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1In this chapter, I investigate expressions of the Nakba in Palestinian narrative work. Specifically, I will focus on the work of Samira Azzam and Ghassan Kanafani, who are considered the founders of a genre in contemporary Arabic literature. Their work exemplifies the new short story. Both authors experienced the trauma of ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and their stories are imbued with reflections of the Nakba.

2The term Nakba, translated as ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe,’ was first coined in 1948 by the Syrian historian Constantine Zureik (1948), and has since been adopted in historiography in many languages. As a concept, the meaning of al-Nakba has been condensed into the series of events that include the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine, the expulsion of most Palestinians, the loss of homes and property, the diaspora and declining conditions of refugees who are denied all rights, including the right of return. In this respect, Elias Sanbar (2005, 169-172) describes the Nakba as a process that represents the “sinking” of Palestinian society. While its symbolic date is 1948, the Nakba has been and is being perpetuated through significant episodes, including wars and events still in progress.

3The significance of the Nakba to the Arab World and Palestinians, however, goes beyond A. Hilàl Dessouki’s definition of it as “the total confrontation […] between Zionism and Arab countries in general, particularly the Palestinian people” (Dessouki 1973, 187). The Nakba has been encompassed into every aspect of social life in the Arab world, so that “it embraces economic, social, political, national, military and technological spheres of life” (Dessouki 1973, 187). Importantly, the Nakba permeates Arabic literary production; its literary theme is the dominant and characteristic feature among Palestinian authors (Said 2002; Amin 1998). In fact, it represents an evolution in contemporary Palestinian literature, what Palestinian literary historian Abdurrahman Yaghi (1968) describes as adab Al-Nakba, the ‘literature of catastrophe’ (see also Peled 1982).

4The emergence of adab Al-Nakba according to Israeli scholar Mattiyahu Peled represents a period “marked by anxious expectations of the outcome of the Second World War, the bitter war that ensued and the subsequent disaster al-nakba of 1948” (1982, 147). Nevertheless, the Nakba not only represents a moment in 1948 per se. It also refers to the historical and political processes that lead to the continuous geographical modification of Palestine and primarily to the displacement of the human community that has shaped the Palestinian cultural landscape over centuries. Therefore, it is inevitable that the Nakba is suffused in diverse artistic languages, figurative arts, photography, cinematography, and writing, including journalistic, historiographic, and literary writing. In fact, it is the context of catastrophe that germinates forms and styles to tell it, an antidote to the loss of memory, or “memoricide”—a neologism introduced during the days of the Yugoslavian civil war and later adopted by Ilan Pappé (2006a, 179; 2006b, 269-279).

5In the Nakba narrative, the catastrophe has a starting point, a lived experience that recurs as a beginning. Thus, for Palestinians, the stories, memories, and fragments of memory always return to that first moment evoked by the poet and writer Muhammad al-Qaysi:

In a few years time, with a certain maturity, you will come back to this moment and you will cry. Everything will originate from this moment; from it, and returned to it, your song will be born. (al-Qaysi 1997, 16)

6The expulsion in 1948 marks the beginning of an endless exile that assumes later-repeated contours, uniting the exiles and integrating their stories. Al-Qaysi was four years old when he travelled the road of exile with his mother:

How to describe the road to Lydda and the human terror imprinted on all those known faces, just like the face of my mother, faces pursued, persecuted, which formed a painful succession of defeats apparently destined never to end! (al-Qaysi 1997, 17)

7For every Palestinian, there is always some “road to Lydda” experience; among Palestinian contemporary narrative writers, context tends to be found in that historical moment. A salient feature of today’s writing is recounting the catastrophe or some fragment of it—an imperative indicating the burden of pain and the sense of injustice suffered, immanent, obsessively present, the memory of something that instead ‘is’ concrete. In memorials, the road to exile often represents the starting point of the Nakba and tends to occupy the narrative centre. At other times, the beginning is marked by invading soldiers. Salman Abu Sitta recalls:

Women and children ran in a northerly direction. Mothers tried to locate their children in the darkness. They tried hurriedly to pick up things their children needed: milk, blankets, and the like. In the background, the threatening lights, the hail of bullets tracing arcs in the sky, the hurried confusion, the agonizing cries, and the shouts for a missing child heightened our fear of impending death.
My mother led my sister and me in the darkness. “Where are you?”
“I am here,” I cried back.
“Where? Where?” she pleaded.
All the women and children knew where to go. They all headed toward Wadi Farha, a deep ravine and a dry riverbed in the summer. In the winter, its bed carried rainwater that filled the wells. I knew this wadi well; it had steep sides that were several times my height. It was a place where I often hid and went on wild adventures, with galloping horses, monsters, and demons. But that night—or dawn— was different. It wasn’t a flight of childhood fantasy: the deafening noise of Zionist bombs, the crying children, and frightened mothers were the elements of a real nightmare. Women dirty their faces to discourage rape. (Abu Sitta 2016, 69)

8In his Book of the Son, al-Qaysi recalls the child who ran away along the road to Lydda; little Salman Abu Sitta, on the way to Khan Younis, turns to take a last look at his house:

I looked back at the smoldering ruins, at the meadows of my childhood, golden with the still-unharvested wheat. I was engulfed by a feeling of both anxiety and serenity: serenity because we were still alive and an anxiety that was never to leave me. (Abu Sitta 2016, 71-72)

9Qaysi travels the road on foot clinging to his mother’s robe, Abu Sitta is behind his older brother riding a horse, while Ghassan Kanafani is piled onto a truck with parents, siblings, and many others. Similarly, Kanafani recalls that moment in his story, The Land of Sad Oranges:

The weather was a little overcast, and my body was beset by a feeling of cold. [...] Riyadh was sitting quietly, with his legs on top of the edge of the iron luggage rack, his back leaning on the luggage, staring at the sky. [...] I was sitting in silence with my chin between my knees, which I encircled in my arms [...]. The orange groves followed one another along the road [...] a feeling of fear took hold of us all, while the truck climbed heaving on the damp earth [...] distant gunshots echoed like farewell greetings... (Kanafani 1999, 364)

10The truck carrying the fugitives stops near an orange seller. The women get off and buy some: “they took the oranges and their tears reached us. I understood then that those large and clean oranges were a dear thing to us” (Kanafani 1999, 364). Even the oranges, like refugees, dry up: “far from the land of the oranges, the oranges that – tells us a farmer who cultivated them, had gone away too – dry out if the hand that waters them changes” (Kanafani 1999, 375). But even God becomes a stranger: “I had no more doubts that the God, that we knew in Palestine, had gone away too, had become a refugee, who knows where” (Kanafani 1999, 368).

11In the Nakba narrative, the ‘beginning’ of the catastrophe coincides with the expulsion of the indigenous population starting in 1948, the culminating moment of a violent ethnic cleansing conducted independently of the war; as historians have shown, expulsion is only one aspect that forms the framework of Al-Nakba1. Expulsion was not an effect of the war, but the cause for the ‘miracle’ which the Israelis had obtained in conquest—as Haim Weizmann, the first president of the Jewish state, said “a miraculous simplification of Israel’s tasks” (Mac Donald 1951, 176).

12But if the Nakba has a chronological starting point, then it cannot be identified merely through events, but rather through the elaboration and implementation of the ideas that unleashed these events, an ideological impulse of colonial thrust: the purification of the or ‘holy’ or ‘promised’ land, freed of the indigenous population in order to endow biblical stories with historical significance. Edward Said’s analysis shows that this is a constantly recurring idea in nineteenth-century European literature, ranging from the return of the ideology of the Crusades to the exoticism of European intellectuals—citing, for example, Orient travel stories by Flaubert and Lamartine. In Voyage en Orient, Lamartine desires the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the occupation of its territories to establish “free colonies.” Said’s analysis elaborations of the concept of an “orientalized” East and of Homo orientalis, to Chateaubriand who hopes for new Crusades to ‘free’ Palestine from a usurping religion which has been installed there. In his Itinéraire he calls for a resumption of the crusades to “liberate” the Holy Sepulcher, to fight “a cult enemy of civilization, systematically favourable to ignorance, despotism and slavery” – “naturally Islam,” highlights Edward Said- and calls for France to go to war against Turkey and Egypt, to teach the “Orientals” the meaning of “freedom” (Said 1978, 172).

13It is within the scope of literature that the idea of a ‘holy’ land, a ‘chosen’ land, and eventually a ‘target’ land (contaminated by Islamic presence and awaiting to be redeemed) is first elaborated. The literature posited an ‘uncharted’ land waiting to be discovered that would provide the Bible with the scientific documentation necessary to prove its historical truth. Assigning the value of objectivity to the Bible entails denying the cultural and historical deposit accumulated and developed over millennia of Palestinian civilization (Sanbar 2005, 65; Scarcia 1987, 163)—including what is concretely found there, namely its population, which then becomes “an element of disturbance” as B. Scarcia (1987) stated. This idea that found its effective political translation through British Army Officer Charles Warren, one of the leaders of the Palestine Exploration Fund, who in 1880 discussed the idea of placing Palestine under the control of commercial interests similar to the East India Company and asked: “The question of the fate of the Palestinian Arabs could certainly arise. But I will answer with another question: But who are the Arabs?” (Sanbar 2005, 81). The degree of malevolence implied by this question, posed towards the end of the nineteenth century, does not diminish throughout the following century—to the extent that historians are unanimous in affirming that, even before this reflection, the Nakba was prepared, studied, and programmed.2

14But the Nakba was soon recounted by those writers who lived it, like Samira Azzam. It could be said—along with Luce d’Eramo—that in reading her stories “we find ourselves watching the world through Palestinian eyes; you are plunged into the drama of people driven from their land” (D’Eramo 2002, 9). During her lifetime, Azzam had experienced the passage of Palestinian history from a ‘normal’ life in a legendary world before 1948, the year of the Nakba, to that of a refugee after 1948—segmented by wars and violence, without a homeland or identity, and its unending consequences, and which inevitably becomes the dominant motif of Palestinian writing. Kathyanne Piselli highlights this aspect:

Everything she talked about had to do with the tragedy of Palestine [...]The loss of her people and home, as well as her broken heart, was exposed for everyone to see. (Piselli 1988, 94)

15and stresses that it is not just a complaint:

Stories written by those who had left their homeland in 1948 were moving gradually away from alienation and pain toward anger and resistance. Azzam’s own writing is an excellent illustration of this progression, even though her untimely death prevented its culmination. (Piselli 1988, 95-6)3

16Azzam’s stories travel not through chronological time, but relate to stories according to the allegorical value of inquiry or passage, liberation or hope, the elaboration of absence or experience of waiting.

17In the short story Fi t-tarìq ilà Birak Sulaymàn (“On the Road to Solomon Pools”), the protagonist Hasan, a primary school teacher, escapes with his wife after having attempted to defend his home, while his son sleeps in his arms.

He lifted his left arm which was becoming stiff to calm her, when he felt something hot washing it [...] So he was afraid to stop to check where the blood was coming from lest he raise her doubts.
He held the boy’s body closer and started to walk so quickly that his wife could not keep up (…).
He turned right and then down a side street. He stopped and lifted the blanket and turned the small body that was bleeding profusely. He collapsed under the weight of pain, anger and bitterness.
He put the child on the ground. The moon had waned and become red as though it were the sun rising in the west. The sky was filled with magical dawn colors and he caught sight of the square roofs of the houses at Solomon Pools (…). He looked around him and then made his way towards the almond groves. He spent a long time trying to find a generous tree. He laid the child beneath it. Then he pulled at one of the branches and broke it off. He started to poke the ground with it in circular motions until he had made a little grave. When he had covered him with earth handful by handful, he stood up and shook the tree and it provided the grave with a cover of tiny white stars.
He recited no prayer. Hate had struck him dumb. (Azzam 2018, 21-22)

18As in all Azzam’s Palestine stories, nature is a constant. Hasan buries his son under a “generous” almond tree and shakes it to lay flowers on the grave. The spring season is the backdrop to the whole story, but Palestinian nature is always shaped by the work of man with which it becomes integrated:

Hasan looked at his house. It was still holding out with dignity. Its white walls, washed with the spring perfume of almond blossoms, drank in the silver of the moon. The stones of his house had been quarried from the mountain, brought by his ancestors. His orchard was the fruit of an axe hoe whose every blow was accompanied by thousand promises.
He had planted an almond tree the day Umar was born. It had thrown down roots and produced leaves. He used to carry his son and, placing him near, would say, “Let’s measure. Which of you two is the taller, you or the almond tree?” (Azzam 2018, 20)

19Hasan buries his child and returns to the road to reach the multitude of the “defeated.” Piselli’s reading summarises the tragedy of events:

His sense of defeat is overwhelming, his grief turns to hatred, and he loses his earlier heroic strength. He buries the baby and returns to the road to join the other “defeated” refugees, blinded by his hatred and “trying to keep from stumbling over the stones in the road.” He loses his job, social position, home, village, son, and wife, for the two become separated on the road. In his hatred, he loses also his soul, for he recites no prayer over the child’s grave; “hatred had silenced him”. The author emphasizes the unnatural, horrible nature of the tragedy of Palestinian defeat in her description of the night sky. (Piselli 1988, 97)

20Yasir Suleiman reads the scene in a different but equally emotional way:

This scene is enveloped in an atmosphere of sadness. But it is also intended to convey a sense of love and hope. The teacher ‘deposits’ his only son in the land he cherishes and loves, sowing the seeds of growth and hope which the tree and the moonlight, in their traditional interpretations, symbolize. (Suleiman 1991, 157)

21In another story by Samira Azzam, Khubz al-fidà’ (“Bread of Sacrifice”), the protagonist Su’ad loses her life to get bread for Ramiz and his companions who defend the besieged city. Su’ad’s blood-soaked bread represents survival for the five boys on the barricade, but no one dares to touch it. Ramiz asks:

What price would he pay? Could he bear to see the hands tearing off a piece and the teeth chewing the bread she had stained with her blood? [...].
But if he could choose the death he desired, the lie would not choose to starve. Su’ad herself would never allow that of a hero [...] Then he got up and carried loaves of bread. As he opened his hand to open the trash, he would tell them an ancient story known to this land and its inhabitants, a story to weave about the redemption of life in flesh and blood. (Azzam 1992, 398-39)

22Again, the narrative environment of Al-Nakba in which the characters move and into which they merge is the Palestinian natural world:

It was spring. Springtime in this part of Palestine is a sparkling sea, traversed by white sails during the day, and lit by the twinkling lamps of fishing boats at night. The fragrance of the orange groves fills the air. That spring, Ramiz learned about two things--love and war--and the first gave meaning to the second. War was not simply an enemy to kill voraciously. Rather, it was the assertion of the life of the land he loved and the woman he loved. Palestine was not only a sea with fishermen’s boats, and oranges shining like golden apples, and not only olives and olive oil filling the large oil jars. It was Su’ad’s black eyes as well and in Su’ad’s eyes he saw all of Palestine’s goodness. (Azzam 1992, 393-94)

23In her writings, Azzam reads Palestinian nature through labour, as in The Orange Spring:

Tree that accompanies tree, orange grove that follows orange grove, garden that embraces garden to form a single large garden for everyone: the one that plants, the one that gathers, the one that exports. They worked with energy, ready to lighten the trees of what weighed them down to prepare them for a new promise. Don’t ask me how all these people tied their lives to trees. The truth is that orange is not just a tree, it is a plant that knows what its role is. Hands for collection and hands for crates, hands that took them to ships, hands that took and hands that gave. (Azzam 1982, 93-94)

24A recurring motif in the Nakba narrative, is that Palestinian nature recognises only those that take care of it. As in the Almond and the Garden:

They told me that with its white stars the tree with its huge shadow, looked for the children to make its stars rain on them in April, and did not find them and waited for them in the mornings and in the spring evenings. No more appeared in the garden, so the almond tree shed its blossoms, branch by branch. (Azzam 1982, 98-99)

25The choice of the almond tree in bloom in many stories recalls ethnic cleansing. Almond trees bloom in April, and in April 1948 the large coastal cities of Haifa and Jaffa and almost the entire Palestinian coast came under attack by the Zionist military. The number of expelled inhabitants exceeded 420,000. The author is from Acre, which fell on 16 May 1948, the month when trees blossom. These are the perfumes that 21-year-old Samira will take into exile.

26In Azzam’s narrative, as in many works by Palestinian authors, the relationship with the natural and historical environment is direct, normal, and not mediated by ideological structures. On the contrary, colonisers assign a regenerating, sacred, redemptive function to the land. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, as well as Chaim Weizmann, head of the Zionist Movement and future first president of the State of Israel, did not like the Palestinian landscape. Writing in 1941, Weizmann recalls his first visit to Palestine in 1907: “A dolorous country it was on the whole, one of the most neglected corners of the miserably neglected Turkish Empire” (Weizmann 1959, 125). And even more: “It seems as if God has covered the soil of Palestine with rocks and marshes and sand, so that its beauty can only be brought out by those who love it and will devote their lives to healing its wounds” (Weizmann 1959, 371). The colonisers insisted they should have the function of redeeming the earth and regenerating the Jewish spirit; therefore, they are the “regenerators of Jewish settlement in Palestine” (Ben Artzi 1990, 132).

27The characters of Azzam’s stories are immersed in the natural and historical landscape of Palestine; farmers, workers, and many women, all carrying the trauma of the Nakba, they are (and feel) defeated. They have lost their home, their land, and their work. They have become refugees. They feel “out of place”4 and some do not hold up and go mad—as in The Madman of the Bell, a story written in two versions that describes the madness of a bell ringer who, having become a refugee, can no longer ring the bells of his or other churches:

“The Madman of the Bell”. This is what they called him in the land where he had taken refuge, a nickname that you can understand ... He used to stand for hours in front of the church bell with the desire that they would leave him the rope for a few minutes. [...]. We heard that Masùd had gone to the neighboring villages, in that land of exile, and had tried and prayed saying that he was a bell ringer; but he had always come back with his desire unquenched in front of every bell he had implored for. He had stopped staying in the church square, he was content to remain in the doorway, with his hands in the air like someone who pulls the rope and imitates the sound of a bell: dong, dong. (Azzam 1982, 132-134)

28The social boundaries of what happens during the Nakba are difficult to circumscribe. However, in Azzam’s as well as in Kanafani’s work, the Nakba is translated into literary creations, conveyed through different forms, narratives, and theatricalities. In particular, Kanafani’s novel Return to Haifa—which is perhaps the most famous Palestinian literary work—is a precise example of Nakba narration, taking on a familiar and individual dimension. (Kilpatrick 1976a ).

29The protagonist of Return to Haifa, Said, says to his wife:

This is part of the war. They’re saying to us, “Help yourselves, look and see how much better we are than you, how much more developed. You should accept being our servants. You should admire us”. But you’ve seen it yourself. Nothing’s changed. It was in our power to have done much better than they did. (Kanafani 1984, 151)

30Here we find a significant key to Kanafani’s narrative, one that rejects the idea of the superior “white man” and instead indicates the path that the protagonists, or their children, must take to obtain a new Palestine. Not in the abstract—not a ‘lost paradise’ or the ‘promised land’—but a land to be reconquered through struggle, for a new beginning.

31This short novel describes a Palestinian couple, Said and Safiyya, who were expelled in 1948. After the 1967 war and the abolition of the armistice line that divided Palestine between Israel and the West Bank, they can return to Haifa for the “trivial reason” of revisiting the house left twenty years prior. In reality, are looking for their son who was abandoned in the cradle in that house during their escape. Said and Safiyya never talk about their lost son but decide to go to Haifa anyway.

32The silence between the two characters while traveling to Haifa is full of memories of their personal experience of ethnic cleansing, of the exodus, of that moment when it all began, confused between past and present:

The explosions intensified. Even though he was far enough away from the site of the shooting he could still make out British soldiers who were boarding up some windows and opening others. Somehow, he found himself in the Old City and from there he raced with a strength he didn’t know he possessed toward South Stanton Street. And then he knew he was less than two hundred meters away from Halul Street, and he began to catch the scent of the sea. At that exact moment he remembered little Khaldun, his son who was five months old that very day, and a dark apprehension suddenly spread over him. It was the one taste that never left his tongue right up to this moment, twenty years after it happened for the first time…
Had he expected that disaster [fajìca]? The events were mixed up, the past and present running together, both in turn jumbled up, with the thoughts and illusions and imaginings and feelings of twenty successive years. Had he known? Did he sense the calamity [fàjìca] before it happened? (Kanafani 1984, 154)

33It should be remembered that the return of the two characters to Haifa can only be achieved following a further defeat, the 1967 war, the so-called Six-Day War. Said and Safiyya, although fully aware of that defeat, cannot explain their tragedy, their Nakba, even after twenty years:

That has never happened in any war in history. You know the terrible thing [fàjìca] that happened in April 1948, so now, why this? (Kanafani 1984, 151)

34Here Kanafani, rather than resorting to the more frequent term Nakba, in these contexts introduces fajìca (فاجعة) for its meaning of ‘misfortune, disaster, calamity, disaster, catastrophe, drama, and/or tragedy.’ With the adjective fàjic (‘distressing, painful, anguished, tormenting, atrocious’) falls within the semantic field of the root fjc (ف.ج.ع) where the ‘mourning’ component is strong. Therefore, in addition to the collective aspect, there is a marked individual component of personal mourning in fajìca.

35In memory, the journey is a return to that night they had been forced to flee by sea, a moment signalled by defeat. Barbara Harlow tends to focus on the psychological implications of the event:

The decision to visit Haifa did not come easily to Said and Safiya who, during the several weeks following the war, had struggled with the trauma of defeat and their fear of confronting the past, the nightmare hidden in their memories. (Harlow 1986, 4)5

36Return to Haifa, elaborated right after that defeat, is part of the debate that takes place under the banner of muqàwama (resistance) and revolves around the fate of Palestinian refugees. It was Kanafani who initiated the use of expressions such as adab al-muqàwama (resistance literature) and al-adab al-muqàwim (resistant literature), both contained in the titles of two books he wrote on Palestinian literature (Kanafani 1966, 1968). At the end of the novel, Said, the father’s character, “looks at the catastrophe” hoping that the remaining second son will join the resistance. Even in its paratextual elements, Kanafani’s novel is considered adab muqàwim, resistant literature. The Arabic title is ‘À’id ilà Hayfà whose morphological form hints at a will to resist, the only way to ‘go home.’ The substantive ‘return’ stands for a verbal adjective, which in Arabic indicates a dynamic subject, an active participle that could be translated as ‘that has returned,’ ‘that returns,’ or ‘that will return,’ in which the expected value prevails over the temporal data. Using the same morphological form of Kanafani’s title, the Palestinian writer Emile Habibi reaffirms its meaning in having “I’m remaining in Haifa” engraved on his plaque, Bàqin fì Hayfà. This detail becomes quoted and finds continuity in Mohammad Bakri’s film Since You Left (2004), where the director-actor “builds” a dialogue with the master Habibi and when he goes to the writer’s grave in Haifa cemetery, the epigraph is in the foreground.

37With Return to Haifa, Kanafani joins the vast Nakba literature, one that simply tells it with one that incites revolt (Campbell 2001). The novel opens up new horizons to the general public in presenting the ‘enemy’ in a non-stereotyped way, in the guise of a victim— The elderly Polish Jew who now occupies the house welcomes Said and Safiyya; later, it will be discovered that she survived Auschwitz. The dialogue between the three takes place in embarrassment. Miriam, the Israeli, says: “I’m sorry. But that’s what happened. I never thought things would be the way they are now.” Said, the Palestinian, thinks: “She wasn’t guilty of anything…But how could he explain it to her?” (Kanafani 1984, 164).

38Some scholars, including Khalida El-Shikh Khalil (1989), who studies the symbolism in Kanafani’s work, believes that realism prevails over symbolism in Return to Haifa. Others, such as the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1971), think that Kanafani goes beyond the contingency linked to Palestine.

39Return to Haifa translates the historical and apocalyptic significance of the Nakba into individual terms. The contours of a catastrophe that has become a human condition involving two worlds rapidly follow one another. Edward Said’s expression “victim of the victims”6 reaches its apex when the son bursts onto the scene: for the Palestinians, a natural son (Khaldun), and for the Israeli, an adopted son (Dov). The boy is a soldier in the Israeli army who was adopted by the Polish Jewish couple that took over the house. The blood link passes to a second order, replaced by emotional relationships supported by a cultural model that seems to be winning. Man is a Cause by Siddiq (1984) affirms the character of Khaldun/Dov, now an Israeli son:

Said asked quietly: “You’re in the army? Who are you fighting? Why?”. The young man jumped to his feet. “You have no right to ask those questions. You’re on the other side”. “I? I’m on the other side?”. Said laughed heartily. And with that explosive laughter he felt as if he were pushing out all the pain and tension and fear and anguish in his chest. (Kanafani 1984, 180)

40In Return to Haifa, two parallels are established. First, between the Jewish European tragedy and the Palestinians enforced diaspora. A second parallel is drawn in which the drama becomes personal: the Jews who had escaped extermination camps and the two Palestinians who had escaped the ethnic cleansing of their land. The ideological and emotional clash between the Palestinian father and the adopted Israeli son overlaps the two levels. The son assumes the colonial European discourse of the ‘promised land’—something his indigenous biological father cannot accept. The son interprets the reasons of occupancy and does not hide his contempt for the “natives,” so much so that he accuses them of being “cowards and incapable” (Kanafani 1984, 185). The wounded father reacts: “I’m looking for the true Palestine, the Palestine that’s more than memories, more than peacock feathers, more than a son” (Kanafani 1984, 186). The peacock feathers are a compositional motif: Said had noticed that everything in the house had remained as he had left it twenty years earlier, except for two of the six peacock feathers in a vase, which were gone.

41In Return to Haifa, the story of Said and Safiyya who lost their home and son, the story of the capture of Haifa, and the story of Iphrat and Miriam who escaped the Nazi death camps are told in parallel. Most importantly, it tells the story of the son—a man/country—in which symbolic elements laden with ‘sacred’ value coagulate.

42Ideological-political interpretations have been put forward concerning this short novel. For example: “Return to Haifa represents Kanafani’s effort to project in literature the vision of a ‘democratic solution’ for the future of Palestine” (Harlow 1986, 8). Starting with the presence/absence of victims and primarily of Khaldun/Dov (symbolising the son-country dichotomy), all the ingredients of the short novel are constitutive elements of the Nakba. The enforced absence is total: moral, onomastic, mnemonic, and, above all, physical (Sanbar 2005, 204).

43On the way from Ramallah to Haifa, Said speaks continuously until, upon reaching Haifa, silence falls between the two:

Finally, nearing Bat Gallim, they fell silent. Here they were, gazing silently at the road they both knew so well, its memory stuck fast in their heads like part of their very flesh and bones. (Kanafani 1984, 160)

44Memories crowd together in a rapid succession of flashbacks, a recurrent technique in Kanafani’s work that he used in Return to Haifa to reconstruct the apocalyptic scene of the exodus from Haifa. The moment of fagìca, of personal tragedy, is told as follows:

Evening began to settle over the city. He didn’t know how many hours had passed as he rushed from street to street, but it was clear that he was being propelled toward the port. All the side streets leading off the main road were closed. He kept plunging down side streets trying to get to his house, but he was always driven back, sometimes by rifle muzzles, sometimes by bayonets. The sky was on fire, crackling with shots, bombs and sounds, near and far. It was as though the very sounds themselves were pushing everyone toward the port. Even though he could not concentrate on anything specific, he couldn’t help but see how the throng of people thickened with every step. People were pouring from the side streets into main street leading down to the port. [...] In this case Kanafani does not draw on his own or his family memories. We know that the family had left Haifa a few days before the fall of the city when the writer was 12 years old. Return to Haifa was published in 1969, during years passed in exile, it is through personal stories that the author was able to reconstruct versions of the memory of the fall of Haifa. But if personal memory is the sediment of experience, what we have chosen to remember, collective memory constitutes a vast circle of that experience: men, women and children, empty-handed or carrying a few small possessions, crying or being floated along in a paralyzed silence in the midst of the clamor and confusion. He was swallowed up in the rushing wave of humanity and lost the ability to direct his own steps. (Kanafani 1984, 154-155)

45Some scholars believe that the quoted passages are too compressed, which in artistic terms constitute the weak point of the novel. El-Shikh Khalil (1989), for example, places Return to Haifa in the context of realism, denying any symbolic value:

It is a work with a strong ideological point addressed to the general public. This has led the author to simplify the characters and the narrative technique [...]. From an artistic point of view the novel is inferior to the previous ones. (El-Shikh Khalil 1989, 163)7

46In fact, the details described in the scene above has some passages recurring in military reports, journalistic reports, and the historiographic narratives of the Israeli side. The day after the Haifa catastrophe (23 April 1948), the Jerusalem Post wrote that it was “an offensive that forced the Arabs to flee to the only open escape route: the sea” (AA.VV. 1987, 120).

47David Ben Gurion, the director of the ethnic cleansing campaign, reports in his diary how the Zionist military managed to create a panic situation and to direct the inhabitants to the port:

On the night of the bombing on April 22, there were 25,000-30,000 [in reality 70,000] Arabs in the city who started to flee to the port, the German quarter (under English control), boarded boats and buses. Many hid in port warehouses, Christians in churches. Now in Haifa there are less than 10,000, perhaps 6,000. The Arabs are constantly leaving. Some go back to get bags, but you don’t allow it because you don’t know who everyone is. (AA.VV. 1988, 43)

48All the details that Kanafani uses to build that scene are reflected in some Israeli historiographical works. One example is that element called by Zionist historians “psychological blitz” (Kimche 1950, 229; Kimche and Kimche 1960; Valabrega 1988, 41-42) of which Kanafani’s character, Said, is a victim:

The moments passed slowly, relentlessly, making it seem like an incredibly severe nightmare. He went through the iron gate to the port where British soldiers were restraining people. From the gate he could see masses of people tumbling one over the other, falling into the small rowboats waiting near the wharf. [...]. Above him the smoke and the wailing of bombs and hail of gunfire fused with the screams, the footsteps, the sea’s pounding and the sound of oars slapping the surface of the waves... (Kanafani 1984, 155)

49“Lamentations” and “cries” are reported by Israeli authors who then spoke for Zionist militias. They describe in detail the systems used to spread uncontrolled panic in Palestinian neighbourhoods. Jeeps with speakers were used to broadcast recordings of “terrifying sounds”: shouts, moans, anguished cries of Arab women, siren screams, and tolls of alarm bells, interrupted by an Arab sepulchral voice that invites people to escape! (Valabrega 1988, 118).

50Numerous testimonials on the subject exist in Israeli literature or documentation. For example, Arthur Koestler (1949, 233) describes the means used to panic the population and war actions that led to ethnic cleansing. John Kimche (1950), provides a detailed description of the military campaign to generate panic, forcing people to gather in the port to get on the boats, thus completing the expulsion operation.

51In the novel, the scene of expulsion, or the context in which the fajìca takes place, is not a place that can take on immediate symbolic values. For Kanafani though, that place—Haifa—takes on a particular value: “This is Haifa then, twenty years later” (Kanafani 1984, 150) The city is described in two stages, with twenty years difference. The names of neighbourhoods and streets are imprinted in the memory of the protagonist; they have changed not because of the natural passage of time, but because the transformation is desired by people who designate those places in another language. Those same places that in Return to Haifa were a collective memory are now only in his personal memory, recognised as an ancient relationship with the city:

He was driving his car just as he used to, as though he hadn’t been absent those twenty bitter years. The names began to rain down inside his head [...] for him the street names had never changed. (Kanafani 1984, 152)

52The character moves following the habit of the time preceding the expulsion, demonstrating the fact that his presence interacts with that place, as if to reject his own absence imposed by the enemy:

He turned the car the way he always did and climbed the slope, watching out for the exact spot on the narrowing road. The three cypress trees that hung over the road had new branches. He wanted to stop a moment to read the names carved long ago on their trunks; he could almost remember them one by one. (Kanafani 1984, 160)

53For the exiled refugee the images of the past emerge from the memory:

Suddenly, the house loomed up, the very house he had first lived in, then kept alive in his memory for so long. Here it was again, its front balcony bearing its coat of yellow paint. Instantly he imagined that Safiyya, young again with her hair in a long braid, was about to lean over the balcony toward him. There was a new clothesline attached to two pegs on the balcony; new bits of washing, red and white, hung on the line. Safiyya began to cry audibly. He turned to the right and directed the car’s wheels up over the low curb, then stopped the car in its old spot. Just like he used to do-exactly-twenty years ago. (Kanafani 1984, 161)

54While Said and Safiyya make the usual habitual gestures—they cross the street, enter the building, go up the stairs, ring the bell—remembering the series of known details, the doodles on the wall, the broken step, the old wooden light meter box: “He put his fingers on the bell and said to Safiyya quietly: ‘They changed the bell.’ He was silent a moment, then added: ‘And the name. Naturally.’” (Kanafani 1984, 162)

55The interest of the story, after all, lies in the intersection of two places: that of the Nakba, the collective catastrophe, the city with its neighbourhoods, markets, and streets; and the place of fajìca, the familial and personal disaster, in the house with its stairs, balconies, rooms, objects, and memories. It is in the city that many individual fajìca merge into the general Nakba. The circumstances from which the story emerges give rise to a further observation: the relationship with the city’s space is not owned, but is to be found in the interior, made intimate because it is made of the memory of the dreams that were placed in the past. Kanafani, insisting on details that in another context would be completely ordinary and normal, indicates one of the most problematic aspects of the Palestinian Nakba: the difference between the perception of a real country that the Palestinians have of Palestine, and the perception of a ‘holy land’ or ‘promised land’ held by Europeans.

56That place holds different meanings, for the natives and for the colonisers. Like few other places, it has been the subject of narration, undergoing manipulations dictated above all by the Nakba—told by those who have undergone it, and also by those who have wanted it.

57The reader of this book, even if only through the examples cited, will find confirmation of what scholars have largely highlighted. It is the individual and collective trauma of the Nakba that lies at the bottom of the new Palestinian literature, modelling in many ways a new identity that is to be understood, in Elias Sanbar’s (2005) convincing elaboration, as a long series of figures in movement. In each of these figures and representations, and in their themes, the Nakba can be glimpsed. Even in works that do not directly refer to ethnic cleansing and the exodus, or to war and its horrors, the catastrophe is continually recalled, in the memories of characters, in references to places and monuments, in settings and in the reference to nature, in meetings and in all representations. Collective trauma has repercussions on every social aspect and, therefore, on the cultural and literary life of the Palestinians, so that everything written—both literary and otherwise—does not escape the Nakba, which has now become a part of the Palestinian human condition.