All That's Left to You: A Novella and Other Stories

By Ghassan Kanafani. Translated by May Jayyusi and Jeremy Reed. The University of Texas Press, 1990. 128 pp. List; $8.95; AET: $6.00 for one, $8.95 for two.

Reviewed by Samir Dayal

The Arab world has been a cauldron of political turmoil at least since Israel's War of Independence in 1948, boiling over most recently with the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and its liberation in 1991. Each time the cauldron boiled over previously, however, in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute provided the heat. It is the same heat that fueled the 1987 explosion in Israeli-occupied territories called the Palestinian intifada.

For an insider's view of Palestinian life, one could do worse than turn to the recent posthumous English translation of Ghassan Kanafani's All That's Left to You: A Novella and Other Stories.

Kanafani participated in that 1948 exodus, at Israeli gunpoint, of the Palestinians from their homes, soon to be occupied by Israelis.

As a Palestinian journalist and activist, Kanafani witnessed and personally participated in the subsequent struggles of his people, until he and his niece were killed in 1972 by a bomb planted in his car in Beirut.

While there are certainly hints of his passionate commitment, in this collection he seems to have subordinated his role as a politically active journalist to that of an artist liberally exercising his poetic license.

It ought to be said also that Kanafani is perfectly aware of instances in which the reader's credulity is tested. In an author's note to the first story, for instance, he warns the reader about the lack of any "clear distinction between places and times which are far removed from each other, or indeed between places and times at a single moment." As Kanafani goes on to say, "The difficulty implicit in making one's way through a world which is jumbled in this fashion is one that is freely acknowledged."

This caveat might well stand for the entire collection. For one thing, the "jumbling" of space and particularly time is a persistent and even obsessive theme. Death in Kanafani's world is nothing if not a falling out of time, and life is no more than the "balance sheet of remnants, the balance sheet of losses, the balance sheet of death." For many of Kanafani's characters, death becomes a release.

In virtually every story, time is more than is simply a dimension. It is experienced, invariably, as fate, or as the uncanny coincidence of convergence of personal destinies. In "All That's Left to You, " Hamid encounters a soldier who speaks only Hebrew, while Hamid speaks only Arabic. Unavoidably, they find that they are locked in a struggle. The only resolution to this symbolic impasse is violent death. The fateful convergence of Hamid's life and the soldier's is calculated, of course, to evoke the larger political resonance, that is to say the historical emnity between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

One particularly effective story, "The Viper," chronicles the futility of struggling against fate. A poor drummer's son lies in a hospital bed, having been struck down by a car, unable or unwilling to respond to the doctors and nurses attending him. The reader, however, has access to his fatalistic reflections and flashbacks:

"If his father was informed of what had happened he would smash the car. But what was the use now? They would never know that the car had intended to hit him, and had mounted the pavement in order to do so."

The car, the reader learns, has a sinister history. It is the same car which his father's neighbor had hired for the marriage of the neighbor's son. The father of the narrator had prepared a drum for the wedding, but had not even received an invitation. Already embittered by the displacement of the tradition of a wedding procession with drummers by the new fashion for closed wedding cars, the drummer stones the car and almost kills the driver. Now it is that same car that has become the nemesis of the drummer's son.

Instead of struggling against fate, the narrator luxuriates in the futility of struggle as he lies between life and death: "He was unwilling to relinquish the sense of euphoric numbness that coursed sluggishly through his veins. How terrifying it all seemed... The black viper advanced, slow, cruel, repulsive, then plunged into the small pool of blood and began to lick the red liquid with a long, thin tongue."

Kanafani's obsession with just such liminal states gives the stories their tautness and energy. Characters find themselves in some twilight zone of space and time between life and death, between reality or dream, or between reality and fiction.

A reader may find it hard to distinguish, sometimes, between a real or a fabulous landscape, as when Kanafani personifies Time and the Desert as sentient and malicious entities, or when he describes empty towns with chimerical "black asphalt mirror[ing] the reflection of naked trees in large silver pools" and streets "stretching to infinity. " Indeed, Kanafani's style leans so far toward a mythical lyricism that his fictional universe seems to take on a harrowing hyperreality.

If it is hard to tell where fiction begins and ends in that world, that is just how Kanafani seems to want it. It is as though he were holding a mirror up to his own art. In "The Death of Bed 12, " the central character, a patient in a hospital, writes a letter describing the death of Muhammad Ali Akbar in an adjacent bed. Feeling a closeness to the dead man, the narrator had "formed a complete story about him, for myself, " which he tells in his letter. At the end, the narrator recounts his discovery of what seems to him an uncanny correspondence between the fiction he has spun and what he has discovered are the facts. Kanafani is always just self-conscious enough in his writing to prevent such moments from slipping into absurdity.

Kanafani's fictional imagination can occasionally seem exaggerated or fevered. Perhaps it can be understood, however, as a response to, if not as a representation of, what must be the almost unbearable reality of the dispossessed Palestinian people.

Samir Dayal is an assistant professor of English at Franklin College in Indiana.