1962 saw the publication of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, a striking novella that depicts the fates of three Palestinian refugees as they seek to make their way out of an Iraqi camp, hoping to find work in Kuwait. From a committed revolutionary and visionary documentarian of liberatory futures, Men in the Sun was one of Kanafani’s most powerful and symbolic tales—a narrative that at once elucidated the precarious liminal position of the exiled, and criticized passivity and silence in the face of injustice. Ten years later, the story would be adapted and released as The Dupes by Egyptian director Tewfik Saleh, who repudiated Arab cinema at the time as being woefully ignorant, stating: “No one ever proposed a serious political analysis of [the Palestinians’] situation as victims of an imperialist machine.”
That same year, in 1972, Kanafani was assassinated by a car bomb placed by the Israeli Mossad; his seventeen-year-old niece died along with him. He would be remembered as a comrade who had never lost faith in the Palestinian cause, continuing to insist that the future, with all its hardships and destructions, was still a site of hope: “I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child. . .” In this vein, him and Saleh were united in the necessity of persistence, with the latter explicating: “. . . I think, even if this isn’t everyone’s opinion, that a film like The Dupes is extremely mobilizing. Under what conditions can we say a film is mobilizing? When it inspires the overthrow of a situation.”
In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we take a look at Men in the Sun and The Dupes, the way these two master storytellers intersect, diverge, and speak together of human dignity—how it has been undermined by the world. When Men in the Sun was published, there were 1.1 million refugees registered with UNRWA; today, there are approximately six million. The persistence to live continues, and the resistance along with it.
Christina Chatzitheodorou (CC): In these two narratives, Tewfik Saleh and Ghassan Kanafani grasp the meaning behind the Nakba as an ongoing event and a transgenerational trauma, focusing on three generations of Palestinians who, after being expelled from their homeland after 1948, find themselves living in temporary shelters. Yet the fact that Kanafani uses three generations of Palestinians to tell the story symbolizes how the temporary experience of exile has been transformed into something permanent, with dispossession being at the heart of the Palestinian experience. The protagonists each have their own flashbacks—living off their memories—and though they are products of different Palestinian experiences, their commonalities are found in betrayal and despair, the material implications related to the loss of the homeland.
Mia Ruf (MR): I was also struck by the frequent use of flashbacks, both in the novel and the film. Each character enters the story with his respective memory burden. I thought that the montage interweaving Abu Quais’s experiences with shots from the broader “historical record” (diplomatic summits, etc.) was particularly impactful—it really gave us a sense of the scope of Abu Quais’ life, in both general and personal terms. Over the course of the narrative, though, as Abu Quais, Abbas, Marwan, and their smuggler Abu Khaizuran make their way toward Kuwait, all these individual memories converge, in a way. There’s a line in the text: “their thoughts seemed to run from one head to the other”—it’s almost like the men have come to share a collective consciousness, the heat melting their minds into one. In Saleh’s film, this is evoked through shots of swirling dust on the barely-perceivable road toward Kuwait—objects in the physical world become less and less individuated.
Although the men share in one another’s misery, they die in utter isolation, in darkness, baking to death inside a sweltering water tank. Though it’s not included in the book, the film has the men banging on the insides of the tank for help in their final moments, unheard by Abu Khaizuran, who has been held up at the customs desk. This is a broader theme in the film and text: the exiles’ repeated pleas for help, the world’s failure to respond, and the crushing sense of isolation and betrayal that results.
I’m especially interested in your thoughts on the idea of Heaven/Hell in this story, and also on its themes of judgment and the afterlife; there is frequent mention of Hell, both in reference to the desert and the water tank enclosure.
Junyi Zhou (JZ): Thank you for pointing toward the flashbacks in the story and the film, Christina and Mia! I was also struck by their power while reading and viewing, and was especially interested in how Kanafani’s text was transposed onto the screen. Perhaps no sequence more precisely and harrowingly captures the collective nature of displacement other than the montage midway through the film that breaks with the text’s plot. Shown in rapid, successive shots, the footage first consists of dusty roadsides, barbed-wire fences, and emaciated Palestinians (taken from UNRWA), which soon seamlessly transitions into a shot of Abu Quais’s wife and child eating at a food distribution point. If we stretch the definition of the “collective consciousness” that Mia spoke of to accommodate the experiences and recollections beyond that of Abu Quais, Assad, and Marwan, it seems to be anchored in these perpetual hardships—the eternal present. The only way for the migrants to access their past (the evocation of which is very much sensory, like the depleted Abu Quais imagining himself to be smelling his wife’s hair after a bath when he’s actually smelling the scorched earth) is through memories, and by extension flashbacks. How do you all see the tension between the need to escape the old dispensations, and the desire for return?
I thought the film’s visuality, especially in the agonizing final checkpoint sequence, works well to articulate the distinction between heaven and hell. It’s interesting to consider the implication of shooting in black and white when technicolor was available long before the ’70s. The claustrophobic darkness inside the water tank (and its inhuman heat) visually juxtaposes with the immense border control center, which is highlighted by the blinding sunlight. There’s an ironic undertone to this arrangement, of course—a bleakness accentuated by the sound of the three men’s desperate banging of the empty water tank and the humming of the air conditioning in the government building. For me, watching this scene was a more visceral experience than reading it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
CC: I think that the flashbacks are also extremely important vis-a-vis the continuous Nakba that has thus far affected three generations of Palestinians. The Nakba is not solely portrayed as a historical event, frozen in time; instead, its material implications continue to affect the people who are suffering in its aftermath, which also manifests the centrality of the Nakba as a lieu de memoire for Palestinians collectively. This is especially true in the case of Abu Quais, who is old enough to remember the time pre-Nakba; there is a clear juxtaposition of his memories before and after.
Interesting thoughts about the film’s visuality; I find the point about heaven and hell particularly interesting. If we take into account that Kuwait is portrayed as a paradise on earth—where one can make money and live a decent life—it is also an element of irony. The three of them managed to reach this land that is portrayed as paradisiacal, but they did not make it there alive. For me, it is also a criticism of the nature of borders themselves, especially if we consider the ideas surrounding Arab nationalism at the time of the film.
MR: Yes, I think there is definitely an implicit critique of borders, and I think the meaninglessness of such borders is really driven home by the final checkpoint scene; what holds up Abu Khaizuran—and ultimately kills the smuggled men—is the officials’ glib questioning about Khaizuran’s alleged affair with a dancer. It is infuriating that such officials, representatives of the border, should decide the fates of others. On the one hand, there are these superficial, man-made delineations; on the other, there is the profound connection that Abu Quais feels with his homeland, conveyed in the text’s opening lines when he lies against the ground to feel the earth’s “tired heartbeats, which trembled through the grains of sand and penetrated the cells of his body”. The land inhabits him—he is the land—and efforts to separate him from this land amount to a dissolution of the self.
Junyi, to your point about the death scene/its aftermath and its viscerality on screen, I agree that hearing the men’s banging on the water tank and actually seeing their dead bodies elicits a more physical response from the viewer. One thing I found interesting about this series of scenes in Kanafani’s text was that, upon Abu Khaizuran’s discovery, the men are no longer referred to by name; they are instead “the bodies” or “the corpses” (though Abu Khaizuran does refer to Marwan by name when he sees him in his mind’s eye, a kind of haunting). Given that we’ve grown so familiar with these men and the complexity of their lives, their deaths feel unbearably abrupt, their absence is starkly felt, and it is all the more unbearable to see them reduced to mere forms (“bodies”, “corpses”) and deprived of identity. I feel that this depersonalization effect, in this one instance, points to a broader depersonalization of the Palestinian people in much of popular discourse. I also want to note that, in the film, after Abu Khaizuran dumps the men on the roadside, we see Abu Quais’s outstretched hand frozen in rigor mortis. In a way, this is the characters’ defining gesture, and I felt it offered us a certain closure, or at least a kind of coda for this character.
Junyi Zhou (JZ): That’s really interesting, Mia, that the film to some extent echoes the text’s depersonalization of the men. We no longer see their faces after they’re dead, only their bodies against the surface of water tank, and—after Abul Khaizuran drives away with their belongings—their bodies strewn over each other on a pile of debris. But one thing the film does differently is that it literalizes the ending of the text. While the film ends on Abu Quais’s outstretched hand frozen in rigor mortis, the text closes with Abul Khaizuran’s cry: “Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?” By offering the audience exactly an audio-visualization of the three men’s experience inside the water tank, the film refuses to downplay their suffering and invites us, the spectators, to partake in their anguish as something fundamentally embodied.
What you said about flashbacks in the film, Christina, made me think about the role of time and how it is represented in both the text and the film. The text effects a clear demarcation between the past and present. Kanafani writes about Abu Quais’s reminiscences with indicators of time: “This, then, was the Shatt that Ustaz Selim had spoken of ten years before. Here he was lying thousands of miles and days away from his village and Ustaz Selim’s school.” Saleh’s film, however, breaks down the flow of time by abruptly inserting flashbacks to the point where the main plot, situated in the present, begins to feel like flashforwards. The disruption of time not only causes disorientation, both in terms of the characters’ perception and the audience’s, but also eliminates the distinction between the past and present altogether—the past becomes the present and the present, future. The memories of displacement and exile appear to be cyclical; there is no escape.
CC: Junyi, on your point about the flow of time, I think that its representation through a fragmented narrative brilliantly captures the very essence of the Nakba. Nur Masalha has written about the Nakba as both a memory and a reality, with additional layers of ethnic cleansing continually adding to the extant memory of 1948. There is a dialectic relationship between the present and the past, but at times, throughout the film, it is not clear which is what; this is particularly the case with Assad’s recollection of his first attempt to reach Kuwait. In the film, we catch Assad trying to cross the desert, only to realize that he was fooled and has been left alone. However, up until the middle of the film, it remains unclear whether the sequences tell the story of a first attempt or if they are a foreshadowing of his future.
Mia, a really interesting point about the land. The very opening of the film manifests that: “A man with no country will have no grave in the Earth, I forbid you to leave.” For Palestinians, the land is central to both the pre-Nakba past of living closely with the land, the present that represents the loss of that intimacy, and a future of returning to the lost homeland. It is the ancestral land that mobilizes Palestinians to join the struggle—as we see through the figure of Assad.
MR: Yes, I agree that the film handles the flow of time especially well; Christina, your mention of Nur Masalha prompted me to read his remarks on storytelling and “history from below”—a historical record developed through the testimonials of the people, namely the dispossessed. The storytelling in The Dupes and Men in the Sun is so effective, I think, precisely because it matches the ways in which a trauma-impacted memory can lurch back and forth, and because it illustrates how the Nakba can hardly be discussed in the past tense, given that its repercussions are continually felt. When Abu Khaizuran speaks of the endless humiliation of having lost his genitals in an explosion, it seemed that he is subtextually speaking to the broader experience of dispossession: “Ten year had passed since they took his manhood from him, and he had lived that humiliation day after day and hour after hour… And still he hadn’t got used to it, he hadn’t accepted it.” In this way, a pivotal past event is fused so firmly into the present that, as you mention, Christina, it becomes at once memory and reality.
JZ: Both of your comments make me consider Kanafani’s story in a different light precisely because of how Saleh’s film adaptation, committed to examining the disorientation of the dispossessed (through devices such as fragmentation), posits that memories—whether personal or collective, whether actively chosen to be remembered or continuing to emerge despite efforts at repression—constitute the essence of displacement. And the film deals powerfully with involuntary memory through jarring insertions of the characters’ past lives—such as when Abul Khaizuran recalls his impotence. In this way, like you mentioned, Christina and Mia, memory and reality converge, and this reality is very much grounded in the memories, relived in waves.
In his 1977 interview with Guy Hennebelle and Khemaïs Khayati, Saleh referred to The Dupes as a revelatory film because it “invites reflection.” “My duty as a filmmaker consists in furnishing the arms of critique, the intellectual means to understand what happens so that the spectators are not ‘had’ by what they’re told,” he said, “my method consists in trying to touch people, in trying to move them emotionally in order to get them to think.” As we watch the film, we’re swept into the specter of the sweltering water tank, the optimism for elsewhere, and the liminal space between the past, present, and future. Powerful feelings can be particularly mobilizing, and the film, through its unflinching portrayal of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, compensates for the largely cerebral process of reading Kanafani’s story. That being said, I think we need to assume both the interrogative and emotive perspectives to better approach the ongoing atrocities in Palestine. It’s a small way, but a way nonetheless, to enact change.
CC: Indeed, Saleh represents the idea of revolutionary cinema—revolutionary in terms of one’s attitude towards cinema and its broader purpose beyond being simple spectacle, in the way of Jean-Luc Godard. The film can act as a means to learn. Militant cinema can inspire, and such cultural practices can help build bridges and solidarity beyond borders and language barriers. Saleh in his film invites the spectator to learn from the oppressed/colonized subject and their experience, instead of projecting Orientalist ideas onto them. Along with oral history, this type of filmmaking provides a space for “subaltern” subjects to assert their voices, share their experiences, and shape the narrative. Cinema, just as everything else in life, is political; even supposedly apolitical films also do their part to shape narratives and foreground silences—muting, most of the time, the voices of the oppressed and the colonized.
MR: I agree that The Dupes’ revolutionary spirit has much in common with Godard’s later, more politically-engaged films, especially with regard to its fragmented narrative structure and use of montage. On the whole, however, I think Saleh more closely exemplifies the tenets of Third Cinema, a movement that stands as a departure from both European auteur-centric and commercial Hollywood films, and which aspires to achieve social change by depicting the struggles of the dispossessed and foregrounding themes of liberation and anticolonialism.
The film and text’s respective handling of this revolutionary theme is especially fascinating, and might be indicative of the director and author’s slightly differing stances. Men in the Sun culminates with Abu Khaizuran’s despairing, rhetorical questions to the now-deceased men: “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything? Why?” Kanafani, who was known to urge towards resistance above all else, could be suggesting that the men might have been saved had they ignored Khaizuran’s instructions and made noise—had they put up a fight. But Saleh, in choosing to include shots of the men pounding from within the tank, provides his own response to this “what-if.” Indeed, the men did put up a resistance, but to no avail. In this light, perhaps Kanafani’s is the more didactic narrative (one must resist or else perish), while Saleh’s is the more fatalist (resistance is in vain). Ultimately, though, I believe that Saleh’s intention isn’t to underscore the hopelessness of resistance, but to make a broader point about the onlooking world’s callousness with regard to Palestine. We hear the banging inside the tank, we are well-aware that the people within are dying, and yet we fail to intervene, effectively condemning them to death.
JZ: Right! I can definitely see the slightly differing visions of Kanafani and Saleh (the former being more “didactic” and the latter, more “fatalist”), but I also want to highlight another perspective regarding their respective artistic agendas. In Mohannad Ghawanmeh’s essay on The Dupes, he mentions that to Kanafani, the top priority for Palestinians—despite excruciating hardships such as poverty—is to restore control over their country; he thus condemns immigration as a way to actualize freedom and wealth. If we follow this line of thinking, Abul Khaizuran’s cry at the end of the text can perhaps be regarded as a reproach of sorts. While his closing remark criticizes the three men’s inaction at the border control, it also alludes to their abandonment of the collective imperative—namely, social resistance. In Saleh’s case, by showing us exactly what Kanafani opted to omit, he seems to suggest that we need to discover a completely new solution to achieve liberation and reclamation.
I’m fascinated by this dialectical relationship between Men in the Sun and The Dupes. More often than not it begets questions and not answers; but questions, I realize, are a necessity in trying times like these—an inescapable need, a possibility—and I’m so grateful for the conversation we shared and the questions asked over the past few weeks.
Christina Chatzitheodorou is a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, focusing on women’s participation in left-wing resistance movements during the Second World War. Originally from Greece, she speaks Greek, English, French, Italian, Spanish, a bit of Portuguese, and Turkish—and learning Arabic. Along with her PhD, she is currently working on a visual archive focusing on Greek solidarity to Palestine.
Mia Ruf is a copy editor for Asymptote and a dubbing script writer by trade. She lives in Queens, NY.
Junyi Zhou is a writer and an Assistant Editor (Visual) at Asymptote. She received her BA from Vassar College and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, concentrating on English and film studies. Her published work can be found in Mediapolis.
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