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

198 abu-remaileh
a script he had begun while in New York, and which eventually became his
first feature film, Chronicle of a Disappearance. The result was a minimalist
diary-like narrative wherein scenes of an episodic nature offered an unconventional
treatment of the Palestinian ideal of return. Indeed, Suleiman himself
had returned to a situation that had changed remarkably since Khleifi’s Wedding
in Galilee. The integral relationship Kanafani had seen existing between
culture and armed resistance had subsided significantly since the Palestinian
leadership had been forced into a further exile in North Africa in 1982. Thereafter,
the locus of political activity had gradually shifted to the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, where grassroots resistance gathered momentum throughout the
1980s before culminating in the mass uprisings that became known as the First
Intifada, erupting in 1987—not long after the release of Wedding in Galilee.
The Intifada catapulted the Palestinian struggle under occupation into public
consciousness, and eventually forced the international community to intervene
in a bid to lessen the violence. The results of these interventions became
known as the ‘Oslo peace process’, taking their name from the interim agreement
signed in 1993 by plo Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin; this established direct negotiations between the two parties and
proposed lending a form of limited self-government to a transitional body, the
so-called Palestinian Authority (pa). The pa essentially assumed joint responsibility
with Israel for policing its own people, in exchange for questionable
promises of partial Israeli withdrawals from limited areas of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip. Oslo thus signaled a counter-revolutionary turn, marked by
a bureaucratization of the national movement. It became intensely divisive
among Palestinians, with many notable public figures outspokenly criticizing
the shift, including Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said. More militant critical
opponents later launched a new phase of armed struggle, some of them
embarking on a campaign of suicide bombings.
This was the fraught and divisive scene that Suleiman entered when he
returned to the homeland. Being critical of the new political project himself,
he quickly realized that the vacuum created by the demise of all-encompassing
political ideologies had inadvertently opened up new spaces for cultural and
creative dissent. In an understated but critical manner, Suleiman’s Chronicle of
a Disappearance records the disillusionment that followed the Oslo agreement,
making a series of satirical image-comments on the alleged hollowness of its
new bureaucratic façade. Addressing the reduction and fragmentation of Palestinian
lands as a result of the Oslo process, and highlighting the many unfulfilled
promises that process involved, Chronicle of a Disappearance introduces
a powerful element of Palestinian self-critique with its sardonic depiction of
the results of the interim agreement. At one point we encounter es, Sueliman’s
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7 (2014) 190–206