Women in the Works of Ghassan Kanafani: A Comparative Reading of Two Novels

Abstract

This article surveys Ghassan Kanafani’s fictions, arguing that his literature of resistance features militant men or ordinary men coping with the consequences of dislocation. Hence, the presence of women is mainly subordinate. Then the article investigates the ambivalent presence of women in two novellas diverging from Kanafani’s mainstream texts which marginalize women, offering instead prevailing female figures: All That’s Left to You (1966) and Umm Saad (1969). In the former, Maryam loses her honor, getting pregnant out of wedlock just as her people lose Jaffa; the fallen woman allegorically becomes the lost nation, and thus assumes negative attributes of the mother archetype. In the latter, this ancillary presence changes as the titular heroine enacts resistance and attachment to the land. Umm Saad assumes the positive attributes of the mother archetype, figuratively becoming the fertile land to be regained. Using a relevant framework on resistance literature and archetypal criticism on the feminine, this article shows the close association between women and the Palestinian land (the positive ideals of liberty and fertility as well as the negative meanings of loss/disgrace). Such ambivalence can be understood in a range of positive and negative aspects of the mother archetype. Appealing to recurring patterns and primordial aspects of the human psyche, Kanafani asserts the universalism of his committed fiction, the right to regain the land as a basic human need, and the richness of the mother archetype to the collective unconscious of a nation. Hence, this article problematizes traditional gender roles in Kanafani’s fiction.