Reading Jin’s previous post on suicide, I was reminded of a novel that had prompted me to think more about suicide and its meaning. Why do some people deliberately choose suicide? What does suicide bring to one committing it? Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal novel Men in the Sun shows a glimpse to the answers of such questions.
In the novel, three Palestinian refugees, Abu Qais, Assad and Marwan, attempt to escape extreme poverty in refugee camps by illegally entering Kuwait on Abul Khaizuran’s lorry. Abul Khaizuran is a lorry driver for a rich man in Kuwait and is willing to illegally transport the men in his truck to Kuwait at a reasonable price. So the men climb into the water tank on the lorry and try to cross the vast desert, burning under the Middle Eastern sun. They are desperate enough to do this as they and their families are on the verge of starvation and homelessness. This bleak reality motivates them to embark on the journey to secretly enter Kuwait to earn money.
Their plan goes as planned and seems to be on its way to success at first. In the first customs station at Safwan, the men manage to stay for six minutes hidden quietly inside the water tank, which is more like an oven under the sun. They pass their first hurdle with much sweat, but not much difficulty. However, in the second customs at Mutlaa, things go downhill quickly. Before Abul Khaizuran leaves for the customs to get a signature, he promises them that seven minutes will be enough for him to come back and get them safely out of the tank. However, he unexpectedly gets caught up in a conversation with the officers there, who throw jokes and sexual undertones at him. Consequently, his return to the lorry gets a few minutes delayed and unfortunately those few minutes were more than enough to kill the men in the water tank.
When Abul Khaizuran finds the bodies dead in the heat of the tank, he laments to himself “why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank,” signifying that even as they felt their lives coming to an end, they did not even attempt to escape death. Although this death is not in the form of deliberately hanging or cutting oneself, it is still suicide as the men let go of their will to live.
Reading this, my thoughts went back to a question that Abu Qais throws to his two companions to convince them to make the trip. He asks ‘do you think that the life you lead here is better than death,” implying that death may be better than the hopeless reality that poverty had given them. The three men tacitly all decided that the risk of dying under the heat is worth a chance of escaping poverty and hence agreed to enter Kuwait. Only in reality, the alternative to death turned out to be much more austere than starvation; if the men had been caught while being smuggled to Kuwait, they would have to await severe governmental repressions, possibly depriving them of the little that they have. Hence, I believe that the reason of their suicide was that between death and being discovered, death was closer to freedom, which is what they had eventually dreamt of. In this sense, suicide is, in Kanafani’s words, the rejection of a “life full of continuous misery, suffering and harship.”
As such, in this novel, suicide was not a mere result of desistance. Rather, it was a deliberate choice made to reach an eventual goal, given the impossible reality. By choosing suicide, the men were at least able to get closer to their original purpose of escaping poverty. Thus, from a literary perspective, death can be seen as another form of agency given to the characters as a last resort to continue on their journey. Perhaps, it may be the bravest form of agency, as the men directly acknowledge death and the obliviousness of it. This novel for me was quite a shock as it had never occurred to me that suicide, often socially labeled as an irresponsible and sorrowful choice could also be quite heroic at times. What do you think about suicide? Have you had any similar thoughts on the topic?