I was walking to the library with my two youngest kids on a brisk evening in December when one of them noticed a bus nearby that said “Happy Holidays” below the route number on the destination indicator. “Why not Merry Christmas?” one kid wanted to know.
I described as many of the holidays I could think of that happen at this time of year, and realized we needed a little education around the topic. So while we were at the library I picked up a couple of books on Hanukkah to get us started.
I’m popping in with another book. It’ll be a short blurb, so you don’t have to click through to read the whole thing.
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, compiled and edited by Cate Malek and Mateo Hoke, was my first nonfiction read about Palestine. The book is part of a series called Voice of Witness, a nonprofit organization that “uses oral history to illuminate contemporary human rights crises in the U.S. and around the world.” It was published in 2014.
The book interviews sixteen people: fourteen Palestinians, an Israeli settler, and an Israeli activist. Each person’s account is told in narrative form, based on interviews with the subject. The people interviewed are all different ages and backgrounds, and include a fisherman, an NGO worker, and a physics professor, just to name a few.
I enjoyed reading firsthand accounts of each person’s experience. In addition, though, I found it interesting and telling how similar these real life accounts were to the fiction books I’ve read on the subject. While those stories came from the imaginations of the authors, they are grounded in reality.
I often don’t read the appendices of books, I read this appendix all the way to the end because the information included (from the history of Hamas’ tunnels to poetry) provided fascinating context for the personal accounts in the book.
Storytelling has always been a part of my life. It’s why I majored in English, it’s why I became a nurse, and it’s why I write. Hearing the stories of real Palestinians – and knowing these stories cut off ten years ago, with no way to find out “the rest of the story,” was a powerful reminder of the ongoing nature of the narrative.
A long time ago, I wrote a post about death. Then I wrote one about Swedish death cleaning. And surely you’ve noticed in recent days a lot of talk about death in my writing about Palestine. Today we’re going to kind of veer in a different direction, but like everything in life, it’s still all connected.
A while ago, I saw a video where Irishman Tadhg Hickey challenged Irish Americans. He educated us on the history of The Great Famine. He said in Ireland, they call it The Great Hunger, because the food shortage was not because of a lack of food. It was because the British Empire, Ireland’s colonizer, was exporting all the food and leaving the Irish with fields full of rotten potatoes.
I’ve read another book I want to recommend, called Wild Thorns, by Sahar Khalifeh, translated by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea. First, I wanted to share a little about the background of the collection it is a part of, and some info about the author. I found the context really interesting.
