When Man is a Cause: The Undecidability of Belonging in Kanafani's Returning to Haifa

Abstract

The focus of my article is on the undecidability of Dov's/ Khaldun's identity throughout his conversations with Said X., his 'biological father', along with some significant selective semiotic referents in Ghassan Kanafani's novella Returning to Haifa. These aspects are highlighted to elicit/ trace Kanafani's implied symbolism of Palestine, the land, and the undecidability/ conflict of its belonging to critique (healthy self-criticism) the submission of the Palestinians as being guilty of ceding with their land then keep crying to restore it. The novella has been previously tackled from a variety of perspectives: parody, intertextuality, characterization, among others. However, the key parts of the novella that show the conflict between father/ son, self/other, right/loss are the conversations between Dov/Khaldun and Said X. To achieve the article's goal, Derrida's conception of undecidability is employed to indicate the inability to take a decision due to factors beyond the focal character's, Dov/Khaldun, means. This state of freeplay makes it impossible to settle to any side/identity. In Dov's/ Khaldun's case, it is the indeterminate area between the biological Palestinian identity and the acquired Jewish identity. Given that, this view of undecidability is supplemented by other related philosophical aspects such as identity of the 'I', the conception of belonging, and the symbolic reflection between the Dov/ Khaldun: the Jew/ the Palestinian: the Colonizer/ the Colonized (both Man and the land). The analyses of the novella reveal that a state of bewilderment and vortex of undecidable identity opens once Dov Iphrat Koshin, the Israeli soldier, knows he was born Khaldun Said, the Palestinian citizen. Dov's/ Khaldun's words to Said X. show a defensive attitude whereas his semiotic behavior reflects the pain of the truth, and that since that moment, he will not be able to settle; his identity is undecidable between Israel/ Palestine, Zionists/ Palestinians, Colonizer/ Colonized, Judaism/ Islam... Kanafani provides a criticism of the Self, here. As the Palestinians of 1948 escaped from their homes forsaking their land to the foreign occupation and then they (with the Arabs and Muslims) did nothing to restore it but waiting and weeping. Kanafani's self criticism is healthy as being the first step towards profoundly diagnosing the problem, the loss of Palestine, so as to find practical final solutions for the problem.