Men in the Sun
Men in the Sun
by Ghassan Kanafani
THE LITRARY WORK
A novella set in Iraq and Kuwait in 1958; published in Arabic (as Rijal fi al-shams) in 1963, in English in 1978.
SYNOPSIS
Three Palestinian refugees who seek security and a future outside their homeland meet a grim fate without achieving their goal.
Events in History at the Time of the Novella
Ghassan Kanafani was born in Acre on the northern Mediterranean coast of Palestine in 1936. After his family moved to Jaffa, Kanafani attended a French Catholic school. His father, a lawyer and anti-British Mandate activist, was expelled to Acre at the start of the 1936 Palestinian revolt. In 1948, when Kanafani was 12 years old, his family fled Acre empty-handed to a small village in southern Lebanon, near the border, hoping to return home after the fighting ended. Overnight life changed drastically, with the family’s plummeting from an upper to an under class. In 1952, Kanafani’s father moved the family to Damascus, Syria, where Kanafani worked during the day and continued his studies at night. He earned his high-school certificate, then enrolled in Damascus University. Attracted to journalism, Kanafani contributed to a number of periodicals, including al-Ra’y (The Opinion), organ of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM).
In 1955 Kanafani traveled to Kuwait to teach art and sports in a government school for six years. There he was devastated to learn he had a severe form of diabetes that entailed daily insulin injections, which he self-administered until the end of his life, an ordeal he compared to his uprooting from Palestine: “When I was twelve, just as I began to perceive the meaning of life and nature around me, I was hurled down and exiled from my own country. And now, now, just as I have begun to perceive my path… along comes “Mr. Diabetes” who wants, in all simplicity and arrogance, to kill me” (Kanafani, Palestine’s Children, p. 5). In 1960 George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), convinced Kanafani to leave Kuwait for Beirut, Lebanon, to work on al-Hurriyah (The Freedom). Here the writer met and married the Danish teacher Ann Hoover, and the couple had a son and daughter. Kanafani worked for several more newspapers, becoming editor-in-chief of the daily al-Muharrir (The Liberator), publishing the weekly Filastin (Palestine), and serving on the editorial board of the daily al-Anwar (The Lights) and as editor-in-chief of its weekly magazine. In 1969 Kanafani left the security of his job at al-Anwar to publish the weekly, al-Hadaf (The Goal), organ of the PFLP. He stepped into the job of official spokesman for the PFLP in 1970. Kanafani was assassinated by a car bomb on July 8, 1972. From his perspective, his political interests were always directly tied to his literary career. “Insofar as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case” (Kanafani in Wild, p. 13). His novella remains a biting illustration of this indivisibility, and of the Palestinian author-activist’s point of view.
Events in History at the Time of the Novella
The Palestinians in Jordan
When the British realized in 1947 that they would be unable to strike a compromise between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine, they turned the whole matter over to the United Nations, whose members voted to partition Palestine between the two peoples. On May 14, 1948, the Jews declared statehood on the territory allotted to them. This declaration of the State of Israel led to military confrontation between the Arabs and Jews, which drove more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland. Moving outside the newly established Jewish State, they became a dispersed people—scattered among Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. A great number of Palestinians fled to the West Bank of the Jordan River, which fell under the control of the Jordanian Arab Legion, and to Gaza Strip, controlled by the Egyptian administration.
The population of Jordan skyrocketed as some 900,000 Palestinians joined the 400,000 Jordanians already there. Both groups were Arab peoples, but their backgrounds differed and the influx posed a threat to the Jordanian status quo. Jordan’s King Abdullah acted to protect his people’s holdings and identity. In 1950 the king issued a decree forbidding the word Palestine in Jordanian documents. He labeled the Palestinian area annexed to Jordan the “West Bank.” (“East Bank” came into use as another name for his state, known then as the “Emirate of Transjordan.”) Jordan granted citizenship to all its Palestinian population. Having taken the necessary precautions, Abdullah was pleased to see his population more than double and his kingdom expanded by the addition of the West Bank. Thereafter, many of the Palestinians sought their fortune in the East Bank, which offered more economic opportunities. The move helped dissolve barriers between the earlier Jordanians and newcomers. In the East Bank, the transported Palestinians engaged in agricultural and trade occupations. They remained politically conscious of their separate identity, having undergone a long struggle against the British Mandate and the Zionists. Meanwhile, the earlier Jordanians, formerly nomadic Bedouins who moved between the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent, continued to adjust to farming and settlement in towns and villages.
On July 20, 1951, a Palestinian in East Jerusalem assassinated Abdullah as he was entering the Mosque of Omar for the Friday prayer. Abdullah’s son Talal assumed the kingship for a short while before being dethroned. His successor, King Hussein, demonstrated a remarkable maneuverability by striking a balance between concession and imposition of his will, especially with Palestinian opponents. The dismissal of General John Bagot Glubb and 36 senior British officers from the Arab Legion on March 1, 1956, is but one example of how his regime made concessions to the opposition in its sphere. An election in 1956 brought the opposition parties to power in Jordan, leading to the appointment of Sulayman al-Nabulusi, head of the National Socialists, as Prime Minister. In 1957 the king dismissed this cabinet, in the belief that his authority might easily be undermined by the pan-Arab tendency of its members.
Politically speaking, Palestinians in Jordan embraced the ideal of Arab unity given the fact that since 1948 the Palestinian problem had been treated as a general Arab cause. A number of political parties emerged among the Palestinians in Jordan. Most of these parties—for example, the al-Bath (Ba’th Party) and the al-Qawmiyun al-Arab (Arab Nationalist Movement, ANM)—had a strong pan-Arab ideology. Greatly impacting the political scene in Jordan were dramatic developments in the Arab world—the rise of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser as a popular Arab leader (especially after the 1956 Suez War), the birth of the United Arab Republic (UAR, temporary union of Egypt and Syria) in 1958, and the coup d’etat that toppled the pro-Western royal regime in Iraq that same year. Though economically they were adjusting to their new environs, many of the transported Palestinians remained emotionally tied to their homeland and showed a political restlessness about renewing their control of it. They followed events in the wider Arab world closely and weighed them against their national objective, the liberation of Palestine from Jewish control. The Jordanian establishment, a pro-Western group, whose policy was to cooperate with the United Nations, felt it necessary to crack down on dissidents. When it came to sharing official power in Jordan, the Palestinians remained at a disadvantage; appointments usually relegated Palestinian cabinet members to economic rather than political posts (Mishal, p. 42).
King Hussein struggled to gain popularity among the Palestinians of Jordan, intensifying his efforts in the late 1950s. During the fall of 1959, the king made several visits to West Bank cities trying to project the image of a caring leader. In another attempt to solidify his popularity in the Palestinian sector, the king announced on January 16,1960, that East Jerusalem, under his control at the time, would be a second capital of Jordan and that the cabinet and parliament would meet there from time to time. The act was part of a campaign to emphasize the unity of the two banks, and it dovetailed with an Iraqi and Egyptian campaign to promote the concept of Palestinian identity.
This concerted effort to revive the Palestinian identity in the early 1960s was, in part, a response to the faltering drive to achieve Arab unity for the sake of resolving the Palestine question. A pan-Arabic alliance between Egypt and Syria fell apart, when on September 28, 1961, Syria seceded from its partnership with Egypt in the United Arab Republic. Two years later, negotiations to unify Egypt, Syria, and Iraq proved futile. The next year, 1964, saw the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which held its first congress in Arab-controlled East Jerusalem. King Hussein agreed to recognize the PLO only after its chairman, Ahmad al-Shuqayri, promised not to threaten the integrity of Jordan. In 1966, when the PLO threatened the king’s authority over the Palestinians in his land, he closed its offices.
After the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, the West Bank passed into the hands of the Israelis and became subject to their occupation. At first, there was confusion regarding who held the reins of authority. To maintain its influence on the West Bank, the Jordanian government distributed payments to Palestinians who showed loyalty to the Jordanian authorities (Mishal, p. 118). In September 1970, battles broke out between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (PRM), a movement headquartered in Jordan and engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Israeli forces. Often called Black September or the Jordanian civil war, the fighting drove the armed Palestinians out of Jordan. The West Bankers’ loyalty to the Jordanian throne was shaken by the conflict, giving rise to a political current that sought to secede from Jordan and establish a Palestinian entity in the occupied territories. This minority trend developed into a mainstream, majority position after 1973, when the idea of an independent West Bank state became an established part of PLO strategy. At a summit of the Arab League Council in October 1974, all the members of this pan-Arab Organization finally recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians. The 1976 municipal elections in the West Bank, sponsored by the Israelis, proved beyond a doubt that the inhabitants there saw the PLO, not Jordan, as the object of their loyalty.
The Palestinians in Kuwait
In the field of education, the Palestinian contribution to Kuwait stems back to 1936. That year the Council of Education in Kuwait asked Amin al-Husayni, mufti (Palestine’s highest Islamic religious authority) of Jerusalem and president of the Arab Higher Committee, to bring four Palestinian teachers to Kuwait. (The Arab Higher Committee [AHC] was formed to spearhead the Palestinian uprising against the British and the Zionists.) The four teachers, paid by the AHC, arrived in Kuwait on September 5, 1936 (Abu Bakr, p. 6). They were followed by two Palestinian siblings, sisters, who had been asked to start the first modern girls’ school in Kuwait.
This Kuwaiti-Palestinian connection was renewed after the 1948 war, now in the economic rather than the educational realm. Most of the Palestinian pioneers to Kuwait, who hailed mainly from Jordan, came from lower- or middle-class origins. Almost everyone in this first wave had a high-school or college degree and some working experience. A second wave of Palestinians in search of work came to Kuwait in the 1950s; unlike the first wave, this group consisted mostly of peasants, who struggled hard to adapt to city life (Ghabra, p. 63). Abu Qais in Kanafani’s Men in the Sun is a representative of this second group.
At first, the peasantry had no means to reach Kuwait except via an underground railroad. Kuwait was still a British Protectorate at the time, and it was almost impossible for members of the second wave to obtain work visas from the British consulates in Jerusalem or Baghdad. So its members resorted to illegal tactics. Literally above ground, like the “underground railroad” used by slaves in antebellum America, this clandestine network of travel took the Palestinians on a long arduous route from Amman, Jordan, to Basra, Iraq, through Syria. Once in Basra, the “passengers” had to find a smuggler who would take them across the desert to Kuwait. Those men and boys who could make the proper arrangements were smuggled into the border area, then crossed on foot the 80-mile desert strip from Basra to Jahra (located 20 miles from Kuwait City). The trip was dangerous, for the group had to evade Kuwaiti as well as Iraqi patrols, which often meant walking up to 120 miles. Scores of people died on the desert trek. In many cases the smuggler abandoned them (Ghabra, p. 67). Hundreds of Palestinians were captured after being smuggled into Syria, Iraq, or Kuwait, or while trying to enter these territories. By the mid-1950s, when Jordanian-Iraqi relations improved, the underground trail no longer had to pass through Syria; the Palestinians could travel directly to Baghdad and from there to Basra. Modified thus, the underground route remained operative throughout the decade.
Palestinians in Kuwait never received the refugee status attained in some other Arab countries. Kuwait did not grant them citizenship or travel documents (with a few exceptions), nor did it offer them the prospect of permanent residence. However, the size of the Palestinian community in Kuwait and the high positions it held in the bureaucracy made it an influential group. Furthermore, Palestinians were allowed to form their own unions. It was in Kuwait that the first central committee of Fath (or Fatah, the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine) was formed by Yasir Arafat, Khalid al-Hasan, Khalil al-Wazir, and Salim Za’nun, all of whom were residing in Kuwait at the time. Fath’s headquarters would remain in Kuwait until 1966. The Palestinians formed a significant part of the population in Kuwait. A 1975 survey conducted by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for West Asia found that the Palestinians “constituted 28 percent of all [Kuwait’s] engineers, 34 percent of surveyors and draftsmen, 27 of all doctors and pharmacists, 25 percent of all nursing staff, 38 percent of all economists and accountants, [and] 30 percent of the teaching staff” (Peretz, p. 22).
The harmony between Kuwait and its Palestinian community was neither absolute nor permanent, however, as shown by events that transpired between the publication of the novella in Arabic in the 1960s and its translation into English in the late 1970s. The first sign of tension emerged in 1970 during bloody clashes in Kuwait between Palestinian guerillas and the Jordanian army. In 1976, after the initial phase of the Lebanese civil war, the Kuwaiti authorities, fearing the effect of the strife on their land, closed the separate PLO schools in Kuwait and admitted Palestinian children to Kuwaiti government schools. Tensions would continue to manifest themselves in the next decade too. After the 1991 Gulf War around 350,000 Palestinians, long-time residents in the region, were expelled or forced to flee from Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf countries (Farsoun and Zacharia, p. 152).
The Novella in Focus
Plot summary
Men in the Sun is about three uprooted Palestinians who leave Jordan for Kuwait without visas in 1958. The three are in search of work. They make arrangements in Basra, Iraq, to be smuggled over the border into Kuwait.
At the start of the story, the three Palestinians reach Basra at the same time but separately. Each one hunts for a smuggler to help him cross the border into Kuwait, the Promised Land, where their financial problems will be solved by finding work. The three men try to hire an Iraqi smuggler to help them reach Kuwait, but he turns out to be a fat, greedy man who refuses to lower the fees. He even beats up one of the three who threatens to inform the Iraqi police of the price gouger’s illegal activities. When they fail to convince this professional smuggler, the three turn to Abul Khaizuran, who offers to get the job done at a discount. He will shuttle them into Kuwait in his empty water-tank truck, hiding them in the closed water tank while the officials at the checkpoints approve the driver’s paperwork so he can cross the border. This plan succeeds at the Iraqi checkpoint, where the driver spends only six minutes. At the Kuwaiti crossing, however, things go awry. The bored Kuwaiti officials, in air-conditioned offices, detain Abul Khaizuran, gossiping about some juicy rumors that during his stay in Basra he was involved in a sexual encounter with a loose woman. The officials insist on getting details about this sexual encounter (ironically Abul Khaizuran is impotent). The director of the office, Abu Baqir, another fat man, refuses to clear the papers. All these interruptions delay the crossing until the three men in the airtight water tank suffocate to death. Finally cleared, Abul Khaizuran drives his truck to a Kuwaiti garbage dump and disposes of the three bodies, but only after removing their valuables and money. Before returning to his truck, he agonizes over his involvement in this senseless waste of life. “Why didn’t they bang on the walls of the truck? Why?” he shouts, unable to contain himself (Kanafani, Men in the Sun, p. 56).
The action in the novella unfolds through a succession of flashbacks that provide background for each character. A separate section devoted to each of the adventurers (Abu Qais, Assad, and Marwan) acquaints the reader with his past and his plans for the future, starting with Abu Qais, the oldest.
Abu Qais hopes to earn enough money in Kuwait to secure the future of his family. He plans to provide his children with an education, to buy a small house, perhaps even to purchase one or two olive shoots. On his way to Kuwait, he reminisces about life in Palestine (he is the only one of the three old enough to harbor pre-1948 memories). He recalls Ustaz Selim, the new teacher from Jaffa who came to his village in Palestine. This teacher was different from his predecessors; instead of mastery over how to pray, he knew how to use arms.
The mercy of God be upon you, Ustaz Selim, the mercy of God be upon you. God was certainly good to you when he made you die one night before the wretched village fell into the hands of the Jews. One night only. O God, is there any divine favour greater than that? You saved yourself humiliation and wretchedness, and you preserved your old age from shame.
(Men in the Sun, p. 11)
Abu Qais represents the second wave of Palestinians, the peasants who traveled to Kuwait in the 1950s without any particular skill. As a peasant, he has an intimate relationship with the land: “Every time he breathed the scent of the earth, as he lay on it, he imagined that he was sniffing his wife’s hair when she had just walked out of the bathroom, after washing with cold water. The very smell, the smell of a woman who had washed with cold water and covered his face with her hair while it was still damp. The same throbbing, like carrying a small bird in your hand” (Men in the Sun, p. 9). Abu Qais is the least adventurous among the three, perhaps because he is the oldest and is married.
For the younger Assad, Kuwait means freedom: freedom from his uncle who wants his daughter and Assad to marry. The young man hides from the authorities in Jordan because he is politically active. The smuggler who promises to help Assad reach Baghdad knows the young man’s father (they fought together in Palestine in 1948). Now the smuggler, Abu-Abd, reminds young Assad of the danger of being a wanted man: “Do you think you’ll spend your life here hiding? Tomorrow they’ll arrest you” (Men in the Sun, p. 17). To avoid being caught by the border guards with a fugitive from the Jordanian regime, Abu-Abd sends the young man on a detour and promises to meet up with him beyond the checkpoint. But when Assad reaches the highway, he waits in vain for his father’s friend and finally hitches a ride from a tourist. A determined Assad reaches Basra. There he negotiates with the smuggler Abul Khaizuran, not only for himself but also for his two companions. He gets Abul Khaizuran to admit that his job is not really transporting water but smuggling goods for Haj Rida, a Kuwaiti merchant. Smuggling people is just a sideline that brings in extra money. Certainly this sideline is risky, but in need of the money, he takes the risk.
Marwan, the youngest of the three, had to leave school at an early age to provide for his family. His brother is already working in Kuwait, but not for the family. He abandoned his financial responsibility toward them when he married. Marwan’s father has also abandoned the family. He left his wife and four children to marry a one-legged woman who owns a three-room house, hoping to gain some financial security by renting out two of the three rooms.
Although he is a pivotal character, the driver, Abul Khaizuran, is not given his own section in the novella. He fought in the 1948 war in Palestine and paid dearly when he was wounded in battle and “lost his manhood.” Since then, the impotent driver keeps repeating to himself the following refrain: “He had lost his manhood and his country, and damn everything in this bloody world” (Men in the Sun, p. 38).
Pan-Arabism
Behind the scenes of this novella is the specter of a great ideological and actual tension between pan-Arabism and the predilection to align oneself with a specific Arabic state such as Jordan, Palestine, or Kuwait. The fate of the novella’s three victims can be read as a critique of specific nationalism, a force contrary to the drive for pan-Arabism, whose own roots are in the medieval era. In 1258 the Mongols conquered Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Empire. Arabs lost their political independence and after that were ruled, in one form or another, by foreign powers until the end of World War II. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Arabs began to identify themselves as a unit in a larger sphere; for them, as for other peoples, the era gave birth to a nationalistic impulse.
Among the pioneers of Arab nationalism—although his ideas were charged with religious overtones—was Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1849–1903). He harshly criticized the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid for his despotism. Al-Kawakibi advocated granting the Arabs, rather than the Turks, the political power to rule the Muslims. Meanwhile, some Christian Arabs started contemplating the notion of Arabs’ uniting to become one nation with a distinctive cultural identity. These intellectuals expressed their views through different platforms. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Butrus al-Bustani (1819–83) used his periodical al-Jinan (The Gardens) to foster a bond among the Arabs while maintaining Ottoman loyalty. A number of secret societies were formed in greater Syria calling for unity and autonomy, mostly by graduates of European and American missionary schools that had been set up in the Middle East in the 1860s. These schools, which emphasized the Arabic language and its literature in contrast to Turkish culture, helped raise a national consciousness among their students.
The political aspect of Arab nationalism manifested itself in the works and activities of a pioneering generation of intellectuals who resisted all attempts to assimilate the Arabs into larger Turkish society. One of these theorists, Negib Azoury (d. 1916), Lebanese by birth and French by education, set out to articulate his political views on Arab nationalism. He founded a political party (ligue de la Patrie arabe —League of Arab Party) and published a monthly periodical Independence arabe —Arab Independence). But most importantly, he published a book (1905, Le Reveil de la nation arabe —The Dream of the Arab Nation) that advocates the existence of one Arab nation that resides in Asia and includes both Muslims and Christians. This nation would be entitled to political independence from the Turks.
In addition to writings that promoted it, the idea of nationhood began to manifest itself in politics as early as the second decade of the twentieth century. In 1913 a group of individuals organized an Arab congress in Paris. Some 25 persons attended the congress; roughly half were Muslims and half Christians. The participants demanded the Ottoman Empire grant the Arabs certain rights. In the sphere of culture, they demanded Arabic be recognized as an official language in parliament as well as in local government (Hourani, p. 484).
After World War I, Qustantin Zurayq, an Orthodox Christian from Damascus, Syria, and a professor of history at the American University of Beirut, devoted himself to articulating the concept of Arab nationalism. In 1939 he published al-Wa’y al-Qawmi (The National Consciousness), a volume of essays on national identity. Zurayq analyzes the situation of the modern Arabs; they are in need, he concludes, of the sense of collective responsibility related to nationalism, which in their case draws its inspiration and principles from a religion. For Arabs, this religion can only be Islam, a surprising conclusion perhaps from a Christian, though Zurayq goes on to distinguish “the religious spirit” (al-ruh al-diniyah) from “sectarian solidarity” (al-asabiyah al-ta’ifiyah).
Another major Arab theorist, Sati al-Husri (1881–1968), rejects the British and French schools of thought that say a nation is any group that wants to be a nation. A nation to him is something that truly exists: a man is or is not an Arab whether or not he wants to be. One of the most important components of nationalism is a common language. The Arab nation, he argues, consists of all who speak Arabic as their mother tongue, no more, no less. Second to language comes history; a common history is important but only secondary.
Events as well as individuals contributed to the development of pan-Arabism. The Arab defeat in Palestine in 1948 was followed by intense soul-searching in the Arab world. The fragmentation of the Arab peoples was singled out as a major cause for the loss of Palestine. It followed that achieving Arab unity became a prerequisite for liberating Palestine. The intellectuals of the day, inspired by the earlier Arab thinkers named above, responded positively to this call. Zurayq’s political views were particularly influential among a group of Arab students at the American University of Beirut. In 1951–52, led by two Palestinian medical students there—George Habash, (b. 1925?) and Wadi Haddad (1927–1978)—they founded a political movement. It took the name Harakat al-Qawmiyin al-Arab (Arab Nationalist Movement, ANM), and its main objectives were fighting political fragmentation, imperialism, and Israel. “To Habash,” writes Walid Kazziha, “the loss of Palestine was not only a national disaster, but also a painful personal experience. His feelings were shared equally by his close friend Haddad and by a number of their colleagues from different parts of the Arab world” (Kazziha, p. 18). In 1954 Habash started the weekly al-Ra’y (The Opinion) in Amman, Jordan, as an organ for the ANM. When it became critical of the pro-Western Arab governments in the Middle East, the Jordanian authorities ordered its closure. A few months later, the same weekly reappeared in Damascus, Syria, then was replaced
AN ALLEGORICAL TRUCK DRIVER?
Some scholars speak of Men in the Sun as a political allegory in which Abul Khaizuran plays a key part: “Abul Khaizuran, the truck driver, represents the Palestinian leadership at the time, emasculated and impotent, having lost his manhood’ in 1948 in the first Arab-lsraeli war… He bargains over rates with the three Palestinians… once they are dead [he] avails himself of their wristwatches” (Harlow, pp. 48–49).
by al-Hurriyah (The Freedom), published in Beirut. As noted, Kanafani worked on both periodicals.
Soon the ANM established branches outside Lebanon in Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Kuwait. With the rise of the Egyptian popular leader Gamal Ab-del Nasser in the 1950s, especially after he forged the Egyptian-Syrian union that became the United Arab Republic in 1958, the line between the ANM and Nasserism became hard to draw. The dissolution of the united republic in 1961 touched off a shift in the Arab Nationalist Movement. Its members turned to Marxism-Leninism, adopting it as the way to achieve “real” national unity, forged among the masses rather than regimes. The Arab defeat in the 1967 War would only deepen the movement’s commitment to socialist policy. In keeping with its pan-Arabism, the doctrine of popular resistance against the Israeli occupation, rather than traditional military confrontation by the forces of separate regimes, became an attractive one.
The dissolution of the union between Egypt and Syria disheartened Kanafani, along with other pan-Arabists. The evaporation of the Arab dream to unite for the liberation of Palestine contributed to the rise of a separate Palestinian consciousness. This consciousness would find concrete expression in the formation of the PLO a year after the release of Men in the Sun.In fact, the novella itself can be seen as one of the first manifestations of the quest for Palestinian identity. It can also be seen as an indictment against larger Arabic society, including the Palestinians, for their homelessness. In Kanafani’s story, both the price-gouging Iraqi smuggler and the Kuwaiti border officials contribute to the demise of the three passengers. The truck driver, a Palestinian
MEN IN THE SUN ON FILM
In 1972 His Egyptian director Tawfiq Salfh adapted Men in the Sun as a black-and-white feature film called al- Makhdu’un (The Dupes).The film was banned in some Arab countries because of its perceived criticism of Arab regimes, A striking difference between the novella and the film lies in the ending. In the novel la, the three men inside the water tank suffocate silently under the blazing sun. The driver, as noted, asks “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?” In the film, however, the victims knock continuously on the sides of the tank, crying, “We are here, we are dying, let us out, let us free,” Kanafani, who viewed the film several times before his death, did not disapprove of the altered ending (Harlow, pp. 53).
leader of sorts (after all, he promises to shuttle them safely to Kuwait), fails to deliver.
Sources and literary context
While Kanafani’s stay in Kuwait can be seen as his formative years, his period in Lebanon (1960–72) was productive in terms of literary as well as journalistic writings. He began publishing his fiction in the early 1960s, with two collections of short stories—Mctwtsarir raqm 12 (Death of Bed No. 12) in 1961 and Ard al-burtuqal al-hazin (Land of Sad Oranges) in 1963. This same year saw the publication of his first novella—Men in the Sun.Kanafani’s own car trip from Kuwait to Damascus in 1959, coupled with other information regarding smuggling Palestinians from Amman to Kuwait, helped inspire the story.
Influential on Kanafani’s writing was an array of literary works. While still in Syria, Kanafani began reading, most probably in Arabic translation, Western literature, including works by Charles Dickens, Honore de Balzac, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He is known to have read Soviet literature during his stay in Kuwait (1955–60), particularly the works of Maksim Gorky. “I admired and still do the Soviet writers,” Kanafani stated, “my admiration was absolute” (Kanafani in Abd al-Hadi, p. 17).
Kanafani sets his plot in 1958, ten years after the refugees left Palestine, a long enough interval to discourage them from making their way homeward. In fact, they are heading in the opposite direction, a reality that reduces the degree of sentimentality in Men in the Sun.Other novels of the decade (George Hanna’s LajVah [1952; A Woman Refugee], or Isa al-Na’uri’s Bayt wara’a al-hudud [1959; A House Beyond Borders]) were charged with heavy doses of sentimentality, so Kanafani’s work stood in contradistinction to other Arabic fiction depicting the Palestinian dilemma at the time.
Composition and reception
Men in the Sun was written in January 1962, during a month in which Kanafani remained hidden at home in Beirut because he had no legal documentation. Prior to its publication, poetry was the genre through which the Palestinian ordeal was depicted. This poetry, in general, tended to highlight the suffering of the uprooted Palestinians caused by the other, whether that other was a Zionist or a European power. Kanafani’s novella charged Palestinians with aiding and abetting their own victimization, and the revelation shocked the average reader (the novel’s Assad is tricked by his father’s Palestinian friend; the Palestinian driver does nothing to save his three passengers, then disposes of their corpses in a garbage dump after stealing their valuables). “At the time when the book was published,” writes Hilary Kilpatrick, “many readers took the ending literally and Kanafani was accused by enraged compatriots of ‘throwing Palestinians on the garbage heap’” (Kilpatrick in Kanafani, p. 3). Most critics, though, hailed Men in the Sun as an accomplished literary work, and the Palestinian critic F. Mansur applauded it as the first serious attempt to highlight the refugees’ plight (Mansur, p. 211). The Egyptian literary historian Hamdi al-Sakkut goes further and endorses the idea that Men in the Sun is the first Palestinian novel in the full sense of what defines the genre. Al-Sakkut applauds Kanafani’s courage in describing the Palestinian’s plight in an innovative manner: “The author is to be commended for openly proclaiming through his novel an opinion on which the overwhelming majority of Palestinians and Jordanians generally disagree” (Sakkut, p. 78). The brave, unpopular opinion referred to here is that Arabs, including Palestinians, are complicit in the Palestinians’ plight.
—Joseph Zeidan
For More Information
Abd al-Hadi, Fayh. Wa‘d al-ghad: dirasa fi adab Ghassan Kanafani.Amman: Dar al-Karmal li-al-Nashr wa-al-Tawzi, 1987.
Abu Bakr, Tawfiq. al-Filastiniyunfi al-Kuwayt 1936–1990 wa-azmat al-Khalij, 1936 M-1990 M. Amman: Markaz Janin lil-Dirasat al-lstiratijiyah, 2000.
Farsoun, Samih K., and Christina E. Zacharia. Palestine and the Palestinians.Boulder: Westview Press, 1997.
Ghabra, Shafeeq N. Palestinians in Kuwait: The Family and the Politics of Survival.Boulder: Westview Press, 1987.
Harlow, Barbara. After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing.London: Verso, 1996.
Hourani, Albeit. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939.London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Kanafani, Ghassan. Men in the Sun.Trans. Hilary Kilpatrick. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1978.
——Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories.Trans. Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley. Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 2000.
Kazziha, Walid W. Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World: Habash and His Comrades from Nationalism to Marxism.London: Charles Knight, 1975.
al-Mansur, F. “Ghassan Kanafani fi kutubihi al-ahad ashar.” Shu’un Filastiniyah 13 (September 1972): 205–21.
Mishal, Shaul. West Bank/East Bank: The Palestinian injordan 1949–1967.New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
Peretz, D. Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute, 1958.
Sakkut, Hamdi. The Arabic Novel: Bibliography and Critical Introduction (1865–1995). Vol. 1. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000.
Wild, Stefan. Ghassan Kanafani: The Life of a Palestinian.Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1975.