[News] Writing Palestine

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/27/writing-palestine/>


  Writing Palestine


    An Interview with Susan Abulhawa

Susie Day
Aug 27, 2023

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In Palestine – a country whose existence goes unrecognized by most of 
the West – Palestinians are arrested, humiliated, beaten, killed by 
Israeli military or settlers every day, if not every hour. What began in 
1948 as the Nakba has taken on force, ramped up control, occupied every 
aspect of Palestinian life. And, given Israel’s “most right-wing 
government in history,” what had shown no signs of stopping is now 
getting worse. Here, in the United States, we barely talk of this. But 
susan abulhawa, descendant of generations of Palestinian refugees, is 
doing all she can to talk about Palestine. She does this by telling us 
stories.

abulhawa’s parents came from Jerusalem’s Al-Tur neighborhood, but were 
forced out by the 1967 War. Born in 1970, abulhawa grew up in Kuwait, 
Jordan, Jerusalem, and since the age of 13, has lived in the United 
States. Although, in school, she was tracked into science, she began 
writing fiction in her 30s. /Mornings in Jenin/ 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mornings-in-jenin-9781608190461/>, 
abulhawa’s 2010 breakout novel, depicts a Palestinian family’s survival 
through several decades of Israeli rule. Translated into 32 languages, 
it became an international bestseller. abulhawa has written two novels 
since, with another on the way.

susan abulhawa is also a veteran activist, essential to creating and 
organizing Palestine Writes, a conference that, due to Covid, happened 
online in December 2020. But now, Palestine Writes 
<https://palestinewrites.org/> has become a real-life literary festival, 
to be held this September in Philadelphia. We in the States need to know 
more about Palestine; we also need to know about susan abulhawa. I 
started by asking her how she became a writer…

*I Just Kept Writing*

*susan abulhawa:*    My family were peasants. We didn’t have books, 
growing up. My dad barely finished middle school and my mom went to a 
trade school after high school. I think my uncle was the first person to 
go to college. For a lot of Arab families, and immigrant families in 
general, being a doctor or a lawyer is really prized. But being a writer 
– I thought that was like wanting to be the Queen of England, right? So 
I went into science because, you know, I had something to prove.

*sd: *How did you come to write /Mornings in Jenin/?

*susan abulhawa:*    I was one of the international eyewitnesses to the 
to the 2002 massacre in Jenin. It was life changing. I mean, as 
Palestinians, we grow up knowing a lot of these horrors, but it was 
another matter to see it up close and smell – to smell it – that was the 
overwhelming impression. Death, rotting corpses everywhere, pulling 
corpses from the rubble after Israel had bulldozed people inside their 
homes. I never stopped thinking about it. And when I came back [to the 
US], the disconnect between the life I was living, the job I had, and 
what I had just witnessed, was profound. I didn’t know what to do with it.

I was a single mother at the time. I wasn’t making much money working 
for a pharmaceutical company. I didn’t have a lot of choices. At the 
same time, I’d been writing articles that were getting picked up by 
major papers, including /The Philadelphia Inquirer/ – which, unknown to 
me, was irritating a lot of the Zionist bosses where I worked. Thus 
began the plan to get rid of me. So they started moving me from one lab 
to another – eventually, I was laid off my job, so the decision was made 
for me.

It was December 22nd, a few days before Christmas, and I was terrified. 
I cried that whole day. And the next day, I just got up and started 
writing about what I had seen in Jenin. I just kept writing; I didn’t 
know what else to do. I didn’t know I was writing a book until I was 
knee-deep into it. Then I realized: /Wait, this is a novel/. So I 
mortgaged my house, went into massive debt, and yeah, wrote this.

*sd: *In /Mornings in Jenin/, two Palestinian brothers are separated 
when one, as a baby, is stolen by an Israeli soldier and brought up by 
Holocaust survivors in a Zionist household. This boy in turn grows up to 
join the IDF and ends up kicking the shit out of his older Palestinian 
brother at a checkpoint, because his army buddies have pointed out how 
much he and this Arab guy look alike. What do you think this might show 
people in the US about the humanity of Palestinians – and Israelis?

*susan abulhawa:*    Americans really have a huge way to go in terms of 
moral evolution. Like, we are more technologically advanced than any 
other nation in the world, but we’re the least morally advanced. There’s 
this word in English that I think a lot of people use when it comes to 
describing others, which is, “humanizing.” This need white Americans 
have for other people to humanize themselves, so that Americans can be a 
little more moral, is strange.

Even the way Americans talk about race relations: /Oh, African Americans 
have made great advancements/. When the reality is that the people 
who’ve oppressed African Americans for centuries might have developed a 
little bit more, morally. I think Americans need to look at their own 
deficiencies, instead of looking to oppressed people, trying to see 
these others as more “human.”

*sd: *Do you think /Mornings /has influenced Palestinian literature in 
the years since it was published?

*susan abulhawa:*    I don’t know if this has anything to do with 
/Mornings in Jenin/, but there have been a lot more Palestinian writers 
to emerge on the literary scene. That’s a beautiful thing. But there’s 
still a lot of racism within the publishing industry and reluctance to 
publish Palestinian writers. Like, when it came time to publish my last 
novel [/Against the Loveless World/] – ordinarily, if publishers see 
somebody who’s sold over a million copies, they’re happy to publish that 
person because they’ll already have a readership. But that wasn’t the 
case here.

There’s a lot of people who are afraid, who want to publish Palestinian 
writers to say they have a diverse portfolio, but the books they want 
are ones that confirm popular misconceptions and stereotypes. If you 
look at books from our region that have exploded in this country – and 
they’re all good books; I’m not knocking them – they follow a certain 
genre. Number one is /The Kite Runner/, which affirms this horrible 
oppression of women. Same thing with /A Thousand Splendid Suns/ or 
/Reading Lolita in Tehran/ – horrible oppression, and how Americans 
really need to go and save these people.

These books might reflect real conditions – they certainly don’t reflect 
the societies at large. But they are the books Americans will lap up 
because everybody wants to read things that affirm their assumptions. 
Almost nobody wants any hint that we’ve spent billions of dollars 
destroying people who are /people/, like us.

*sd: *What’s so threatening about /Against the Loveless World/ 
<https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Against-the-Loveless-World/Susan-Abulhawa/9781982137045>?

*susan abulhawa:*    First of all, it doesn’t contain the usual 
Orientalist tropes of oppressed women. To the contrary, it’s an 
indictment of the Iraq war, it shows subversive resistance among 
Palestinians, a defiance. And it highlights Israeli barbarity, as all my 
books do. Those are, in the West, what seem to be the threats. In the 
Arab world, there are objections to the book as an indictment of 
patriarchal structures.

*Palestine Writes: Terrain of Unknowns*

*sd: *Besides literature at Palestine Writes, there’ll be cooking, 
dancing, film…. There’ll also be speakers who are obviously not 
Palestinian, like Gary Younge, Marc Lamont Hill, Rachel Holmes, Viet 
Thanh Nguyen. Why do you think they’re important at a Palestinian 
conference?

*susan abulhawa:*    Palestine Writes is meant to be an intersectional 
space. I do want it to bring Palestinians together from all parts of 
Historic Palestine, our diaspora and beyond, the intellectual exchange, 
the creative enrichment, the books, conversations, collaborations 
expanding our cultural footprint, our existence in places that would 
like to see us disappear. But, though most of the writers are 
Palestinian, we wanted a place where we could exist with agency and with 
our friends – the people who have showed up for us over and over. We 
want this kind of cross-pollination among writers and intellectuals and 
other marginalized communities.

*sd: *Is there some historical presence, like Malcolm X, that inspires you?

*susan abulhawa:*    I think the sort of internationalism that was 
embodied by Malcolm X is important. Not just Malcolm X, but others of 
his era who saw the importance of people uniting across various 
struggles. We do stand on those incredible shoulders; the luminaries and 
revolutionaries, who have influenced so many of us, are present in 
everything we do.

But it’s not just noteworthy personalities. It’s this terrain of the 
unknowns – all those people, our ancestors, our parents and 
grandparents, who died in anguish, in exile. It’s really those people 
who will haunt the festival, in some ways. There’ll be an art and a 
photography exhibit – there will be photographs of those people – 
because we want them with us at our festival.

*sd: *Since Palestinians are an Indigenous people, is Palestine Writes 
making links to Indigenous communities here?

*susan abulhawa:*    A couple of members of the Delaware Nation are 
going to be at the festival, and one of our partners is the Indigenous 
Peoples’ Day <https://ipdphilly.org/> in Philadelphia. We also have a 
contingency of Aboriginal writers coming from Australia – brilliant, 
talented women. In fact, for the opening, there’s spoken-word poetry 
<https://palestinewrites.org/p-events/performance-spoken-word-poetry/> 
with two women. One of them, Lorna Munro, is a Wiradjuri woman from 
so-called Australia; the other is a Palestinian woman, Dana Dajani. So 
they’ll set the tone.

*sd: *Speaking of Australia. Last winter, you and Mohammed El-Kurd made 
international headlines when you were nvited to the Adelaide Writers 
Week – then almost banned as antisemitic; in your case, for tweets about 
Zelenskyy preferring to “drag the world into World War III, instead of 
giving up NATO ambitions.” What was it like to face down all that 
opposition?

*susan abulhawa:*    It was wild, especially when I got there. One of 
the things that stood out to me was the disconnect between what the 
media were doing and the actual people in attendance. I mean, there were 
tens of thousands – and the organizer, god bless her, refused to back down.

*sd: *Louise Adler. Who, I read, thinks it’s important to separate 
writers’ tweets from their published work. She also says: “/We talk a 
lot about safe spaces and I think we’d be better off talking about brave 
spaces and courageous spaces in which we’re respectful in our dialogue 
with one another but that we can actually tolerate ideas that we 
disagree with/.”

*susan abulhawa:*    I absolutely agree with her. One reason 
Palestinians get shut down is that saying anything about Palestinian 
life is interpreted as antisemitism – which is a weaponization of 
antisemitism that’s frankly unconscionable. It’s stunning that, as an 
Indigenous, occupied, exiled, genocided people, we have the added burden 
of worrying about the feelings of our oppressors.

*sd: *Is Palestine Writes in touch with people in Israeli prisons?

*susan abulhawa:*    One of Walid Daqqah’ 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/30/setting-the-future-free-from-inside-an-israeli-prison/>s 
books, /The Secret of the Oil/, is going to be part of the festival. So 
is a book called /The Trinity of Fundamentals/ 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/trinity-of-fundamentals-palestine-introduction/>, 
by Wisam Rafeedie [ex-political prisoner; now university lecturer]. 
We’ll also have a panel of former political prisoners.

*Palestine in a Heartbeat*

*sd: *Walid Daqqah has spent his life in Israeli prisons, writing, but I 
was only able to find one piece of his translated into English. He 
definitely isn’t the only Arab writer who’s almost unknown in the West. 
I’m amazed at this huge amount of work that needs to be translated.

*susan abulhawa:*    There is a lot. In Arab society over the last 
century, we’ve been consumed with colonial violence. Everybody has been 
trying to survive, and there’s been little space – economic, political, 
social, or even intellectual space – for thinkers and writers to 
document the lives and history that need to be written.

*sd: *So do you see a need to start a publishing house here for 
Palestinians?

*susan abulhawa:*    We did! It’s called Palestine Writes Press 
<https://arablit.org/2023/04/09/palestine-writes-anthology-of-palestinian-literature-in-the-diaspora/>. 
We’re going to publish – actually, republish – Anni Kanafani’s biography 
of her husband, Ghassan Kanafani, in English and Arabic.

*sd: *Beyond Palestine Writes, are you reading anything now that 
inspires you?

*susan abulhawa:*    I just finished Susan Muaddi Darraj’s debut novel, 
/Behind You Is the Sea/ 
<https://www.harpercollins.com/products/behind-you-is-the-sea-susan-muaddi-darraj?variant=41049302335522>. 
It’s not out yet, so I got an advanced readers copy. It’s stunning – 
about the intersection of three Palestinian-American families.

*sd: *Are you planning any writing projects for after the festival, or 
can you even think that far?

*susan abulhawa:*    I’m two-thirds of the way done with a book – I put 
it aside to organize this festival. Actually, the first four chapters 
are going to be published in /Boston Review/ soon, so people will get a 
sneak peek at that. No title yet.

*sd: *Finally. If it were possible for you to return to Jerusalem, where 
your parents lived, would you go ba–

*susan abulhawa:*    In a heartbeat – without hesitation.

*sd: *And, if you were able to live in Palestine, would you still write?

*susan abulhawa:*    Of course. I would have much richer material.

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