Tag: Palestine

As Khaled Hosseini rightly said that the novel isn’t about the refugee voice; it is born from it and told through it. On every page, the glint of hope for dignity and a better life is heartbreakingly alive.

The Shatila Refugee Camp was set up for Palestinian refugees in 1949 and is known for the massacre that took place in 1982 where thousands of civilians were slaughtered. This is a remarkable piece of collaborative fiction which resulted from a creative writing workshop organised by Meike Ziervogel, Publisher of Peirene Press and an NGO called Basmeh & Zeitooneh. Out of the nine writers who contributed to the book, some had never had the opportunity to complete formal schooling and some had never read a novel in their entire life. The authors are Omar Khaled Ahmad, Nibal Alalo, Safa Khaled Algharbawi, Omar Abdellatif Alndaf, Rayan Mohamad Sukkar, Safiya Badran, Fatima Omar Ghazawi, Samih Mahmoud and Hiba Mareb. The stories were written in Arabic and translated to English by Nashwa Gowanlock.

Each story in the book is a part of a larger picture – of everyday life and at times, death in Shatila. A family flee their home in Syria and settle at the Shatila Camp, and each member in the family deal with their struggles of love and loss while adjusting to the camp conditions; a girl and her father are survivors of the massacre that took place in 1982; drugs and poverty compel a family to take drastic measures. Violence and chaos runs rife at the Shatila Refugee Camp and yet in the midst of all this, new friendships are forged and independence is found. Each narrative is unique and yet inexplicably connected to the others portraying a vivid and descriptive picture of the Shatila Refugee Camp. The stories were straightforward yet potent- packed with lines that made my heart wrench and my tear ducts swell.

In the beginning I was unsure about how the novel would turn out to be but in the end, I had only tears in my eyes and no words to describe this novel. Reflective of real life incidents, the novel is brilliant, heartwarming, and heart wrenching all at the same time- don’t miss this!