The three novels by Palestinian writers ; “The Book of Disappearance”, by Ibtisam Azem, “Stranger in My Own Land” by Fida Jiryis, and “Velvet” by Huzama Habayeb are all “a new kind of Palestinian novel”. They all grabble with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. All three novels present the national narrative and the complexity of people’s lives under Israeli military brutal attacks. In their fascinating work, they move us, the readers, by pressing the moral drift that can sit in when people are confronted with unforeseen solution for the Israeli military and settlers’ colonialism of Palestine.
The three remarkable literary works narrate through the use of narrative, descriptive, or explanatory text, rather than dialog or dramatic action which leaves no imagination is required to understand the calamity of Palestine’s lives facing relentless assaults under occupation by Israel.
If we take a context such as the Nakba, for example, it is difficult, due to this identification that the three novels allow, not to consider this a strength, not only in producing a space for forgotten and marginalized voices, experiences, and narratives, but also in their impact and political dimension.
In Sinan Antoon’s translation, Azem builds the story of a young Israeli journalist and his vanished Palestinian friend into a devastating exploration of the nakbah, betrayal, erasure, and love of home. For lovers of Palestinian literature, The Book of Disappearance has earned its place beside Saher Khalifa‘s Wild Thorns, and thanks to Sinan Antoon’s masterful translation, Anglophone readers can now experience this thrilling, essential work.”—Molly Crabapple, coauthor of Brothers of the Gun.
“What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel’s project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel’s search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question.”
In Stranger in My Own Land, Fida Jiryis tells the story of Palestine since 1948 through two generations of one family and the experience of a nation’s life struggled in their desperate search for a homeland. Fida is a talented storyteller through her details her movement, her emotions, her thoughts that we follow, her obsessions, her pains and wounds, her human experience that makes her resemble us; That is, they are personalities that could be us, and experiences and stories that could be our experiences and stories; Our stories intersect with their stories, our characters with their characters, and our world with theirs. In the sense that they are believable experiences and personalities (Relatable), in a way that enables us to identify with it.
In his review, Danny Rich a Patron of the Balfour Project recounts Fida Jiryis’s moving memoir of the family journey from Fassouta, its Galilean village of origin, via Lebanon, Cyprus and Canada as “a long but readable story which reflects the tragic history of Palestine since the fall of the Ottoman Empire until now.”
“A decade of research has produced a chronicle of Fida’s search for belonging in an ‘unholy trinity’ of (the State of) Israel, (the land of) Palestine and a number of diaspora homes, although the work’s main character is the author’s father, Sabri, whom the reader meets as a child in his grandfather’s home, seeing ‘unknown to him …the Nakba’. (Jiryis: p19).”
Huzama Habayeb’s third novel “Velvet”, the 2017 winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, which was translated into English by Kay Heikkinen, is masterfully and meticulously follows the painfully difficult life of Hawwa in Baqa’a refugees camp in Jordan.
It was hailed by the judges for the Naguib Mahfouz Medal as “a new kind of Palestinian novel” that wrote about the “everyday lives of Palestinians”, and about the “human condition” through its portrayal of woman.
Habayeb’s central character of Velvet is Hawwa, and although it is essentially her story that is being told, she does not tell it herself. The third person narrator, the traditional storyteller, “gives the novel a unique depth, and plenty of space for passions and emotions along with the very detailed, vivid and sensuous descriptions that abound. It allows Hawwa the freedom to think, to dream, to imagine, to react, to observe, and for readers to watch and appreciate her ups and downs and her conflicting emotions, in a way that would not be possible if she was telling her own story. It is a clever strategy by the author as it creates a kind of distance from Hawwa in which the reader is an observer, able to move to and from and around Hawwa, and to appreciate her sensitivities at different times of her life, as well as build an overall picture of the poverty-stricken and particularly harsh lives of the women living in the huge Baqa’a camp for Palestinian refugees on the outskirts of Jordan’s capital Amman.”
Hawa is a child of the grinding hardship of a Palestinian refugee camp. She has had to survive the camp itself, as well as the humiliation and destruction of an abusive family life. But now, later in life, something most unexpected has happened: she has fallen in love.
“This is a novel of enormous power and great beauty. Rich in detail, it tells of the women of the camp, and the joy and relief that can be captured amid repression and sorrow.”
Hawa’s experience that could be the one of all Palestinian women living under Israel military and settlers’ colonialism or in the refuge camps in various arab countries.