The Literature of Resistance after al-Kārithah (the Catastrophe)
Original by Ghassan Kanafani
Excerpted from: Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation: 1948-1968 (Al-Adab Al-Filistīnī Al-Muqāwim Taḥt Al-Iḥtilāl)
Translated, from the Arabic, by Amanda Batarseh
When the catastrophe befell Palestine in 1948, its profound impact was felt in Arab society not only numerically [in the dramatic decline of the population], but also demographically due to the fundamental shock it caused to the social composition of Arabs in occupied Palestine. More than three-quarters of the 200,000 Arabs remaining in Palestine after the Zionist occupation were villagers, while the overwhelming majority of city dwellers fled Palestine during, or shortly after, the 1948 war.
[…]
After the fall of Palestine in 1948, popular literature continued as an expressive site for the longings of the defeated peoplehood. At this time, a transformation emerged of weddings into fierce public demonstrations in al-Jalīl (the Galilee), propelled by the sharp tongues of nationalist singers and poets. Incapable of responding to these protestors in any way except through open fire, the occupying Zionist forces were subsequently compelled to present a large number [of these singers and poets] to the military governor, imposing stringent restrictions upon their movement.
Nevertheless, a word may inflict more damage than gun fire, capable of piercing through the siege encircling it. In May of 1958, clashes broke out between Arab protestors and enemy police forces in al-Nāṣirah (Nazareth), resulting in casualties. Tightening their ranks, shoulder-to-shoulder, protestors pushed police forces back, rending them from their positions as they rolled down the street. Since then, a new poem has arisen in al-Jalīl:
al-Nāṣirah supported al-Jalīl where the police speak of us
The land of Arabism is liberated, Dayan, leave and depart! [1]
Our brothers in Port Said [2] their history is recorded.
Even if the seventh sky falls, from our land, we will not depart!
[1] Moshe Dayan, former member of the Haganah, held several positions in the Israeli military established after 1948, including chief of staff and minister of defense.
[2] Reference to the Tripartite Aggression of 1956.
أدب المقاومة الكارثة
حين وقعت كارثة فلسطين عام ١٩٤٨ لم تخلف تغييرا جذريا في المجتمع العربي هناك من حيث العدد فقط، ولكنها أحدثت أيضا هزة جوهرية في التركيب الاجتماعي لعرب فلسطين المحتلة. أكثر من ثلاثة أرباع الـ ٢٠٠ ألف عربي الذين بقوا يومذاك في فلسطين بعد الاحتلال الصهيوني كانوا من سكان القرى. أما سكان المدن فقد هجرت الغالبية الساحقة منهم فلسطين إبان حرب الـ ١٩٤٨ أو بعدها بقليل
[…]
وقد ظل الأدب الشعبي بعد سقوط فلسطين عام ١٩٤٨ هو المكان الذي عبر فيه الشعب المغلوب على أمره عن أشواقه، ويبدو أنه حين كانت تتحول الأعراس في الجليل إلى مظاهرات عنف تندفع من تحت لسان القوالين والشعراء الشعبيين لم يكن بوسع سلطات الاحتلال الصهيوني إلا أن تفتح النار على المتظاهرين، وقد اضطرت هذه السلطات فيما بعد إلى تقديم عدد كبير من القوالين إلى الحاكم العسكري، وأن تضع رقابة صارمة على تحركاتهم
ورغم ذلك فإن الكلمة تفعل أكثر من فعل النار وتستطيع أن تخترق حصارها، ففي أيار\مايو ١٩٥٨ اشتبك متظاهرون عرب في الناصرة مع شرطة العدو، وتطور الاشتباك إلى سقوط قتلى، ولكن المتظاهرين الذين كانوا يشدون أكتافهم إلى بعضها اندفعوا نحو صفوف الشرطة فمزقوها ودحرجوها على الطريق، ومنذ ذلك تفتحت في الجليل أزهار أهزوجة جديدة
والناصرة ركن الجليل فيك البوليس مدحولي…
أرض العروبة تحررت دايان شيل وارحلِ
إخواننا في بور سعيد إلهم تاريخ مسجلي
لو وقعت سابع سما عن أرضنا ما بنرحل
Ghassan Kanafani was born in Akka (Acre), Palestine in 1936, fleeing with his family in 1948 during the Nakba. He lived the rest of his life in exile until his assassination in Beirut on July 8,1972 by a car-bomb, which also killed his 17-yr-old niece, Lamees Najim. Kanafani was a prominent Palestinian writer and political figure. He was the author of more than a dozen novels, short stories, plays, and essays—including the world-renowned collection Men in the Sun. He was also an official representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and editor of its weekly journal, al-Hadaf. The now defunct Daily Star of Lebanon is said to have written in Kanafani’s obituary that: “he was a commando without a gun, whose weapon was a ball point pen.”
Amanda Batarseh is an Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis and was a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Riverside in the Department of Languages and Literature. Her research and teaching interests include Modern Arabic Literature, Arab Literature in Diaspora, Palestine Studies, Indigenous Studies, Mediterranean Studies and Comparative Literature. Her recent publications include “Centering Place in Tawfiq Canaan’s Literary Cartography” (Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023) and “Raja Shehadeh’s ‘Cartography of Refusal’: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks” (Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2021).
Q/A
Editor-in-Chief Reem Taşyakan speaks with Amanda Batarseh
RT: What drew you to this particular excerpt and inspired you to translate it?
AB: I first read Kanafani’s Al-Adab Al-Filistīnī Al-Muqāwim Taḥt Al-Iḥtilāl: 1948-1968 (Palestinian Resistance Literature Under the Occupation: 1948-1968) as a graduate student, and first attempted to produce my own translated excerpts from the text the summer of 2013 while conducting research in Palestine. I continue to be dismayed by the fact that this pivotal piece of Palestinian literary history and analysis has (to my knowledge) yet to be translated in full into English, although serving as an important entry point for many scholars, such as Barbara Harlow’s foundational transnational analysis of resistance literature.[1] This section in particular resonates with me because it encapsulates not only the spirit and potency of Palestinian cultural resistance, but also the formal characteristics of both popular and classical Arabic poetry at this time within Palestine. The rhyme scheme and structure of this poetry facilitated the transmission of these works across space, and, critically, across military borders and the state of siege (ḥiṣār) under which Palestinians lived until 1966 in what Israeli’s call “Israel proper.” Of course, that siege has continued across various geographies of Palestinian dispossession, not the least of which is the brutal siege of Gaza and a genocidal assault of Palestinian life there that has endured (as I am writing this) for more than 100 days. As Kanafani writes:
[الشعر] يستطيع أن ينتشر دون أن يطبع، وأن ينتقل من لسان إلى لسان
“Poetry can spread without being printed, moving from tongue to tongue…”[2]
And as he notes in the excerpt I translated, this mobility presents a distinct threat to oppressive regimes because “it is capable of piercing through the siege encircling it.” We see this happening in this very moment with the poetry of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer. Refaat, a renowned poet and professor of world literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, was killed by an Israeli military airstrike on December 6, 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister, and her three children. His poem – “If I must die, let it be a tale” – which was penned before his murder, has bypassed the siege on Gaza and continues to mobilize people across the world to, in his words, “bring hope.”
RT: I noticed that the word used by Kanafani in the title is kārithah rather than nakbah? Can you speak to this?
AB: The word نكبة nakbah (now often written Nakba, meaning disaster or catastrophe in Arabic) was first offered by Constantine Zureiq, a historian at the American University in Beirut, to describe the cataclysmic destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 in Ma‘nā al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Disaster), released that same year. He writes “this is a disaster in every sense of the word and one of the harshest of the trials and tribulations with which the Arabs have been afflicted throughout their long history.”[3] Before this, the term nakbah (as noted by historian George Antonius in his The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement published in 1946) referred to the 1920 partition of Arab lands under European colonial regimes following the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916.[4] I bring up this genealogy in part to highlight the colonial history (and resistance) embedded within its use, but also to highlight the ever-shifting terrain of language and meaning. Although I cannot surmise the motivations for which Kanafani opted for the word kārithah (also meaning catastrophe or tragedy) rather than nakbah, for me it signals a destabilization of language’s permanence – that is, which engenders a sense of inevitability. The 1948 Nakba was an event in time that has – through the continuity of Zionist settler colonialism – come to delimit Palestinian life. It is, however, neither an inevitable reality nor, I would argue, a permanent one.
RT: Although it seems to be indicative of urgency and necessity, there is also something poetic about weddings erupting into sites of protest. How does that idea strike you?
AB: It is not at all surprising to me that weddings become a site of resistance, given that weddings nurture community, the continuity of Palestinian life through the growth of the family and love. These are all aspects of Palestinian life under constant threat by settler colonialism, and as such, are politicized by their very presence within that structure. It is also worth noting, however, that any form of communal gathering – whether in the celebration of lives-yet-to-come (in weddings) or lives-now-past (in funerals) – continue as sites of struggle and Palestinian repression. At the funeral procession of the Palestinian American journalist, Shireen Abu Aqleh, killed by the Israeli military while reporting on a raid in Jenin on May 11, 2022, Israeli police beat back attendees, throwing stun grenades into the crowd, and causing the pallbearers to nearly drop Shireen’s casket. The same day that Shireen was killed, Israeli police entered her family home in Jerusalem and the church where they were receiving condolences for the sole purpose of removing Palestinian flags and prohibiting songs they deemed provocative of nationalist sentiment.
RT: How would you sum up Kanafani’s legacy in a few words or sentences, literary or otherwise?
AB: For Ghassan Kanfani, there was no distinction between his political and creative life. His novels and short stories have profoundly shaped the landscape of Palestinian and Arabic literature. It feels nearly impossible to fully encapsulate his legacy, especially in a few sentences; however, in my own work his influence has been profound for how he theorizes Palestinian peoplehood and its literature as a profoundly embodied attachment to place. The land (الأرض – al-arḍ) is not a “property” to be seized or looted, or “state” of exclusion, but a home-space, a place of collective belonging, of ancestral connection, of both heterogeneity and totality, of Palestinian continuous presence and of return.
References
[1] Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987).
[2] Ghassan Kanafani, Al-Adab Al-Filistīnī Al-Muqāwim Taḥt Al-Iḥtilāl (Cyprus: Dār Manshūrāt al-Rimāl, 2013), 16.
[3] Constantine Zureiq, The Meaning of the Disaster, trans. Bayly Winder (Lebanon, Beirut: Khayat’s College Book Cooperative, 1956), 2.
[4] George. Antonius, The Arab Awakening : The Story of the Arab National Movement (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1979), 312.