The memory of Ghassan Kanafani .. The neck that refused the sword dialogue
As for Kanfani, the question of dialogue with Israel was a great deal on & quot; the people who were uprooted from their land, thrown in camps, lived in famine, killed for 20 years, and forbidden to use even the name of a Palestinian. & Quot;
"We have a cause for which we are fighting, and this is a lot ... In order for Palestine to be liberated and its people to obtain dignity, justice, respect and human rights, fighting becomes essential, as is life itself." Thus, Palestinian writer and novelist Ghassan Kanafani summed up the struggle of the Palestinian people and its goals.
In his rare published interview with Australian journalist Richard Carleton in Beirut in 1970, Kanafani answered a question: Why does your organization not enter into peace talks with the Israelis? Why don't you talk to them? He replied, "You mean surrender talks ... This is a kind of conversation between the sword and the neck."
For him, this question was in and of itself too much for "the people who were uprooted from their land and thrown into camps and living in starvation and killed for 20 years and forbidden to even use a Palestinian designation," he said.
Resistant literature
Kanafani’s talk was just two years before his assassination by detonating his car at the hands of Israeli Mossad agents, on July 8, 1972, and he was accompanied by his sister’s daughter, “Lamis Najm”.
He was then a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and his assassination was included in what an Israeli called the "Revenge Campaign" that targeted Palestinian leaders and activists, in the wake of the kidnapping of 11 Israeli athletes by a group of the Popular Front during the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany.
Despite the passage of 48 years since his assassination, Ghassan Kanafani's cultural and political legacy still constitutes the ground that inspired the Palestinian resistance, and he was the one who authenticated this in his book “Palestinian Literature Resisting Under Occupation 1948-1968 قائلا,” saying, “Armed resistance is not a shell, it is the fruit of a rooted planting. Deep in the ground. "
Kanafani was born in 1936 in the city of Acre on the Palestinian coast, and he lived in the city of Jaffa, where he enrolled in the Frere School and where he learned English. He was displaced on the Nakba of 1948 to Lebanon on foot, then he moved with his family to Damascus, and there he violated his father's ambition to become a merchant and turned to literature, and he obtained a degree in Arabic from the University of Damascus.
There, he worked as a newspaper distributor, a restaurant worker, and a teacher for the Relief and Works Agency for Refugees in Damascus for drawing and sports, then he traveled to Kuwait in 1955 and worked as a teacher. In 1960 he moved to Beirut with the newspaper "Freedom" of the Arab Nationalist Movement, then became editor-in-chief of "Al-Muharrer" newspaper, editor-in-chief of the Anwar supplement and founder and editor-in-chief of "Al-Hadaf" magazine.
Until his assassination at the age of 36, Kanafani wrote 18 books between a short story, a novel and a theatrical work, along with his research contributions, and translated some of them into several foreign languages.
Among his most famous novels are “Men in the Sun” (1963), for which he took the movie “The Deceived”, “What is Left for You” (1966), and “Umm Saad” (1969), and “Who Killed Leila Al-Hayek?” (1969), and “Returning to Haifa” (1970), from which a series is quoted with the same name.
In the anecdotal collections, he wrote “Death of Bed No. 12 ″,“ The Land of Sad Orange ”and“ On Men and Guns. ”Among his studies were“ Literature of Resistance in Palestine ”(1966), and“ In Zionist Literature ”(1967), and“ Palestinian Resistant Literature "(1968), and a collection of articles on the Palestinian struggle under the title" The Palestinian Resistance and its dilemmas. "
Transfer the tragedy to literature
The masses knew him - as the covers of his literature tell - a bold progressive journalist and writer, but Palestinian writer and critic Ismail Al-Nashif said that Kanafani "transferred the Palestinian tragedy to literature as an attempt to restore its place in history, and then examined the possibilities of solving it in the reality of the suffering of suffering through the path of return and liberation."
The Palestinian novelist, Yahya Yakhlef, believes that Kanafani contributed to protecting the Palestinian identity that was fragmented after the catastrophe. "He has introduced the Palestinian novel to the gateway to creativity and has created a presence in the Arab and international scene."
Yakhlef believes that Kanafani founded a novel that includes high artistic elements, which lit up the paths and paths of generations of Palestinian novelists after him who provided rich and varied additions, so that the Palestinian narrative became a large area in the Arab and human cultural scene.
Yakhlef says to Al Jazeera Net, "He loved him from us adults and grew up with his love for the young." He adds, "After translating his work into many languages, he brought the Palestinian issue to the depth of global and cultural ethics, and became an immortal symbol of the literature of resistance and freedom literature at all levels, Palestinian, Arab and humanitarian." .
Draw his texts in his body
Palestinian writer and academic Muhammad Farhat says that the secret of Kanafani was in his true affiliation with Palestine, and in presenting his literary and political contributions at an important historical moment in the march of the Palestinian people.
In his view, Kanafani was "the deepest in terms of awareness that his literature and his body drew the greatest texts of all time, and in his departure he established the total congruence between what he was requesting from the heroes of his novels and his personal life and his choices", after he "wasted his life in people's lives" as described by the poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Just as Ghassan was the heir of a previous generation of militant writers such as Ibrahim Toukan, Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud and Abd al-Karim al-Karmi (Abu Salma), he also had a generation of inheritors. But the time has changed after the awareness of the Palestinians, which witnessed setbacks, overthrew the dream, and after the schism between the political and cultural in the Palestinian national project, according to Farhat's term.
However, Kanafani remained a picture of the ideal Palestinian who called for ending the tragedy by moving forward in rejecting reality and the struggle to change it and the progress of the masses in his call. Therefore, the permanent evocation of his texts among the Palestinians is not a longing for the literature of resistance, but a yearning for a deep and distinct awareness that is lacking in their current reality.
Therefore, the goal of his assassination, as Mahmoud Darwish said, in an "attempt to lament the volcano":
when they
blow you up ... they blow up the pace of progress ...
so they reckon
Source: aljazeera
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