A Long Walk From Gaza

 

A Long Walk from Gaza / Asmaa Alatawna
trans. from the Arabic by Caline Nasrallah & Michelle Hartman
Northampton, MA : Interlink Books, 2024.
180 p.

This newly released novel is quite timely, and it looks at a woman's life in occupied Palestine, and in Europe where she finds freedom. 

The book starts out in France, where the narrator, also named Asmaa, has ended up after fleeing her life in Palestine. She then works backwards, to explain how she left, and then takes the reader right back to her childhood to explain some of the why. The book ends at the point that she was making the connection that would give her a road out. This structure was really interesting, giving an unusual perspective to the narrator's decisions. 

She experiences the danger of living in an occupied zone; as a young girl she's a tomboy and sneaks out to play with the boys in an empty lot. Once she hits a certain age, this is absolutely not allowed. She and her sisters live in a tiny house in the Gaza Strip; their family is part Palestinian Bedouin. Their grandparents are also close by, but these are not warm and cuddly grandparents, they are strict and demanding. At some point, her father finds a job in the Emirates, so they all go to join him there in the desert. This section is brief, but evocative. When her grandfather becomes ill, though, they return to Gaza -- a harrowing experience to cross the border -- where they end up marrying off her 15 yr old sister.  

Asmaa stays in Gaza after this and studies English Literature at the university, which leads to her acquaintance with José, a Spaniard who takes her to Madrid with him; she soon leaves him to go to France. Her story is told from the perspective of this French life, after much adjustment. Much of this story is similar to Asmaa Alatawna's own biography, but this is a fictionalized account, published as a novel. It reads very quickly, and is engaging despite some of the awful things she relays. I appreciated the opening, in which Asmaa (the character) talks about her mental state when first starting to feel settled in France. 

I said that I had come here for one simple reason -- to find a few inches of calm, a safe space -- to live like an ordinary person with no extraordinary abilities. I wanted him to understand that I hadn't left the Gaza neighborhood I grew up in to carry my national cause in my back pocket. Nor to shape myself into the image of a militant woman of the Palestinian resistance. I left to find some personal space, a few square meters of my own where I could put a bed and a table. 

This was a different look at life in Gaza, from a woman's perspective, with all the issues of violence and oppression doubled for women in the occupied territories.  Really worth reading. 

Velvet

 

Velvet / Huzama Habayeb
trans. from the Arabic by Kay Heikkinen
Cairo: AUC Press (Hoopoe), 2019, c2016.
312 p.

I wanted to read this story as soon as I saw in the blurb that learning to sew helps the main character construct her life. I am definitely a sucker for books with sewing. But it's also the story of a woman raised and living her whole life in a Palestinian refugee camp.

Hawa grows up in the camp with her family; harsh mother, cruel father, sisters and two brothers. Their father is an angry man and beats his children and wife, and worse. One of Hawa's brothers grows up with this behaviour reflected in the way he lives his own life, as well. 

She learns to sew as a teenager after being apprenticed to Sitt Qamar, a  glamorous seamstress who lives in a nearby town. Sitt Qamar loves fabric and stitching, and during Hawa's time with her, Hawa learns about the luxury of beautiful fabrics, being a businesswoman, and a more independent way of life. There is a chapter that moves away from Hawa to tell us Sitt Qamar's tragic love story also. 

But as we meet the middle-aged Hawa at the start of the book, she has splurged on a length of pale blue velvet (silk velvet, no poly blends for her) for a wedding dress -- there is a sensuous description of velvet and the secret joy she has in it, imagining her wedding outfit. She has fallen in love with a gentle man, some years after being divorced by her abusive husband she was married to by her parents when she was young. She is now caring for her cruel but decrepit mother, and puts off marrying because she's afraid of what her brother and her son will say - she's been meeting her new love privately, a no no in the eyes of the horrible men in her family. 

The brother she protected all her life, and the son she cared for treat her like a food producing machine and money dispenser; they are utterly useless and disrespectful of all women, but somehow especially Hawa. She prepares a big dinner for them, planning to tell them about her intention to marry, but things do not go well. They have already heard. 

The violent ending was a shock and ruined this book for me, I couldn't take it. I was completely engaged in the story, and imagining one good thing for Hawa right alongside her. I understand the events of the story, I can see how it came to the conclusion that it did, but I didn't like it. It just seems like there was so much constant misery for all the women in this book, from Hawa to her mother and sisters and relatives. Only Sitt Qamar seemed to control her life, but in the end it was a man who destroyed both her business and her life. 

I thought this was a powerful book, worthy of its Naguib Mahfouz Literary Award, but I just wish that the misery was not quite so unrelenting, that these women were given even a ghost of chance. 

The Sea Cloak

The Sea Cloak / Nayrouz Qarmout
trans. from the Arabic by Perween Richards & Charis Bredin
Manchester: Comma Press, 2019.
106 p.

This collection of 11 short stories by Gazan journalist and women's rights campaigner Nayrouz Qarmout is beautifully written, while also hard-hitting.

The stories are all layered and poetic, with sensuous writing describing the realities of life in Gaza, prior to the current conflict. The collection focuses on women, sharing many perspectives of both young and old characters. It looks at patriarchy, colonialism, violence, religion, and women's rights, and how they all intersect.

Qarmout is able to build a life into just a few pages in these very short stories. The title story is one of the longest, and it is the gentlest one; in it a young girl wishes to wear the Sea Cloak, to simply sink into the sea away from her family and responsibilities. Others are more stylistically unusual; Black Grapes starts with the final moment and moves backwards to reveal the truth behind a political murder of a young man. The Anklet of Maioumas is another unusual story, shifting its setting between ancient Palestine and today, with a young woman dancing on a beach - it's hard to tell from moment to moment which girl and which year it is.

The brevity of the stories are their strength. Each gives a glimpse of a life, like snapshots, and many times they are told from multiple perspectives. In such tiny stories, it is striking that the structural decisions Qarmout makes support the story she's telling. I would say that this book will appeal to anyone who enjoys literary writing, and appreciates a poetic eye that can describe and evoke reverie, beauty, and violence at the same time. She writes with such compassion for the women in her stories, and can also point out how hypocrisy, patriarchal violence and war affects an entire region. It's writing that looks to the interior life of characters, but in a way that illuminates wider society and all its ills. Really powerful and evocative reading.