The revolutionary intellectual who wrote Palestine: Remembering Ghassan Kanafani 50 years on since his assassination

In Akka, the northern Palestinian coastal city whose walls defeated Napoleon in 1799, Ghassan Kanafani was born. And in 1972 in Beirut, then an icon of Arab culture and art, fifty years ago today Kanafani’s body, along with his 17-year-old niece’s, was pulverised in a car bomb planted by the Mossad.

"Ghassan Kanafani’s martyrdom secured his place in the arc of suffering that envelops the Palestinian collective, yet, again through martyrdom, he was born anew to become part of the collective history of his people"

Shortly after his family became refugees in Lebanon in the wake of Israel’s 1948 inception, 12-year-old Ghassan moved to Damascus to finish his secondary school and university, then to Kuwait to work as a teacher, only to return to Beirut a few years later. 

Kanafani’s revolutionary journey began with the Arab Nationalist Movement but was cut short due to his disillusionment with its Pan-Arab agendas, which blurred and scattered the Palestinian identity in the process of creating a unified Arab geographical and political continuum.  

It is by becoming a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1967 and especially helped by being the founder/editor of the widely circulated weekly Al-Hadaf, that Ghassan Kanafani transcended Arabism to Palestinianism.

And yet, this is not a biography about Kanafani’s 36 years of life; but about his much longer and rather continuous post-life. It is about how his multiple struggles with diabetes, smoking, identity, romances, loss, and narration have cast a long shadow on his novellas and short stories and paved the path for the next generations of Palestinian writers.

It is with the same incisive yet less known spirit that Kanafani, once a student of literature at Damascus University, analysed and critiqued multiple literary works, of which a book he authored on Zionist literature was translated into English only recently.

What is of great importance is how this young revolutionary intellectual breathed into the realm of literature an unorthodox chronology of the dare-not-to-say Palestinian journey: from exile to self-lamentation and disorientation, to revolution and resistance, and eventually to self-discovery and internationalism. 

"The most dominant theme in his work, one that continues to unify almost all Palestinians, is exile. Each Palestinian has their version of it, whether as refugees abroad or within the borders of historical Palestine or as legally alienated subjects on their land, as is the case for Palestinians inside Israel"

Renowned Lebanese novelist, Elias Khouri, spoke profusely about the timelessness and precognition of Kanafani’s work.

Ghassan Kanafani’s martyrdom, says Khouri, secured his place in the arc of suffering that envelops the Palestinian collective, yet, again through martyrdom, he was born anew to become part of the collective history of his people.

As if to say, death liberated his text and allowed it to continue a journey toward becoming a collective work, first for all Palestinians, then for revolutionaries and humanists around the world.

The most dominant theme in his work, one that continues to unify almost all Palestinians, is exile. Each Palestinian has their version of it, whether as refugees abroad or within the borders of historical Palestine or as legally alienated subjects on their land, as is the case for Palestinians inside Israel.

Precisely because of that, Kanafani set a literary trajectory where the exile was stripped of its physical form – from being an actual uprooting and denial of return to the homeland – to also an ethereal and deeply psychological existence of exclusion, marginalisation, and memoricide.

In All That’s Left to You (1966), Kanafani projects his own experience and struggles, highlighting the exile through the broken family ties and scatteredness.

The protagonists Hamid and his sister Maryam get separated from their mother as they could not all get on the same boat during the 1948 exodus. The siblings are then taken to Gaza and the mother to Jordan.

Throughout the novella, by focusing on the emotional void and the search for the missing mother Kanafani illustrates the sense of collective disorientation that fell upon most Palestinians following the Nakba. More critical yet, the author explores the overwhelming but rather muted sense of shame and guilt among the refugees.

Hamid continuously grapples with guilt for failing to get on the other boat with his mother. Meanwhile, his sister, Maryam – inundated with desperation and searching for meaning on a seemingly purposeless journey – becomes an easy victim to the temptations of her lover Zakariya.

This affair, and later unholy pregnancy, drives a wedge between her and her brother; another metaphor for the even more shameful internal Palestinian fragmentation, which has become an archetypical attribute of Palestinian realpolitik.

The exilic shame is as pronounced in Returning to Haifa (1969), albeit this time represented through the idea of abandonment and betrayal.

"In the Palestinian exilic experience, many refugees went through a process of 'refugee authentication,' where they sought to maintain the perception of a refugee as a helpless, vulnerable, and speechless victim"

The protagonist Said returns with his wife to Haifa after twenty years to look for their missing child, Khaldoun. The parents repeatedly try to avoid mentioning the child’s name, taking comfort in the deluded idea that he must be well and happy now.

But, much like many refugees who chose to ignore the reality of exile and focus on the almost unrealisable return to Palestine, the parents are crushed to find that their son is now adopted by a Jewish family and serving in the IDF.

Yet, because the shame and guilt are too much to bear, the parents soon resort to the “comfort zone of denial,” to routinise and normalise the dire consequences of exile, as if what happened was meant to be.

In her book, Purity and Exile (1995), Liisa Malkki maintains that in the Palestinian exilic experience, many refugees went through a process of “refugee authentication,” where they sought to maintain the perception of a refugee as a helpless, vulnerable, and speechless victim.

Even by highlighting the hush-hush feelings of shame and guilt, Kanafani rejects the stereotypical notion that the refugees were helpless or willing to accept the exilic reality as irreversible, even if it appeared as such.

In Men in the Sun (1963), Kanafani tells the story of three Palestinian refugees who are smuggled from Iraq to Kuwait hiding in a tank.

On the Iraqi-Kuwait border,  the men inside the tank die from heat and lack of oxygen. Kanafani tells us that they did not even knock on the tank wall for help. 

The “tank” does not only represent the muted death of the refugees inside the camp, but also the ghettoisation of their lives as refugees. And, as such, Kanafani resists the notion of passiveness, rather aggressively calling upon Palestinians to rise and fight, “to knock to the tank wall” and break free from the debilitating ailments of victimhood.

Kanafani broke ties with the traditional writing of the era, ushering in a new style more representative of the various, albeit not all, planes of existence of the Palestinian experience.

To Khouri, Kanafani’s novellas are characterised by short, clipped sentences, economy and austerity of expressions, providing a sense of immediacy  – as if the author had started at the end of the story because he was pressed for time and lacked the patience for elaboration. And, as if unless he did so, Palestine would slip away like water through his fingers.

But this hastiness and apparent incompleteness are what liberated Palestine literarily, and precisely that is what lent Kanafani’s work a peculiar, timeless charm and malleability, and made it an inspiration for the next generations of writers.

Dr Emad Moussa is a researcher and writer who specialises in the politics and political psychology of Palestine/Israel.

Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa