Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories PDF
Preview Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories
RETURNING TO HAIFA and Ocher Stories PALESTINE’S CHILDREN r RETURNING TO HAIFA & O ther Stories A THREE CONTINENTS BOOK PALESTINE’S CHILDREN r RETURNING TO HAIFA & Other Stories Gha ssan Kanafani translated by Barbara Harlow & Karen E. Riley, with an Introduction and a Biographical Essay on Gha ssan Kanafani YN N I R It N N I R I'li |;| | s||| i; s Published in the United States of America in 2000 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2000 by Anni Kanafani. All rights reserved by the publisher. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kanafani, Ghassan. [Short stories. English. Selections] Palestine’s children : Returning to Haifa and other stories / Ghassan Kanafani; translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley; with an introduction to the work and a biographical essay on Ghassan Kanafani. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-89410-865-4 (he : alk. paper) ISBN 0-89410-890-5 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Palestinian Arabs—Fiction. 2. Exiles—Palestine—Fiction. 3. Kanafani, Ghassan. I. Harlow, Barbara. II. Riley, Karen E. III. Title. PJ7842.A5 A24 2000 892.7'36—dc21 00-024783 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the Lhiited States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements (0) of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 5 4 3 2 1 Contents r Ghassan Kanafani: A Biographical Essay Karen E. Riley 1 Introduction Karen E. Riley & Barbara Harlow 13 The Slope 29 Paper from Ramleh 37 A Present for the Holiday 43 The Child Borrows His Uncle’s Gun and Goes East to Safad 47 Doctor Qassim Talks to Eva About Mansur Who Has Arrived in Safad 39 Abu al-Hassan Ambushes an English Car 75 The Child, His Father, and the Gun Go to the Citadel at Jaddin 83 The Child Goes to the Camp 99 The Child Discovers that the Key Looks Like an Axe 107 Suliman’s Friend Learns Many Things in One Night 113 v VI CONTENTS Hamid Stops Listening to the Uncles’ Stories 123 Guns in the Camp 129 He Was a Child That Day 135 Six Eagles and a Child 141 Returning to Haifa 149 Acknowledgments 197 Ghassan Kanafani: A Biographical Essay KAREN E. RILEY My feelings are very strange. They are the feelings of a man who was on his way somewhere in search of suitable work when he died suddenly—on the road.1 Ghassan Kanafani was not yet twenty-four, teaching in a Kuwaiti government school, when he wrote these words in a let ter to a friend. The image is a precursor of his first major liter ary work, the novella Men in the Suny written two years later. It is also sadly prophetic of Kanafani’s actual fate, for at the age of thirty-six he did indeed die “suddenly,” killed when his booby- trapped car exploded in Beirut. During Kanafani’s brief life he was always “on his way somewhere,” always searching for the appropriate tool as well as the most effective setting in which to use it. From his birth the circumstances of his life were inextricably enmeshed with the Palestinian cause. His “work” was survival, both his own and that of his people, the Palestinians. Ghassan Kanafani was born in Acre on the northern Mediterranean coast of Palestine on April 9, 1936. That same month, the Arab Higher Committee was established in response to rapidly increasing Jewish immigration, and a general Arab 2 A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY strike throughout Palestine was called by the committee to protest British mandatory government policies with respect to immigration. The strike paralyzed activity for six months. Ghassan’s father was a lawyer, and the family belonged to the upper middle class. He had an older sister and brother and three younger siblings. As was common at the time among the middle and upper classes, young Ghassan attended a school run by French missionaries in Palestine and was thus educated pri marily in French rather than in the language of his own coun try. In his own words, he “did not have a command of the Arabic language like an Arab,”2 and he would later make a con scious and serious effort to enrich his Arabic and rid it of for eign expressions. In 1948, on his twelfth birthday, one of the most egregious events of the Zionist struggle for Palestine took place: the brutal massacre of the residents of an Arab village called Deir Yassin. Anni Kanafani, his widow, writes that Ghassan never celebrated his birthday after that year.3 Within a month the city of Acre itself fell to Zionist forces, and his family escaped, first to a small village in southern Lebanon, then to the mountains out side Damascus, and finally to a ghetto in Damascus. There, the family’s position changed dramatically. In sudden exile and living in extreme poverty, the Kanafanis believed at first, like all the other Palestinians, that it would only be a matter of weeks, months, or a year at most before the situation would be reversed and they could go home. As a child Ghassan heard other Palestinian children playing in the camps and speaking with compassion of Syrian or Lebanese children, saying, “Poor things, they don’t have Palestine to return to.”4 Reality proved otherwise— it proved to be permanent exile. Ghassan took a keen interest in everything around him in the camps and noted the difference between his actual surround ings and his yearned-for past, and he began to draw and paint as a means of forging a link between that past and his miserable present. When he was fourteen or fifteen years old, Ghassan broke his leg. He and two school friends had played hooky and gone into the mountains above Damascus, where Ghassan fell while trying A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY 3 to jump between boulders. Not wanting to admit his truancy to his lather, he invented a clever story about a minor accident in town, and as a result, the leg was at first not treated properly. His convalescence stretched some six months, and he spent that time studying Arabic literature intensely in an effort to improve his usage and literary command of his native language. At the age of sixteen he took a job teaching at a United Nations relief (UNRWA) school in a refugee camp, to help sup port his family as well as to continue his own education. His experiences even then were propelling him toward political involvement, and he would later state that he “turned toward politics at an early stage in life because we were living in a refugee camp.”5 Two incidents while he was teaching are indicative of this propensity and illustrate the basis for his commitment to the Palestinian cause— a commitment that would develop through his life experiences and, in his literature, would symbolize and encompass the cause of all oppressed peoples seeking freedom. For one thing, he noticed that many of his young students were falling asleep during class, which angered him at first. But he then discovered that the children were working late into the night, selling sweets at the cinema or on the streets, to help sup port their families: I realized that the children’s drowsiness did not stem from scorn for me or dislike of their studies, nor did it have any thing to do with my capacity as a teacher. It was simply the reflection of a political problem.6 On another occasion Kanafani was giving a lesson in accor dance with the official curriculum, which called for the instruc tor to teach the children how to draw an apple and a banana. While drawing these items on the blackboard, it suddenly occurred to him that these children had never seen either an apple or a banana; such things had no real bearing on their lives. So he erased his drawings and asked them to draw pic tures of the refugee camp instead. He later described this event as a “decisive turning point” in his life, saying: “I clearly remem
The list of books you might like
