The Exile from Time: Men in the Sun

There is an element of fragmentation of time in Kanafani’s work – whereby he shifts between the past and the present in different scenes, taking us from Basra to Palestine within the same paragraph at times. The instance I wish to analyse here is the description of the journey in the chapter titled “Sun and Shade” whereby there is a constant break in time – the past thoughts of each passenger are interrupted by the present where we are informed of what the lorry is doing – “the lorry travelled on over the burning earth, its engine roaring remorselessly” (63). My contention is that the longing for a lost past fulfils two purposes – it reminds us of the impossibility of the resurrection of the past but at the same time it serves to argue that the Nakba represents a suspension in time, following which there is a lack of control over time by the Palestinians i.e. an exile from time.

 In the chapter “Sun and Shade,” we are informed of the details of Abu Khaizuran’s castration, whereby he loses his manhood and humanity following the Nakba. In the wake of such loss, his reaction to the deaths of the three passengers (returning to steal their prised possessions) represents an inability to act as ‘normal.’ In Kanafani’s work, therefore, I see the emergence of an awareness of the cost to the Palestinians of their exclusion from mainstream, modern time and a relegation to an alternative temporal order – whereby both orders contradict each other since they are the same way of viewing history; with the Zionists and Palestinians both claiming a different history of the same homeland. The Palestinian alternative temporal order is one in which the present acts as a hiatus in thoughts of the past whereas any semblance of a future (at least a stable one) is completely absent. In this manner, Kanafani represents the three passengers and the driver lost in thoughts of their past, while the motion of the lorry in the present interrupts the narrative but at no point do concerns about the future enter the picture in a dominating manner.

In my reading of the text I felt that there was an attempt on Kanafani’s part to reconcile the past and future by arguing that the interruptions of the present with thoughts of the past does not diminish its value but, in turn, the longing for the past can become a factor within Palestinian awareness that is capable of motivating the future. While the theme of time represents obvious breaks in the narrative and serves to act as a reminder of the lack of control that the Palestinian passengers have over their own time; at the same time it also provides hope – by pointing out the lack of control over time, Kanafani, hence, advocates its necessity for the realisation of an individual and collective’s sense of being and placement in history.