Review Session Notes

Midterm Review Sheet
ID’s- 7 options, only have to do 5
Essays- 3 prompts, only have to do 2

**i've underlined all of the i.d.'s... we were unable to get to all of them during the session so make sure you go over them. good luck everyone, hope this helps!

Allegory
-When a structure, represents the whole. (Social reality)
-Operates on two levels, a literal level and a symbolic level.
-Person cannot be an allegory, it has to be a literary structure.
-Bakha “Untouchable,” day to day activities, incorporate western elements even when he doesn’t try.
-Toloki “Ways of Dying,” representing death through his appearance and actions but he is living.
Caste system
-A system of dividing society, based on occupation and socio-economic status. No room for upward social mobility.
-Example: Bakha’s father was a street sweeper and when he passed, Bakha was expected to
-Untouchable- Indian society in the 19th society
Love
-Complications,
-“Love, do not ask”à addresses issue of love… at first he has a deep love for an individual, but then he realizes the issues going on in the world. Transition into a specific kind of love, all encompassing.
-Love as an allegory..
-Love as a ritual… different forms of love,
Grotesque
-A chemical element of distortion…compared to the figure of Toloki himself (costume, appearance, “dead eyes”)
-Also, events in the book… the church and the practices, cleanse themselves with herbs.
-“Chronicle of a death foretold” autopsy scene…
-“Season of Migration to the North” death of European women, and murder of wad rayyes and suicide.
-Raising the level of interpretation in the novel, of violence and objection… disturbing elements… makes readers confront underlying violence in colonization and decolonization or even apartheid… violence involved in a system like apartheid.
Mourning
-Toloki in Ways of Dying… professional mourner. He’s selling his feelings to people. Goes to funerals and moans…
-Mourner and nurse.. compare/contrast how they are similar and different.
-Nurse has always been there, tells how the death actually happened…narrative count of the death.
-TOloki makes sounds, groans. Attends funerals of poor people, others think he is crazy.
-A way of forming or reforming a community.
-Mourning?
-Displacement of people, loss of homeland,
Culture
-Where is culture emphasized?
-“Chronicle of a Death Foretold” – Arabic and Latin cultures… how they affect relations between groups.
-Try to speak on confrontations of culture..
Revenge
-Chronicle of a Death Foretold- twins kill Santiago Nasar, revenge will give you something back. And if you don’t retaliate you are less of a man. Hyper masculinity… if he doesn’t fulfill expectations of society than he is less of a man.
-Season of Migration to the North… Mustafa wanting to dominate over English women… deaths.
-Untouchable… Bakha wanting to kill the priest for what he did to her sister.
Violence
Independence
Refugee
Guilt responsibility
Magical realism
-“Ways of Dying” sends you on a path. Everything is intricate and well thought it, it makes you think it’s real but it’s not really.
-Ex: Toloki and Noria putting pictures up, sitting on a queen size bed…but not really happening.
-Makes you really see how the situations are absurd, such as apartheid. The ways in which the novel deals with depicting these situations.
-Chronicle of a Death Foretold- the letters… obsession with Bayardo, dreams he’s with her. Then he comes back.
Community
Polyphonic novel
-Chronicle of Death Foretold – written through many different voices. Almost as if it is a live interview.
-Ways of Dying – voices of Mustafa and the narrator. Also, Toloki and Norias voices, but the narrator is the community.
Historical memory
-History is subject to the opinions of those recording it. No official account, no dispute.
Pan-arabic nationalism
-“Men in the Sun”—the belief that the whole Arab world should be unified as one country.
-What political obstacles does that belief encounter? The border between Iraq and Kuwait, but also the real geopolitical effects of the line brought upon.
-England and France drew those lines, Sikes-Picot agreement.. secretly drew up a boundary.
Displacement
Resistance literature
-Men in the Sun- the culture, how is it working in the colonial/post-colonial literature? Is resistance literature actually resisting?
-The fact that it is written in the form of a novel…
·Stateless

Men in The Sun

In the novel we see the theme of hope and hopelessness. Throughout the journey we see the struggle of the characters to achieve their goal of reaching Kuwait in order to find jobs to provide for their families. Abu Quais in the beginning of the novel shows a sign of hopelessness when he is suggested the idea of going to Kuwait for financial stability. He says that the journey will kill him and this foreshadows his death. His death was fate from the moment he says he will not make it to the journey and it is in this journey that he dies. We can also see the internal struggle that Abul the person that is smuggling them across the border when they die I mentioned this in class located in pg. 74. It starts off with "As he returned to the lorry" This is an internal conflict that Abul was having after having dumped the bodies and taken their valuables. He was reflecting on what he had just done to the three men he promised safety to. He entered a stage of shock in which he tries to say something but couldn’t. He wants to shout and release the stress of what happened during the day, he could not even climb into his car because not only was he exhausted of driving in the hot sun that was suffocating, but he was also exhausted because he lost the men he was transporting. We see him trying to expel the thoughts of these men he had just bonded with, but the emotion overpowers him. In the end he gives into his emotion and can no longer take it and he ends up questioning himself. For Abul knowing that he was suppose to help them and he couldn’t is always going to gnaw inside of him. Even though he tried his best the guilt is always going to be within him.

Men in the Sun

Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani, is a novella that tells us the story of three refugees trying to reach Kuwait for a chance at a better life. At the end of the novel, the three refugees die inside the water tank they were being smuggled in by Abu Khaizuran. Although this novella directly shows us the struggles Palestinian refugees had to endure, it also paints a larger picture of refugees and immigrants worldwide. Like Marwan, Abu Qais, and Assad, many people around the world attempt to cross borders and are either cheated by the smugglers or die while attempting to cross. The deaths of the three refugees is also very silent, no one heard their suffering, which is how many people die when crossing the border.

Men In the Sun

While reading "Men In the Sun," I was intrigued by the story "If you were a horse..." The story is about a young boy who's father constantly says to him, "if you were a horse I would put a bullet through your brain." As a result the boy grew up thinking that his father had hated him, until one day he began to question where his father got this saying and why he always said it to him. As the story unfolds, we see the irony and the parallels in the story with the horse and the son. They are essentially the same character, in that both carried the mark of their victims blood, a birth mark like feature, meaning that they were destined to kill their victim. For the horse it was Abu Muhammad's mom, and for Abu Muhammad it was his father. Which explains why his father was always so afraid of him. This story caught my attention because it represents the idiocy that many individuals live in, afraid to make another move because they do not know where their lives may lead. Also, this reoccurring theme of violence and destiny, as the entire story ends in death.

Men in the Sun

I think two important themes in the novel Men in the Sun is the idea of fate and the act of being hopeless or helpless. The three refugees in the story are being held down by the life they were born into and long to break free to the prospering land of Kuwait. However, their journey ends with their tragic deaths on the path of their escape, bringing into question fate. Were these refugees meant to break free of the life given to them? Is that why they joined the many unsuccessful attempts at trying to make it across the Iraq/Kuwait border? Due to the fact that this story ends tragically, it could be possible that even today it could be used as a deterrent to keep people from attempting to move up in the social order and disrupting the "predestined" heirarchy of many nations. Moving back to the idea that these refugees are helpless, we can see this proven by the fact that they needed to seek help from a higher figure, or smuggler to help them reach their goal, they could not do it by themselves. Also, they are hopeless and poor in their current lives, so the two choices presented to them leave them with the only option of being helpless, which probably played a big role in their decision to try and have control of their life in this new prosperous land.

Men in the Sun

Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun is novel with significant symbolism about themes concerning displacement, opportunity, and freedom. Kanafani writes the novel from the perspective of three Palestinian men who attempt to escape the hardships of Palestine after World War I. The three men trust to hire a cheap smuggler named Abul in his task to Kuwait. Unfortunately, the men's dream of new opportunities is short lived as they die on the road because of the excrutiating heat that suffocates them.
I think that on of the most important scene in the novel is when the men choose not to knock to signal Abul that they are suffocating when he is stopped and talking to a guard. The men knew that if they had knocked, it would caused a bigger stir for the country of Palestine because human smuggling would be a lot more difficult. By remaining quiet the men made it possible for others to achieve their dream of reaching Kuwait and ending their struggles in Palestine. This scene is also significant because it demonstrated their trust on Abul even when they were in a deadly state. Like the other novels we've read in class, this book reveals the voice of the unheard as many times refugees like the three Men in the Sun don't make it to tell their stories and struggles they encounter to attain their long lived dream of freedom.