Posts filed under 'Palestinian genocide'

To Exist At All: On Nasser Abu Srour’s Prison Memoir

August 26, 2024 | in Reviews | by Matt Hanson

. . . Abu Srour exercises a poet’s iteration of prose, gliding towards the mystic wonders of his undivided, individual experience.

The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom by Nasser Abu Srour, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, Other Press, 2024

In his opening note to the readers of his prison memoir, The Tale of a Wall, Palestinian poet Nasser Abu Srour wishes a “rugged time” to those who are heading into his scintillating prose, a terrain which is also interspersed with charged moments of verse. Indicating that its author is a romantic at heart, this philosophical and nihilist work of mental abstraction was inspired by the “womb of a concrete wall” that has held Abu Srour since 1993, when he was given a life sentence at the age of twenty-three for being an alleged accomplice in the murder of a Shin Bet intelligence officer.

As literature, The Tale of a Wall is a visceral, Dionysian feast of words, lain with a delicate hand. Fired by righteous indignation and howling with a disembodied eccentricity, Palestinian self-determination is here distilled into a single voice, tortured within the echo chambers of a confession table and the paper cuts of intellectualism, finishing with a full course of epistolary melodrama. The memoir itself is cleaved in two, with the first half dedicated to letting go, to saying farewell to the world after his incarceration in Hebron Prison in the last year of the First Intifada. The latter portion is devoted to his relationship with a woman named Nanna, a diaspora Palestinian who returns to her ancestral homeland to capture his heart with a power rivalling that of Israel’s occupying force.

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 9, 2024 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Carol Khoury and Christina Chatzitheodorou

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Greece!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for updates on recent publications and annual book fairs! From a discussion on ‘cancelling’ and its real-world parallels to the genocide of Palestinians, to the passing of a beloved Greek poet, read on to learn more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Has ‘cancelling’ subsided lately? Surely not for the Palestinians. Sadly, these times might even be the worst for them, to the extent that the ICJ is considering whether they are being subjected to genocide, i.e., literally a cancelling, an erasure! But when it comes to literature, this concept of cancelling, of erasing, often serves as a lens to examine social dynamics, power structures, and questions of identity.

This is the case of The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem. Originally published in North America by Syracuse University Press some five years ago, a revised and updated English translation (by the original translator Sinan Antoon) is appearing this month by And Other Stories.

Using magical realism to shed light on real-world tensions and human experiences in Israel and Palestine, this book is a thought-provoking novel that explores those complexities through a unique premise. The story imagines a scenario where all Palestinians suddenly vanish overnight. Azem skillfully uses this surreal concept to examine issues of identity, memory, and power dynamics in the region. The narrative alternates between the perspective of Alaa, a young Palestinian man, and the reactions of Israeli society to the mysterious disappearance.