Kanafani’s stories deal with the consequences of the Nakba, rather than the event itself. Desperate refugees, having lost everything, doing what they can to make ends meet. The celebrated opening story recounts the tragic journey of three men seeking to cross the desert from Basra to Kuwait, a land of supposed opportunities. (Following the same path that Saddam fatefully took years later.) It is a mission that ends in absolute disaster, of a similar vein to the disasters that occur at borders across Europe and between Mexico and the USA, among others. Desperation is the driver, a desperation far removed from the kind of problems these characters’ ancestors might have faced. Ancestors who lived quiet lives near the orange and olive groves, in villages which no longer bear the names they did then, or don’t even so much as exist. To think that Kanafani’s tales are even more prescient today than when he wrote them is just another factor in the indictment of the Israeli state’s crimes against the Palestinian peoples.
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