Form

Edward Said reminds us that form conveys content and in so doing prompts reflection on modern day reading habits. A culture of skimming--indeed, a culture which tends to gut sources simply for simple "facts"--overlooks the importance of the media form itself in conveying the message.

"The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at [...] In Kanafani's Men in the Sun much of the action takes place on the dusty streets of an Iraqi town where three Palestinian men must petition, plead, and bargain with "specialists" to smuggle them across the border into Kuwait. Impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinians need to carve a path for themselves in existence, which for them is by no means a given or stable reality. Like the history of the lands they left, their lives seem interrupted just before they could come to maturity and satisfaction; thus each man leaves behind family and responsibilities, to whose exigencies he must answer--unsuccessfully--here in the present. Kanafani's very sentences express instability and fluctuation--the present tense is subject to echoes from the past, verbs of sight give way to verbs of sound or smell, and one sense interweaves with another--in an effort to defend against the harsh present and to protect some particularly cherished framgent of the past. Thus, the precarious actuality of these men in the sun reproduces the precarious status of the writer, each echoing the other.
     Our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatim, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations."

---Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986)