A letter from Ghassan Kanafani to Ghada al-Samman

By Eva A. Koronios

Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani (1936-1972) was a Palestinian author, journalist, and political leader. He is widely regarded in the Palestinian and Arab popular imaginations as one of the most renowned and influential figures of the modern age. His works include eighteen published novels such as Men in the Sun (1962) and Return to Haifa (1970); a number of prolific short story collections such as The Land of Sad Oranges (1962); hundreds of journal articles spanning a variety of publications; and these love letters, written in a state of desperate longing for the beautiful Ghada al-Samman. Kanafani’s oeuvre is rooted in the depth and richness of Palestinian culture, and serves as an enduring source of inspiration for generations past and present not only through- out the events of his life, but also in the decades that have since followed his martyrdom1. In 1972, Kanafani and his niece Lamees were assassinated in Beirut by a car bomb that had been planted by the Mossad, who targeted Kanafani in retaliation for his politi- cal activity and lifelong outspokenness for Palestinian liberation. Most notably, Kanafani was a member of the Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary socialist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)2.

Kanafani was born in Akka, Historic Palestine3, and lived the first twelve years of his life in Yafa until the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) of 1948 forced him and his family to flee their ancestral homeland and take refuge in Beirut, after which they moved to Syria. Kanafani lived and studied in Damascus before moving to Kuwait and returning to Beirut once more, where he lived the last twelve years of his life. Today, Kanafani’s works have been translated into twenty languages and continue to enjoy wide afterlives in translation, cultural imagination, and collective memory the world over.

Ghada al-Samman (1942-) is a Syrian novelist, poet, and journalist born to a prominent and conservative Damascene family – in fact, the famed poet Nizar Qabbani, one of her foremost literary influences, is a relative of hers. Upon completing her higher education, al-Samman chose Beirut as her place of permanent residence and worked as a journalist at multiple Lebanese publications throughout the 1960s, a time during which she also published her first short story collections and novels and simultaneously worked and traveled throughout Europe. First living in self-imposed exile in Lebanon to avoid a prison sentence from the Syrian government for allegedly leaving Syria without having obtained the proper permission from the authorities4, since the 1980s al-Samman and her husband have continued to live in exile in France5. Her short story collection The Square Moon (1999) puts into words some of this experience’s effects on her psyche.

Other highly-regarded titles from among al-Samman’s more than forty complete works include the short story collection No Sea in Beirut (1985) and the war novel Beirut Nightmares (1976). Her work is irrefutably influenced by the ideologies of pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism; furthermore, al-Samman remains sharply critical of the Zionist project as well as the processes of settler colonialism and imperialism with which Zionism goes hand-in-hand. Still yet al-Samman’s work also centers around Lebanon and consequent- ly reflects her many years spent in Beirut, holding a mirror up to expose the ills of Lebanese society in class-based novels such as Beirut ’75. Following the Naksa6 of 1967, al-Samman was deeply affected by the Arab world’s military and sociopolitical defeat, penning “I Carry My Shame to London” (أحمل عاري إلى لندن). After- ward, she refrained from publishing novels for six years7.

In 1992, al-Samman’s publication of the letters Kanafani wrote her throughout the duration of their love affair caused shockwaves in the literary and cultural circles in which she and Kanafani moved. Many were angry with al-Samman’s decision, locating her motives as born of a desire to ruin Kanafani’s legacy posthumously. Al-Samman, however, defends her decision to publish in her own brief introduction to the collection: rather than conceiving of them as hers and hers alone, al-Samman believes Kanafani’s letters to be collective property, as in her view they constitute a vital component of Arab literary history8. Today, the love letters circulate widely on social media in Palestine, the Arab world, and beyond9.

Kanafani’s identity as a writer is fundamentally inseparable from his identity as a Palestinian, and knowing this before beginning the process of translating imbued me with an accompanying
implicit knowledge that guided my hand as it passed over Kanafani’s eloquent prose: the political will leak into and inform every aspect of my translation, in both its act and process and in its final result. With this in mind, I chose to lean into the sentiment as much as possible, as my decision to translate these texts is itself intended as an act of solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Since October 2023, the ongoing dehumanization of Palestinian men over the past seven decades has reached a fever pitch; in celebrating Ghassan Kanafani’s love for Ghada al-Samman, we might begin to overwrite prevailing narratives of colonial violence with alternatives of revolutionary joy, revolutionary love.

Kanafani’s love for al-Samman is almost philosophical in its gravity, and it is always tortured. Although singling out passages I found rewarding to work on represents, at least for me, a foray into a somewhat dangerous game (for I would like to dwell at length upon them all), I will close out my commentary with this: that it is when Kanafani openly and mournfully laments over what might happen to him if he were to lose al-Samman, followed by a masterful reinvocation of his own powerful imagery to conclude his letter to his love only a few lines later, that we as readers – cast in the role of silent witnesses to his effusive proclamations – might feel ourselves called, from within and without, to develop a proper understanding of just how deeply and immutably the two-sided coin of love and struggle remains intertwined in the Palestinian body as a site of radical resistance:

‘‘And I love you so much, oh Ghada, and if I were to lose you so much of me would be destroyed; I know that the dust of the passing days would eventually settle around the wound, but I also know equally well that the wound will be like those of my body: every time the wind blows on them, they catch aflame.

[...] Though this time I will depart knowing that I love you, and I will keep bleeding every time the wind blows upon the precious things that we have built together...’’

In solidarity,
Evangelia A. Koronios

#1 // “An undated letter – I don’t remember the date! Perhaps it is the first letter he wrote to me”10

Ghada,

I know that many have written to you, and I know too that the writ- ten word often conceals the truth of things – especially if it is lived, and felt, and bled onto the rich, rare tableau that we have lived through over the past two weeks... And despite that, when I took up this paper to write, I knew that there is only one thing that I am able to say while trusting in its veracity and its depth and its solidi- ty, and perhaps its cohesiveness that seems to me now as though it were something inevitable, and will continue to remain so, like the fates that created us: I love you.

I feel this love deeply now, more deeply than ever before, and only a moment ago I went through the cruelest thing of all that a man like me can go through, and all of my miseries appeared to me as nothing but a false passage for this misery, that I tasted in a mo- ment like the glint of a knife’s blade as it cuts through blind flesh. I feel this love now, this word that they have sullied, as you told me, and I felt I must expend everything in the power of man so as to not sully it in turn.

I love you: I feel it now and the pain that you despise – no less and no more than I myself abhor it – gnaws at my bones and creeps through my joints like the march of death. I feel it now as the sun rises behind the barren hill opposite the blinds that tear asunder the skyline of your balcony; tear it into long-extended fragments... I feel it as I remember that I also did not sleep last night, and I am surprised to find that I, as I await the sunrise on the balcony of my home; I, who once resisted tears and scolded them as I was being whipped – am crying in agony. With a bitterness I never knew until the days of true hunger, with the saltiness of all the seas, and with the homesickness of all the dead unable to do anything... and I wonder: is it sobbing, that which I hear coming from within myself? Or is it the crack of the whips as they fall?

No. You know I am a man that does not forget, and I know more intimately than you about the inferno that surrounds my life from every possible angle, and the heaven I cannot bring myself to hate, and the fire that ignites in my veins, and the boulder that fate destined me to drag and that drags me toward where no one knows... and I know more intimately than you, too, about my own life that is slipping through my fingers, and I know that your love deserves for someone to live for it, and that your love is an island that an exile, cast adrift in the vast waves of the ocean, cannot pass by without... And despite that, I also know more intimately than you that I love you to an extent that I can disappear into, in the way that you want, if you thought that this absence would make you happier, and that it might change something of the truth of things.

Is this what I wished to say to you when taking up paper and pen? I don’t know... but believe me, oh Ghada, believe that I have been thoroughly tortured throughout the past few days, a great torture I doubt anyone can bear. I was being whipped from within and with- out with no hint of mercy, and the entirety of my life seemed to me worthless and hurried without justification for such haste, [and that Allah put me, by chance, in the wrong place, because he failed at inflicting His long, excruciating, unjust torture upon this body of mine whose inhuman capacity for obstinacy I despise, a body that is tortuous and dying...]

Our story is truly one that cannot be written, and I would despise myself if I were one day to try. The past month has been like a whirlwind that cannot be understood, like rain, like fire, like tilled soil that I worship to the brink of madness, and one night I was proud of you to the point of blaming myself when I said to myself that you are my shield in the face of man, and objects, and my weakness. And I knew, from deep within myself, that I do not de- serve you – not because I cannot give you my very eyes, my sight; but because I will not be able to keep you forever.

And it is only this that has been torturing me... that I know you as an incredible woman, whose mind cannot be believed, and that you are capable of understanding that which I intend to say to you: no, oh Ghada, it was not jealousy of others... I had felt you greater than all of them in a manner that cannot be measured, and I was not afraid of them taking from you anything even as small as the tips of your fingernails. No, oh Ghada... it was neither arrogance, nor comparison, nor falseness, that sole thing I have not ever been able to master; and if I were to master it, then I would not be where I am now, at the bottom of the world... no, oh Ghada, it was nothing except for that depressing feeling that would not leave me, like a fly that I crush against my chest; the feeling that, inevitably, you will one day say what you said tonight.

Truly the sunrise amazes me, despite the shutters that transform its light into neat, thin slices, reminding me of the thousand barri- ers that make of the future – before me – only fragments...

And I feel a sense of unparalleled serenity like the serenity of the end, and yet... I want to stay with you. I do not want for your eyes, that have given to me what everything I have been able to wrest from this world has been unable to give me, to be absent from me. Put simply, it is because I love you. And I love you so much, oh Ghada, and if I were to lose you so much of me would be destroyed; I know that the dust of the passing days would eventu- ally settle around the wound, but I also know equally well that the wound will be like those of my body: every time the wind blows on them, they catch aflame.

I do not want anything from you – and when you speak about the allotment of victories, it occurs to me all of a sudden that all the world’s victories were meted out from above the corpses of men that died in their path.

I do not want anything from you, and I do not want – with the same conviction – to ever, ever lose you.

For the distance that you will travel will not serve to obscure you from me; we have indeed built many things together that cannot, as of yet, be erased by distance, nor can alienation or enmity destroy them – because they were built on the basis of a trust that cannot be shaken.

And I do not want to lose “the people” that do not deserve to be the fuel for this horrifying, appalling collision with the truths that we are living...

But, if this is what you want, then tell me this: that I must be the one to disappear. You stay here, for I am the one that has become used to carrying my little bag as I depart...

Though this time I will depart knowing that I love you, and I will keep bleeding every time the wind blows upon the previous things that we have built together...

Ghassan