5: Marwan’s letter

"Do not believe that man grows.  No: he is born suddenly—a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb.  One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road." -Kanafani

Masculinity is a problematic notion in Kanafani’s Men in the Sun. The focus of this blog post will be the character of Marwan and his masculinity- which in my opinion is expressed or rather negotiated through the letter he wrote to his mother.

This argument can be realized if you consider the events leading up to the memory of the letter. The sixteen year old Marwan faces both mental and physical degradation in the shop of the fat smuggler: The mocking derisive tone of the smuggler-“I beg you, I beg you. Don’t start wailing. You all come here and then start wailing like widows”- leaves Marwan thinking that he is being treated like a child. And his naïve show of strength- “You’ll take five dinars from me and be satisfied, or else…Or else I’ll denounce you to the police”- only yields him a blow to his cheek [36]. He remains virile and helpless.

This emasculation at the hands of the fat smuggler compels him to hold on to the last vestiges of his masculinity which is preserved in the letter he wrote to his mother. The letter is regarded as, “the source of that feeling of rest and contentment…it had broken down all the barriers of despondency that stood between him and the realization of it. Here was this feeling taking possession of him again with unparalleled force” [38-9]. This unparalleled feeling can be interpreted as his patriarchal sense of responsibility which informs his masculinity.  

The contents of the letter serve to strengthen this argument. Case in point is the fact that, “he had allowed himself to describe his father as nothing but a depraved beast” (for leaving his wife and four children for a deformed woman)despite understanding his circumstances .  Marwan’s masculinity then emerges from the failure of the male patriarch (his father) and the inability of his brother Zakaria to provide for the family. His journey then is a challenge to prove to his father that he could support the family better than he did-“He would send every penny he earned to his mother, and overwhelm her and his brothers and sisters with gifts till he made the mud hut into paradise on earth and his father bit his nails with regret ”- and to rise to Zakaria’s challenge that he too could provide for the family [43]. In this context, the letter symbolizes the last vestiges of Marwan’s masculinity.