Book Review
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An unfulfilled desire has no sanctuary other than remembrance. Radwa Ashour’s novel, The Woman from Tantoura (Hoopoe Fiction, 2019), explores the ramifications of memory and how its story is told. Chronology, while important, plays a lesser role than emotions, while memory takes on its own trajectory. “The story moves on, but sometimes not completely, because as…
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One cannot speak of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 without touching upon identity and its ramifications. Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury’s novel, My Name is Adam is replete with questions and answers regarding identity, juxtaposed against inscribed recollections of the ethnic cleansing of Lydda. No matter the veneer one strives to don as part of the journey moving…
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Mhani Alaoui lays bare the cliché of “forgotten memories” in her latest novel, Aya Dane (Interlink Books, 2018). Likewise, the perceptions of nostalgia and identity as imagined by an outsider also contribute to shifting memory into an isolated place. An implosion takes place which, for Aya Dane, starts unravelling when she received a letter from an art…
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Bashir Abu-Manneh’s detailed study “The Palestinian novel: From 1948 to the present” (Cambridge University Press, 2016) combines the historical processes of Palestinian memory and postcolonial and literary theory in a manner which brings the various narratives and experiences of Palestinians to the fore. There is a unifying factor identified by the author – dispossession –…
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Far from accentuating the glorification that is synonymous with Mahmoud Darwish and his beautiful poetry, the new biography “Mahmoud Darwish: literature and the politics of Palestinian identity” by Muna Abu Eid (I.B. Tauris, 2016) is a competent exercise in revealing the intricacies of Palestinian collective memory combined with the complex persona of the man himself.…
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Refugee narratives beyond those which reach the mainstream media are fraught with complexities, while humanitarian aid remains insufficient. Ilana Feldman’s treatise “Life Lived in Relief — Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics” (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the discrepancies between the political and purportedly apolitical dynamics of the humanitarian sector. Feldman’s overview of…
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Space, silence and encroachment intertwine, while a prevailing solitude emanates from the pages of Mahmoud Shukair’s novel ‘Jerusalem Stands Alone’, translated by Nicola Fares and published by Syracuse University Press. The title itself is an intense metaphor that is felt throughout the book. Jerusalem is alone and its inhabitants navigate the space between community relations,…
RAMONA WADI 