In Ghassan Kanafani’s short story “Letter from Gaza,” the narrator describes his life in Kuwait as follows: “My life there had a gluey, vacuous quality as though I were a small oyster, lost in oppressive loneliness, slowly struggling with a future as dark as the beginning of the night, caught in a rotten routine, a spewed-out combat with time” (87). Like the narrator of his epistolary story, Kanafani moved to Kuwait as a teacher under contract with the Ministry of Education in 1955. He began to publish his short stories during his six-year stay. The trope of Kuwait looms large in many of Kanafani’s stories, including Men in the Sun. Seen by desperate refugees as paradise, Kuwait, in Kanafani’s nuanced depictions, never quite lives up to expectation. As it turns out, Kuwait can provide no viable solution to Palestinian woes. At best, it is a stopgap, at worst, a death trap. Barbara Harlow has demonstrated how textual and practical examples set by revolutionaries such as Kanafani constitute their “after lives” (7). Part of the project of critical inquiry is to read textual remains and to assess the possibilities they may set forth. Gilles Deleuze argues that writers, like doctors, are “astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists” (Logic 237). As he explains, “Clinicians who are able to renew a symptomatological table produce a work of art; conversely, artists are clinicians, not with respect to their own case, or even with respect to a case in general; rather they are clinicians of civilization” (237). One role of the critic is to trace symptoms organized by artists in order to assess what might be done with their diagnoses. Building on Harlow’s notion of the after lives of writers and texts and using Deleuze’s clinical methodology, this paper reads Kanafani’s “Kuwait stories” symptomatically in order to consider what the legacy of both him and his writing might be to contemporary Kuwait. His clinical diagnosis of the fraught relationship between Kuwait and Palestinians in the 1940s and 50s can provoke a reconsideration of that early history, especially in light of the devastating aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. I will also consider how Kanafani’s actual presence in Kuwait in the second half of the 1950s represents an early promise of Kuwait as a tolerant and cosmopolitan place soon betrayed and, since the turn of the millennium (and to the detriment of the present), mostly forgotten.