A Reading List for Palestine
In a time that feels hopeless and sad as reports of bombings and deaths continue to flood our screens, the role of writing can be dismissed as indulgent, even futile. But with little else we can do to address the terrible events that have unfolded in recent weeks, writing can always be a place of solace, of recording and of memory. So we decided to put together a reading list of books about the Palestinian people and conflict that are worth reading.
I Saw Ramallah - Mourid Barghouti, 1997
Poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile after 1967, among various cities, separated from his family and uncertain between being a visitor, refugee, citizen, or guest. Returning for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge ov into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters, I Saw Ramallah is a deeply humane account of reflection, lamentation and resilience.
Out of Place: A Memoir - Edward Said, 1999
Edward Said experienced both British and American imperialism as the old Arab order crumbled in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This memoir of his early life reveals how it influenced his vastly influential books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. The book is a mixture of emotional archaeology, memory, theory and personal experience, exploring an essentially irrecoverable past.
In the Presence of Absence - Mahmoud Darwish, 2006
One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he crafted a luminous work that defies categorization. In stunning language, Darwish's self-elegy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. Looking back at his own existence, intertwined with lyrical meditations on love, longing, Palestine, history, and more.
Mornings in Jenin - Susan Abulhawa, 2006
Mornings in Jenin is a devastating novel of love and loss, war and oppression, and heartbreak and hope, spanning five countries and four generations of one of the most intractable conflicts of our lifetime. From 1948 to recent history, following the fates and fortunes of one family, the book goes from refugee camps to Israeli occupation to exile and captures the intricacies of a conflict that seems destined to continue.
Palestinian Walks - Raja Shehadeh, 2008
When Raja Shehadeh first started hill walking in Palestine, in the late 1970s, he was not aware that he was travelling through a vanishing landscape. Over six walks that span a period of twenty-six years, in the hills around Ramallah, in the Jerusalem wilderness and through the ravines by the Dead Sea, Raja Shehadeh attempts to preserve, at least in words, the Palestinian natural treasures that many Palestinians will never know, while capturing two decades of turmoil and change in the Middle East.
A Minor Detail - Adania Shibli, 2017
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with a particular atrocity or ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure.