My memories of Ghassan Kanafani
Fifty years ago, in July, Israel assassinated Ghassan Kanafani. Over the years, I have thought a lot about Ghassan, his contributions to Arabic literature and the role he played in shaping my doctoral thesis and my thinking in Palestine.
During the summer of 1971, while in Lebanon doing research on the emergence of a Palestinian national identity, I met Ghassan. That first confrontation almost ended before it even began. After he finished his call, he looked at me and pointed lightly that I was “another American of Arab origin who came to Lebanon to find himself in the Palestinian cause.”
Pointing to a picture behind him of mass mobilization against the war in Vietnam, he pointed arrogantly that if I wanted to find myself, I had to go home and join this effort and fight for civil rights.
Rather than just leaving him and leaving, I answered curtly that I am active in all the anti-war and civil rights movements, and that I am in Lebanon not to find myself but to do research for my thesis. I added that I needed help in contacting the Palestinians in the camps, and either he would help me or he would not help me. My direct words seemed to work. Kanafani and others called to take me to the camps.
I spent time in Ein El-Hilweh meeting dozens of Palestinian refugees there, recording their stories, seeing pictures of the homes they left behind, and talking about what it means to them to be Palestinian. When I returned to Beirut, I had several other meetings with Ghassan in which we talked about my thesis.
I told him about the idea of ”revival movements” developed by one of my thesis supervisors, anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace, and talks about the extent of the shift that often occurs in the ideas of groups that have been traumatized by social, political or economic disruption. Wallace, who has studied revolutionary movements in Native Americans, described this transformation as a “labyrinthine realignment,” in which old patterns of thought and identity are replaced by a new sense of collective understanding. Some of these movements look back to an idealized past.
Others rely on past experiences but look forward to a future transformation moving forward. Ghassan listened and then said: “To understand the forward-looking revolutionary thought, you have to go to the Palestinian citizens of Israel. You will find in their poetry and their policies the Palestinian future. It is their vision that will lead us.” He gave me collections of poetry by Tawfiq Ziyad, Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and others, and I conducted a long interview with him (which I published later) on “The Role of Poetry in the Palestinian Struggle.”
I went back and started writing my thesis, and I wrote to Ghassan periodically. Months later, the world was shocked by a horrific terrorist attack by elements of the Japanese Red Army that killed 29 innocent tourists at Israel’s Lod Airport. When I saw that the magazine that Ghassan was editing had praised the attack, I was appalled and wrote to him in anger condemning the massacre, describing it as an absurd and disgusting murder, and condemning the magazine’s support for it. Despite the West’s double standards, the action was a horrific terrorist attack.
The impact of Ghassan and his generation of Palestinians has been profound. What would have happened if the world had responded to their call for justice for Palestine – and if the ongoing shocks that shaped Palestinian existence had not occurred – and if all parties had not followed a conflicting sense of morality over the violence of the resistance and the violence of the “Nakba” and the horrors of the occupation that followed? We’ll never know what might happen, but I’m sure I wish Ghassan had stayed with us to have a conversation with him.
President of the Arab American Institute – Washington
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