“Language is the first border,” writes the Syrian theorist Yassin al-Haj Saleh, “and the last occupied territory.” Across the twentieth century, writers repeatedly exposed how power rewires the meanings of everyday words, turning instruction into coercion and speech into an instrument of injury. This anxiety around the manipulation of language becomes especially vivid in regions marked by partition, occupation, and exile.

The mid-twentieth century saw writers across South Asia and the Middle East grapple with the wounds of colonial partition, occupation, and exile. Saadat Hasan Manto, writing in Urdu after the Partition of India in 1947, and Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer exiled after 1948, both turn to fiction to capture how displacement reshapes bodies, families, and entire social orders.

Ghassan Kanafani

Manto’s “Khol Do” (“Open It!”), part of his searing Partition stories, presents a world where violence has so saturated life that language becomes corrupted: an ordinary medical command is heard as an order of violation. Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza,” written a decade later in Arabic, stages a personal refusal of emigration and reimagines wounded bodies as sources of moral instruction and communal renewal. Taken together, these stories show how literature from two different geographies of displacement wrestles with the same urgent question: what happens when human lives are reduced to objects of command and how might language, even in its more ordinary forms, either destroy or rebuild the world?

Both Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Khol Do” and Ghassan Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza” pivot on imperatives: a command that a damaged world drills into a body in Manto and a command that a damaged community speaks to a friend in Kanafani. Reading the stories side by side shows how the grammar of orders, which is who gives them, who obeys, and to what end, maps two starkly different horizons of life in displacement and desolation.

Manto’s Story begins in a camp where even the sky is “murky,” the atmosphere of history itself thickened into opacity. The narrative’s crucial command arrives when a doctor, finding Sakina on a stretcher, exclaims, “Open it!” referring to the window. The body hears otherwise. “With lifeless hands, she slowly undid the knot of her waistband and lowered her shalwar.” The imperative, seemingly neutral, even sanitized, activated a reflex learned through repeated violation. Orders here are not pathways to action but triggers of compliance.

The story’s earlier lines have prepared us to see how a social world converts people into objects of instruction, the volunteers catalogue Sakina as “fair… about seventeen… a beautiful big mole on her right cheek,” a searchable profile rather than a subject. Even their “Don’t be afraid” reads, in retrospect, like another softening command that ends in capture. In this universe, imperatives travel downward, from men, doctors, rescuers into Sakina’s Body. They do not rebuild a world—they reopen wounds.

Kanafani’s Letter works with the same grammar but flips its vector. The piece is stitched with refusals that sound like counter-commands to the self: “No, my friend… I have changed my mind… I’ll stay here.” The narrator’s earlier life is paced by others’ orders and capitalist clocks. Mustafa’s “rapidly moving lips… without commas or full stops” and Kuwait’s “gluey, vacuous” routine.

The visit to Nadia supplies the story’s own shock command, not spoken but shown. When she “lifted the white coverlet… [to] her leg, amputated from the top of the thigh,” the image instructs the narrator in a new ethics. From that moment, the letters imperatives turn outward as an invitation rather than domination; “I won’t come to you, but you, return to us! Come back….”

The different destinies of commands are keyed to setting and light. Manto’s camp fixes the eye on a “dull” sky and a procedural search: “Sakina! Sakina!” joins a chorus—“Someone was looking for his child… his wife or daughter” that feels like a mass, directionless, calling. When illumination finally floods the room (“all of a sudden the room lit up”), it exposes not truth but conditioning, the doctor “broke into a cold sweat” as he witnesses what the command dredges up.

Saadat Hasan Manto’s graffitti at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka. Image: Wikimedia Commons

By contrast, Kanafani’s light brightens without erasing pain: “The blazing sun filled the streets with the color of blood… It seemed… just a beginning… a long, long road leading to Safad.” The sun does not anesthetize, it stains. But precisely by staining it inaugurates. The imperative “come back” thus participates in world-making rather than world-breaking.

Both texts hinge on a girl’s body as a site of instruction. In Manto, Sakina’s body has learned to obey; her motion is automatic, “lifeless,” and the father’s ecstatic cry “She’s alive!” lands as bitter irony. In Kanafani, Nadia’s body teaches by sacrifice: “She could have saved herself… But she didn’t,” and the community must learn from “Nadia’s leg… what life is and what existence is worth.” If Sakina’s trained obedience signals the collapse of social order into predation, Nadia’s chosen refusal reorients a social order toward solidarity.

“Open it!” is an order whose misfire exposes a society where the very grammar of help has been corrupted; it asks readers to recognise how ordered speech can carry violence. “Come back,” by contrast, is an order that becomes an appeal; it relocates agency from the commanding to the commanded, from rescuer to returnee.

Read together, the stories trace a spectrum of imperative language under displacement from coercive command inscribed in the body to communal summons that rebuilds a horizon of belonging. The question each text presses on us is the same: when we say “open” or “come,” what world are we asking someone’s body to enter?

Sources

Note for the reader: The lines from the text are taken from Ghassan Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza” (in Men in the Sun & Other Palestinian Stories, trans. Hilary Kilpatrick, Lynne Rienner, 1999) and Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Open It!” (“Khol Do”)

Kanafani, Ghassan. “Letter from Gaza.” Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories. Translated by Hilary Kilpatrick, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999, pp. 111–15.

Manto, Saadat Hasan. “Khol Do” (“Open It!”). Kingdom’s End and Other Stories. Translated by Khalid Hasan, Verso, 1987, pp. 3–10.