What is a Homeland?
In Gassan Kanafani’s celebrated novella “Returning to Haifa”, Said, the protagonist, asks his wife, Safiyya, “Do you know what homeland is? It is where nothing like this happens.”
Ghassan Kanafani was a writer, editor of many Arab journals, and political activist. He was born in 1936 in Akka (Acre), Mandatory Palestine. In 1948, his family were forced to flee to Syria. Before Kanafani could graduate from the University of Damascus, where he was a student in the Department of Arabic Literature, he was expelled for his political ties with the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN), a pan-Arab nationalist organization that would develop into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 1956, he moved to Kuwait to teach, and then to Beirut.
Two years after the 1967 war, Kanafani joined the PFLP and became its official spokesperson. In 1972, Kanafani was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad in Beirut along with his 17-year-old niece, Lamees, using a car bomb.
In the novella, Said and Safiyya were forced to abandon their house during the 1948 war on Palestine. Not only did they lose their home to the new state but also their son, Khaldun, whose name means “eternal” in Arabic. I believe Kanafani chose that name to signify the Palestinian people’s right to claim something that is eternal: “homeland.”
Amid the clashes of the 1948 war, Safiyya leaves her baby with her neighbor while she looks for her missing husband. By the time she finds him, it is too late to return and pick their son.
The couple debate many times whether to go back and find their son. When the Mandelbaum Gate (the checkpoint between Israeli and Jordanian sectors of Jerusalem) is reopened in 1967, they decide to visit their home and see their son. They find their home now occupied by Miriam, a widow who lost her father at Auschwitz and whose husband died in the war. They also find Dov, their son Khaldun, an officer dressed in an Israeli military uniform.
After much debate about identity and the son’s blaming his father for leaving him when he was five months old, Khaldun, or Dov, concludes that he does not have any feelings towards his biological parents and does not want to go with them.
When Khaldun tells Said that he is in the Reserves, Said sighs:
Maybe your first battle will be with a fida'i¹ named Khalid. Khalid is my son. I beg you to notice that I did not say he's your brother. As you said, man is a cause. Last week Khalid joined the fedayeen². Do you know why we named him Khalid and not Khaldun? Because we always thought we'd find you, even if it took twenty years. But it didn't happen. We didn't find you, and I don't believe we will find you.
Safiyya keeps crying and sobbing throughout the dialogue between Said, who keeps walking around in the room and talking to himself, and Khaldun.
Said then tries to engage his silent wife, asking:
What is a homeland? Is it these two chairs that remained in this room for twenty years? The table? Peacock feathers? The picture of Jerusalem on the wall? The copper-lock? The oak tree? The balcony? What is a homeland? Khaldun? Our illusions of him? Fathers? Their sons? What is a homeland? Is it the picture of his brother hanging on the wall? I'm only asking.
Said looks at Khaldun and starts to doubt that Khaldun is Safiya’s son. He believes that Khaldun does not look like Khalid, his other son. The wounded Said convinces himself that Khaldun might have been that killed Arab child near Bethlehem church that Miriam told him about earlier. For Said, that would be preferable to discovering that his own son had become his enemy.
Suddenly, Khaldun asks Said:
Perhaps none of that would have happened if you behaved the way a civilized and careful man should behave.... You should not have left Haifa. If that wasn't possible, then no matter what it took, you should not have left an infant in its crib. And if that was also impossible, then you should have never stopped trying to return. You say that too was impossible? Twenty years have passed, sir! Twenty years! What did you do during that time to reclaim your son? If I were you I would've borne arms for that. Is there any stronger motive?
Said feels dizzy and wounded. He finds no answer to Khaldun’s questions but concludes, answering his wife’s question about why he was anxious, that they were indeed cowards. However, he tells his son:
But our cowardice does not entitle you to continue talking to us like this… I know that one day you'll realize these things, and that you'll realize that the greatest crime any human being can commit, whoever he may be, is to believe even for one moment that the weakness and mistakes of others give him the right to exist at their expense and justify his own mistakes and crimes.
In the end, Said turns and addresses his wife:
I’m looking for the true Palestine, the Palestine that’s more than memories, more than peacock feathers, more than a son, more than scars written by bullets on the stairs. I was just saying to myself: What’s Palestine with respect to Khalid? He doesn’t know the vase or the picture or the stairs or Halisa³ or Khaldun. And yet for him, Palestine is something worthy of a man bearing arms for, dying for. For us, for you and me, it’s only a search for something buried beneath the dust of memories. And look what we found beneath that dust. Yet more dust. We were mistaken when we thought the homeland was only the past. For Khalid, the homeland is the future….Dov is our shame, but Khalid is our enduring honor. Didn’t I tell you from the beginning that we shouldn’t come — because that was something requiring a war? Let’s go!
They leave…
Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s national poet, born in 1941 in Birwa Village in Mandatory Palestine, lived most of his life in exile in Beirut and Paris. In his poem “As He Walks Away”, the speaker addresses his enemy:
Greet our house for us, stranger.
The coffee cups are the same.
Can you smell our fingers still on them?
Can you tell your daughter
with the braid and thick eyebrows
it has an absent owner,
who wishes to visit it, to enter its mirror
and see his secret?
The question for Darwish isn’t about whether one is right to think about returning to see one’s former home; it is, rather: “Why did one leave it in the first place?”
Homeland, for me, is where I feel I belong. Homeland is what I imagine to be a safe place to recall the memories of my childhood without the interruption of airstrikes by F-16s.
However, living in peaceful Cambridge, I’m unable to forget that my homeland remains swathed in horrific memories, suffering a gloomy present, and with dim prospects for the future. What I try to convince myself of is that this is temporary, and one day the hope of peace will shine on every roofless house in my country.
No one chooses one’s birthplace; once born, one does have the right to decide whether one belongs there or not.
I wrote this poem in memory of the late celebrated, exiled Edward Said, author of Out of Place:
Displaced
I am neither in nor out.
I am in between.
I am not part of anything.
I am a shadow of something.
At best,
I am a thing that
does not really
exist.
I am weightless,
A speck of time
in Gaza.
But I will remain
where I am.
_______________________________
¹ fida’i: freedom fighter
² fedayeen: freedom fighters
³ Halisa: an Arab neighborhood in Haifa
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Gaza. He is the founder of the Edward Said Public Library, and in 2019-2020 was a visiting poet and scholar at Harvard University. He gave talks and poetry readings at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the University of Arizona (w/ Noam Chomsky), and the American Library Association conference. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, Solstice, Arrowsmith, Progressive Librarian Guild, among others. Mosab is the author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, forthcoming from City Lights Books in April 2022.