The Symbolic Conflation of Space and Time in Ghassan Kanafani’s Ma Tabaqqa La-Kum (All That’s Left to You)

No individual experience dramatized in a work of fiction is likely to measure up to accepted human standards if studied outside the specificities of space and time and the network of meanings emanating from that experience. In the novel, as a literary genre, this statement sounds plausible. However, the modern and contemporary Palestinian art of fiction presents quite a peculiar model when it comes to spatial and temporal issues shaping the life experience of the individuals involved. The elements of space and time, skillfully used as principal fictional referents in Ghassan KanafanVs ma Tabaqqa la-Kum (All That s Left to You) are a case in point when the individual experience of the protagonist becomes part and parcel of a vision in which the notions of geography, history, space and time symbolically conflate to nurse an abstract idea, a national identity project, which is likely to serve as a guide for future activities that transform that project into a geo-political reality. The struggle over geography as a discursively defined space is so crucial for the national project underlying the narrative to be in time, to stay in history or re-enter history as an existing material reality. This article explores the poetic logic of space and time and the impact of their symbolic conflation on the protagonist s consciousness that gradually takes shape in a world whose adversary constituents can only sustain conflict and provide no exit. The paper examines all this against a theoretical framework of the concepts of space and time deriving from modern and post-modern schools of thought and literary theories in the field