Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories

Product Information

the same world that doesn't give a damn about the civilians and children that fall victim to the drone assassinations of the "West" and starts a discussion about the moral implications of this extra-legal killings on a large scale only in that moment when some of the victims happen by chance to be one of "us" (i. There is an inter-generational trauma that binds every single instance of pain to subsequent generations of Palestinians. Thereafter, many of the Palestinians sought their fortune in the East Bank, which offered more economic opportunities. A unique opportunity to support your beloved one's in the refugee camps, pay for a decent education for your siblings, or prepare to get married.

It left me with an immense sadness for the characters upon completion; and more importantly, I really enjoyed Kanafani’s writing style. While Kanafani’s stay in Kuwait can be seen as his formative years, his period in Lebanon (1960–72) was productive in terms of literary as well as journalistic writings. A short novella about Palestinian refugees struggling to make ends meet and deciding to try and smuggle themselves to Kuwait for work, and some other stories.

Meanwhile, the earlier Jordanians, formerly nomadic Bedouins who moved between the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent, continued to adjust to farming and settlement in towns and villages. The harmony between Kuwait and its Palestinian community was neither absolute nor permanent, however, as shown by events that transpired between the publication of the novella in Arabic in the 1960s and its translation into English in the late 1970s. As a non-Palestinian, he takes us through layers of pain, as he brings realisation that pain for Palestinians is everything from suffering the indignity of being forcefully removed from their lands, to watching an orange shrivel away before them. Most of the Palestinian pioneers to Kuwait, who hailed mainly from Jordan, came from lower- or middle-class origins. After he leaves the smuggler’s office, Marwan is approached by Abul Khaizuran, a Palestinian who drove a truck for the British during the 1948 war.

Or is there something transcendent that is identifiable via the soul or the heart over and above any mental or physical form of identification? Since then, the impotent driver keeps repeating to himself the following refrain: “He had lost his manhood and his country, and damn everything in this bloody world” (Men in the Sun, p. Through a series of fl ashbacks and stream-of-consciousness narratives, the text shows that even though all three imagine Kuwait to be a paradise of riches, they each fl ee the refugee camps of Palestine for different reasons. His father ‘thought about the matter; if he let two rooms and lived with his lame wife in the third, he would live out the rest of his life in security, untroubled by anything.

You cannot be sure how to feel about this man, whether to blame him or not, as he seems genuinely saddened, but at the same time, his only concern is money and does not shy away from stealing their possessions after their deaths. All these interruptions delay the crossing until the three men in the airtight water tank suffocate to death. There is a sense of humiliation that is attached to the predicament the Palestinian refugees find themselves in. It was in Kuwait that the first central committee of Fath (or Fatah, the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine) was formed by Yasir Arafat, Khalid al-Hasan, Khalil al-Wazir, and Salim Za’nun, all of whom were residing in Kuwait at the time.