What's left is yours

What remains for you is the name of a novel by the Palestinian writer (Ghassan Kanafani), and it is the writer’s second experience in the world of the novel. Before talking about the novel, I will talk briefly about the writer Ghassan Kanafani. He was born in Acre in 1936 AD. He was a journalist, storyteller, and novelist. He was assassinated in Beirut in 1972 AD. He was 36 years old, by blowing up his car.

Kanafani was known for his treatment of the topics of the Palestinian struggle and liberation. He was displaced with his family in 1948, and resided in Syria, then he resided in Lebanon, and obtained Lebanese citizenship. He did not complete his university studies, as he dropped out of studying Arabic literature at the University of Damascus in his second year of study. He worked In the primary teaching profession in the State of Kuwait, he then returned to work in Lebanon.

He wrote the novel What Remains for You after his first experience (Men in the Sun), which is an attempt to move away from the self into action, and from his personal concerns, which he referred to in general terms, to the concerns of a personality separate from the concerns of the public.

The novel talks about a Palestinian family from Gaza, who moved to Gaza from the city of Jaffa after the Jews took control of the city. This displacement led to the dispersion and fragmentation of the family. The main character in the novel is (Hamid), one of the young men who represent Palestine, and who suffered the tragedy of displacement in the year 1948 AD, Hamed did not comprehend these events due to their rapid occurrence, and the second character (Maryam) was Hamed’s sister. Her dreams, hopes, and money were lost due to the loss of her land, and she entered a life of suffering and misery that was imposed on her as a result of displacement.

The third character is the traitor Zakaria. He was the one who directed the Zionist soldiers to a safe place, and he took advantage of Hamid’s absence from home to attack Maryam and rape her. He ended up being killed by the free and pure Maryam. Here, Kanafani shows that the Palestinian woman is a symbol of the land and an image of Palestine when She gets angry and angry.

The novel did not take the traditional form with the development and sequence of events, but rather it was built on an event in which places and times intersect and those events coincide and parallel. Kanafani created the characters of his novel after carefully observing the patterns of behavior and psychology of the ordinary people he sees and deals with in his ordinary day, and Ghassan was able to dress those characters in the garment of immortality. In the great literary arena, because those characters went beyond the pages of criticism for people to talk about them as if they were real people who were actually with them.