Tuesday, April 18, 2006
The Land of Sad Oranges
When we set out from Jaffa for Acre, there was nothing tragic about our departure. We were just like anybody who goes to spend the festival season every year in another city. Our time in Acre passed as usual, with nothing untoward.
Ghassan Kanafani’s story ‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ (1958) is a six page tale about a family who go to another city for a holiday, only to find themselves unexpectedly fleeing for their lives with what possessions they have. [Quotations are from the translation by Hilary Kilpatrick .] On a cloudy, cool morning they drive past groves of orange trees, ‘eaten up with fear’. At Ras Naqoura the family stops to buy oranges. The father stares in silence at his orange and bursts into tears ‘like a despairing child’.
The narrator remembers how all this occurred when he was a child. He is evidently telling the story to a younger sibling, too young to have known or remembered these events. The narrator recalls how, at the border with Lebanon, he, too, began to weep. And how mother stared in silence at an orange.
In the afternoon, when we had reached Sidon, we had become refugees.
Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) is probably the most important novelist and short story writer to come out of twentieth century Palestine. His life and work are well known in the Middle East but he is virtually unknown in Britain, where none of his books are in print. Publication of his work in the English speaking world is found, in a very limited way, in the USA, not here. His importance as a writer who registered the central modern Palestinian experience of violent dispossession, expulsion from the homeland, and a despairing, rootless refugee existence is generally acknowledged; I first came across his name in Anton La Guardia’s admirably non-partisan book Holy Land, Unholy War: Israel and the Palestinians (John Murray, 2002). As La Guardia notes, two works in particular are important: his story ‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ and his novella Men in the Sun (adapted by the Egyptian director Tawfiq Salin into a film, entitled al-Makhduun).
In ‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ (which I would guess is substantially autobiographical) the narrator discovers that his uncle has reached Sidon before them.
Your uncle never had great faith in ethics, and when he found himself on the pavement like us, he lost it entirely. He made for a house occupied by a Jewish family, opened the door, threw his belongings inside and jerked his round face at them, saying very distinctly: “Go to Palestine!” It is certain that they did not go, but they were frightened by his desperation, and they went into the next room, leaving him to enjoy the roof and tiled floor.
The children sleep on the floor. In the morning they discover that the men, lacking the space to stretch out, had spent the night sitting up. ‘The tragedy had begun to eat into our very souls.’
After three nights in Sidon the mother asks the father to go and find some employment. Either that, or they should return to their ornage trees. ‘Your father shouted in her face, the rancor trembling in his voice, and she fell silent. Our family problems had begun.’
The family move to a village on the outskirts of Sidon and wait. The year is never mentioned but it is plainly 1948. The context is only loosely sketched. Arab readers do not need to be told that this is a story of the Naqba – ‘the catastrophe’, that defining moment when predatory Jews violently seized control of Palestine and drove out most of the indigenous population. And the refugees dream of a return. At the village outside Sidon
there your father sat on the high stone balcony, smiling for the first time and waiting for the fifteenth of May in order to return in the wake of the victorious armies.
A line of lorries appears on the road, filled with Arab troops. They pass by and the family cheers them on. Then they return to their house.
Things dragged past extremely slowly after that. The communiqués deceived us, and then the truth in all its bitterness cheated us. Despondency found its way back to people’s faces. Your father began to find enormous difficulty in mentioning Palestine and talking of the happy past spent in his plantations and houses.
The father takes shape in the story as a figure in torment. He sends his children to climb hills in the morning as a diversion from demanding a breakfast he can’t supply. He angrily empties a chest and scatters its contents. He shouts that he wants to kill his children and then himself.
The narrator recalls the moment when he saw his father lying on the floor, weeping, with a revolver next to him. Suddenly his childhood is over. A bullet in the head for each of them seems very real.
Later that day, seeing his father ill in bed, the child sees two objects lying on the low table. One is the revolver. The other is a dried-up, shrivelled orange. And the story ends.
‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ is written in a very plain style. Part of its power resides in what it leaves out: a vast burden of historical reality. Its humanity is shown in its ability to portray, briefly, a Jewish family who become the victims of angry, dispossessed Palestinians. And its enduring importance is in lucidly and economically representing both the original moment of Palestinian dispossession and its aftermath, obliquely represented through the story of a single family. The narrator’s family represent the entire Palestinian people, embittered, dispossessed, miserable, despairing – and with violence and death an ever-present solution to an intolerable reality.
The story’s final image, of the revolver and the shrivelled orange, aptly expresses a continuing reality. One is the violence of the dispossessed; the other is the drying up of hope. And the symbol of this story – the Jaffa orange – is an enduringly tangible one. Jaffa oranges can be seen on sale in any British supermarket, and I would never buy any (just as I never buy radishes or herbs or organic carrots or organic potatoes which bear the word ‘Israel’ on the labelling).
Let John Rose tell the historical background to this story (from his book The Myths of Zionism [Pluto Press, 2004]):
The Zionists have long claimed the Jaffa orange as their own, a result of land reclamation ‘turning the desert green’. The facts tell a different story.
It was Arab hard labour which transformed the sandy soil on the coastal plain, from north of Gaza to about half-way to Haifa, preparing it for citrus, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Marshlands and swamps too were drained. The results were staggering and helped to shift the economic focus away from Jabul Nablus. The introduction of steam navigation brought this export crop, which by 1880 was being grown in about 500 orange groves in the Jaffa region, to the world market. Further expansion ensured that, by 1913, no fewer than 1.6 million cases of oranges were being exported from Jaffa, making it Palestine’s most valuable export crop. (pp. 95-6)
‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ emerges from the story of the theft of that land, its crop and those who farmed it by violent, pitilessly sectarian European Jews. Today, the striking thing is how little has basically changed in the Middle East since 1948.
More about Ghassan Kanafani another day.
Ghassan Kanafani’s story ‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ (1958) is a six page tale about a family who go to another city for a holiday, only to find themselves unexpectedly fleeing for their lives with what possessions they have. [Quotations are from the translation by Hilary Kilpatrick .] On a cloudy, cool morning they drive past groves of orange trees, ‘eaten up with fear’. At Ras Naqoura the family stops to buy oranges. The father stares in silence at his orange and bursts into tears ‘like a despairing child’.
The narrator remembers how all this occurred when he was a child. He is evidently telling the story to a younger sibling, too young to have known or remembered these events. The narrator recalls how, at the border with Lebanon, he, too, began to weep. And how mother stared in silence at an orange.
In the afternoon, when we had reached Sidon, we had become refugees.
Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) is probably the most important novelist and short story writer to come out of twentieth century Palestine. His life and work are well known in the Middle East but he is virtually unknown in Britain, where none of his books are in print. Publication of his work in the English speaking world is found, in a very limited way, in the USA, not here. His importance as a writer who registered the central modern Palestinian experience of violent dispossession, expulsion from the homeland, and a despairing, rootless refugee existence is generally acknowledged; I first came across his name in Anton La Guardia’s admirably non-partisan book Holy Land, Unholy War: Israel and the Palestinians (John Murray, 2002). As La Guardia notes, two works in particular are important: his story ‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ and his novella Men in the Sun (adapted by the Egyptian director Tawfiq Salin into a film, entitled al-Makhduun).
In ‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ (which I would guess is substantially autobiographical) the narrator discovers that his uncle has reached Sidon before them.
Your uncle never had great faith in ethics, and when he found himself on the pavement like us, he lost it entirely. He made for a house occupied by a Jewish family, opened the door, threw his belongings inside and jerked his round face at them, saying very distinctly: “Go to Palestine!” It is certain that they did not go, but they were frightened by his desperation, and they went into the next room, leaving him to enjoy the roof and tiled floor.
The children sleep on the floor. In the morning they discover that the men, lacking the space to stretch out, had spent the night sitting up. ‘The tragedy had begun to eat into our very souls.’
After three nights in Sidon the mother asks the father to go and find some employment. Either that, or they should return to their ornage trees. ‘Your father shouted in her face, the rancor trembling in his voice, and she fell silent. Our family problems had begun.’
The family move to a village on the outskirts of Sidon and wait. The year is never mentioned but it is plainly 1948. The context is only loosely sketched. Arab readers do not need to be told that this is a story of the Naqba – ‘the catastrophe’, that defining moment when predatory Jews violently seized control of Palestine and drove out most of the indigenous population. And the refugees dream of a return. At the village outside Sidon
there your father sat on the high stone balcony, smiling for the first time and waiting for the fifteenth of May in order to return in the wake of the victorious armies.
A line of lorries appears on the road, filled with Arab troops. They pass by and the family cheers them on. Then they return to their house.
Things dragged past extremely slowly after that. The communiqués deceived us, and then the truth in all its bitterness cheated us. Despondency found its way back to people’s faces. Your father began to find enormous difficulty in mentioning Palestine and talking of the happy past spent in his plantations and houses.
The father takes shape in the story as a figure in torment. He sends his children to climb hills in the morning as a diversion from demanding a breakfast he can’t supply. He angrily empties a chest and scatters its contents. He shouts that he wants to kill his children and then himself.
The narrator recalls the moment when he saw his father lying on the floor, weeping, with a revolver next to him. Suddenly his childhood is over. A bullet in the head for each of them seems very real.
Later that day, seeing his father ill in bed, the child sees two objects lying on the low table. One is the revolver. The other is a dried-up, shrivelled orange. And the story ends.
‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ is written in a very plain style. Part of its power resides in what it leaves out: a vast burden of historical reality. Its humanity is shown in its ability to portray, briefly, a Jewish family who become the victims of angry, dispossessed Palestinians. And its enduring importance is in lucidly and economically representing both the original moment of Palestinian dispossession and its aftermath, obliquely represented through the story of a single family. The narrator’s family represent the entire Palestinian people, embittered, dispossessed, miserable, despairing – and with violence and death an ever-present solution to an intolerable reality.
The story’s final image, of the revolver and the shrivelled orange, aptly expresses a continuing reality. One is the violence of the dispossessed; the other is the drying up of hope. And the symbol of this story – the Jaffa orange – is an enduringly tangible one. Jaffa oranges can be seen on sale in any British supermarket, and I would never buy any (just as I never buy radishes or herbs or organic carrots or organic potatoes which bear the word ‘Israel’ on the labelling).
Let John Rose tell the historical background to this story (from his book The Myths of Zionism [Pluto Press, 2004]):
The Zionists have long claimed the Jaffa orange as their own, a result of land reclamation ‘turning the desert green’. The facts tell a different story.
It was Arab hard labour which transformed the sandy soil on the coastal plain, from north of Gaza to about half-way to Haifa, preparing it for citrus, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Marshlands and swamps too were drained. The results were staggering and helped to shift the economic focus away from Jabul Nablus. The introduction of steam navigation brought this export crop, which by 1880 was being grown in about 500 orange groves in the Jaffa region, to the world market. Further expansion ensured that, by 1913, no fewer than 1.6 million cases of oranges were being exported from Jaffa, making it Palestine’s most valuable export crop. (pp. 95-6)
‘The Land of Sad Oranges’ emerges from the story of the theft of that land, its crop and those who farmed it by violent, pitilessly sectarian European Jews. Today, the striking thing is how little has basically changed in the Middle East since 1948.
More about Ghassan Kanafani another day.
# posted by Ellis : 8:17 PM
