Men in the Sun. Ghassan Kanafani.

There are historical figures and characters who unfortunately remain ignored by the spotlight of narration and critical debate within the Western literary panorama. Figures whose legacy holds essential value in contemporary times, and whose contributions have inscribed entire chapters of historical heritage, yet remain unknown to public opinion, an audience unconsciously overfed with information shaped and manipulated by a Eurocentric narrative. Their consciousnesses thus become unwitting victims of contemporary interpreters of historical memory, who refuse to take responsibility for mediating an honest reconstruction of the past.

Among the most significant voices held hostage by the heavy hands of this dialectical manipulation, in the Palestinian case, the name of Ghassan Kanafani stands out. Writer, novelist, journalist, and teacher, Kanafani introduced the concept of Resistance Literature into the vast and boundless field of Arabic literature. But more than that, he was a militant of the Palestinian resistance struggle and an active participant in the founding of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, for which he became spokesperson between the late 1960s and early 1970s in Beirut.

A solitary flower suffocated by the shadow of luxuriant trees of refined and sublime poetic metaphors, and at the same time obscured by the massive and sturdy trunks of a that denialist narrative that has so far revealed to be necessary to soothe the Zionist fear of every form of culture. A narrative that pursues nothing but the violent memoricide of all impulses of resistance, and that therefore struggles to allow the powerful etching of Kanafani’s writing to carve its way into the disinhibited and hypnotized consciousness of Western public opinion. Kanafani’s works are not idyllic poems meant to charm and caress the imagination. Rather, they are committed novels and political condemnations that stir and torment the soul; hardened millstones of realism and humanity that disfigures the occupier's face and conscience.

April 8, 1936. Palestine is under British occupation. In the northern quarter of the Palestinian city of Akka (Acre), welcomed by the melodic silence of the waves, Ghassan Kanafani is born. He grows up among those alleyways, which become extensions of his arteries, nourishment for his identity; among the gentle scents of bread and oil, and the more inebriating ones of coffee and spices, which imprint themselves upon his very skin. Twelve years later. All of a sudden, a noise rises on the horizon, growing louder and louder. The sound of the sea is no longer recognisable. The alleyways gradually fill with armed men. The stones of Acre’s houses are stained with tears and dyed with the blood of his veins, violently torn from the soil of home. Ethnic cleansing begins. It is 1948. It is the Nakba.

Kanafani, like thousands of other Palestinians, is forced to flee. His identity is cut into fragments of essence, dancing uncertainly, carried by the breath of the wind along the limitless path of fate. He thus finds himself an exile in the immense garden of the world.

What do I belong to? What belongs to me?

He gazes at the sky, an endless mantle that still connects him to his land. He sees the moon. He follows it and allows it to guide him through Lebanon, Syria, and Kuwait, resigned to losing in each place a fragment of his self. The moon appears unchanged, immovably anchored to its original place. He has bumped into its face in every exile, in all those distant and foreign lands, but it has never moved. And yet, every dawn, it is set aside to make room for the warm and invasive light of the sun, only to return at every subsequent sunset to the place that belongs to it.

Perhaps this is my destiny as well. They have denied me a home in the heart of my land; therefore, I will build within my soul a safe place in which to inhabit it.

Kanafani’s biographical experience strengthens his human and literary depth. The specter of his past, perpetually clinging to his back, gradually loosens its grip, and the traces of pain and alienation transform into awareness of the present. In 1962, the mature processing of the tragedy that marked both him and his people flows into the publication of his first novel. One of his most renowned and significant works: Rijāl fī al-shams.

Men in the Sun - the English title - besides constituting a fundamental pillar of Palestinian, Arab, and world literature, is undoubtedly essential for understanding the complex and increasingly widespread phenomenon of migration, of desperate and involuntary flight from one’s land and affections.

A banner of his people, a conscious spokesperson for the anxieties of those who like him were forced to crystallise the warmth of their motherland into an abstract memory. Kanafani immortalses the stories of three men: the old Abu Qays, the young Asad, and the boy Marwan, introduced in the very first chapters of the novel. Three ages, three stages of life, three different social environments. A metaphorical synecdoche for the entire Palestinian population in exile.

Their stories are initially separated, distinguished by chance events and concrete aspirations. Three stories of ordinary men. Three accounts of everyday lives, suddenly shattered by an unnatural necessity: the need to imagine life anew, the pursuit of a new identity.

At the endpoint of their distinct paths, their lives converge and fatally intersect, united by a single condition: they are three Palestinian refugees fleeing toward the distant and long-desired Kuwait.

Kanafani recounts their dreams and illusions, but also their profound shame and searing pain. Men driven by necessity to flee, reasoning almost with animal instinct, and ultimately accepting to be treated as such, in the name of a forcibly idealised destiny that torments and invades their minds, perhaps their only remaining refuge for continued existence. Men whose past existence has been erased, stripped of their present identity, deprived of the human possibility of choosing among more dignified alternatives upon which to build a future. They drag fear behind them like dirt clinging to their shoes and entrust their lives to a smuggler who will transport them across the infernal desert, toward a tragic end perhaps already written.

The direct experience of this trauma grants the author the awareness needed to stitch together, symbol by symbol, the collective experience of Palestinian exile. The journey itself assumes a central role, becoming a symbolic and isolated entity.

A harsh, exhausting, humiliating journey that in Kanafani’s text becomes the universal representation of the Nakba of 1948. Memories that still violently carve into his unconscious, corroding mind and soul.

These stories mirror the human tragedy that defines the migratory phenomena of our time. They are the portrait of a people bent beneath the perfidious will of History, or its distorted reconstruction. A photograph of three men annihilated by their own dreams; forced to abandon their land and plunge into the terrifying sea of the unknown, carried forward by a single idea, by an inexhaustible hope. A hope that will soon be burned and suffocated within the scorching entrails of a metal tank.

Kanafani’s work is not a historical or political treatise. It is a literary work in its fullest sense; one that does not fictionalise History, but reconstructs it through symbolic images and reflects it in a sublime style. It is the patrimonialization of a trauma shared by entire communities: not only that of the Palestinian people, but of every human being forced to endure the tragic consequences of a “coloniality” - past or present - that remains an invisible claw tearing at their flesh.

Men in the Sun is a torrential river of words, designed to give form to an absence - the homeland that was stolen from them - to reconstruct the destruction of a past whose very remnants are being erased.

The result of masterful storytelling, of an arid and brutal realism; born of a harsh, concise, direct, and ultimately political language, reflecting the author’s profound social awareness. A novel whose apparent linear simplicity conceals an immense well of unexplored symbolism, enriched by a brilliant use of multiple literary techniques.

Through flashbacks - a hallmark of his narrative style - Kanafani succeeds in his intent. He dusts off and reconstructs, fragment by fragment, a past disrupted by vortices of silence, singing two parallel stories: alongside the escape, he returns to narrate the protagonists’ lives before the forced diaspora. Chapters of existence that have not dissolved in the time of tragedy and that, without echo, could not be saved.

Who were the protagonists before all this? Simple men, simple boys, whom fate had unwillingly assigned the role of victims of a new diaspora.

This is where Kanafani focuses: on the importance of giving a face and a voice to these children of time’s flow, to these men unjustly and cowardly forgotten by rhetoric and narrative.

Men, children torn from their roots. And what are roots, if not the nourishment of humanity? What awaits them afterward? Yes, the unknown. But what if, beyond it, there lies oblivion?