After the Last Sky

"It’s one of my favourite books by the author. I even prefer it to his memoir, Out of Place . While working as a consultant at the U.N. International Conference on the Question of Palestine, Said suggested they hang photographs of Palestinians, taken by the leading Swiss photographer, Jean Mohr, in the entrance hall at the main venue in Geneva. The only text allowed on the captions was place names. The situation upset him and he decided to write a book about the pictures. In the process, he wrote about his own exile and memories of 1948. The photographs were taken in refugee camps, Lebanon, the West Bank and other areas. He writes in the introduction that the collection is ‘a personal rendering of the Palestinians as a dispersed national community… proud, tender, miserable, funny, indomitable, ironic, paranoid, defensive, assertive, attractive, compelling.’ The result is touching and beautifully accomplished. One was taken at the Allenby Bridge in 1967 at the time of the Palestinian exodus after the Six-Day War. Perhaps I respond to it so strongly because I vividly remember that terrible time. It led to the occupation of the West Bank, where I live. He also writes very touchingly about Lebanon, where he lived for a while. One of the book’s four sections is called After the Last Sky, from a poem by my next author, Mahmoud Darwish. The full line is: ‘Where should we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky?’ It’s very evocative. At the end, Said writes: ‘I would like to think that we are not just the people seen or looked at in these photographs: we are also looking at ourselves.’ He wants to distance himself from those who see the Palestinians as passive or as mere objects to be scrutinised."