Saturday, July 08, 2006
Remembering Ghassan Kanafani
Today is the anniversary of the novelist Ghassan Kanafani’s assassination.
His best writing is bleakly deadpan, often about the comedy and absurdity of being a victim. His best known book Men in the Sun, for example, has a Chekhovian aspect: it is a tale of frustrated dreamers, of longing, inertia and failure. Kanafani uses metaphor, irony and a charged poetic prose to put across his Angst at the inertia and paralysis of his own fragmentary refugee society. There are no tales of heroic guerilla fighters crossing the border to achieve magnificent feats of resistance. The Zionist enemy is usually remote; not visible. In much of his fiction Kanafani writes about the aftermath of defeat; the anguish of barren lives and broken, dispossessed people. Absurdity and low comedy are never far away. Men in the Sun ends not with a call to armed resistance or a tidy conclusion but with a man in despair, shouting into the night. It ends not with answers but with questions.
In Return to Haifa Kanafani made a huge imaginative leap for an Arab novelist. He was the first Arab writer to represent Israelis sympathetically, as victims. For a dispossessed Palestinian – a victim of the Naqba - it showed enormous generosity of spirit.
I first came across Kanafani’s name in Anton La Guardia’s book Holy Land, Unholy War: Israel and the Palestinians (John Murray, 2002). Most books on this subject are passionately partisan; La Guardia – Diplomatic Editor of the Daily Telegraph - is impressively even-handed and supplies an excellent introduction to this fiercely contested area. But what he doesn’t mention is Kanafani’s fate.
Kanafani might well have become a major modern novelist, had his career not been cut short at the age of 36. What cut it short was what happened exactly 34 years ago today, on July 8 1972.
Kanafani was living in exile in Beirut with his wife and young children. He stepped out of his house in the company of his 17 year old niece Lamees, his sister’s daughter. They climbed into the family car. When he turned the ignition key the car exploded. All the windows of the house were blown out. His wife Anni ran outside and saw the wreckage of the car and the corpse of her niece. She cried out her husband’s name but couldn’t see him. But then she saw a body part: his left leg. She stood paralysed. Behind her, their nine year old son, traumatized, banged his head repeatedly against a wall. Their daughter sobbed her father’s name repeatedly.
The Israeli secret service, Mossad, had put a bomb in the car. It was retaliation for a massacre at Lod airport, perpetrated by Japanese terrorists. Ghassan Kanafani had nothing at all to do with the massacre, but as a prominent Palestinian intellectual and spokesman for Palestinian nationalism, he was deemed a suitable target for a revenge killing.
Murdering a novelist – all in day’s work for the state of Israel. As far as I’ve been able to find out, this assassination troubled neither its own intelligentsia nor, for that matter, the West’s.
More here and here.
His best writing is bleakly deadpan, often about the comedy and absurdity of being a victim. His best known book Men in the Sun, for example, has a Chekhovian aspect: it is a tale of frustrated dreamers, of longing, inertia and failure. Kanafani uses metaphor, irony and a charged poetic prose to put across his Angst at the inertia and paralysis of his own fragmentary refugee society. There are no tales of heroic guerilla fighters crossing the border to achieve magnificent feats of resistance. The Zionist enemy is usually remote; not visible. In much of his fiction Kanafani writes about the aftermath of defeat; the anguish of barren lives and broken, dispossessed people. Absurdity and low comedy are never far away. Men in the Sun ends not with a call to armed resistance or a tidy conclusion but with a man in despair, shouting into the night. It ends not with answers but with questions.
In Return to Haifa Kanafani made a huge imaginative leap for an Arab novelist. He was the first Arab writer to represent Israelis sympathetically, as victims. For a dispossessed Palestinian – a victim of the Naqba - it showed enormous generosity of spirit.
I first came across Kanafani’s name in Anton La Guardia’s book Holy Land, Unholy War: Israel and the Palestinians (John Murray, 2002). Most books on this subject are passionately partisan; La Guardia – Diplomatic Editor of the Daily Telegraph - is impressively even-handed and supplies an excellent introduction to this fiercely contested area. But what he doesn’t mention is Kanafani’s fate.
Kanafani might well have become a major modern novelist, had his career not been cut short at the age of 36. What cut it short was what happened exactly 34 years ago today, on July 8 1972.
Kanafani was living in exile in Beirut with his wife and young children. He stepped out of his house in the company of his 17 year old niece Lamees, his sister’s daughter. They climbed into the family car. When he turned the ignition key the car exploded. All the windows of the house were blown out. His wife Anni ran outside and saw the wreckage of the car and the corpse of her niece. She cried out her husband’s name but couldn’t see him. But then she saw a body part: his left leg. She stood paralysed. Behind her, their nine year old son, traumatized, banged his head repeatedly against a wall. Their daughter sobbed her father’s name repeatedly.
The Israeli secret service, Mossad, had put a bomb in the car. It was retaliation for a massacre at Lod airport, perpetrated by Japanese terrorists. Ghassan Kanafani had nothing at all to do with the massacre, but as a prominent Palestinian intellectual and spokesman for Palestinian nationalism, he was deemed a suitable target for a revenge killing.
Murdering a novelist – all in day’s work for the state of Israel. As far as I’ve been able to find out, this assassination troubled neither its own intelligentsia nor, for that matter, the West’s.
More here and here.
# posted by Ellis : 9:13 AM
