Three Palestinians Hiding in a Water Tank — Men in the Sun

Title: Men in the Sun (Rijal fi al-Shams) Author: Ghassan Kanafani Creation Date: 1962 Location: Lebanon (Beirut)

Summary

Three Palestinian refugees — Abu Qais, an old farmer; Assad, a young man; and Marwan, a teenager — each try separately to smuggle themselves from Iraq into Kuwait to find work. They converge on a fat, jovial Palestinian truck driver named Abul Khaizuran, who agrees to hide them in the empty water tank of his truck as he crosses the border. The plan is simple: they will endure the furnace-like heat of the tank for the few minutes it takes Abul Khaizuran to clear customs. But at the border post, the Iraqi officials delay Abul Khaizuran with small talk and jokes. The minutes stretch. When he finally reaches the Kuwaiti side and opens the tank, all three men are dead, cooked alive in the desert sun. He dumps their bodies on a rubbish heap and drives away. The novella ends with a question that reverberates through all subsequent Palestinian literature: "Why didn't you knock on the walls of the tank?"

Why This Book Matters

Men in the Sun is the most searing work of Palestinian fiction and one of the essential texts of modern Arabic literature. In fewer than eighty pages, Kanafani created an allegory for the Palestinian condition that is simultaneously a perfectly constructed realist narrative and a mythic parable of political failure. The three men — representing three generations of Palestinian dispossession — are killed not by their enemies but by their own silence, their trust in a compromised intermediary, and the indifference of surrounding Arab states (the border post, the small talk). The final question — "Why didn't you knock?" — became a rallying cry for Palestinian resistance literature: a demand for agency, voice, and refusal in the face of annihilation. Kanafani himself was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972, allegedly by the Mossad, at the age of thirty-six.

Historical Context

Kanafani wrote Men in the Sun in 1962, fourteen years after the Nakba (the 1948 displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel) and five years before the 1967 war that would further reshape the region. The novella reflects the desperate economic situation of Palestinian refugees in the 1950s and 1960s — stateless, scattered across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, dependent on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and driven to dangerous migrations in search of employment. Kuwait's oil boom drew tens of thousands of Palestinian workers. Kanafani was himself a refugee: born in Acre, his family fled to Lebanon in 1948. He became a leading figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and its chief spokesman, combining literary art with political activism.

Literary Significance

Men in the Sun achieves its devastating power through formal economy and structural precision. Each of the three refugees is introduced in a separate section that provides his backstory — each a variation on the theme of dispossession and emasculation — before they converge in the truck. The tank itself is the novella's central symbol: a sealed container in the desert that is simultaneously a womb, a coffin, and a political condition. Kanafani's prose is stripped bare, almost clinical in its restraint, which makes the horror of the ending all the more overwhelming. The final question, addressed to the dead, ruptures the fourth wall and transforms the novella from a story into an accusation. The work's formal compression — its ability to contain an entire political history within a single truck crossing — makes it one of the masterpieces of the novella form.

Research Notes

Men in the Sun was included to represent Palestinian resistance literature and Kanafani's central role in the development of modern Arabic fiction. Kilpatrick's translation is the standard English version. Kanafani's other works — particularly "Returning to Haifa" and "All That's Left to You" — are also important, but Men in the Sun remains his most concentrated and formally perfect achievement. Barbara Harlow's work on resistance literature provides valuable context for reading Kanafani within the broader tradition of anti-colonial writing.

The Reading

The sun is the first character. It is there before any of the men appear, pressing down on the Iraqi desert with the weight of something deliberate, something hostile. In Kanafani's opening pages, the heat is not weather -- it is a condition of existence, the element in which Palestinian refugees live and, as the novella will demonstrate with merciless precision, die.

Abu Qais

Abu Qais lies on the damp earth near the Shatt al-Arab waterway in Basra, pressing his chest to the ground, and he can feel the earth's heartbeat. He is an old man, a farmer, and the earth has always been his language. But it is not his earth. His earth is in Palestine -- olive groves near Haifa that he worked all his life until 1948, when everything was lost. Now he is a refugee in Iraq, and the earth beneath him belongs to someone else.

Abu Qais has been offered a way to Kuwait. A smuggler will take him across the border for the right price, and in Kuwait there is work -- real work, the kind that pays enough to send money home. His wife and children are waiting. His son needs shoes. The details are small and ordinary and crushing in their ordinariness: a man needs to earn money for his child's shoes, and to do so he must risk his life crossing a desert border illegally, because he has no passport, no country, no documents that any state will honour.

Kanafani gives us Abu Qais's memories in fragments: the smell of his wife's hair, the feel of the olive bark under his hands, the morning he woke to the sound of gunfire and knew that the life he had built was over. The old man carries Palestine not as an idea but as a physical sensation -- soil, roots, the particular quality of light in a grove at dawn. What has been taken from him is not abstract. It is sensory, bodily, irreplaceable.

Assad

Assad is young, strong, and has already failed once to cross the border. He was cheated by a smuggler who took his money and disappeared. Now he is trying again, and this time he is harder, more calculating. Kanafani shows us a man whose idealism has been replaced by a bitter practicality. Assad does not think about Palestine in the poetic terms that Abu Qais does. He thinks about money, about survival, about the humiliation of being a young man with no future.

There is a scene in which Assad encounters an older Palestinian man who, for a price, offers to arrange passage to Kuwait. The man's fat, comfortable body -- his ease in the world -- stands in silent accusation against Assad's desperation. The economy of refugee smuggling is, Kanafani makes clear, itself a form of exploitation: Palestinians profiting from the desperation of other Palestinians. The solidarity that should bind the displaced has been corroded by the same forces that displaced them.

Assad has a backstory that Kanafani reveals with characteristic economy. He had been involved with a man who promised to arrange papers for him in exchange for Assad marrying his daughter. The arrangement collapsed. Assad's masculinity -- his ability to act, to provide, to make decisions about his own life -- has been systematically undermined by his status as a refugee. He is not a man, the novella suggests; he is a category, a problem, a body to be processed or disposed of.

Marwan

Marwan is the youngest, a teenager, and his story is the most nakedly economic. His father abandoned the family for a new wife. His older brother, who had been working in Kuwait and sending money home, has stopped. Marwan's mother needs the money. It is as simple and as brutal as that: a boy must cross a desert because the adults in his life have failed him.

Kanafani draws Marwan with a few precise strokes: his youth, his uncertainty, his desperate attempt to appear older and more capable than he is. There is something almost unbearable about his presence in the novella -- the knowledge that this is a child being fed into a machinery of survival that has no interest in his childhood. When Marwan meets the other men and they begin to discuss the crossing, he says little. He watches. He is learning the lessons that Palestinian boys learn: that the world is not arranged for your benefit, that borders exist to keep you out, that your life has a price and it is not very high.

Abul Khaizuran

The driver is the key to everything. Abul Khaizuran is a Palestinian who has made a life for himself -- he drives a water truck for a rich Kuwaiti merchant, crossing the Iraq-Kuwait border regularly. He is jovial, competent, talkative. He knows the border guards by name. He offers to smuggle the three men in his empty water tank for a fee. The plan is practical: at each checkpoint, the men will climb into the tank, Abul Khaizuran will clear customs, and then he will let them out. The time inside the tank will be brief. The heat will be terrible but survivable.

Kanafani reveals Abul Khaizuran's secret gradually: the driver was emasculated -- literally castrated -- during the 1948 war. He lost his manhood to a landmine. This detail is not incidental. It is the novella's symbolic centre. Abul Khaizuran, the man in whom the three refugees place their trust, the man who holds their lives in his hands, is himself unmanned. The Palestinian condition, Kanafani suggests, is not merely dispossession but emasculation -- the systematic stripping of agency, potency, the ability to act in the world as a full human being.

And yet Abul Khaizuran is also the most alive of the four men, the most verbal, the most present. His joviality is a mask, but it is also a survival strategy. He has made accommodation with the world as it is. He has found a way to function, even to prosper, within the system. The question the novella poses is whether this accommodation is possible without a fatal cost.

The Crossing

The four men set out. The first checkpoint goes smoothly. The three passengers climb into the tank. The heat inside is staggering -- Kanafani describes it with a physicality that makes the reader flinch. The metal walls of the tank absorb the desert sun and radiate it inward. The air is thick, unbreathable. The men crouch in darkness, suffocating. Minutes pass. Then Abul Khaizuran opens the tank and they tumble out, gasping, drenched in sweat. They have survived.

The second crossing must be the same. They approach the Iraqi border post. The men climb into the tank again. Abul Khaizuran drives to the checkpoint, and here Kanafani's narrative tightens with the precision of a trap closing.

The border guards are in no hurry. It is hot. They are bored. One of them engages Abul Khaizuran in conversation -- small talk, jokes, the idle cruelty of men with power over other men's time. They ask about his employer. They make lewd jokes. They are not hostile; they are simply indifferent to urgency. They do not know that three men are slowly being cooked alive in the tank behind the cab.

Abul Khaizuran laughs at their jokes. He cannot rush them. He cannot explain. He plays his role -- the cheerful, cooperative driver -- because the alternative is to reveal the men in the tank, which means prison or worse. The minutes stretch. The conversation loops and circles. Kanafani renders the small talk with excruciating precision, every pleasantry a knife turning in the reader's gut, because we know what is happening in the tank and they do not.

Finally, the guards wave him through. He drives to the Kuwaiti side. The same routine: small talk, papers, jokes. More minutes. The sun is at its zenith. The tank is a furnace.

When Abul Khaizuran finally reaches a safe spot and opens the tank, all three men are dead. Abu Qais, Assad, Marwan -- dead. Cooked alive in the desert sun while a man joked with border guards a few metres away. Kanafani describes the bodies with clinical restraint: the twisted postures, the open mouths, the stench. There is no drama in the discovery. There is only the fact of it.

Abul Khaizuran stands beside the open tank in the blazing sun, and what he feels is not grief but panic. He must dispose of the bodies. He cannot be found with three dead men in his truck. He drives to a rubbish dump on the outskirts of Kuwait City and drags them out, one by one, and leaves them on a pile of refuse. Three Palestinian men -- a farmer, a young man, a boy -- discarded on a garbage heap. The possessions in their pockets -- money, a watch, small personal items -- scatter on the ground, and Abul Khaizuran, in a moment of terrible human weakness, gathers them up.

And then the question. The final line of the novella, the line that would echo through all subsequent Palestinian literature, the line that became a rallying cry and a self-accusation and an unanswerable demand:

"Why didn't you knock on the walls of the tank?"

Why didn't they cry out? Why didn't they pound on the metal? Why didn't they make noise, demand attention, refuse to die in silence? The question is addressed to the dead, who cannot answer. It is addressed to all Palestinians. It is addressed to the Arab nations who watched the Palestinian catastrophe unfold and did nothing. It is addressed to the reader.

The silence in the tank is the novella's deepest subject. Three men agreed to be sealed in a container, to trust their survival to someone else's schedule, to make themselves invisible in order to cross a border that should not exist for them. They chose silence because silence was the condition of their survival -- and silence killed them. The Palestinian condition, Kanafani argues, is not merely exile or poverty or statelessness. It is the acceptance of containment, the agreement to be hidden, the fatal willingness to entrust your life to a system that does not value it.

The novella is barely eighty pages. It contains no wasted word, no extraneous scene, no character who does not carry the weight of an entire political reality. Kanafani wrote it in Beirut in 1962, fourteen years after the Nakba, five years before the next catastrophe. He was twenty-six years old. He was already a leading figure in the Palestinian resistance, writing and organising with the fierce energy of a man who understood that literature was not separate from politics but one of its essential instruments.

Ten years later, on July 8, 1972, Kanafani started his car in Beirut and it exploded. He was thirty-six. His seventeen-year-old niece, Lamees, was with him. Both were killed. The assassination was attributed to the Mossad.

The question he left behind -- why didn't you knock? -- has never been answered. It has never stopped being asked.

This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →

The Hilary Kilpatrick translation, published as Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories (Lynne Rienner Publishers), is the recommended English text. Both the current edition and the 1984 edition are worth seeking out.

Trans. Hilary Kilpatrick. The standard English translation, collecting Men in the Sun alongside other essential Palestinian stories by Kanafani.