“Your father shouted in her face, the rancor trembling in his voice, and she fell silent”
This quote is an ambiguous quote, yet it conveys a characteristic of inequality and so does the context of the story through the lens of the role of women or the “mother” specifically. Kanafani tells his story through a first person perspective in the formation of telling a story to another person. The mother’s agony was mostly demolished throughout the story about the exile of her family from Palestine. Kanafani describes each of the victimized siblings’ emotional and physical pain and mainly the father. However, the mother is portrayed as an “aid” and backs up her husband whenever he has his “electric shocks” or emotional breakdowns caused by his economic situation; preventing him from the ability to feed his own family.
Nonetheless, it felt like the feelings of the mother are excluded especially when her husband sold “the gold he had bought for your mother when he wanted to make her happy and proud the she was his wife” (139); it is as if he does not care whether she is proud to be his wife under this circumstances. On the other hand, he tries to make the children distract themselves by “climbing the hills”, so why does he not take his wife’s feelings into consideration as well?
The mother had more sensations and motherly feelings that made her more protective and useful than the others during some phases of the story. When she felt the danger reflected upon her children, she immediately sheltered them and pushed them out of the room demanding them to run into the mountains (140). Whereas, during the same moment the father was having an emotional breakdown shouting “‘I want to kill them. I want to kill myself. I want to be done….’”. This illustrates how the mother was indeed the powerful figure and the masculine one and the father was the weaker and pessimistic one. The mother stared at him “anxiously” while he lied on the ground, grasping for breath and “grinding his teeth as he wept” (141).
In addition, in the near end of the story, the father collapsed ill in bed while the mother remains strong and fights the tremendous tragedies she suffered “choking back the tears of a tragedy which was not left her eyes till now” (141). Therefore, I believe that the role of the mother was highly underestimated and hidden in ways that could have reshaped the story in a more powerful and aggressive tone to elucidate how the Palestinians suffered, yet remained standing still until today.
Overall, Kanafani describes in great depth each scene as if he was that young boy writing every moment that was carved into his brain and heart resonating deep down his bones. He concluded the paragraph with how the orange was “dried up and shriveled” which could be a metaphorically description of Acre dying under the control of the Jews. Moreover, what arises my curiosity is, who aided the family? Was it the mother or did the father regained his strength? Why was the mother voiceless? Is her husband oppressive or does the time zone of the story resemble women’s role at the time?
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