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<div><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/27/writing-palestine/"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">counterpunch.org</a>
<h1>Writing Palestine<br>
</h1>
<h2>An Interview with Susan Abulhawa</h2>
<div>Susie Day</div>
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<div>Aug 27, 2023</div>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <a
href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mornings-in-jenin-9781608190461/"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"><i>Mornings
in Jenin</i></a>, 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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://palestinewrites.org/"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">Palestine
Writes</a> 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…</p>
<p><b>I Just Kept Writing</b></p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>How did you come to write <i>Mornings
in Jenin</i>?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>The
Philadelphia Inquirer</i> – 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.</p>
<p>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: <i>Wait,
this is a novel</i>. So I mortgaged my house,
went into massive debt, and yeah, wrote this.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>In <i>Mornings in Jenin</i>,
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?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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.</p>
<p>Even the way Americans talk about race
relations: <i>Oh, African Americans have made
great advancements</i>. 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.”</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>Do you think <i>Mornings </i>has
influenced Palestinian literature in the years
since it was published?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> I don’t know if this
has anything to do with <i>Mornings in Jenin</i>,
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 [<i>Against
the Loveless World</i>] – 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>The Kite Runner</i>, which
affirms this horrible oppression of women. Same
thing with <i>A Thousand Splendid Suns</i> or <i>Reading
Lolita in Tehran</i> – horrible oppression,
and how Americans really need to go and save
these people.</p>
<p>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 <i>people</i>, like
us.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>What’s so threatening about <a
href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Against-the-Loveless-World/Susan-Abulhawa/9781982137045"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"><i>Against
the Loveless World</i></a>?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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.</p>
<p><b>Palestine Writes: Terrain of Unknowns</b></p>
<p><b>sd: </b>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?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>Is there some historical
presence, like Malcolm X, that inspires you?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>Since Palestinians are an
Indigenous people, is Palestine Writes making
links to Indigenous communities here?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> A couple of members
of the Delaware Nation are going to be at the
festival, and one of our partners is the <a
href="https://ipdphilly.org/" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">Indigenous Peoples’ Day</a>
in Philadelphia. We also have a contingency of
Aboriginal writers coming from Australia –
brilliant, talented women. In fact, for the
opening, there’s <a
href="https://palestinewrites.org/p-events/performance-spoken-word-poetry/"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">spoken-word
poetry</a> 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.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>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?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>Louise Adler. Who, I read,
thinks it’s important to separate writers’
tweets from their published work. She also says:
“<i>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</i>.”</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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.</p>
<p><img
src="https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/SLIDE-2023-1-680x383.jpg"
alt="" moz-do-not-send="true" width="680"
height="383"></p>
<p><b>sd: </b>Is Palestine Writes in touch
with people in Israeli prisons?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> One of <a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/30/setting-the-future-free-from-inside-an-israeli-prison/"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">Walid
Daqqah’</a>s books, <i>The Secret of the Oil</i>,
is going to be part of the festival. So is a
book called <a
href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/trinity-of-fundamentals-palestine-introduction/"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"><i>The
Trinity of Fundamentals</i></a>, by Wisam
Rafeedie [ex-political prisoner; now university
lecturer]. We’ll also have a panel of former
political prisoners.</p>
<p><b>Palestine in a Heartbeat</b></p>
<p><b>sd: </b>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.</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>So do you see a need to start
a publishing house here for Palestinians?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> We did! It’s called <a
href="https://arablit.org/2023/04/09/palestine-writes-anthology-of-palestinian-literature-in-the-diaspora/"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">Palestine
Writes Press</a>. We’re going to publish –
actually, republish – Anni Kanafani’s biography
of her husband, Ghassan Kanafani, in English and
Arabic.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>Beyond Palestine Writes, are
you reading anything now that inspires you?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> I just finished Susan
Muaddi Darraj’s debut novel, <a
href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/behind-you-is-the-sea-susan-muaddi-darraj?variant=41049302335522"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"><i>Behind
You Is the Sea</i></a>. It’s not out yet, so
I got an advanced readers copy. It’s stunning –
about the intersection of three
Palestinian-American families.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>Are you planning any writing
projects for after the festival, or can you even
think that far?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> 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 <i>Boston
Review</i> soon, so people will get a sneak
peek at that. No title yet.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>Finally. If it were possible
for you to return to Jerusalem, where your
parents lived, would you go ba–</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> In a heartbeat –
without hesitation.</p>
<p><b>sd: </b>And, if you were able to live
in Palestine, would you still write?</p>
<p><b>susan abulhawa:</b> Of course. I would
have much richer material.</p>
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