Ghassan Kanafani: A Life for Palestine
If you ask a Palestinian writer who their literary heroes are, chances are Ghassan Kanafani will be somewhere on their list. Despite being little-known in the West, Kanafani’s writings are foundational in Palestinian literature and a major part of modern Arabic literature as a whole.
Kanafani was born in Acre in 1936. At the age of 12, he was among the 700,000 Palestinians displaced during the Nakba. He taught in refugee camps until he met the political leader George Habash, who would become a mentor and close collaborator. Kanafani won instant acclaim for his first novella, Men in the Sun (1962), about four men who embark on a desperate and ultimately disastrous journey out of a Palestinian refugee camp in Iraq. After the six-day war in 1967, Kanafani, Habash, and others founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist party dedicated to both class struggle and to the complete liberation of Palestine from Zionism—goals Kanafani saw as inseparable.
Kanafani was unapologetic about the Palestinian right to resistance against occupation. On July 8, 1972, Israel planted a bomb in Kanafani’s car that killed him instantly, along with his 17-year-old niece Lamees. Some details about his death are included in the introduction to Palestine’s Children, and I invite you to brace yourself for what I’m about to share: after hearing the explosion, Kanafani’s son ran out and found his leg in their yard. Kanafani and his niece’s remains were wrapped, like so many shattered Palestinian bodies, in Palestinian flags, and carried in a funeral that drew tens of thousands.
I share this because encountering this violence towards a writer I’ve come to hold dear gave me a shuddering feeling that I had never experienced before. And still, it’s nothing compared to what Palestinians go through every day.
Kanafani’s Legacy for Palestine
Ironically, in killing him, Israel helped make Kanafani’s words immortal. Kanafani wrote with a productivity difficult to fathom in the time he had: articles, essays, lectures, plays, children’s literature, historical and cultural studies, and—of course—fiction. His words and sentences, even in translation, move with an inimitable style, combining clarity of thought with an unshakeable sense of purpose. I doubt there is one word that flowed from Kanafani’s pen that was not aimed at the liberation of his people.
At the same time that his focus stayed unwaveringly on Palestine, Kanafani understood the Palestinian situation as a symbol for universal themes. He described this in an interview with a sympathetic Swiss journalist shortly before his death (quoted in Selected Political Writings):
“At first, I wrote about Palestine as a cause in its own right, as well as about Palestinian children, about the Palestinian as a human being, about Palestinian hopes […] It then became clear to me that what I saw in Palestine was an integrated human symbol. When I write about a Palestinian family, I am actually writing about human experience. There is no tragedy that is not represented in the Palestinian tragedy. When I portray the misery of the Palestinians, I am in fact seeing the Palestinians as a symbol of misery all over the world. You might say that Palestine represents the whole world in my stories.”
In his time and our, the injustice against Palestinians is so extreme that the fight for Palestinian rights becomes almost intrinsically a fight for human decency in the whole world. Kanafani’s voice has been silenced because he makes this point dangerously clear.
A Reading Group for Kanafani
Over three weeks, School of Instituting Otherwise and Palestine by the Page will host a virtual reading group on one of Kanafani’s most famous novellas, Returning to Haifa (1967). Returning to Haifa is about a Palestinian couple who was displaced from Haifa in 1948, losing their infant son in the turmoil. After Israel occupies the West Bank after in 1967, they’re able to return home for the first time in 20 years. The absence of two decades shows how Zionism has altered their city in truly astonishing ways.
I got a spoiler for Returning to Haifa, and honestly, I’d recommend going into it blind. I’ll just say that the story, like Kanafani’s other fiction, has a simple, gut-wrenching drama to it that will make it stay with you long after you read.
We’ll read Returning to Haifa over 3 sessions (taking turns reading aloud) starting on Sunday, August 16, at 10:30 AM EST (New York time), and weekly at the same time thereafter. Sessions will be about 90 minutes each, leaving time for discussion at the end. We’ll provide PDFs of Returning to Haifa, but you’re invited to buy the book we’ll be reading from: Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley.
Personally, I’ve found Kanafani’s words have a distinct presence to them. It’s quite noteworthy to me that he began his adult life as a teacher: reading him feels as if you were sitting in the room with a calm, patient, and incredibly knowledgeable guide. Layan Sima Fuleihan captures this beautifully in her introduction to Kanafani’s history of the 1936-1939 revolt in Palestine: she proposes that you “read Kanafani’s text as if he is here, sitting across from you and speaking with you, alive and well.”
We would love to read with you, too. Please join us for three sessions of Returning to Haifa by sending a message or commenting below. All are welcome as we read this text worthy of attention, study, and return.
-Palestine by the Page and School of Instituting Otherwise
Register for the Sessions Here!
