A Socio-Semiotic Analysis of the Text and Images of Ghassn Kanafani’s “Al-Ghandil Al-Saghir”

Harmonizing text and image to produce a meaningful and purposeful text is a discourse process and, thus, a social and cultural one. This social practice is of great importance and value in children stories—and generally children literature—as, for children, it does not merely operate at a socio-cultural level but at an intercultural one. This is the case because children’s speed of image processing and decoding is greater than their speed of processing linear texts. Al-Qandil Al-Saqir is one of the best short stories by Ghassan Kanfani, an author of Palestinian resistance literature, which employs a multi-faceted discourse to instill the concepts of ideology, value, and resistance in Palestinian children who need to be educated. Kanafani has fully understood that Palestinian children, as those who make the future of their homeland, have an important mission to accomplish, namely liberation from the domination of the Zionists. So, encoding the reality is the most prominent characteristic of his story. He is also aware of the ability of temporal, spatial and visual signs, as factors which are complementary to meaning, in consolidating the text, catching the child’s attention, and conveying the message of the text. The story brings a number of questions to mind: How can social semiotics, as a new tendency, be utilized to discover the underlying layers of meaning and discourse analysis in the text and illustrations of the story? What kind of linguistic processes are used by the author to express the bitter experiences of Palestinian children in a better way? What kind of textual coherence is used by the author in order to better define these experiences? This descriptive, analytical study employs a social semantic approach to analyze Kanafani’s short story. This analysis is expected to answer the above questions in order to provide a new reading of the story.