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102 the minnesota review Barbara Harlow History and Endings: Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun and Tawfiq Salih's The Duped When we set out from Jaffa for Acre there was nothing tragic about our departure. We were just like anybody who goes to spend the festival season every year in another city. Out time in Acre passed as usual, with nothing untoward. I was young then, and so I probably enjoyed those days because they kept me from going to school. But whatever the fact ofthe matter, the picture gradually became clearer on the night ofthegreat attack on Acre. That night passed, cruel and bitter amidst the despondency of the men and the prayers of the women. You and I and the others of our age were too young to understand what the story meant from beginning to end, but that night the threads began to grow clearer. Ghassan Kanafani, "The Land of Sad Oranges"1 "To understand what the story meant from beginning to end" is the task the Palestinian child assigns to himself in "The Land of Sad Oranges," an early (1958) story by Ghassan Kanafani, in order to discover the answer to his dire question of "why we had become refugees." The Palestinian writer is himself, however, engaged in the historical project of writing that story. The narratives thus produced are seen to contribute to the historical record and to enter as well into the very events and significant moments of the life of the people: flight (hurub), exile (ghurbah), resistance (muqawamah), steadfastness (sumud), and ultimately the awaited return (audah) to Palestine. The writer not only describes the historical events and circumstances, but provides, as well, a historical sense and identity for those who have lived them. The writer, like the historian according to Marc Ferro, the French historian and cinematician, "has as his first task that of restoring to society the History of which the institutional apparatus has deprived it. The primary duty, then, is to interrogate society, to listen to it. It is not enough to make use of the archives, one must above all create them, contribute to their constitution: film, question those who have never had the right to speak, never had the right to bear witness."2 Whereas "The Land of Sad Oranges" describes a child's reaction to the first Palestinian exodus in 1948 at the time of the establishment of the Israeli state, Kanafani's short novel Men in the Sun3 takes as its central issue a further phase of that exodus and consequent exile, the Palestinians ' search for employment and a livelihood in the traditionally conser- barlow 103 vative but oil-rich Arab states of the Gulf. Men in the Sun, according to Fadl al-Naqib's summary of the main plot development, is the story of three Palestinians who do not know each other but who find themselves in Basra [Iraq] at the same time where they each are trying illegally to cross the border into Kuwait. In Kuwait they hope to find work and a subsistence which they had had no hope of in the different lands from which they come. In Basra each of them discovers that he is unable to pay the price demanded by the professional smugglers, and each tries in his own way to find a means of exit, until finally all of them encounter each other and the self-appointed smuggler who offers to take them to Kuwait for a cut-rate price. This smuggler, called Abul Khaizuran, is the highly skilled driver of a larger water truck belonging to a wealthy Kuwaiti merchant. The truck is not subjected to a search at the border. Abul Khaizuran's plan for smuggling them out of Iraq and into Kuwait is a simple one. Since he is obliged in any case to return the now empty water truck to Kuwait, he can also take the three men with him. For most of the trip they can ride with him until just before the border when he will hide them inside the empty water tank. Once he has cleared his papers and driven a short distance past the border, they can get out...

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