Palestine's Children

By Ghassan Kanafani. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984. 145 pp. $7.00

Reviewed by Lynn Teo Simarski

The children of Ghassan Kanafani's Palestine live in refugee camps or in villages that are under attack, with parents who must stand by helplessly as their sons are questioned and slapped by an Israeli soldier, or as their houses are blown up. Told from a child's perspective or focused on a child, the short stories in this volume span the 1930s through the 1960s in Palestine. One child grapples with his homeland's occupation through naive idealism, another attempts armed resistance. Sometimes the narrator is a teacher, as was the author himself, a native of Acre who taught children in refugee camps in Damascus and later in Kuwait. Terror haunts these stories, as it did Kanafani's life. He was killed in a car-bombing in Beirut in 1972.

A number of the stories are very short, beginning on a pleasant or, at least, familiar note, and veering suddenly to an abrupt conclusion—often a kind of narrative slap. Typical is the searing "He Was a Child That Day," which opens with a dawn of innocent, almost religious beauty: "The blazing redness of the morning sun anointed the sands of the silver coast."

Suffused with the sadness of an "injured melody," played by a passenger on his flute, a taxi wends its somnolent way inland from Haifa with a motley crew—peasants, women, and a child—past "houses of Jerusalem stone, puffed like loaves of bread" and "villages scattered like the still stars through the land." Suddenly, the peaceful lull is shattered: the car is halted by an Israeli patrol, and the passengers are machine gunned—matter-of-factly—by a woman in shorts. Only the child is left alive, and ordered cruelly by the soldiers to remember the scene.

There is little relief from relentless obsession—a bleakness that is the collection's major disappointment, even if it accurately reflects this world's reality. The humor that exists is bitter and barbed, exemplified by the description of Shakib in "The Child, His Father, and The Gun Go to the Citadel at Jaddin." This character is a wizard at procuring British weapons and equipment: "Once when he was plowing in his field he had even had the opportunity to wear the uniform of an English major." Most often, Kanafani's characters only laugh in the context of abusing someone weaker.

Kanafani's female characters are significant only in satellite roles, reflecting the male they have produced or married. Boys have adventures, grow, and change, but their sisters are almost invisible. Even Kanafani's male characters' attempts to change their fate, however, are generally riddled with despair, epitomized in the way an old Palestinian fighter named Abu Al-Abd is addressed in the story "Abu Al-Hassan Ambushes an English Car":

"Oh, unfortunate Abu Al-Abd, do you think that you can enter the battle now as you did in time gone by? Do you think that those who are fighting you now are the same English you fought 12 years ago? Do you think they've become old the way you have? Poor Abu Al-Abd, if you only knew that they keep sending new generations and the old men go back to their homes. We're the only ones who grow old."

The most compelling selection, "Return to Haifa," also has an object of obsession—a child—but otherwise departs from previous stories' structural patters, and "Haifa's" greater length allows its dilemma to better unfold. Twenty years after fleeing Haifa, a couple named Said and Safiya return to their old apartment in search of the son they were unable to retrieve, a child who has come to symbolize the Palestine left behind. They find their infant "Khaldun" transformed into a young man, "Dov"—raised by the new tenants of the apartment, Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland.

Said confronts the meaning of being a Palestinian, and a father, as his lost son berates him:

"You didn't have to leave Haifa. And even if this weren't possible and you had to leave, you didn't have to leave your infant son in his bed. And even if that too were impossible, you didn't have to try to return...You're weak! Weak! Shackled by the heavy chains of backwardness and paralysis!"

Said eventually accepts the sacrifice of his son as the price for understanding the tragedy, and future, of Palestine. This wisdom is the greatest strength of the stories: Essentially an affirmation of a new way of life on the old land, it emerges with greater simplicity in "Guns in the Camp." A mother who "provides the children for Palestine" has also nurtured a new grapevine, "A green head sprouting through the dirt with a vigor that had a voice of its own."

Lynn Teo Simarski is a Washington, DC-based freelance writer specializing in Middle East issues.