistant young man who did not see and did not know the details of the war. To him, the homeland was more than memories, sadness, uncertainty. The homeland was a future worthy of carrying a weapon and fighting for.
As I translated Kanafani’s words into my own, I grew attached to them and decided to read Men in the Sun, also by Ghassan Kanafani, and I even incorporated its analysis into my 4,000-word Extended Essay.
Men in the Sun is the most well-known novella by Kanafani, at least in the West. It follows the story of three refugees—Abu Qais, Assad, and Marwan—who reside in Iraq ten years after the 1948 calamity. The three men, despite coming from different families, share three things: Palestinian blood, dreams of the past and the future, and poverty. The three men coincidentally meet with Abul Khaizuran, a fellow Palestinian, who promised to smuggle them to Kuwait on a lorry. In Kuwait, the three men wish to seek money and employment to feed their families.
The first victim of Palestinian displacement was Abu Qais, an old man with a wife and a son. His story starts with his chest on the ground, smelling the damp earth. He thought the dampness was because of the rain, but he quickly banished that thought and remembered the heat of August in Iraq. The intense heat was a major symbol in the novella that manipulated its events immensely.
Abu Qais spent his ten years in Iraq as a beggar, but he was also a dreamer of the past. He dreamt of his olive trees, his home, his youth, his village, and all that was lost. However, his dreams of the past were replaced by a longing for the future, a future where he can support his wife and son, buy olive shoots, and build a home. But those dreams came with high risks.
Abu Qais was convinced by a family friend to move to Kuwait, and his only option was to be smuggled. He visited an office in Basra that was notorious for smuggling refugees across the borders. He met a fat man who demanded fifteen Dinars in exchange for the trip, but Abu Qais was unable to pay. Instead, he walked out of the office and threw himself on the ground, smelling the dampness of the earth again. This signifies his attachment to Iraq, despite it not being his original homeland, exhibiting the role humans play in the creation of homelands.
The second victim of Palestinian displacement was Assad, who represented the second generation after the 1948 calamity. He was an innocent young man before being subjected to deceit, as he was abandoned in the middle of Iraq’s desert by a smuggler. The desert’s heat was exhausting, and Assad felt alone in the world, preferring captivity over loneliness. “If they had taken me to the desert prison, Al-Jafra, at H4, I wonder if life would have been kinder than it is now. Pointless, pointless. The desert was everywhere.”
After hours, he reached Basra and visited the same fat man at the smuggling office. He had fifteen Dinars on him but wanted to pay on his own terms: after reaching Kuwait. The fat man refused him, and Assad left to stay at a nearby hotel.
The third victim of Palestinian displacement was Marwan, who represented the third generation after the 1948 calamity; he was only sixteen years old. He came from a broken family, with a brother who stopped sending money back home from Kuwait, and a nonchalant father who divorced his mother to marry a wealthy woman with a cement house.
Marwan visited the fat man at the smuggling office with only five Dinars. He threatened to report the fat man to the police if he was not smuggled to Kuwait, but he was met with a harsh slap, sending him out the door. He met Abul Khaizuran, a tall, familiar-looking man. Abul Khaizuran offered to smuggle Marwan to Kuwait, for he needed a secondary source of income. Abul Khaizuran already worked as a transporter for a wealthy and respected man, who owned a large, licensed truck used to transport a water tank. Soon after, the events lead to the Abu Qais and Assad also encountering Abul Khaizuran, who gathered the trio and explained the plan to them. They were each to be smuggled to Kuwait by crossing two borders. Within a fifty-meter radius from the border, the three men were to hide inside the blazing-hot yet empty water tank for no longer than seven minutes. After some argument, the trio agreed and began their journey, each paying ten Dinars for the trip, except Marwan, who paid five.
In the past, Abul Khaizuran worked as a skilled driver for the British army, defending his homeland. However, he lost his manhood after an attack. He hated himself and the world and felt as if he lost the worst thing one could lose for the homeland’s sake. The homeland was not to return, and his manhood was not, either. Kanafani used Abul Khaizuran’s physical impotence to foreshadow how impotent his plan was.
The truck carried the trio towards Kuwait, abandoning their families, their dreams, their pasts, and their futures. They reached the first border at Safwan, but the heat of the water tank was beyond overwhelming, despite spending only six minutes inside it. Paradoxically, Assad complained of the cold, foreshadowing his death.
Upon reaching the second border at Al-Mutlaa, one of the border officials became intrigued with a story he heard about Abul Khaizuran and a dancer named Kawkab, and twenty-one minutes passed with the trio inside the water tank. When Abul Khaizuran returned, he found them dead.
“Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything? Why?
Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you bang on the sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why?”
Within these lines, Kanafani indirectly highlights Palestinian devastation. The trio shared the fate of death and accepted it gracefully, preferring death over imprisonment. By showing the trio’s lack of resistance to struggle, Kanafani’s novella served as a siren-call to shed light on the fact that Palestinians, or anyone subjected to displacement and exile, should fight for the homeland and try to win it back.
Through this novella, Ghassan Kanafani criticizes all parties that caught the plight of Palestine, and precisely its surrendered people, including himself, who abandoned their homeland to search for their own salvation as refugees.
Upon learning the events of these two novellas, I concluded that they are both mandatory reads for anyone who appreciates the art of the written word, for everyone needs to know that the lost homeland is not just memories that one can search for and try to retrieve without resistance. The idea of asylum as a permanent solution to loss is, essentially, the same as siding with the enemy. I also concluded how dangerous normalizing struggle can be, and that the Palestinian issue will always remain a national, regional, and international issue until its liberation.
Alia AlGhurair (aliaalghurair on Instagram) is a 18-year-old writer-in-the-making and economist-to-be from Dubai. When her nose is not immersed in a classic novel; when her fingers are not covered in blisters from the tight grip of her pen; and when her ears are not sore from the pounding of romantic 20th century Arabic songs; she is most likely to be found questioning her profound identity, playing a video game, or designing mkhaweer.
Edited by Halima Zaghbib