Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories

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A short novella about Palestinian refugees struggling to make ends meet and deciding to try and smuggle themselves to Kuwait for work, and some other stories. The two berate Abu Qais for his inability to provide for his family and his fear of dying on the way to Kuwait. 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. To maintain its influence on the West Bank, the Jordanian government distributed payments to Palestinians who showed loyalty to the Jordanian authorities (Mishal, p. 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.

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. One more thing: there are no antisemitic slurs in any of Kanafani's stories of this collection of stories.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. Letter from Gaza" is my favorite- the sense of responsibility and initiative to build our country and live in it for better or worse is presented in a touching way. 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. His works include novels, short stories, plays, children’s stories, literary criticism, and political writings. Tracing the grim voyage of three Palestinian men who left a refugee camp to seek work in Kuwait to help their families, Men in the Sun is a poignant, melancholic exploration of the Palestinian refugee experience.

This was my first Ghassan Kanafani read, and I was told that it would hurt to read this, and it did.

Abu Qais represents the second wave of Palestinians, the peasants who traveled to Kuwait in the 1950s without any particular skill.

Though a translated work, Kanafani’s profound, symbolic prose and creative use of literary devices made each story a captivating read. Attracted to journalism, Kanafani contributed to a number of periodicals, including al-Ra’y (The Opinion), organ of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). They followed events in the wider Arab world closely and weighed them against their national objective, the liberation of Palestine from Jewish control. His successor, King Hussein, demonstrated a remarkable maneuverability by striking a balance between concession and imposition of his will, especially with Palestinian opponents. The story dramatises a world infinitely remote from a comfortable middle class first world urban existence.Diabetes” who wants, in all simplicity and arrogance, to kill me” (Kanafani, Palestine’s Children, p. Many have sharply criticized this ending, accusing Kanafani of tossing helpless Palestinians into the trash.

Israel’s smashing of Egypt in the 1956 Sinai war displayed once again the overwhelming military superiority of Zionism and the folly of hoping that any Arab state would liberate Palestine from its Zionist occupiers. Nobody wants to have to explain their trauma, but this Kanafani did a great job explaining the immense hopelessness. All these interruptions delay the crossing until the three men in the airtight water tank suffocate to death. In the guilt parents feel at their inability to provide dignified lives for their children, and in the anger the younger generation feels toward the older for letting the tragedy of the Nakba befall them, many of Kanafani's stories are grounded in intergenerational psychological conflict and trauma.On July 20, 1951, a Palestinian in East Jerusalem assassinated Abdullah as he was entering the Mosque of Omar for the Friday prayer. Most critics, though, hailed Men in the Sun as an accomplished literary work, and the Palestinian critic F. 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.