This week the memory of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani (9 April 1936-8 July 1972) -- an icon of the convergence of literature and politics -- lent current affairs in the occupied territories a mournful edge. Born in Acre, Kanafani received a French missionary school education in Jaffa, leaving for Lebanon to settle in Syria, then Kuwait, following the war of 1948. Kanafani, who is best known as a novelist and martyr of the Palestinian resistance, began his career in fiction while in Beirut, to which he relocated in 1961. "By day a journalist of the highest order," according to Abdou Wazin, by night Kanafani "turned into that tragic story teller. What connected night to day was his unceasing struggle through writing, a struggle he equated with that revolutionary dream that, emanating from Palestine, would never end there." His most famous novel is Rijal fil-Shams (Men in the Sun), according to Mohamed Berrada "an achievement of the drive to separate [the literature of the resistance] from straightforward realism, employing symbolism and intellectually forging the structure in the attempt to present the Palestinian issue outside the usual context, which relied largely on bringing the issue back to the [Israeli] other." His books -- including Ma Tabaqqa Lakum (What Remains for You), Aaed Ila Haifa (Returning to Haifa) and the detective novel Al-Shai' Al-Aakhar Aw Man Qatal Laila Al-Haik (The Other Thing Or Who Killed Laila Al-Haik) -- represent, for Berrada, the author's attempt to transcend his prescribed role on the literary front of the resistance, affirming "the Palestinian writer's right to listen also to his private voice and his secret wounds". Taken as a whole, Kanafani's life's work is "a continuous exploration of [a whole range of] structural and expressive possibilities". Others dwelled on the tragic brevity of Kanafani's life. "The story of this writer who never departed his youth," writes Elias Kouri, "abandoning us, his young companions, to old age and wisdom, is the story of searching for the beginning." Kanafani's journalism earned him the position of official spokesman of the Popular Front in 1970. His long-standing involvement in the resistance eventually resulted in his being killed in a car explosion, with his niece, two years later. A scrap of paper from Israeli intelligence was found in the wreckage; this, the message implied, was the fate awaiting those who opposed Israel.
