Ghassan Kanafani Research Articles

Ghassan Kanafani and the Urgent Questions of our Day

Ghassan Kanafani and the Urgent Questions of our Day

Ghassan Kanafani and the Leninist Warriors of Palestine

Ghassan Kanafani and the Leninist Warriors of Palestine

Reflections on the Early Works of Ghassan Kanafani 1

Reflections on the Early Works of Ghassan Kanafani 1

Introduction: Toward a Radical International Thought

Bringing together political theorists of empire with critical scholars of international relations who have interrogated the methodological nationalism (indeed the fetish of the nation-state) of their disciplines, this special issue examines the multifaceted dimensions (including political, ideological, and psycho-affective) of a radical international thought. Going beyond articulations of anti-colonial struggle at the national level, the issue charts radical theories and praxes of insurgency and revolutionary violence and brings an internationalist framework to bear on historical moments like the Spanish Civil War, the rise of anti-imperial development alternatives, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and others. In doing so, the issue spotlights thinkers who are rarely read in a global register, such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad, Ghassan Kanafani, and Eqbal Ahmad, among others. Furthermore, the introduction argues, the essays track these understudied articulations of radical international thought in the context of the traveling projects of imperial domination to which they responded. These radical figures’ political thought and action, in turn, inspired further imperial responses, such as political assassinations in the Third World, counterrevolutionary tactics, and other modes of violence in the service of empire.

THE HALF MOTHER: AN INQUIRY INTO THE POETICS OF RESISTANCE LITERATURE

“The Half Mother: An Inquiry into the Poetics of Resistance Literature” investigates the dynamic interplay between literary representation and political resistance in the context of the Kashmir conflict. This paper delves into how Shahnaz Bashir's novel, The Half Mother, exemplifies the genre of resistance literature by exploring the intersection of personal and collective trauma amidst a protracted conflict. The Kashmir Valley, historically a cradle of poetic and artistic expression, has faced profound devastation since the late 1980s due to a surge in violence and insurgency. This period, marked by intense militarization and human rights abuses, has given rise to a distinct body of English-language literature that seeks to authentically portray the lived experiences of its people.The study situates The Half Mother within the broader framework of resistance literature, drawing on Ghassan Kanafani's theoretical construct of resistance as both a cultural and political act. This study demonstrates how these literary efforts transcend mere chronicles of victimhood to engage in a profound examination of human resilience and the quest for self-determination. Bashir’s novel thus emerges as a pivotal text that not only contributes to the international literary discourse but also amplifies the voices of a marginalized and silenced population. The Half Mother encapsulates the transformation of individual suffering into a collective resistance, shedding light on the intrinsic link between literary creation and political struggle, and offering a poignant commentary on the enduring human spirit amidst adversity.

Resistance in Mahmoud Darwish’s “I Come From There”: A Discourse Analysis

Postcolonial studies have dealt with the protest literature since they consider it as the voice of the oppressed people. In the same aspect, resistance literature begins in Palestine with Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish after 1948. Protest literature aims not only at freeing the oppressed from dominating powers and overturning the authority but also at liberating the humans from oppression. “The term resistance "Moqawamah" was first applied in a description of Palestinian Literature in 1966 by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanfani in his study "Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine" (Harlow, 1987). Mahmoud Darwish has been involved in Palestine’s political affairs throughout his entire life. In “I Come from There”, Darwish tries to raise the voice of Palestinians; therefore, it can be heard all over the world. The theme of this poem assures his refusal to forget his country and unveils the struggle for a doomed homeland. By appropriating the descriptive and analytical method, along with the discourse analysis of Darwish’s terms and phrases in the poem “I Come from There”, this paper clarifies the symbolic meaning of the words to represent his sense of loss and sense of possession that he feels towards his land. Against this, the paper argues whether resistance protest literature succeeds in defending oppressed people and giving the subaltern their voices and whether literature helps the occupied people to get free and believe in non-violent resistance instead of violent resistance.

The Effects of Canonity and the Authorial Weight in Translating Men in Sun’ Ghassan Kanafani into English Language

This study deals with canonity in the translation from Arabic to English of Authorial Weight and Translator Authority in the novella "Men in Sun". It debates that if Men in Sun "Rejal fel AL-Shamas" that written by famous author in Arab world Ghassn Kanafani Palestinian writer that defend on the Palestinian issue, the above mentioned novella translated to English by Dr. Hilary Kilpatrick gave the same value to the TT as it appears in the ST during translating accurately the features of figurative language idioms, religious expressions, metaphors, symbolism, and cultural items with choosing randomly examples from the novel. According to strategies found in the translation based on Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995) including direct and Oblique translation and Newmark’s (1988). moreover, the study stresses the value of perception the goal, emotiveness, ideology embedded in Arabic novel Men in Sun "Rejal fel AL-Shamas" when the translator seeks to equal between the TT and ST. The aesthetic features that notable in Arabic that really the translator attempts to reddened it in English to give the sense of the sentences. In short, involves that the translation of literally work is affected by the canonity and aesthetic features that applied.

Voice of Resilience: Unveiling the Humanitarian Tragedy of Palestinian Women in the Lens of Umm Sa'd

This article aims to discuss the humanitarian crisis that Palestinian women refugees have to face in the novel Umm Sa‘d by Ghassan Kanafani. This humanitarian crisis is a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the 1948 Nakba incident, which continues to this day. This article reveals and analyzes the humanitarian crisis faced by Palestinian women in this novel using the state-ibuism approach and qualitative descriptive methods. State-ibuism is defined as the ideology of women’s actions in taking care of their family, group, or state to support male power. Kanafani’s main idea for Palestinian women to rebuild the Palestinian national narrative is a pro-natal movement using their wombs. Their wombs are positioned as a battlefield for the Israel and Palestine movements to determine the definition of their nation. This article contributes to providing an understanding of the role of Palestinian women in rebuilding the idea of a Palestinian national narrative, which makes the womb of Palestinian women a tool and a strategy for population dominance through statistical politics.

Woman Is a Cause: Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa as Critique of Patriarchal Nationalism

How should one read Returning to Haifa, Ghassan Kanafani’s tragedy of post–1967 Palestinian-Israeli confrontation, in the twenty-first century? Though the novella ends with the protagonist’s call to arms, recent interpreters read it as an opening for dialogue and cohabitation. However inviting, though, such a “dovish” reading may not take seriously the unresolved conflicts at the novella’s core. We argue that the novella responds to the tectonic shifts in the Palestinian landscape of 1966–67 by reworking the calls to action and speech with which Kanafani concluded Men in the Sun (1962). Borrowing from Hannah Arendt’s theory of action, we propose a reading of Returning to Haifa that comes to grips with the enigmatic but crucial phrase “man is a cause,” arguing that in his representation of women in the novel, Kanafani not only writes against Palestinians resigning themselves to Israeli rule, but also points to how patriarchal nationalism alienates both Palestinians and Jews, and portends only an eternal recurrence of the Nakba.

Writing the History of the Palestinian Nakba in Return to Haifa. From Novella to Militant Film

Directed in 1982 and primarily screened to Western audiences, the film Return to Haifa is one of the first visual productions to show to the West a major episode of the Palestinian modern history, namely the expulsion of most of the Palestinian population from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948. This article examines the film of Kassem Hawal, an Iraqi filmmaker engaged in the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as a medium that writes the history of the Palestinian Nakba. Reproducing on the screen Ghassan Kanafani’s eponymous novella (published in 1969), the film borrows major features of the Palestinian author’s visual style, specifically in the use of the narrators’ points of view and in its depiction of the individual experiences lived by the novella’s characters. Yet, far from being a mere adaptation, the film stands out in its representation of the collective experience of the Nakba by Palestinians. The predilection of Hawal for archival images is central to understand the film as a tentative to use the novella in a visual writing of the Palestinian history of 1948. The analysis of interactions between archival and fictional shots demonstrates that Hawal’s film reflects on the types of images that are necessary to write this history. The analysis finally shows the cinematic suggestion of the need of impossible images to visualize the collective experience of Palestinians in 1948.

THE CULTURE TRAUMA REFLECTED IN KANAFANI'S NOVEL RETURN TO HAIFA WITHIN THE GENRE OF PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE NOVELS

This study examined the portrayal of cultural trauma in Ghassan Kanafani's novel "Return to Haifa" through character analysis. The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which the characters portrayed in the novel serve as a reflection of the cultural trauma that was endured during and in the aftermath of the Nakba, a catastrophic event that occurred in 1948. The investigation utilized Jeffrey C. Alexander's conceptualization of cultural trauma as a theoretical lens for examination. This study employed a textual analysis approach to examine the effects of trauma on the primary characters, Said and Dov, and their subsequent development of a collective identity. The analysis of data focused on the evolution of self-awareness throughout the narrative, revealing the impact of trauma on individual and collective identity. The findings suggested that the memories and experiences of Palestine diasporas like Said, who were forced to leave their homeland, contribute to their cultural trauma and shape their sense of identity; also illuminated the importance of the Nakba as a crucial occurrence in the history of Palestine and the lasting impacts it has on the communal awareness of Palestinians. The study contributes to the understanding of how literature represents and addresses cultural trauma and its implications for the Palestinian community.

Decolonizing Comparative Literature

This essay seeks to contribute to ongoing debates about disciplinary decolonization in Comparative Literature by urging scholars and students to return to the literature and theory of twentieth-century anticolonial liberation struggles. I begin by considering the relationship of Comparative Literature as it is currently practised in the metropolitan academy to earlier projects of cultural decolonization, focusing particularly on the contrast between the depoliticized ‘worlding’ of the discipline and the more radical and purposeful comparative praxis demonstrated by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association's literary journal Lotus (1968–91). I then turn to examples of literary criticism by two major fiction writers, theorists and party activists with ties to Lotus: Ghassan Kanafani (Palestine, 1936–72) and Alex La Guma (South Africa, 1924–85). Putting their work into conversation enables us to challenge the distance from organized struggle that most contemporary criticism maintains, while also developing our understanding of the conditions, principles, and tactics of what Kanafani famously called adab al-muqāwama, or resistance literature, a concept that any attempt to decolonize Comparative Literature cannot do without.

The Thirdspace of Resistance Literature in Naomi Shihab Nye’s “1935” and Hala Alyan’s “Hijra”

This paper examines the poetry of the two Palestinian American poets, Naomi Shihab Nye and Hala Alyan within the concept of the “thirdspace” of resistance literature. With this premise in mind, the study uses Edward Soja’s concept of “thirdspace” (1998) to examine the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye and Hala Alyan as an articulation of “resistance poetry” exemplified in Ghassan Kanafani’s book entitled Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948-1966 (1966). The poem itself, as a form, is an imagined geography constructed by the poet’s personal and collective memories that build up his/her spaces of resistance poetry. In these artistic cartographies, memories traverse from contested lands and geographies to a “thirdspace” that recreates a timeline of stories and narratives that unfold the poems’ resistance manifesto. To foreshadow these imagined memories, the poem functions as: first, a documented tool of resistance to forgetfulness; second, an artistic device for articulating memory; third, a “thirdspace” where contested geographies of resistance and resilience dissolve to re-visioning history that curates hybridized literary spaces of prose poetry and cartographies of memory.

Emotional Audiences? From Dispassion to Anger in Elite Palestinian Political Discourse, 1930s–1970s

Abstract In the thirty years of British occupation before 1948, elite Palestinian spokesmen understood emotion as a fundamentally ineffective mode of political engagement vis-à-vis a perceived audience of European colonial diplomats. After the nakba, though, as writers like Qustantin Zurayk and ‘Arif al-‘Arif tried to make sense of its traumatic upheavals to new iterations of regional audiences, expressions of emotion began to make new appearances alongside such writings’ abstract appeal to rights. In the 1960s, and particularly after the war of 1967, emotional expression began to take on a rather different valence as writers like Ghassan Kanafani came to understand emotion, and especially the expression of an abstract form of decolonial anger, as a key way to connect with other global audiences and thereby buttress external support for Palestinian political demands. This article, then, seeks to explore changes in the emotional content of Palestinian nationalist literature, and especially the increased rhetorical presence of expressions of anger, as reflections of changes in what we might think of (in a gloss on Barbara Rosenwein’s crucial notion of emotional communities) as “emotional audiences.”

Palestinian Literary Criticism in Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature

In Fi al-adab al-sahyuni (On Zionist Literature, 1967) 1 , the Palestinian writer and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) spokesperson Ghassan Kanafani provides an analysis of Zionist literary production from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, situating it in a broader schema of Western imperialism, settler colonialism, and dispossession in Palestine. Through a treatment of the early Zionist texts, Kanafani’s study traces the evolution of literary representations of the Jewish subject and explores their utility in repudiating integration and advancing racial supremacist logics. The Zionist works in question venerate different relationships to land—extractive, romantic, fraudulent—in contrast to those of Palestinian literary and oral traditions; the former are connected to the ongoing, material efforts of colonizing Palestine. Kanafani’s study was drafted in Beirut and is a reflection of the broader sweep of Arab nationalist and anti-colonial cultural production during the 1960s and 1970s, which was targeted by an anti-communist West. These experiences were formative for Kanafani’s intellectual project, which sees literary criticism as a revolutionary tool and a direct extension of armed resistance, whereby a cultural reconstitution can be used in service of liberating both Palestinian land and people. Kanafani’s study suggests that the “weapons” of literary production will be most effectively brandished by the Arab youth who lead the struggle against Zionism.

Paradigm, Identity Formation, and Reality. ImplicationsHomi K. Bhabha's Third Space on Palestinian Issue through Novel "Returning to Haifa" By Ghassan Kanafani.

Paradigm, Identity Formation, and Reality. ImplicationsHomi K. Bhabha's Third Space on Palestinian Issue through Novel "Returning to Haifa" By Ghassan Kanafani.

The Role of the Arab "Intellectual" and Power Relations in the Translation of Aid ila Haifa and Rabi' Harr

As the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first century, counter discourses emerged to challenge orientalism, colonialism, postcolonialism, capitalism, and globalization in cultural studies. Frequently bound up with culture and politics, the Arab “intellectual” effectively criticizes issues important to the Arab world. Drawing on this viewpoint, this paper examines the intellectual’s social and political role in Ghassan Kanafani’s Aid ila Haifa, translated into English as Returning to Haifa (2000) by Karen Riley, and Sahar Khalifeh’s Rabi' Harr, translated into English as The End of Spring (2008) by Paula Haydar. Edward Said’s ideas about the “intellectual”, “secular criticism”, “origins and beginnings” are the framework used to understand the intellectual’s role in writing-as-action and calling for necessary change. Whenever there is intellectuality, there are power relations entrenched in language. Insofar as the two Arabic originals are read in translation as well, and due to the rise of the cultural turn in translation studies, this paper, correspondingly, considers choices/contributions made by the translators that serve to align the “intellectual” with his/her orientation in the English versions, thus actively exercising a sort of language power that responds to the dominant discourse. The paper reveals that foreignization in the form of literalness, hybridity, and cultural mediation serve the “intellectual” in the translation culture. Keywords: The Intellectual, Origin and Beginning, Secular Criticism, Cultural Turn in Translation, Power Relations in Translation.

Jonathan Wright on translating Arab and Iraqi literature, interview by Ruth Abou Rached

Jonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator, known for bringing many works of Arab fiction to new audiences via translation for the past fifteen years. His recent works, however, seem more connected to Iraq: in addition to The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim and Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, he has translated The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon (Yale University Press, 2020) and God 99 by Blasim (Comma Press, 2020). Jonathan is currently working on a semi-biographical novella by Iraqi writer Ali Bader and on works by Palestinian activist and fiction writer Ghassan Kanafani yet to be translated or retranslated, into English. In this interview, Ruth Abou Rached and Jonathan Wright discuss the experiences of Wright translating Iraqi and Arabic fiction and Wright offers his thoughts and recommendations.

البنية الشخصية في رواية "أم سعد" لغسان كنفاني

The study discusses the forms of personal character structure in the novel "Umm Saad" by Ghassan Kanafani, due to the behavior of colors and the specifications of their internal elements. The approach in it is a descriptive and analytical approach, namely describing the novel and analyzing it with the inclusion of Sigmund Freud's literary psychology. The results obtained by the author are id quotes one, ego quotes four, and superego quotes one and that is the actual psychological reality, because the id is the inner world or human subjectivity, and there is no direct contact with the objective world. And the inner aspect contains things that are born from birth. Ego is the aspect of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality. As for id, it is a single quote because it is the inner world or human subjectivity, and has no direct relationship with the purpose of the world. The inner aspect contains biological elements of instinct and is also a "warehouse" of psychic energy that drives the ego and superego. And the ego is an empathetic quote to see that Umm Saad's ego position can overcome the nature of her identity. Superego quote one is actually very worried and wants to bring the kids home but he realizes that the kids are fighting for their country

Teaching Ecological Awareness Through Literature: A Case Study of Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa

Theories like Feminism, Marxism and Post-colonialism work on the contextualization of literature. Exponents of these theories promote the employment of such approaches in the field of education in order to raise the students’ awareness towards social and political issues, and help them inculcate and develop the skill of critical reading of literary texts. In the 1990s, a new approach evolved in the domain of literary studies that called for the same task but from a different perspective, i.e. Ecocriticism. Hence, taking Ecocriticism as a theoretical framework, the paper in hand has discussed Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Returning to Haifa with a special focus on the use of nature and environment with their various meanings and connotations in the novella. The paper’s main objective is to contribute in the promotion of Ecocriticism as a tool for critical reading. It also aimed at raising students’ awareness of environmental crises, particularly those caused by conflicts and wars. The paper has postulated that Ecological awareness would help students to gain better understanding of the consequences of conflicts and to be more cautious in their treatment of the environment around them. After the analysis of Kanafani’s novella, the researcher found that the author attempted to convey messages to the readers through his treatment of nature. Most of these messages lament the loss of the natural elements as well as the human intuitive nature due to wars and conflicts that result in displacement of people and hence the destruction of environment and imbalance in the ecosystem.