Ghassan Kanafani
Acre,
Palestine
(1936
- 1972 )
Ghassan KanafaniGhassan Kanafani (غسان كنفاني, born April 9, 1936 in Acre, Palestine - died July 8, 1972 in Beirut, Lebanon) was a Palestinian writer and political activist for Palestinian liberation.
Early years
Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was born in Acre in 1936, in what was then the British Palestine Mandate, to Sunni Muslim Palestinian parents. His father was a lawyer, and sent Ghassan to French missionary school. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Kanafani and his family were forced into exile. They fled to Lebanon, but soon moved on to Damascus, Syria, to live there as Palestinian refugees. Kanafani completed his secondary education in Damascus and received a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) teaching certificate in 1952.
Political background
The same year he enrolled in the Department
of Arabic Literature at the University of Damascus but was expelled in
1955 as a result of his involvement in the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM),
a left-wing pan-Arab organization to which he had been recruited by Dr.
George Habash when the two met in 1953. He moved to Kuwait, where he
worked as a teacher and became more politically active. In Kuwait he
edited al-Ra'i (The Opinion), which was an ANM-affiliated newspaper, and
also became interested in Marxist philosophy and politics.
In 1960, he relocated once again to Beirut, where he began editing the ANM
mouthpiece al-Hurriya. In 1961, he met Anni Høver, a Danish children's
rights activist, with whom he had two children. In 1962, Kanafani briefly
had to go underground, since he, as a stateless person, lacked proper
identification papers. He reappeared in Beirut later the same year, and
took up editingship of the Nasserist newspaper al-Muharrir (The
Liberator). He went on to become an editor of another Nasserist newspaper,
al-Anwar (The Illumination), in 1967.
Involvement in PFLP
The Palestinian membership of the ANM
evolved in 1967 into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),
of which Kanafani became a spokesman. In 1969, he drafted a PFLP program
in which the movement officially took up Marxism-Leninism. He also edited
the movements newspaper, al-Hadaf (The Target), which he had founded in
1969, writing political, cultural and historical essays and articles. On
July 8, 1972, Ghassan Kanafani and his niece were assassinated by a bomb
planted in his car in Beirut. It is widely believed to have been planted
by agents of Israel, which had a policy of assassinating Palestinian
figures.
Literary production
Ghassan Kanafani is considered a major
modernizing influence on Arab literature, and remains a major figure in
Palestinian literature. He was an early proponent of complex narrative
structures, using flashback effects and a chorus of narrator voices for
effect.
His writings focused mainly on the themes of Palestinian liberation and
struggle, and often touched upon his own experiences as a refugee. He was,
as was the PFLP, a Marxist, and believed that the class struggle within
Palestinian and Arab society was intrinsically linked to the struggle
against Zionism and for a Palestinian state.
He wrote both short stories and novels (the most famous is probably Men in
the Sun), and scholarly work on literature and politics. His thesis, Race
and Religion in Zionist Literature, formed the basis for his 1967 study On
Zionist Literature.
He was also an active literary critic. His seminal work, Palestinian
Literature Under Occupation, 1948-1968, introduced Palestinian writers and
poets to the Arab world. He also wrote a major critical work on Zionist
and Israeli literature. In the spirit of Jean-Paul Sartre, he called for
an engaged literature which would be committed to change.
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Added: May 2006