War Traumata in Literature: From Homer to Sahar Khelifeh

In this paper, I identify and describe pain, its signs and symptoms, as manifested in various fictional combatants and noncombatants (civilians) in literary texts that span across few millennia and different cultures and literary genres. Since literature is imitation/representation/simulation of reality, it does give insight into the minds and souls of the characters populating it. From the writings of Homer in ancient Greece to the writings of Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats in Britain, Randal Jarrell in America, Ghassan Kanafani in Lebanon, Sahar Khalifeh in Palestine, and others, one can discern war tormented and traumatized characters exhibiting all sorts of symptoms, such as the Agamemnon and Achilles’ syndrome, and the Ulysses-Rambo syndrome. The symptoms exhibited by such tormented characters are similar to and go beyond those inscribed in the scholarly and professional literature in medicine and psychiatry. The paper affirms that war traumas, and pain in certain cases and under certain conditionality that involve occupation of territories and dislocation of civilians, become contagious and dangerous as the plague where the infected becomes either very sick and dies or very sick and lives. Keywords: trauma, war, identity, Homer, Sahar Khelifeh

Israel/Palestine

Since the early 1990s, Israel has greatly expanded a system checkpoints, walls and other barriers in the West Bank and Gaza that restrict Palestinian mobility. As a result, such border spaces have become ubiquitous elements of everyday life, with profound political, socio-cultural, and economic effects. Israel/Palestine examines how authors and filmmakers in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel have grappled with the spread and impact of these borders in the period since the Oslo Accords of 1994. Focusing on novels by Raba’i al-Madhoun, Ghassan Kanafani, Sami Michael and Sayed Kashua, and films by Elia Suleiman, Simon Bitton, Emad Burnat, and Guy Davidi, Israel/Palestine traces how political engagement in literature and film has shifted away from previously common paradigms of resistance and coexistence. Instead, it has become reorganised around these now ubiquitous physical barriers. Using strategies of narrative fragmentation, multivocality, metafiction, fantasy, and silence to depict the effects of these borders, authors and filmmakers interrogate the notion that such spaces are impenetrable and unbreakable by revealing their deceptive and illusive qualities. In doing so, they also imagine distinct forms of protest, and redefine the relationship between cultural production and political engagement.

Colonization in Ghassan Kanfani’s Men in the Sun: A Reason for Destruction and Tragedy

This research delves within the novel Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani, in order to analyze the effect of colonialism on the Palestinian identity. Following what happened to the characters that are presented in the novel after colonization; these characters resemble and present different segments of the Palestinian. This research also includes a deep description of the harsh circumstances that faced each character. Firstly, this research starts with the analysis of each character individually. Secondly, it shows the mutual suffering between all characters. Finally, it ends with the tragic end of all characters. Return to Haifa is also another work for Kanafani. It discusses the conflict that rises within the soul of the colonized as a result of colonialism. This is the focal point for both works. The theory of post-colonialism is the most prominent theory in works of Kanafani. Post-colonial theory describes what happens to the refugees after colonization.

The Deep Meaning of Symbolism Significance in Men in the Sun

The novel of MEN IN THE SUN by Ghassan Kanafani reflects the Palestinian cause, the 1948 catastrophe and its impact on the Palestinian people through Palestinian men of different generations who tell their story in a wonderful symbolic way. The novelist reflected the issue through the characters, as each character in the novel symbolizes a certain personality of his people. The story is the story of three men who decide to emigrate from Palestine to Kuwait illegally for their desire to improve their living conditions. The novel ends with the death of the three men suffocating for fear of beating the walls of the tank. This study is an attempt to examine the symbolism in Men in the Sun and its significance and the deep meaning behind the literal meaning of these symbols. The study tries to examine the basic symbol of the story "the walls of the tank are not pounded", as these three men die suffocating in the tank, without any of them daring to knock the walls of the tank for help. The symbolism of the non-knocking of the walls indicates the legitimate cry of the Palestinian people conflict, who have suffered from displacement. Other symbols in the novel are also analyzed to show how the writer used them for artistic and political purposes.

The Politics of Death and the Question of Palestine

This article considers the work of Hannah Arendt and Ghassan Kanafani in relation to the social and juridical logic and form of the settler colony and of the settler-colonial logic and form of the Israeli state and its ideology, Zionism. The argument is framed in relation to two moments: (1) the notion and practice of Bildung—education, training, formation—where the subject of language, in becoming literate, thoughtful, and self-reflective, is to become a being that recognizes itself and others in these and related terms: as legible, autonomous, and self-determining; and (2) the ongoing debates around the politics of death, articulated through the writing of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt, Achille Mbembe, and Arendt. The article argues that, insofar as they presume an understanding of Bildung as a principal category of social thought, these debates reiterate the terms they claim to diagnose or contest. It also argues that, in their affective relation to decolonization, Arendt—and Foucault and Agamben—conjures and advances a social panic in a desire to domesticate the destabilizing force of anticolonial struggle. Finally, the article reads Kanafani’s Rijāl fī al-shams (Men in the Sun) to argue that Kanafani’s novelistic practice discombobulates the terms privileged in the settler colony and in its social and literary logic and form, as it promises a nonredemptive, anomic, and non-state-centric futurity.

Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa: tracing memory beyond the rubble

This article argues that Ghassan Kanafani in his 1969 work Returning to Haifa portrays a new conception of home as a postcolonial site that transcends the physicality of geography to create a new collective fluid memory. Kanafani’s narrative explores the chasm between the imaginary or utopian territory that exists simply in the memory of the indigenous people, and the real site which exists geographically, and how this makes ethical representation of the traumatised subject virtually impossible/an impossibility. Kanafani’s allegorical journey of Returning to Haifa records the bruised memory of the Palestinian refugees, and reveals a desire to recreate a protean memory for this traumatised people so as to transform them from the state of victimhood to that of resistance. Hence, the three physical sites explored here: body, land and text are opened to the processes of becoming.

Fremd im Eigenen – Hemmungen in der Arbeit mit Gewalterfahrenen

Gewalt ist allgegenwärtig. Nicht nur die Nachrichten berichten täglich davon, vielmehr leben Zeugen von Gewalt in Form von Ausgrenzung, Folter, Rassismus, behördlicher Willkür, Massenmorden usw. unter uns. Dennoch gibt es eine grosse Hemmung, sich mit den Menschen, die Gewalt erfahren haben, auseinander-zusetzen. Ein Grund dafür sind schwer erträgliche Gegenübertragungen als Reaktion auf chaotische Phänomene, da die innerpsychische Ordnung auf vielfältige Weise zerstört ist. Geordnetes Zeiterleben geht in Teilen verloren und das Grundvertrauen in sich und den Anderen wird angegriffen. Der immer auch in der psychoanalytischen Situation enthaltene Bruch, das Gegenüber als stets fremd er leben zu müssen, verweist uns auch auf das Fremde in uns. Die Gewalt radikalisiert dieses Erleben, lässt unmöglich erscheinen, den Anderen zu verstehen. Stammt das Gegenüber auch noch aus einem anderen Kulturkreis, ist er uns buchstäblich fremd. Es muss die Spannung zwischen widersprüchlichen Weltanschauungen ausgehalten werden, ohne einem Ordnungssystem den Vorzug zu geben. Für die therapeutische Arbeit ist es wesentlich, diese neutrale Position einzuhalten, um als Zeuge für das Erleben des Patienten zur Verfügung zu stehen. Wir illustrieren dies unter Einbezug der interkulturellen Perspektive durch die Beschäftigung mit dem Roman «Rückkehr nach Haifa» von Ghassan Kanafãni, der Untersuchung eines fremden Krankheitsverständnisses (am Beispiel Kambodscha) und einem Fallbeispiel eines südafrikanischen Mannes.

The Homeland, Imprisoned and Illegal: The Impact of Marginalisation on Views of the Homeland in Kanafānī's and Khalīfa's Work

This paper deals with the concept of Al-Waṭan, or ‘the homeland’, in Arabic in The Shell (Al-Qawqʿa) by Muṣṭafā Khalifa and Men in the Sun (Rijāl fīsh-Shams) by Ghassān Kanafānī. Analysis of how alienation from this concept has affected both Khalifa's and Kanafānī's characters is carried out through the lenses of Deleuze and Guattari's theories of rhizomatic associations and minor literature, as well as through the lens of affect theory. The paper also examines parallels between definitions of Al-Waṭan/the homeland in Ibn Manẓūr's classical dictionary Lisān al-ʿArab and Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the war machine and the apparatus of capture.