The son of the Palestinian catastrophe who wrote love letters to Ghada | culture

Ghassan’s father was a lawyer in Palestine. After his displacement, he did not want to become a worker with his hands, so Ghassan and his brothers were forced to look for work. He worked in a printing press and continued intermittent studies in schools.

He studied Arabic literature at the University of Damascus for 3 years, but was dismissed due to his political activity within the Arab Nationalists Movement and then in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Ghassan Kanafani – the son of Acre – had met the leading doctor in the Arab Nationalist Movement, George Habash, when he was 15 years old. He moved from newspaper to newspaper and from country to country, and his literary pen remained patriotic without slogans.

The Palestinian writer sought to understand everyone around him, even the usurping occupier of his homeland. In the novel “Returning to Haifa,” the hero of the novel was a child whose father and mother were Arab. His parents left him in the midst of immigration and panic, so he was raised by a Jewish family and wore an Israeli military uniform.

When Ghassan turned 36 years old, Israel blew up his car and he was martyred, along with his niece.

About 20 years after Ghassan’s death, writer Ghada Al-Samman published the love letters she received from him, sparking a literary whirlwind that occupied the press at the time.

Ghassan wrote to Ghada saying:
You don’t know that I’m a man who doesn’t forget

I know better than you about the hell that surrounds my life from every side

And the paradise that I cannot hate, and the fire that burns in my veins

And by the rock that I was destined to drag, and it drags me to where no one knows

I know from you that it is my life and that it is leaking through my fingers

And that your love is worth a person to live for.

In another letter, Ghassan complained that Ghada writes to so-and-so and does not write to him.