Exile continues to occupy a significant space in modern Arabic letters; references to exile, migration and displacement abound. While a wealth of criticism, anthologies and conferences have grown up around the themes of exile and displacement, the bulk of these studies focus on lived exilic experience, or the biographical details of the author. That is to say that exilic writing is usually understood to be the fiction created by authors who are themselves exiles. In contrast, this paper examines the modernist novella “Ma Tabaqqa Lakum” (“What Is Left to You,”1966) by Ghassan Kanafani, for the ways in which it inscribes exile as a poetic act. Rather than anchoring Kanafani’s artistic production in the facts of his biography, this analysis considers how the inscription of exile as a formal aspect of the novel allows for previously-neglected possibilities of representing gender and nation. “Ma Tabaqqa Lakum” makes extensive use of flashback and stream-of-consciousness in its narration, constantly calling into question the uneasy marriage of form and content. Within this modernist treatment of narrative, Kanafani creates a literary space in which aspects of gender and nation are interrogated and recast. In Kanafani’s novella, exile is represented with the goal of interrogating the “proper” and “honorable” roles of men and women, especially as they experience dislocation and the dissolution of their nuclear and extended families. While characters move within and outside the Palestinian nation – a concept already problematic from the outset – Kanafani creates an economy of action and inaction so that characters experience difficult choices against the backdrop of a shifting sense of community and their roles as men and women in society. By shifting our critical perspective to how exilic poetics function within the literary work – rather than how exile informs authors’ own experiences – I aim to open up avenues of insight and reflection into how the staging of exile informs our understanding of gender roles, concepts of nation, belonging and dislocation from one’s community.