ABSTRACT
The early 1960s was a period of deepening political tensions in the region, presaging the Six-Day War of 1967. At the same time, it was a period in which the Arabic novel began to take an experimental turn under the influence of such Western trends as existentialism and the "theatre of the absurd." Ghassan Kanafiini's work exemplifies the confluence of these tendencies. A spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the editor of its weekly, AI-Hadar, Kanafiini fled Palestine with his family in 1948, finally settling in Damascus. Later he moved to Kuwait, and then to Beirut. He was killed in the explosion of his booby-trapped car in 1972, thought to be the work of Israeli agents. What makes Kanafani's work remarkable, given his position as a lifelong Palestinian refugee and activist, is that, unlike most politically committed writers of the time, he refused to resort to polemicism or to impose an ideological scheme on his fiction except in a general sense. Instead, he reworked his overtly political themes to give them a more profound, universal meaning.
