"Returning to Haifa"... the novel that was behind the assassination of its author

The Palestinian city of Haifa before the Nakba in the period between 1940 and 1946 (Getty)

Following the assassination of the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, the then Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, said, commenting on that operation: “Today we got rid of an armed intellectual brigade. Ghassan, with his pen, posed a greater danger to Israel than a thousand armed guerrillas.”

It was Golda Meir who issued a decision to liquidate a number of Palestinian figures and leaders, days before this criminal operation was carried out, which took place on July 8, 1972.

Coinciding with the developments of the brutal war of extermination that Israel continues to wage in the Gaza Strip and its surrounding areas, the details of the horrific incidents that the Palestinian people suffered over the course of several decades, during which they were subjected to horrific massacres committed by the occupation soldiers, come back to memory, the most barbaric type of occupation in history. the talk.

In this context imposed by these massacres, the novel “Returning to Haifa” by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, which was published in Beirut in 1970, his last novel while he was alive, comes to narrate an aspect of the suffering of the Palestinian people, in light of the ugliness of this occupation.

In this novel, which was previously chosen among the list of the 10 most important Arabic works of fiction translated during the 21st century, Kanafani embodies the life of Palestinian youth whose life circumstances take them away from their land, but when they return, they find that many things have changed.

Hence, Kanafani's novels are classified in the category of post-Nakba literature, especially the novel "Returning to Haifa", which despite its small size, in which he was able, brilliantly, to present the reality of the Palestinian issue, in a masterful narrative style.

Return concept

In the novel “Returning to Haifa,” the events are narrated through a third-person narrator, and from a point of view through which he presents the idea of ​​return, in several contexts, which contributed to emphasizing the flexibility of this concept and its breadth as well.

Through this, he was able to tell a story in which reality is mixed with imagination, as all its elements exist on the ground of reality, but he was also able to present an intellectual epic that arouses astonishment and pushes the reader into the past, in order to revolve his questions about the present, to the same extent as his concerns revolve around it. About the future.

When the bombing suddenly begins, Safiya becomes worried about her husband, Saeed, who was outside the house. Then, she puts her son, Khaldoun, in his bed inside the house in the Al-Halisa neighborhood, and goes out to search for her husband.

Safiyya had bid farewell to her son, without knowing that she had bid farewell to him, at this moment forever, and that the kiss she had printed on his forehead, and the stroking during which she had touched his little fingers, would be her last time with him. After she found her husband, she was unable to return to her homeland. Home to take her son, due to the closure of the roads and the stampede of people trying to escape, and the increasing bombing, gradually pushed her and her husband away from their neighborhood, moving from alley to alley, and from one city to another, from the cities of the diaspora.

Since that terrifying moment, Safia's suffering continues, as she thinks about the fate of her son, whom she left alone at home, while her husband, Saeed, who has been with him for more than 20 years, tries to return to search for the child, and when they finally succeed, a big surprise awaits them. Arriving at their home, and discovering the bitter truth, which is that a Jewish family took over their home and their son as well, and that the child’s name, “Khaldoun,” was changed to “Dove,” and that he became a soldier in the ranks of the army of that occupying entity.

The novel begins with the arrival of Saeed and Safiyya to the city of Haifa, after an absence of about 20 years following the Nakba of 1948. When the city appeared to Safiyya, she began to say: I did not expect to see her again, and her husband Saeed responded to her, saying: “You do not see her, but they are the ones who see you, and you "You see it."

Watching the streets brings back painful memories for them, filling their hearts with feelings of heartbreak and sorrow. These memories begin with remembering the people who were lost, and the memories that connect them to all the places this city contains, starting from childhood and attending school, all the way to their marriage and the birth of their son Khaldoun. These memories bring tears to flow from Safiya’s eyes.

But the real tragedy for Saeed and Safiya happens when they see for themselves a soldier who is completely separated from his Arabism, and becomes on the other side, after joining the army of the occupying entity. That was the bullet that headed directly to hit the heart. At that moment, Saeed and his wife realized that everything had been stolen from them: the home, their loved ones, the memories, and most of all, the homeland had been stolen. Then, Saeed felt a wave of remorse for leaving the country and the house, and the pressure of this feeling caused that wound that would never be healed. Time can heal it.

Several questions

The novel “Returning to Haifa” raises many questions, the most prominent of which is the question that revolves around what “loss” means, and whether it is limited to death only? This question arises at the moment when Said was surprised by the fact that his son Khaldoun had been raised on Jewish principles, and that he had become a volunteer in the occupation army, and had also become a fierce defender of his ideas.

At that time, Saeed began to reconsider this concept, and this prompted him to think about his other son, called “Khaled,” whom he had prevented from joining the Palestinian guerrilla factions.

Despite the circumstances that the novel explains, revealing that leaving the infant was not an option for Saeed and Safiya, the circumstances are decisive in embodying the mistake of the parents who should not have left the child, the house, or Haifa, according to the vision of the novel, and according to the words of Saeed and his son Khaldoun (Dove), who became a soldier. A reserve in the Israeli army, as highlighted by the two contexts that convey, respectively, a dialogue between Saeed and his wife, and a letter addressed by the son (the enemy) to his father.

Saeed says to his wife: “The crime started 20 years ago, and the price must be paid. It started when we left him here.” Safiya replies to him: “But we did not leave him. You know,” and Saeed’s answer is: “We should not have left anything. Khaldun, the house, and Haifa.”

Then Dov, whose name was Khaldoun before, intervened and said: “You should not have left Haifa. And if that was not possible, then you should have, at all costs, not left an infant in the bed. And if that was also impossible, "You should have never stopped trying to come back."

Saeed understood this lesson, even before he saw Khaldoun (Dove), when he told his wife that “Haifa is denying them,” because they returned disappointed, and he began to tell her a side story, the details of which included what indicated that restoring the homeland was the way to restore everything in it. Saeed then said to Dov or Khaldun, and to his supposed Polish mother, “Maryam,” before he and Safiya went out the door: “You can temporarily stay in our house, as this is a matter that will require war to settle.”

Inside the story

Saeed used a story within the story to be able to convey the idea that he had and was going to tell his wife: “Faris Al-Labdeh returns to his home in the Al-Ajami neighborhood in Akka, to find another Arab to hire him: “There is no need to take your anger out on me, because I am an Arab too, and a Yafawi like you, and I know you, because you are a son.” the town. Come in and let's have coffee."

The crisis of the story begins when Fares enters his house, which he left 20 years ago, to see a picture of his brother, the martyr Badr, still hanging on the wall. He discovers that his host, who rented the house after him, has preserved the picture and named his son Badr after the martyr: “They are Badr and Saad, my sons.” ". The other responds: “Yes. We named him after your martyr brother.” "This is how the picture remained here. It remained part of our lives. Me, my wife Lamia, my son Badr, my son Saad, and he, your brother Badr, are one family. We lived 20 years together."

In contrast to the changes that Saeed sees in his home, and despite the new things that mean a change in identity such as the bell, the name, and the seats, Fares does not see a change in his home, which means that the Palestinian is preserving the legacy of his homeland, and on the opposite wall, which was painted in a glowing white color, the picture of his brother Badr was still there. “Alone in the whole room,” she commented.

The story's crisis reaches its climax when Fares asks the owner of the house for the picture. He presents it to Fares, only to notice behind it a faded, meaningless rectangle of white. When Fares almost arrived in Ramallah, he felt that he did not have the right to the image of the martyr, because he did not preserve the house and Acre, and because he discovered that that image loses its value when it leaves the wall of the house, just like a handful of dirt when it leaves the ground, and an orange seed when it leaves the tree. Then, he returns again, to put the picture back on the wall, and to absorb the rest of the lesson he learned from the disappointing return. “At night, I said to my wife: If you wanted to take it back, you had to take back the house, Jaffa, and us.”

Hence Fares' position in the story, "He is carrying weapons now," came to reinforce Saeed's final position, after he thought about embracing his son Khaled and crying on his shoulder, exchanging with him the role of father and son, and atone for his sin in preventing him from joining the Fedayeen, hoping that He may have joined them during his absence.

Saeed remained silent all the way, and did not utter a word until he reached the outskirts of Ramallah. There he looked at his wife and said: “I hope Khaled has gone... during our absence.”

What home means

In the context of the novel, the narrator confirms that Saeed was aware that settling the affairs of the house could only be achieved through confrontation, and perhaps he needed that in order for his conviction to overcome his fear.

Those who settle in the house act as if they were in their own home, and even usurp Khaldoun’s lineage to his father. This confirms what the Polish-Israeli Miriam said to Saeed about the time for “Dov” to return to the house, but she adds, saying: “But he may be a little late. He has not committed himself for a long time.” "His age when he comes home. He's just like his father."

She meant his father, who belonged to the occupation, which prompted Safiya to say to Saeed, her husband: “She says like his father, as if Khaldoun had a father other than you.”

However, Miriam was not satisfied with that, but began to tell them that time had passed, and that Khaldoun (Dove) had grown up, and then the tall man was coming forward, wearing a military uniform, and carrying a hat in his hand.

At that moment, Saeed jumped to his feet, as if an electric current had thrown him off the seat. The son, Dov, was no less sharp than Maryam. When Saeed asked him: “You are in the army. Who are you fighting? And why?” He answers: “You have no right to ask these questions. You are on the other side.” Then he confronts Saeed with his Judaism, which makes him go to synagogue and Jewish school, eat kosher, and study Hebrew.

At that moment, Saeed’s questions revolve around what the homeland is, then he tries to understand the position of (his struggling son) Khaled on Palestine, while he talks to his wife about what is on his mind: “What is the homeland? Are these two chairs that have been in this room for 20 years? The table? ? Peacock feathers? The image of Jerusalem on the wall? The brass bolt? The oak tree? The balcony? “What is Palestine for Khaled?” He does not know the vase, the picture, the ladder, or Khaldun. However, for him, it is worthy of taking up arms and dying for it. And for you and me, it's just searching for something under the dust of memory. And look what we found under that dust. New dust.

Eat my thoughts

In her book “The Road to the Other Tent,” which studies the works of Ghassan Kanafani, the writer Radwa Ashour discussed Kanafani’s novel, and stated that the characters in that novel “express ideas and convictions more than they are characters that have taken their course in growth in order to emerge to us as living entities that have weight and value in the novel.” ".

Ashour considered that the novel was dominated by intellectual treatment through the development of events and the drawing of characters, and that the intellectual framework was what was insisting on the writer, so the characters were in most cases mere spokesmen with intellectual statements ready on the writer’s tongue.

This is what the critic Farouk Wadi pointed out in his book “Three Signs in the Palestinian Novel” when he mentioned that the novel responded to the requirements of politics in terms of education and incitement, and he described it as a novel of political dialogue in the first place, considering that its characters do not pulse as much as they represent a political position, which is expressed directly through... "Dialogue."

Wadi believes that “Saeed” and “Dove,” the two main characters, each represents “an intellectual and political state, and the writer aspires through them, and through their dialogue, to reach answers to the questions raised: What is fatherhood? What is the homeland? What is the issue? He goes on to say that Dove does not represent a human entity “as much as he represents a false ideological state, and a consciousness formed in such a society.”

Identity fate

“Returning to Haifa” is a novel that immortalizes in the memory of time the paradox of escaping the siege and killing of the body, but it brings us into questions about the fate of identity, entity and history, and the right to return and belong to this place, where the past remains one of the facts that cannot be defeated by the sounds of crimes and the fires of war, no matter how high their smoke rises. It does not obscure the coming dawn.

And here is Saeed telling Dove his positions in turn: “Your first battle may be with a guerrilla named Khaled, and Khaled is my son. I hope you notice that I did not say he is your brother.” And when he asks him: “Do you know why we called him Khaled and not Khaldoun? Because we expected to find you, even after 20 years. But that did not happen. We did not find you, and I do not think we will find you.”

Then he stated his conviction, saying: “The greatest crime that any human being can commit, whoever he may be, is to believe, even for a moment, that the weaknesses and mistakes of others are what constitute his right to exist at their expense.”

The novel "Returning to Haifa" calls for transferring memory to a future generation that will be more capable of confrontation, but it does not call for relying on that memory, or just crying over its ruins. This prompted the occupier to realize the seriousness of this vision, so he assassinated the martyr writer when he was 36 years old, so Ghassan Kanafani crowned his career with martyrdom.

This testimony was present in the details of his short life when he was martyred on July 8, 1972, after the explosion of an explosive device, placed in his car by the Israeli Mossad while he was with his 17-year-old niece, Lamis Najm. The martyr’s remains were scattered with little Lamis, who was closest to his heart, as he would write stories to her and give her gifts on her beautiful occasions.

The occupation forces assassinated the novelist, but they were unable to assassinate his writings, which are still vibrant and continue to be subject to multiple readings.

Source: Al Jazeera