Edward W. Said

A searing portrait of Palestinian life and identity that is at once an exploration of Edward Said's dislocated past and a testimony to the lives of those living in exile.

Palestinian Lives

After the Last Sky

Marion

The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at. Particularly in fiction, the struggle to achieve form expresses the writer's efforts to construct a coherent scene, a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present. A typical Palestinian work will always be concerned with this peculiar problem, which is at once a problem of plot and an enactment of the writer's enterprise.

In Kanafani's Men in the Sun much of the action takes place on the dusty streets of an Iraqi town where three Palestinian men must petition, plead, and bargain with 'specialists' to smuggle them across the border into Kuwait. Impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinians need to carve a path for themselves in existence, which tor them is by no means a given or stable reality. Like the history of the lands they left, their lives seem interrupted just before they could come to maturity and satisfaction; thus each man leaves behind family and responsibilities, to whose exigencies he must answer - unsuccessfully - here in the present. Kanafani's very sentences express instability and fluctuation - the present tense is subject to echoes from the past, verbs of sight give way to verbs of sound or smell, and one sense interweaves with another - in an effort to defend against the harsh present and to protect some particularly cherished fragment of the past. Thus, the precarious actuality of these men in the sun reproduces the precarious status of the writer, each echoing the other.

Our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatim, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations.

The recuperation of our past by it’s partial re-creation in the present was obviously a political act.

Their sumud is real, concrete, solid: They are in Palestine, which not an idea, as it is for us, but a place.

A part of something is for the foreseeable future going to be better thanall of it. Fragments over wholes. Restless nomadic activity over the settlements of held territory. Criticism over resignation. The Palestinian as self-consciousness in a barren plain of investments and consumer appetites. The heroism of anger over the begging-bowl, limited independence over the status of clients. Attention, alertness, focus. To do as others do, but somehow to stand apart. To tell vour story in pieces, as it is.

After the Last Sky quotes

Join the club