Mornings in Jenin

"This is the first English-language epic novel to comprehensively express the Palestinian tragedy. Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian-American and the novel starts shortly before the ethnic cleansing of 1947/8 in a village near Haifa and it follows a family driven out of their village to a refugee camp in Jenin. It covers the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, the refugee camp massacres in Beirut and finally the Jenin refugee camp massacre of 2002. It is a great interpenetration of fiction and documentary. Although the subject matter is necessarily political, it remains a great work of fiction and the characters are not ciphers for a political message. The main character’s first menstruation and first kiss are as important as the first time she has a gun pointed at her. There are interesting Jewish characters, one who has been a friend of the family since before 1947, escaping fascism in Germany, and another who is an Israeli soldier who discovers he was taken from Palestinian parents and brought up as Jewish. These things have happened. I know of brothers born to a Palestinian father and a Jewish mother so that by Muslim law they’re Muslim and by Jewish law they’re Jewish, and one became a Hamas activist and the other a right-wing settler and apparently they all get on really well. This book is not an ‘us and them’ rant. It recognises complexity. I include it partly because it’s a good book but partly as representative of the explosion of Palestinian talent that is happening at the moment in hip-hop, films, novels, poetry. I think this is really important, that people are able to represent themselves and be heard. It’s necessary because it means they can’t be typecast as nutters who only shout and blow themselves up. Palestinians now are very much like the Jews were, still are, in diaspora. On the one hand they can’t go from one place to the next in Palestine and on the other hand they are all over the world, building the Gulf and Jordan, in America and Britain. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Palestinians have a strange stateless existence like the Jews had in the past. They can’t really own anything, can’t invest in land because it will be taken away or in business because it will be destroyed, so they invest in education and culture. As the land disappears from under their feet their identity as a nation paradoxically grows stronger and stronger because it can’t be based in land or money."