There are discoveries you make as a reader that divide your reading life into before and after. Ghassan Kanafani is one of those discoveries. Once you have read him you carry him with you, not as an influence or a reference but as a presence, something that altered the temperature of how you read everything that came after. Men in the Sun is the book that does that to people. It did it to me. It will do it to you.
It is impossible to separate Kanafani from what happened to him, because what happened to him is part of what the book is about. He was a Palestinian writer, a journalist, a political figure, exiled from his homeland at twelve years old during the Nakba of 1948. He wrote this novella in 1963. In 1972 he was assassinated in Beirut by a car bomb planted by Israeli intelligence. He was thirty-six years old. He left behind a body of work that is among the most essential in 20th century Arabic literature, and a voice that has not dimmed by a single degree in the sixty years since.
Knowing this does not make the book more significant. The book is significant entirely on its own terms. But knowing this tells you something about the weight a writer brings to a story when the story is not metaphor. When it is memory. When it is his people.
Three Palestinian men are trying to reach Kuwait in the back of a water tanker, smuggled across the desert in the hope of work, of money, of some version of a future. The driver, Abu Khaizuran, is a Palestinian himself, a man who lost something in the wars that rendered him, in a way the novel does not state directly but makes absolutely felt, incomplete. He carries these three men in a tank designed for water, in the desert heat, crossing borders. At each checkpoint he must leave the truck to deal with the guards while the men inside wait in the sealed, airless dark.
That is the structure of the story. What Kanafani builds inside that structure is something that operates on every register at once: as a physical thriller, as a political allegory, as a meditation on exile and the particular kind of hope that exile produces, which is not quite hope but the performance of it, the insistence on moving forward because stopping means accepting that the forward was never real.
What the Heat Does
Kanafani writes heat the way very few writers write any physical sensation: as a moral condition. The sun in this novella is not atmosphere. It is a force with an argument, pressing down on bodies that the rest of the world has decided can be moved, transported, hidden, made useful or made to disappear depending on the needs of the moment. The men in the tank are people with full interior lives, with mothers and debts and memories and plans. Kanafani gives you their inner worlds in detail, in full, and then he puts them in a metal box in the desert and seals the lid.
The intercutting between their present physical situation and their individual pasts is masterfully controlled. You learn who each man is exactly as quickly as you need to, and you learn it in a way that makes what is happening to them in the present unbearably specific rather than emblematic. Kanafani refuses to let them be symbols. They are people. That refusal is the most political act in the book.
The Voice
Kanafani writes with a compression that feels almost unbearable in places. Nothing is wasted. No sentence exists for atmosphere alone. The prose in Hilary Kilpatrick's translation carries an austerity that never becomes coldness, a restraint that is always one sentence away from breaking open into something devastating. He trusts the reader completely. He does not explain what his images mean. He does not soften what they require you to feel. He places things in front of you and waits.
The shorter stories that accompany the novella in this collection are equally extraordinary. Each one a different angle on the same subject, exile, displacement, the specific psychology of people who are waiting for a return that keeps receding. The letter, the photograph, the orange peel, the child. Kanafani finds the political inside the domestic with a precision that makes you realise how completely he understood that the personal and the political are not two different things. They are the same thing, described from different distances.
The question at the end of Men in the Sun is not asked by the narrator. It rises out of the final image like heat from asphalt. Why did they not knock? Why did they not beat the walls of the tank? It is not an accusatory question. It is a question about what exile does to people over time. About what it does to the will. About what happens to a person who has been told often enough, through displacement and dispossession and the slow accumulation of closed doors, that their noise will not be heard. You stop making noise. You wait. You trust the driver. You hope the border goes quickly.
That question has followed me since I first read this book. It follows everyone who reads it. Kanafani wrote it in 1963 and it has never stopped being present tense.
This is one of those books that earns the word necessary. Not because it is important in an abstract historical sense, though it is that too. Because it is written by a man who understood something true about the human cost of statelessness and made you feel it without a single moment of sentimentality or self-pity, and that kind of writing does not arrive often. When it does you hold it close and you do not let it go.
Rating: ★★★★★ 5 / 5 stars
For readers drawn to: The Secret Life of Saeed by Emile Habiby, Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa, I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti, and anyone who has ever needed literature to do what journalism cannot.