I wrote this essay four years ago, in February 2021, for a seminar on modern Arabic literature. It is very much a product of its time, in the sense that it reflects my worldview then, and is not necessarily how I feel today. I would say I’m a much more hopeful person now. But enough about me.

The subject is Ghassan Kanafani’s novella—a devastating work about three Palestinian refugees, a smuggler, and the unbearable silence that swallows them. Unlike much political fiction, Men in the Sun is neither polemic nor parable. It’s a slow, searching work that renders atrocity through texture, gesture, refusal. I was seventeen when I wrote this piece, but I return to it often. It was the first time I tried to write not just about a text, but with it—staying close to its silences and its grief.

This essay also won my high school’s prize for best literature paper out of a pool of 5,000, but what stayed with me more than the award was the feeling of having touched something real: the shared ache of diaspora, dislocation, and deferred mourning.

It feels right to begin The Close Read here. These are the themes I keep coming back to. These are the questions I still can’t answer.

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Kanafani on Ignominy & Anonymity

Sunt lacrimae rerum. — Vergil, The Aeneid, I.462
tr.: “There are tears for things.”

Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 novella, Men in the Sun, is a centerpiece of Palestinian national literature. With its focus on three Palestinian refugees, the man they pay to smuggle them, and their journey from Basra, Iraq to Kuwait—where they hope to find gainful employment—it renders the massive, overwhelming issue of global refugees fathomable. Kanafani treats the complected lives of these four Palestinian men unflinchingly and a symphonic piece of literature, dense in its motifs and implications, is the result. While the plot reaches its highest pitch in the second-to-last chapter, it is in the final section that its gravity reveals itself. Kanafani depicts the despair of helplessness, and it makes his text universal: to be powerless against massive tragedies—yet to still know of their existence—is what makes us modern. Capturing that universal despair without lapsing into polemic is Kanafani’s true achievement.

As in classical tragedies, the fates of several characters are weaved together; their stories culminate in their shared journey and eventual deaths. The backstory explains how three refugees of divergent ages and backgrounds—Marwan, Assad, and Abu Qais—meet their eventual smuggler, himself a Palestinian, Abul Khaizuran. This is well-established by that penultimate section, which contains the masterfully executed climax. “Sun and Shade” details how they cross the last checkpoint that stands between them and Kuwait. It is a sweltering day in the desert, and in order to cross, Abul Khaizuran has the three men to hide in the lorry. Despite their protests that it seems dangerously hot, he assures them it will be brief: “Think, in seven at the most I’ll open the cover for you. Remember that, it’s half-past eleven.” Marwan’s only response is to “[look] at his watch and nod.” However, the truly tragic, absurd turn comes when a border official, obsessed with “the idea that his friend had slept with a prostitute” detains Abul Khaizuran with lecherous questions for several torturous pages. Twenty-one minutes later, he escapes, but when he climbs into the trailer, discovers that they are dead. The section ends with him re-entering the lorry, discovering Abu Qais’s shirt there, hastily throwing that out of the truck’s cab, and shakily driving onwards. Here (and it is about midday) he is overwhelmed by unspecific emotion: he is dizzy, confused, sweating heavily and likely crying. Kanafani closes this portion on the question of whether the ‘salty drops’ falling into Abul Khaizuran’s eyes are “tears, or sweat running from his burning forehead.”

The next chapter cuts to several hours later, in the dark of night. However, bridging that gap is the solemn, subdued section title, « القَبر», which is as misleading as not. On the one hand, it is inaccurate because Abul Khaizuran does not bury the men: there are zero graves. On the other, it is correct, as they share a final resting place: there is a singular grave when there were going to be three (i.e., plural) graves. It is this title that primes us for the imminent scene and its darkness. Darkness is the crucial metaphor of this section: fittingly, Kanafani opens it with details of a dimming, which establishes the time (the same day, around dusk), sounds the thematic keynote (obscurity and shame), and drives the plot forward (the action requires secrecy). This dimming begins with the sun’s setting, but continues: first with Abul Khaizuran driving far away from the light of civilization and towards the municipal garbage dump, and second, with his switching off of the truck’s lights. The darkness serves two functions: it protects him against detection and allows him to be blind to his grim task.

However, the darkness is an imperfect shield. While insulating him from the obvious grise, it—perversely—amplifies other, more morbid elements. As such, we the readers are immersed in the complete opposite of day: amid darkness and silence, we undergo an inverse sensory experience through (everything but the eyes of) Abul Khaizuran. The primal horror of this section extends and intensifies that of ‘Sun and Shade,’ where just as before, in the darkness, the bodies lose their persons, and the only thing distinguishing them to Abul Khaizuran is how difficult they are to dispose of. How Kanafani situates this scene is subtle: on some level, the plot requires this darkness, but that is just half the reason. Note the continuity between this section and the prior one, where the passengers’ dying moments are not shown to Abul Khaizuran, and so are invisible to the reader. Though Kanafani is clearly comfortable with moving between points of view, he chooses to stay in Abul Khaizuran’s perspective even as the main action separates into the tractor (the driver) and the trailer (the passengers). This arrangement, where we are not forced to watch their death but still must deal with its aftermath, is mimetic of the Palestinian situation: sequestered away from view, cut off from contact, Palestine was—and still quite is—something of a black box as far as news goes. We spectators (which is what we are) do not have to face their faces: hidden from view, their deaths are not anyone’s responsibility. Like our passengers, they get killed, but it is often hard to identify who killed them: that is the effect of, one, modern journalism’s infamous passive voice, and two, deliberate obfuscation of events. However, regardless of how the story is told or not told, the bodies—sometimes, the sole record of those people, and the only proof of the atrocity—are intractably there.

It is this problem, that of stubborn corpses, which makes the scene so ghastly. The dead bodies seem to have a certain power, even in their lifelessness. While questions of dignity, fraternity, and responsibility are the novella’s entire basis, those issues come into sharpest relief in the resolution: the interactions between Abul Khaizuran and the nameless bodies. This is in part achieved by Abul Khaizuran’s (literal) hermeticism. He is far removed from civilization—on the edge of the desert—and set in utter darkness, without even the moon for company. That detail of the moonless night is masterful: there is something so godless about the total desolation. And of course, I cannot neglect the choice of setting—i.e., the municipal dump—because that is another masterstroke. Whatever indignity there is in mass, unmarked, or shallow graves is completely outdone by the sheer brutality of this particular non-grave.

Yet, the non-burial is not something wholly depraved—instead, it is an unsettling and complex mixture: tenderness and apathy, compassion and disregard. On the one hand, it represents Abul Khaizuran trying to give his charges some paltry respect in death: he thinks that they will receive an official burial once the city workers discover them in the morning. At the same time, he is no saint in the matter: the decision also represents his abandoning the plan to bury them properly. But that’s just it—is he to blame? He is genuinely exhausted after the day, and could very well expire on the spot; with the consideration of a city burial, leaving the bodies prominently out may be the honorable thing. It is the next event—the looting—that truly muddles a reader’s judgement.

The looting is the most rarefied turn in the whole book. I think it surpasses even the final sentences in its artistry—especially with, one, how it is almost an afterthought for Abul Khaizuran, and two, how he thinks to not only take their money but Marwan’s watch as well. To me, that watch is the whole book, and is the moment I most remember. Despite the societal belief that corpse looting is one of the most dishonorable acts, the judgement is still complicated: we see Abul Khaizuran’s guilt and faltering, and know that he is not without a conscience. Of course, it is in very poor taste, but he is not so easily condemned. He is only slightly less desperate than his passengers were, and that is the nature of desperation: one lacks the security to say no, and as such, he is not in the position to behave tastefully. Yet his privation does not wholly excuse him here: a dark thought occurs to me: is this not a bigger payout than he would have received? The whole situation recalls the tourist’s earlier comment that “this desert is full of rats [who eat] rats smaller than them” and the ‘law of the jungle’ comes to mind: the wildness is felt acutely when far from civilization.

The brutal, animal loneliness is the essence of the horror: it forces us to realize that we have no one protecting, watching or guarding us and that there is nobody who will grant us succor or solace. That is a very primal fear. As Abul Khaizuran feels genuine anguish at the end and cries into the desert, there is no one to comfort or understand him. Moreover, he realizes, I think, that there is very little intervening between life and death, and that existence is a matter of luck and a weak social contract: little prevents someone from killing him like that: and who would take care of him then?

It is a kind of secular theodicy. The checkpoint episode in the chapter preceding “The Grave,” where Abul Khaizuran tells the three men to enter the lorry, illustrates this: the last interaction he has with the passengers is assuring them, “Think, in seven at the most I’ll open the cover for you. Remember that, it’s half-past eleven,” and meanwhile, Marwan’s only response is to “[look] at his watch and nod”—all the more crushingly, as it is the same watch Abul Khaizuran will later take. The sheer ridiculousness forces us to confront the enormity of the situation along with Abul Khaizuran: because of a chatty clerk, three men have died, and though plenty of people are at fault, there is no one truly to blame. In this moment of reckoning, there is no divine presence; even the old gods— the sun, the moon—are gone. He has ventured so beyond the pale of humanity that he has no god to call upon in this moment. He has no way to materially atone: he does not even have people to apologize to. His guilt has to be his expiation: no other penance is available.

We end on his vox clamantis in deserto, asking a question without an answer. Stricken, alone, in the worst night, he hears the desert call back to him, “Why? Why? Why?” But there is no answer: there was never a ‘why’ to any of it. It is the only fact in a godforsaken world. Ancient societies could take comfort in that “sunt lacrimae rerum,” but here that vanishes: there are no tears for things. This is Kanafani’s ultimate conclusion: in a godless universe, one is only answerable to themselves.