Recounting the grit of the exile

Recently, on her Substack The Elif Life, the American writer Elif Batuman pondered the main argument in Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, that the contemporary novel omits large-scale human suffering. Batuman eventually concludes that, actually, writers (including Rooney) have always addressed the big questions of their times “…by representing interiority and love affairs compellingly enough to keep you turning the pages — ideally, persuading you that, when people are fighting for their lives in situations of geopolitical or environmental extremity, that’s what they’re fighting for: the right/ability to live private dramas.”

For the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani — who lived and died for his ideals (he was assassinated in 1972) — good fiction was that which didn’t adhere to some rigid ideological scheme. Kanafani worked painstakingly on his literary craft and produced a body of work widely considered some of the best in modern Arabic fiction. He’d been a refugee most of his life and was committed to radical Pan-Arabism, Marxism, and, of course, Palestinian liberation, but rarely used his fiction to grandstand for his political ideals. Instead, as his translator Hilary Kilpatrick notes in her introduction to a collection of his short fiction, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, he “…avoided this pitfall—for rather than transfer experience directly from reality to the printed page, he reworked it to give it a more profound, universal meaning.”

It’s there, that commitment to building a human narrative grounded in the sweat and despair of the real world, in the novella Men In The Sun which was first published in 1962 and tells the story of three Palestinian men who have washed up in Basra in Iraq to get to Kuwait. They haggle with people smugglers and embark on a perilous journey to what they hope will be a land of opportunity. They extend their trust and small savings to Abul Khaizuran, also a fellow Palestinian, who drives a water tanker between the two countries. Things don’t go as planned and the cruelty of borders and the despair of exiles permeates the story that also richly fleshes out the families and loved ones these men have left behind. This is a very modernist story, swinging back and forth in time, building up to an inexorable end that leaves the reader bereft.

In a couple of the works included in this slim collection — The Land of Sad Oranges and Umm Saad — the ongoing Nakba that Palestinians have been enduring since 1948 is the inciting incident but Kanafani keeps the personal stories of his characters at the forefront and thus renders them timeless. Over the past year, Letter from Gaza — which is also included in this book — has found new currency as it tells the story of a young girl maimed in a bombing and her quiet defiance in the face of life-shattering violence.

It’s impossible not to wonder what Kanafani would have made of this, the saddest and most heartbreaking phase yet of the seemingly endless attempt at annihilating his countrymen. The answer can perhaps be found at the end of Men In The Sun when the smuggler Abul Khaizuran agonises over what he’s done, asking of his victims:

“Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything? Why?” The desert suddenly began to send back the echo: “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you bang the sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why?”

Palestinians have always been there, telling their stories, in itself an act of resistance. The world owes it to them to listen to their voices and prevent their erasure.

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

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