READING PALESTINE
A reading group focused on Palestinian literature, with discussions led by Professor Elliott Colla of Georgetown University. Last fall, we read all three published works of the British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad (The Parisian, Exit Ghost, and Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative). This spring, we are reading Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, and Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani.
We will discuss The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem on Thursday, May 8th at 7pm, with Professor Elliott Colla.
About the book:
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem's powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel's project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother's memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel's search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question.
The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon's translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.
We will discuss Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani on Thursday, June 5th. Note: in discussion we will focus mainly on the novella contained in the collection, Returning to Haifa. This will be our last meeting before taking a break over the summer. Please sign up below for the email list if you’d like to be updated when we resume.
About the book:
"Politics and the novel," Ghassan Kanafani once said, "are an indivisible case." Fadl al-Naqib reflected that Kanafani "wrote the Palestinian story, then he was written by it." His narratives offer entry into the Palestinian experience of the conflict that has anguished the people of the Middle East for more than a century.
In Palestine's Children, each story involves a child—a child who is victimized by political events and circumstances, but who nevertheless participates in the struggle toward a better future. As in Kanafani's other fiction, these stories explore the need to recover the past—the lost homeland—by action. At the same time, written by a major talent, they have a universal appeal.
This edition includes the translators' contextual introduction and a short biography of the author.
Born in Acre (northern Palestine) in 1936, Ghassan Kanafani was a prominent spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and founding editor of its weekly magazine Al-Hadaf. His novels and short stories have been published in sixteen languages. He was killed in Beirut in 1972 in the explosion of his booby-trapped car.