Kanafani, Ghassan. Men in the Sun.

The message is not an implicit exoneration of Israel, of course, but it dismantles the starkly bipolar structure in which the conflict is often presented. Primarily, the refusal of neighboring Arab states to accept Palestinian refugees abandons them to the squalor and poverty of refugee camps. Through this personal, rather than political, approach, any reader hurt by betrayal, falsehood, loneliness or despair will find themselves identifying with a story created by and about Palestinians. Khaizuran “didn’t know if they could hear him as he shouted through his teeth…or was his voice lost in his throat” (Kanafani, 53). already sympathetic to Kanafani’s outspoken pan-Arabism and socialist viewpoint. In a literary sense, the intimacy of this information humanizes Khaizuran and casts the powerful as simultaneously vulnerable.

Kanafani primarily intends to bring Palestinian suffering to the forefront of the Arab-Israeli debate - to put names and histories to faceless refugees and to put their suffering in the context of Arab political and social divisions. But it also provokes reflection on the war’s universal if auxiliary demons: the acquisition of bodies (particularly women’s bodies) as the spoils of war, and the silencing of victims. It also, in a sense, echoes the situation of European Jews during the Holocaust, when restricted entrance to unoccupied European states (and the United States) propelled mass immigration to Palestine even among non-Zionists. He provides a window into the internal conflict of Palestinian refugees after the Israeli victory - to remain and struggle for political emancipation, or to seek material security elsewhere for the sake of one’s family. The story’s climactic and symbolic ending has Khaizuran wondering why the dead did not alert outside forces - scream or pound on the walls - as the oven-like compartment asphyxiated them. Kanafani, who wrote the story while underground in Lebanon, does not comment on the strategic motivations for this, but explicitly demonstrates the consequences of this policy.

Some aspects of Abu Qais, Assad and Marwan’s situation and suffering finds parallels in other 20th century conflicts. This dilemma is approached through the experiences of three generations and reflected upon by Abu Qais, who recalls Ustaz Selim, a friend who valiantly defended his school and died a martyr. Men in the Sun presents the various factors within the Arab world that enable Palestinian marginalization.