#ReadAroundTheWorld. #Palestine (which is not recognised as a country but should be)

This award-winning book highlights the suffering of the Palestinian people throughout the Israeli occupation and other conflicts. The author was born in Kuwait to Palestinian refugee parents.

The main character is Nahr, a woman born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents in the 1970s. After the US invasion of Iraq, she flees to Jordan then Palestine, her ancestral homeland. The story shifts between the present, with Nahr being held in solitary confinement in The Cube in Israel, as a political prisoner for acts of terrorism, and the past that has led up to this point.

Nahr’s story is one of heartache and struggle but also great bravery. She begins with a simple dream of marriage and owning her own salon, which rapidly evaporates when her husband abandons her and she is forced into a life of prostitution. In Palestine she is faced with the suffering of her people at the hands of the Israelis and the destruction of their olive groves and traditional way of life. She falls in love and becomes involved in the resistance.

There are several scenes involving sexual abuse and this book is not an easy read. It is a dark story about the traumas facing this woman, representative of the suffering of so many Palestinian women. It is about the suffering of women at the hands of men, and the suffering of the Palestinian people as a whole. It was very reminiscent of a book I just read, Woman At Point Zero, set in Egypt. Despite the heavy subject matter, this book helps give insight into many issues facing Palestinians, it creates a picture of their home, and there are moments of beauty and humour. Best of all Nahr is a badass and I loved her snarky internal dialogue. ( )

Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa is an intense story about a young Palestinian refugee as she slowly becomes radicalized while searching for a better life for her family throughout the Middle East. Growing up in Kuwait, she learns hard lessons about how women are held to be inferior, and how being Palestinian makes everything harder. I was surprised that the Arab world is not particularly sympathetic to the Palestinian plight perhaps because they want to keep the devastating Israeli-Palestinian conflicts front and center in the world view.

This story gives us a human face to follow and is an interesting blend of fact and fiction. The perspective is unapologetically Palestinian and heartbreaking in it’s content of conflict, struggle and resistance. The story of her life is told by Nahr as she is being held in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison. We learn of her younger years in Kuwait, her family’s escape to Jordan and her eventual discovery of Palestine as her homeland.

I actually wanted to like this book more than I did. I have read Mornings in Jenin by this same author and absolutely loved that book. The troubles in that area of the world are on-going and have flared up again recently. I can’t ever see a resolution being found to this situation and my heart actually goes out to both sides. I suspect that was what I didn’t like in the book, it’s total one-sidedness made me uncomfortable. Although it is good to see the Palestinian side represented in literature, I now feel as if I need to read a pro-Jewish book to acquire some balance. ( )

This!!
When the protagonist is very young, a young man named Mhammad moves in upstairs with his aunt. all of her girlfriends are jealous of her proximity to him, and ask her questions about him. (I want to start using this term for israel--"Zionist Entity".) She ends up marrying him, "seducing" him with her dancing, at a wedding.
P.26:
"Over the next few days, I pieced together Mhammad's story from a conversation among Sitti Wasfiyeh, Mama, and the neighbors. Mhammad came from a well-known family with vast land holdings, though most of it had already been confiscated by the Zionist entity -- that's how people refer to israel, like it'll go away if we don't say the name."

Palestinians are chased from one refuge to another, and never allowed peace wherever they're at. The protagonist was saving money from working for Um Buraq for her brother to go to university in Amman, Jordan. Coming home from the school break, he tries to convince his family to return with him to Amman from kuwait. Her grandmother, Sitti Wasfiyeh, asserted:
P.92:
" 'I'm not going anywhere. I'm tired of being chased out of wherever I am in the world. Out of haifa, then out of Ein el-sultan, then jordan, and now Kuwait? No. I'll just die here instead of facing another exodus. I'm too old for this shit that these shit people keep doing to us. Shit. All of it - shit!' "

When the Iraqis moved out of their occupation of Kuwait, the Americans moved in.
P.93:
"In one way or another, Palestinians would have to pay, not only because some collaborated with iraq, but also because we were a convenient proxy for vengeance against saddam."
P.94:
"A day later, I saw from my window the police and a military Jeep driving on our street. I ran to fetch my brother but by the time I reached the bottom of the stairwell, they already had him on the ground in handcuffs, beating and kicking him. I tried to intervene. An arm swung in front of my face against a black sky in the middle of the day. My heart throbbed. My cheeks pushed against glass. A car window? I bit my tongue. Then I lay stiff with pain on a plastic chair at the police station. I knew some time had passed, but only later understood it had been 10 hours. I had no memory of being beaten, but my body bore the evidence."
P.95:
"Our landlord was waiting for us when we returned [from jail, trying to get her brother released]. We had three days to pay 6 months back rent or he would come with the police to evict us.
'Most people in the country have been pardoned from paying their rent during the occupation,' I protested.
'Not palestinians. Your Iraqi friends gave you jobs. You have money to pay.' "
The next day the landlord came with the police, and using his master key, openex the door while the protagonist was on the phone speaking with a lawyer about getting her brother out of jail. They ransacked the apartment, taking whatever they wanted.
P.97:
"as the bank slowly unfroze accounts, hordes of people pushed and pried their way into the branches, and most ATMs were out of order or out of money. Remarkably, the restored Kuwaiti government announced that all bank accounts would be replenished to what they had been on August 2nd, the day time stood still, as if the past 6 months never happened. .. I waited 5 hours without success to access my account. The second day I camped outside the bank and managed to get a turn when it opened, but they would only allow me to withdraw a small amount, not enough to pay the landlord.
Trying to get a loan from um Buraq, she advises Nahr to go to the man who had paid money to "have her as a wife," until he tired of her, Abu Moathe, who is a bank manager.
In his office, He toys with her, curses her, and sexually molests her. While he's doing that, she sees, on his desk, a bank card attached to a paper, with a bank-assigned PIN, in his name. Without him noticing, she memorizes his PIN and puts the bank card in her bra. Many times afterward, to my surprise, she withdraws money from his account. Until the day that she can't.
After all the abuse, he allows her to withdraw most of the money from her account and she is able to pay the landlord.

Mhammad's brother Bilal and Nahr become friends when she goes to Palestine to process her divorce from Mhammad.
P.156-7:
"I had promised Mama to make the rounds to visit our own extended family as soon as I got to Palestine, but I found myself putting it off, spending my time with Bilal and Hajjeh Ym Mhammad [mother-in-law] instead, and contemplating the contradictions of this place, my birthright. The landscape that lived in the hearts of mama, bapa, and Sitti Wasfiyeh didn't feel like home, though it took hold of me nonetheless. There were no malls everywhere or miles of beaches as I was accustomed to in Kuwait (none that were accessible to palestinians, at least). No salons on every corner to get my lips and eyebrows threaded, have a full body wax, or get scrubbed in a Turkish bath house."

Bilal takes a special place in Nahr's heart.
P.157:
". . . He had inherited some animals and bought others when he was released [from prison, taking the fall for his brother]. Although he helped care for them, JanDal was their full-time shepherd. Together, Bilal and Jandal sheared them once a year for wool, which they sold to local garment factories. During Eid and for special occasions, people would buy lambs for sacrifice. But Bilal insisted on hiring his own butcher to perform the ritual halal traditions for his sheep. 'Because people terrify these animals before killing them. Few butchers actually adhere to halal requirements anymore,' he said. 'to tell you the truth, I hate that we even eat meat as much as we do. Sheep, cows, fish, whales, goats -- they are nations unto themselves. They too deserve to be free.' The primacy of humans was only one assumption I had never questioned until I met him." ( )

In this novel Nahr, a Palestinian woman, recounts her life story from a prison cell, where she has been held in solitary confinement for many years. Nahr’s parents fled to Kuwait when she was young, and she grew up a refugee. As an adult, Nahr is forced to take extreme measures to support her family, with consequences that haunt her for years to come. Over the years she moved from Kuwait, to Iraq, to Jordan – always a refugee. When she was finally able to return to Palestine, it was a far different country than the one her parents left.

Let’s just say Western governments, especially the Americans, do not make a positive impression. If your mind is open to that possibility, you will come away from this novel with more questions than answers, but perhaps also a willingness to learn more about the complexities of the Middle East. ( )

The daughter of Palestinian refugees, Nahr grows up in Kuwait with her widowed mother, brilliant younger brother, and grandmother. As a Palestinian, she is not treated equally, eventually migrating to Amman, Jordan. A bad marriage forces Nahr into prostitution to provide for her family, especially her younger brother's dream to be a doctor. When Nahr returns to Palestine to finally divorce her husband, she is adopted by his brother and mother. Witnessing the effects of Israeli settlements on her people, Nahr becomes involved in active resistance activities, eventually landing her in an Israeli prison. The novel is divided into sections, with each beginning with a story of Nahr's isolation or interaction in the Cube, followed by the backstory of her life before imprisonment. I liked the novel better at the end when I understood how she ended there. ( )