The Body as a Site for Becoming in Ghassan Kanafani’s All That’s Left to You

Abstract

Ghassan Kanafani’s novella All That’s Left To You (1966) attempts to alter the perception of the refugee camp from a prison to a bridge, opening literary possibilities for the politicised subject to move from death zones into becoming as characters try to delimit the regulated bodies by crossing the borders of the refugee camp.  The language of Kanafani’s texts is reflexive of the state of territorial siege.  The narrative in All That’s Left To You leads to a point of dispersal towards the end of the novella, indicating a new promise of what Giorgio Agamben calls the ‘coming community’ (1993).

Keywords: refugee camp, body, territory, Palestine, Kanafani.