Palestinian women collect their olives.
Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
This is the first English-language novel to express fully the human dimension of the Palestinian tragedy
The Zionist story has Palestine before the state of Israel as “a land without a people awaiting a people without a land”. Writers from Mark Twain to Leon Uris, as well as Hollywood studios and certain church pulpits, retell the tale. But Palestinians, in the West at least, lack a popular counter-narrative. Palestinians are reported on, met only on the news.Perhaps this is changing. As the land disappears from under their feet Palestinians have been investing in culture, and Mornings in Jenin is the first English-language novel to express fully the human dimension of the Palestinian tragedy.
The story begins with the Abulheja family at home in the village of Ein Hod, near Haifa, marrying, squabbling, trading and harvesting olives. It’s a touching and sometimes funny portrait of rural life.
Then comes the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948. Driven from their shelled village, the family suffers loss, separation and humiliation, ending up in a camp in Jenin, where “the refugees rose from their agitation to the realisation that they were slowly being erased from the world”. By now we care very much about the key characters, and through them we experience ...READ MORE
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