The Kanafani Effect: Resistance and Counter-Narration in the Films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman

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the kanafani effect 199 regular on-screen persona, walking onto a darkened empty stage. There, he finds an office chair draped in the Palestinian national flag, and decides to sit and spin around a few times before getting up again. Later, es journeys to the West Bank’s new ‘autonomous areas’. Marking the beginning of this journey, the words ard al-miʿad (the Promised Land) appear as a title card on the screen before being replaced by a shot of empty desert. A desert road leads to a fork marked by a sign indicating Jericho to the right and Gaza to the left. These were the first areas to fall under Palestinian Authority administration under the socalled Gaza-Jericho Agreement of 1994. After taking the road to Jericho, es then finds himself sitting on an empty hotel terrace, kept company by a lone swimmer, a wall-mural of Yasser Arafat and a flickering light overhead. This was the changed context that Suleiman estimated was ripe for satire and humor. His work brought two important ingredients to the recipe of aesthetic resistance and counter-narration: the element of self-critique combined with Suleiman’s eye for the absurd and surreal aspects of the Israeli occupation provided the ‘spice’ needed to create a novel narrative texture laden with irony and subversion. While Kanafani had not fully anticipated the subversive potential of humor, he accounted for what he termed ‘al-sukhriyya al-marira’ (bitter irony) (Kanafani 1966: 45) in his analysis of resistance literature, and drew on examples illustrating folk poetry’s potential to combine wit and wisdom. Kanafani remarked that poetry under occupation, unlike in the manfa (exile), was neither sad nor defeatist. On the contrary, he deemed that it was possessed of ‘an on-going revolutionary momentum with a hopefulness that provokes admiration’ (Kanafani 1966: 58). Believing that part of this momentum derived from the recourse to irony and the tragi-comic, Kanafani wrote that ‘the writer finds nothing more serious, in such a context, than satire’ (1966: 67). In Suleiman’s films, satire and humor do not appear to emerge out of a deliberate narrative strategy or design, so much as from the episodic moment, the idiosyncratic characters, the background, and the streets themselves. In this sense, there is an instinctive folk element to the comedy of Suleiman’s films. His starting point is not the story of Palestine, but rather a search for a ‘poetic choreography’ where film sequences follow a certain tempo toward a punch line, a gag or a repetition, and this musicality in turn gives shape to the poetic or the comic. Humor in ‘the ghetto’, as Suleiman has described life in Nazareth, comes out of a necessity to extend and gain time: ‘If you know you only have a certain amount of time you can sustain yourself in despair [… But] one way to expand your life at this moment would be to poeticise’ (Suleiman 2009b). In his description of the tragi-comic element of resistance literature—what he called ‘al-balliyya al-latti tadhak’ (Kanafani 1966: 70), Kanafani touched on Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7 (2014) 190–206
200 abu-remaileh an intrinsic faith that the situation of duress, and by extension the nightmare of occupation, will one day pass: ‘the confrontation is a condition that can only be considered temporary’ he wrote (1966: 67). Suleiman takes this sense of temporariness to another level, to a poetic sphere that can enhance moments of humor and release those moments from the shackles of occupied time. These poetic spaces in Suleiman’s films disclose a resistance in the unexpected—in the margins, the cracks, the mundane and even the slapstick. Whether it is a blindfolded Palestinian prisoner giving directions to a tourist, or two lovers holding hands at the edge of a checkpoint, resistance is not that of heroic characters confronting extraordinary situations, but rather the heroism of the everyday act. In his later years in exile, Mahmoud Darwish was preoccupied with the possibility of dismantling the Palestinian hero and with asking whether Palestinians might instead produce normal writing about a normal life (al-Shaikh 2010: 488–489). However, rather than dismantling heroism per se, Suleiman re-directs the concept so that it is instead found in the capturing and recording of moments of pleasure, tenderness, childhood, neighborhood, nostalgia or melancholy; it is in these small acts of defiance against a psychological and physical occupation that aspires to break all forms of intimacy and de-humanize Palestinians. Experiencing these small joys of life becomes itself a form of resistance, perhaps especially when these experiences enact an indifference toward the occupation itself. A wonderful example appears in Suleiman’s most recent film, The Time That Remains (2009). Here resistance takes the form of the unstoppable human desire we observe in a young man, who despite the siege of Ramallah and an enormous tank turret rotating to track his every move, remains utterly oblivious, absorbed in speaking to a friend on the phone about his new music collection. He even arranges to go a party later that night. Undeterred by the occupation forces, the subsequent disco scene also asserts a thirst for life resilient even under curfew, and to which the soldiers observing from their military jeep themselves eventually submit, nodding to the beat of the music. The Time That Remains, unlike Suleiman’s earlier films, directly engages with, and depicts, the events of 1948. A film set was especially constructed for the shoot so as to recreate a 1940s Nazareth complete with period interiors (other elements of the film are set in modern-day Nazareth, Jerusalem and the West Bank). The 1948 passages of the film are loosely based on Suleiman’s father’s diaries from this period, along with his mother’s letters to her family in Jordan. Suleiman’s father was a young blacksmith turned resistance fighter who was captured by the Haganah (Zionist) armed forces, imprisoned and tortured. Although the first part of the film overtly deals with the events of Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7 (2014) 190–206
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The Kanafani Effect: Resistance and Counter-Narration in the Films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman

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