Ghassan Kanafani Biography and List of Works

Palestinian novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist. Kanafani's life and career as a writer was closely connected to the Palestinian situation, and his intense involvement in Palestinian affairs gave him a unique vantage point. The main themes in his writings were displacement, exile, and national struggle. Kanafan's two first novels experimented with language and form, and rank among the most complex in all of Arabic fiction at that time.

Ghassan Kanafani was born in Acre, Palestine. In 1947 Palestine was partitioned into Arab and Jewish zones by the United Nations. Israel drove 780 000 Palestinians from their homeland. When the Arab-Israeli war started, Kanafani fled with his family first to Lebanon and then to Syria, where they settled as Palestinian refugees. After finishing his secondary education he studied Arabic literature at the University of Damascus. Kanafani was expelled from the university before receiving a degree. He moved to Kuwait, where he worked as a journalist, and then Beirut, where he was among other things the editor of the Nasserian paper al-Muharrir. During there years Kanafani's political activities increased.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. Kanafani was a member of the Arab Nationalist Movement. In 1969 he became spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the editor-in-chief of its weekly Al-Hadaf.

Arab-Israeli wars continued in 1956 and 1967. Kanafani's first novel, Men in the Sun, appeared in 1963. The book was adapted by the Egyptian director Tawfiq Salin into a film, called al-Makhduun. Men in the Sun is the story of three Palestinians representing three different generations who attempt to escape to Kuwait in the tank of a water truck. In the gloomy ending, the refugees perish in their journey across the desert, a reference to the end of the Palestinian people. While they are dying under the heat of the sun, they knock continuously on the wall of the tank, crying, "We are here, we are dying, let us out, let us free."

In his ambitious and experimental second novel, All That's Left to You (1966), Kanafani used multiple narrators - two of them, the clock and the desert, were inanimate. The protagonist of the story is a young man named Hamid, who dreams of being reunited with his mother from whom he was separated in 1948, when he fled to Gaza while his mother left for the West Bank. Hamid tries to find her but he becomes lost in the desert, crossing paths with an Israeli soldier. He is forced to eschew his original plan and turn to confront his enemy. Although he dies before locating his mother, he is in death reunited with his lost land, and the very act of confronting his fears constitutes a symbolic victory. The thematic development reflects the change in political climate, and the initiation of the Palestinian armed struggle.

Umm Sad (1969) reflects the situation of the Palestinians following the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967 and the rise of the Palestinian Resistance Movement. One of the central persons in the story is a woman, Umm Sad, whose son joins the resistance movement. Kanafani's last published novel, Aid ila Hayfa (1970) was also written with a direct political message. In these books Kanafani abandoned interior monologues, flashbacks, and other complex techniques and used straightforward narrative and dialogue. The novels marked the shift from nationalist ideals to a more pronounced Marxist ideology.

Kanafani was assassinated on July 8, 1972, by a car bomb planted by Israeli agents. Kanafani was posthumously awarded the Lotus Prize for Literature by the Conference of Afro-Asian Writers. He left fragments of three novels that were published posthumously. Kanafani wrote also four collections of short stories, literary criticism, plays, and historical expositions. He was also a painter of some standing.

For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2); After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing by Barbara Harlow (1996); Ghassan Kanafani: A Study of his Novels and Short Stories by Fayha Abdul Hadi (1990); Man Is A Cause by Muhammad Siddiq (1984); The Arabic Novel by Roger Allen (1982, 2nd ed. 1995); Al-Tariq ila al-khaymah al-ukhra by Radwa Ashur (1977); Ghassan Kanafani: The Life of an Palestinian by Stefan Wild (1975); Ghassan Kanafani by A. Kanafani (1973)

Mawt Sarir raqm 12, (1961)