Men in the Sun

Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 work Men in the Sun features three male Palestinian refugees of different generations heading for Kuwait. The storyline and theme of the text is highly political, although Kanafani generally avoids being preachy. However, after doing a little background work, I found that Kanafani wrote all of his texts specifically to stir up resistance against Israel. Kanafani was a writer and journalist from Acre, the editor of al-Hadaf. A member of the Political Bureau of PFLP and its spokesperson, he published their newspapers (Al-Ray, The Opinion). Kanafani was killed by a car bomb on July 8, 1972 in Beirut.

The characters are Abu Qais (the eldest), Assad (middle-aged), and Marwan (youngest). They represent the different outlooks and troubles of the situation for those immigrants of the time who smuggled themselves through borders in the hopes of a better life. Their route was out of Jordan and across Iraq, where they met up in Basra. Because the action is as much internal as it is external, we see into the characters than we would have otherwise.

The eldest, Abu Qais, has a wife and son. He leaves his refugee camp at the urging of his wife; "In the last ten years you have done nothing but wait. You have needed ten big hungry years to be convinced that you have lost your trees, your house, your youth, and your whole village. People have been making their own way during these long years, while you have been squatting like an old dog in a miserable hut. What do you think you were waiting for?" Assad’s uncle gives him fifty dinars, on an agreement that when Assad comes back with money, he’ll marry his cousin. Marwan is 16, idealistic and unable to put up with his father and his father’s new wife.

I think the thing that depressed me the most was the fact that not one of them reached Kuwait. In fact, the three of them suffocatein a water tanker. As an American who loves her happy endings, I never want to read this book again simply because none of the protagonists succeeded in their goal. For the record, I HATE downer endings, and with the relentlessly slow pacing of this book, the ending made the whole experience intolerable. I had to watch three of my favorite romantic comedies to put me in a good mood again.