Umm Saad

Umm Saad, "who now stands beneath the low ceiling of misery in the high ranks of the battle, paying, and continues to pay more than everyone else." This is how the Palestinian political novelist Ghassan Kanafani introduced the Palestinian mother when he wrote his novel in 1969. It's as if "Umm Saad" is the point at which Kanafani's previous novels intersect. She is the lost character in his earlier novels, the implicit figure that hides behind the lines and intertwines with the characters, only revealing itself when it is fully realized in historical reality. It's as if Kanafani's novels are a mirror of the consciousness of struggle, or a constant attempt to write an objective equivalent to the historical experience, and the equivalent is only complete when the revolution is complete. Isn't Umm Saad always possible and only grasps language when it grasps history? Isn't the novelistic hero someone who speaks his own language, reaches out through his language to the language of the group, and disrupts the prevailing language? Kanafani here rushes to learn from the masses; he doesn't search for the fictional event nor does he sculpt a fictional character. The character is complete, or it is consciousness that is fully realized in practice. In this sense, Umm Saad is both the model and its antithesis, the realistic hero and the transformed vision. She is Kanafani's most complete attempt to express the revolutionary moment in its full radiance. Kanafani chooses Umm Saad to declare his class and intellectual bias. He chooses the camp, revealing to us the difference between one tent and another: the refugee's tent and the fighter's tent. He rushes toward what might be called realistic romanticism.