Collective Victimisation: A Study of Resistance for a Humanist Future in Ghassan Kanafani’s All That’s Left to You: A Novella and Other Short Stories and Nadine Gordimer’s Jump and Other Stories

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Arab Open University

Abstract

This paper is an examination of the collective state of literature in Kanafani’s and Gordimer’s selected short stories. Both writers bear witness to the complete erasure or cleansing of peoples’ history and place which is represented in the two collections of short stories in Kanafani’s All That's Left to You: A Novella and Other Stories and Gordimer’s Jump and Other Stories. Collectively witnessing to the colonial injustices and tragedies of a people affects the sense of identity and resistance. Their witnessing to a colonial and psychological crime outlines a time and place to listen to the stories of the silenced and victimised. Kanafani and Gordimer use short stories as an arena of oppositional dispute to tell the stories of resistance beyond victimisation. The Palestinian Nakba and black South African apartheid are among the greatest injustices of modern colonial history and are thoroughly connected and have both occurred in 1948. Although the Palestinian and South African causes and conditions differ, the colonised experiences of the Palestinians and black South Africans are parallel and the roots of discrimination are similar. Both narratives mirror the conditions of the survival and continuation of the victimised Palestinian and black South African households.

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