One of the most influential writers of his time, Ghassan Kanafani, focused his prose on the struggle of Palestine and its people against the colonialism of the Zionist state and, by proxy, the Western powers aiding the invasion and forced relocation of the native Arab communities of the region. The never-ending occupation and subjugation of Palestinian people by their colonisers and their anguish and pain from the loss of their motherland, which ties to their identity as a people, provide the cracked ground for much of Kanafani’s writing whether it is prose or political in form.

“Kanafani depicts Palestinian refugees as wandering aimlessly, perhaps having a vague notion of their desired destination but unable to orient themselves in its direction. Palestinian refugees are thus left with no option but to set forth in whatever direction they can, even if it may in fact take them further from their desired destination” (Farag, 2016). One such story of wandering lost people is portrayed in his novella Returning to Haifa.

Nakba and the Broken People

Returning to Haifa narrates the journey of a couple of displaced Palestinians during Nakba, Saffiya and Said, going back to their homeland from which they were forced out almost two decades before, and the eventual confrontation with their long-lost son, Khaldun. Contrary to their decades-long expectations and hopes of reclamation, all they find back home are the ‘dust and rubbles’ of their past and present mistakes. Khaldun, now going by the name Dov refuse to acknowledge his biological parents and his Palestinian-Arab identity, now content living a Jewish life in the Israeli state as a soldier fighting against the Palestinian resistance movement while staying with his adopted parents; themselves victims of the Holocaust years before their eventual relocation to what was once ‘Haifa’.

After the initial shock of Dov’s refusal, the couple begrudgingly accepts the reality for what it is – their colonisers have erased and forever altered the structure of their and their brethren’s identities and experiences, both as individuals and as a people, leaving them toothless and their will to resist and fight docile. “They [Saffiya and Said] become aware that the intention behind the Israeli decision to allow the Palestinians to visit their houses after 1967 was rather a perpetuation of torment than an act of sympathy” (Mohammad and Meryan, 2020). Another effect of the allowance for re-entry is the rewriting of the memories of their homeland from ‘what was once’ to ‘what it is now’ under the occupation. That aspect is exercised through renaming the streets and places, which in the text Said mentions, but still, as an act of resistance, he refers to them through their former Arab names instead through the new Jewish counterparts, “for him, the street names had never changed” (Kanafani, 1969).

For the past two decades and throughout the narrative, Saffiya and Said recollect and relive the memories of their homeland; such, they live their lives in a perpetual past - unable to unshackle themselves from their memories. Both Kanafani and later Said critique this way of holding on to the idea of Palestine of the past instead of focusing on the future and what it would take to shape it. All the characters in the narrative are victims of tragic events in one way or another. Miriam lost her family to the Gestapo and was forced out of her homeland, similar to Saffiya and Said. Dov was unintentionally abandoned in the midst of a major military intervention, and years later, the confrontation with his biological parents left him speechless and his sense of identity and morale in shambles. Saffiya, Said, Faris, and Lamia and her family lost the life they had and any sense of normalcy to Nakba. All of them, except Lamia and her family, are bound by the trauma they suffered through, and it is their memories that bind them to it and make them unable to move forward. It is only by reshaping and recontextualising those memories with the reality of their lives can they find purpose in moving forward, as happens to be the case for Saffiya, Said, and Faris by the end of the novella.

Names, Memories, and Their Ties

Saffiya and Said could never utter the name of Khaldun during the entirety of their exile. Still, by naming their second and third born with phonetically similar names, Khalid and Khalida, the couple holds on to the memory and hopes of finding their firstborn. That is until they meet Khaldun and then realise how far he has drifted away from them, with the understanding of there never ever being a possibility of identities and parenthood catching back to that of their lost decades. Said and the text indicates this drift by un-naming Khaldun; he truly becomes Dov for the remainder of the narrative. The act is not just the parents coming to terms with the ‘death’ of their child, but they are both grieving and finding relief with the fact that their second-born is very much unlike Dov. Such, Khalid is not just a placeholder for memories of Khaldun but becomes a source of pride for his parents. Khalid’s desire to fight with the resistance, as Kanafani and Said point out, is the future of Palestine. 

Memory is a double-edged sword. While holding on to the memories of Khaldun and the past of Palestine brought only grief and separation for Saffiya and Said, it aids the man and his family living in Faris’s former home. Faris is warmly welcomed into his house, which remains unchanged from his memories. Every detail, every speck, remains the same as if decades have not passed by. The photo on the wall commemorating his brother Badr’s sacrifice for his country remains on the same spot as well. The man explains how he found comfort and pride Badr represented while he was “alone and isolated in a sea of raging hostility” (Kanafani, 1969). Through maintaining the memories of those who came and fought before gives clarity to the ones tormented by trauma and injustice as to what they must do for the future, for their future.

While Khaldun becomes Dov to his biological parents and the readers after he rejects his ancestral identities, in the case of Lamia and her family, naming their son Badr is an act of reaching back into the past and establishing a connection with the goals of the resistance Badr and his comrades represented and fought for. As such, they perpetuate the legacy of the Palestinian resistance. The effect of such is so profound that it wills Faris to take up arms against his colonisers just like his brother did two decades back. When Dov retorts, “if I were you I would have borne arms for that” (Kanafani, 1969), he is not just speaking to Said about increasing his effort to find baby Khaldun in the rubbles of the fallen city of Haifa, but it is Kanafani’s call for action to all the Palestinians to rise up to the oppressors and take back their homeland even if it meant ‘war’ – a sentiment the ‘man’ in the Faris’ house also echoes.

Conclusion

For Saffiya, Said, and Faris, Palestine is rooted in their memories before Nakba. They equate it with the objects, places, and their lost people. As the text suggests, for people like Khalid, Badr, Lamia and family, it represents an idea – a place where ‘none of the tragedies that occurred would ever happen’. Khalid, with the lack of any worldly ties to Palestine, unlike his parents, and Lamia and family with their ties to the resistance movement, push forward for a future of Palestine that is unbound from the memories of ‘what was’; instead, they march forward for ‘what can be’.

Saffiya and Said recognise the same at the end of the novella, and with this realisation, Said proclaims, “Dov is our shame, but Khalid is our enduring honour” (Kanafani, 1969). They break the shackles of their memories of the past and take pride in the future of their Palestine – Khalid.