Summary
Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Rijal fil Shams (fiction), whose opening scene The Question of Palestine quotes in Said’s own translation as the most concrete and eloquent example of the difficult Palestinian relationship to the other Arabs in the present. Events inside the novella are fiction and are not stated as fact.
Details
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Said introduces the novella — Rijal fil Shams (Men in the Sun) by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani — as the opening-scene example of the Palestinian’s paradoxical relationship to the other Arabs, fraternal on one level and separated by an unbridgeable gap on another, enacted in the present (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.171 / printed p.150) (fiction).
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In the novella (fiction), as Said retells it: Abu Qais, a refugee with a family, lies on the dew-wet earth near the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates awaiting arrangements to be smuggled illegally into Kuwait for work, his present an amalgam of disjointed memory — including his teacher’s pre-1948 geography lesson on the estuary — and his difficult situation under a blinding sun signifying universal indifference (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.172 / printed p.151).
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In the novella’s final episode (fiction), Abu Qais and two other Palestinian refugees, smuggled in the empty belly of a tanker truck, are left too long during the border inspection and die of suffocation, unable even to give a sign of their presence (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.172-173 / printed p.151-152).
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Said’s reading: in almost every scene the present is unstable, subject to echoes from the past and to synesthesia, and the Palestinian, impelled by exile and dislocation, must carve a path for himself in an existence that is by no means a given or stable reality for him, even among fraternal Arabs (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.173 / printed p.152).
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Kanafani remained inside Israel until the early sixties, thereafter went into exile as a militant journalist and writer, and in 1972 was assassinated by the Israelis in Beirut, in Said’s account (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.171 / printed p.150).
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Said concludes his reading in Chapter Three II: when the men finally move out of their spiritual desert into the present, toward the future, reluctantly but necessarily choosing, they will die invisibly, anonymously, killed in the sun; the Palestinian must make the present, since the present is not an imaginative luxury but a literal, existential necessity, and, the 1948 disaster preventing continuity, the present is intelligible only as an achievement (fiction, as retold by Said) (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.174 / printed p.153).