Men in the Sun - Book Review

May Makki

March 24th, 2015

PSPA 219

Men in the Sun Book Review

One of the most prominent Palestinian literatures that illustrated the evolution of the Palestinian discourse before and after the defeat of 1967 is Ghassan Kanafani’s literature. Kanafani is a Palestinian leftist writer, who was also active politically, for he joined the Movement of Nationalist Arabs and then the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) when it was formed, only to be assassinated on the hands of the Mossad in 1972. He was considered to be the spokesman of the PFLP, for he was the chief editor of its newspaper Al-Hadaf. In his book, Men in the Sun, Kanafani tries to portray the Palestinian plight prior to 1967. The context of the story tells us much about it, for it was written when Kanafani was hiding in Beirut 1962, with no official papers, under a regime where the Lebanese intelligence activity reached its peak, and prior to the 1969 Cairo agreement. Shortly, it was written in a period when the Palestinian was simply a refugee.

Men in the Sun is the story of three Palestinians, from different generations, Abu Qais the old man, Assad the young man, and Marwan the sixteen-year-old boy, seeking a better life outside their homeland, hopefully in Kuwait, the land of Dinars. Each of them has his own life story and reasons that urged him to follow this path; Abu Qais trying to provide his family with better life conditions, Assad trying to make some money to get married, and Marwan trying to sustain his family after that his father and his brother left them, each to have his own life. After hearing too much stories with unfortunate endings about the deceit of usual smugglers, they decided to deal, for cheaper costs, with Abul Khaizuran, a man who lost his manhood while fighting in 1948 and now works as a driver. Kanafani also devotes many parts of his book to describe the humiliation the three Palestinians themselves received from the smugglers while negotiating with them. The deal with Abul Khaizuran was to hide in the tank of his truck at the checkpoints, just for minutes, under the merciless sun. At the first checkpoint, the plan went successfully; however, at the second point, Abul Khaizuran got late finalizing the necessary papers, because the officials at the frontiers were joking with him. After crossing the checkpoint, when he opened the tank, the three men were already dead. Thus, Abul Khaizuran, despite the feelings of regret, threw the dead bodies over piles of trash, but only after stealing their money (Kanafani, 1962).

Kanafani ended his story with Abul Kaizuran shouting: “Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?”, a question that he meant to draw upon every Palestinian refugee of that period. Men in the Sun portrays the dispersed Palestinian people in a period where the Fida’i picture was still vague, immature, and overwhelmed with the victimized refugee figure. The silent death of the three Palestinians marks the absence of a self-conscious Palestinian resistance during that period (the Palestinian question was mostly addressed by Arab nationalism). The cheap death, just because the clerks felt like joking with Abul Khaizuran, marks the passivity of the three men, for their destiny was vulnerable to the simplest and the most arbitrary circumstances. The absence of patriotism was also remarkable in the characters’ lives, for they were the family ties or personal benefits that mobilized the characters, and made them bear the tough path. In other words, the sense of a nation was overcome by the traditional family ties that were even broken sometimes. The humiliation of the three men in neighboring Arab countries, Iraq and Jordan, is also integrated into the whole picture, to draw a complete portrait of the Palestinian misery. On the other side, contemplating their journey, one cannot unnotice the symbolism of the driver’s character. Abul Khaizuran, the person in charge to lead the three men to comfort, lost his manhood, which is a symbol of toughness and honor in the traditional Palestinian society, in 1948 while defending his patriotism. This loss led him to the ultimate misery and turned him into a person who curses patriotism and cares only about money. This characterization of Abul Khaizuran can possibly talk about the frustrated generation of 1948, the loss of their faith in resistance after the Nakba, and their “sterility” in general or inability to produce a resistant generation.