Susan Abulhawa was born in Kuwait in 1970 of Palestinian parents who fled there from Palestine after the 1967 war. Of her previous works is the novel Mornings in Jenin (2010) and a collection of poems, My Voice Sought the Wind (2013). In 2001 she created the non-profit “Playgrounds for Palestine” to meet a need for “safe places to play” for Palestinian children in refugee camps and occupied territories in the middle east. 

The author has written a beautiful, inspiring and enlightening novel that comes with my unqualified recommendation. Among the several treasures the novel provides are; a celebration of the strength and compassion of women in many of the complicated roles they accept or otherwise occupy, an intimate glimpse into the lives of Palestinians – those prisoners and sometime nomads of the Middle East, and a delicate and unusual love story. The setting in time and place is the Gulf War I Kuwait (1991), the Kingdom of Jordan, and the contested areas of Israel/Palestine between the time of the optimism of the Oslo Accords of 1993 and end of the Second Intifada in 2005. 

The novel is narrated by a Palestinian woman from her cinder-blocked confinement space, the Cube, inside which she serves an indeterminate sentence for ‘terrorism.’ There is light from a small window too high for the prisoner to reach, a shower from which water appears at random intervals, meals pushed under the door and ever-present eye in the middle of the ceiling. Weeks often pass with no human contact during which she often is shackled to a wall. During such times, time would disappear as in vain she tried to track time by noting her menstrual cycles. 

The name on her certificate of birth was “Yaqoot”, given by her father to memorialize his lover at the time, the first of many. The name she preferred was given by her mother “Nahr” (River), a name her mother promised to the god Allah as the pregnant woman crossed the Jordan River in 1967, while fleeing the war and on route to Kuwait. 

The story traces Nahr’s life from her days in Kuwait, a country she loved, to her forced exile from Kuwait after the first Gulf War, to Jordan, to Palestine, back to Jordan and back to Palestine, her resistance activities and her confinement in the Cube. It is a story of Nahr’s strength and fierce honesty as well as the power of other women; her mother, her paternal grandmother, the mother of her lover, Balil, a resistance hero, and her betrayer-then-friend, a beautiful woman, Um Buraq.

This wonderful novel is not a diatribe against Israel. The details of Palestinian displacement and suffering are reported by the narrator as one would a storm disaster, in the manner of a newspaper column. Israeli soldiers are harsh and cruel in the manner that a tornado can rip apart a life. Hatred appears from Palestinian resistors, with their quixotic plans, but only in the way one would shake a useless fist at a devastating mud slide. In the end is the hero, Nahr, a woman, young, then much older, always of strength, resistance, love and honesty. And, there is the mystery of how she became the woman she was.

A note on the title: In the novel Nahr and Balil discuss James Baldwin and a passage in The Fire Next Time in which Baldwin writes to his nephew Big James, “For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were, to be love. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.” 

John Mullen is a philosopher and writer, living in the fishing city of Gloucester, Massachusetts. His book about Soren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy: Self-Deception and Cowardice in the Present Age (1981, 1995) has been widely read and praised. His novel, The Woman Who Hated Philosophers appeared in 2017 (Swallow Tail Press). His interest in issues of Israel/Palestine developed during a period in which he co-owned and tour agency providing Roman Catholic trips to the “Holy Land”, and has been deepened over the years by the website: mondoweiss.net.

Categories: Fiction

Keywords: fiction, literature