Men in the Sun_Blog 5
Men in the Sun
Bassim Oshiba
Blog 6
Going into today’s class, the students were much prepared with this week’s reading, Men in the Sun. I guess the fear of being kicked out of a college class hit a spark as everyone was ready to present their part of the story. There was much more relaxed feel in class this week; I thought it was due to the lack of pages in the book by Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun. We began by getting a quick feel for the book and immediately I saw the uneasy reaction shown by the class overall. Before I began reading the book, I was drawn initially to the topic of an adventure through the dessert, almost like Disney’s Aladdin. As I began to read the book I began to wonder when the other characters of the story would appear other than Abu Qais. Kanafani initially focuses the story on one character making it his use of flashbacks easy to follow within the first few chapters. As a common opinion of the class I began to lose track of the story once Kanafani introduces Asaad and Marwan, the two other travelers. In all I thought that Kanafani use of flashbacks was overdone and that it didn’t allow the reader to comprehend each part of the story as well as it needed to be.
I felt that each traveler had his own destiny or goal in travelling on this journey. Abu Qais, is portrayed as the wise one, the one who has overcome personal goals and now only has dreams of providing the best possible like for his wife and son. Assad is shown to be the muscle of time; he is in his primal age, who has hopes of dreaming big and his on this journey to travel and find a wife. Then we have Marwan, the juvenile who escaped from home. Marwan, the 16 year old country man, intrigues me the most due to his dialect with the other characters. He resembles every youngest boy in the planet who is trying to strive to be like his older brother, however is hindered by the confinement of the overprotective father. The description and imagery created by Kanafani was excellent in a sense that it made each character relatable and believable, however it is in the plot and describing the journey itself that makes this book very hard to read and follow. Thus I wish that Kanafani would have just began the story from the beginning without switching back and forth between the past and the present.
The journey in all turned out to lack the majestic ending of finding ones hopes and dreams come true, rather all it contained was pointless hopes that ended in a water tank. Kanafani’s ended the journey by having all three hopeful journey men suffocate to their death is not exactly the kind of ending the title “Men in the Sun” portrays. It is common human behavior to think that with hard work and effort one’s dreams will eventually be reality, instead Kanafani tumbles each dream by having the pessimist of the story take the last laugh. Maybe Kanafani was basing this short story on real like situations and tries to inform the wolrd about the horrifying situations that affect all kinds of people in the Middle East. However, I wonder what about the readers who are in the horrific situations, does this book provide hope for the future or does it promote depth in despair.
Though this novel was hard to read and follow, I think it is because it was translated from Arabic. Arabic a more rhythmic and dynamic language doesn’t exactly evolve and move that same way in English as Kanafani meant it to be. As one who’s studied in the Arabic language, I can first hand tell you that many of the dialect and expressions that are commonly used can very much change when translated to any other language. Many of the expressions refer to personal family, where in English most expressions that refer to direct family are usually an insult.
This ending empowers us, the reader in imagining the situation within our close homes. one of the guys in class mentioned that as residence of the great state of Texas, we can imagine long trips that families have taken to migrate from one area to another, unlike cities in the north, where long trips may involve a 2 hour drive down to grandma’s house. I completely agree with that opinion in that on many trips on the road along the Texas plain, I notice a plethora of different license plates from all over the united states. Though is not way close to the type of trip that the 3 travelers were on, we can at least picture the pain of being in one car for five to six hours and multiply the agony by a million. This leads to the question, what would I do if the conditions in my community have become unbearable not in terms of nature, but the society’s hierarchy are completely unfair? I’ve concluded that I would have to leave as the travelers did. This shows that these men were not acting on pure instinct; it was literally their last option. However, living in the US, travelling across the great lakes or the Rocky Mountains cannot be as grueling as travelling in the lifeless dessert for weeks at a time. I actually think traveling across the United States might actually be relaxing and it would allow many people to re discover a new heart beat to share with Mother Nature.
Ironically, all this talk about migration to a better future led to the conversation of immigrants in the United States. The issue on how Mexicans cross the border to send money back to their family proved that many people simply come to the US just to make more money, and not because it is a “better life”. The movie, “A day without a Mexican” was brought up, and it showed the society may have rules about immigrants and how people can become citizens, but the truth is: people need each other, as long as they are safe and peaceful people who don’t cause terror. Law is only good as it is being followed, most people follow the law as long as it keeps things going smoothly and keeps everybody happy, however the second panic strikes one’s tummy, acts like the patriot act are created that invade peoples personal privacy. Very little people travel and migrate to another city or community simply to disrupt its equilibrium. Hence I believe that tought people must earn their citizenship, they mustn’t feel that they are already proven guilty of not being one in the first place. In the distant future, I can see a country that welcomed all people with no question to what their purpose in the territory is, this way people begin to see each other’s similarities rather than their differences. Turmoil over land will definably vanish. More brains and hands come together in the fight to cure diseases instead of having the common patenting of every little discovery that slows down the advancing of medicine and technology. This will lead to the tacky quote if “Word Peace”.
