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language: English/Arabic (English tr. various)
country: Palestine
year: 2019
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 21.8.23-4.9.23
Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba, edited by Basma Ghalayini, is the second of the soon to be four short fiction anthologies produced by Comma Press inviting writers from — respectively — Iraq, Palestine, Kurdistan, and Egypt (and their diasporas) to imagine what their home will look like in the more or less distant future. this collection has twelve stories, six originally written in English and six translated from Arabic.
it’s an extremely pensive and, in a variety of ways, striking collection. I was not expecting, for starters, how many of the stories would be partly or primarily from the perspective of Israelis: Anwar Hamed’s “The Key” (tr. Andrew Leber), for example, is about the grandson of a Zionist activist who helped develop the “gravity wall” that absolutely separates Israel from the rest of the world, creating a (self-described) ghetto of safety against the “chaos” outside. although the narrator reports that “[e]ven Arabs living here have a sense of belonging, and would rather be here than out in the chaos crashing against that wall”, the story shows that in this ostensible paradise Israelis are nonetheless haunted by the long memories of Palestinians who still hold the keys to the homes they were driven out of a century before.
many of the stories, unsurprisingly, imagine various degrees of more or less absolute apartheid. Saleem Haddad’s devastating “Song of the Birds” sees Palestinians trapped in a kind of Matrix, “the frontier of a new form of colonisation”; in Majd Kayyal’s “N” (tr. Thoraya El-Rayyes), Israel and Palestine have been bifurcated into parallel universes, and the narrator’s son has just returned from studying abroad on the Israeli side.
what I think is perhaps most striking throughout almost all of the collection, though, is the confidence that in spite of everything, Palestine and Palestinians will still be there in 2048. whether this is as a unified virtual Palestinian state (as in Emad El-Din Aysha’s “Digital Nation”) or as the last living Palestinian who has developed the supernatural ability to summon the ghosts of every Palestinian who died in the final Israeli attack (as in Mazen Maarouf’s “The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid”, tr. Jonathan Wright, which also draws attention to internal tensions within Israeli society that threaten civil war) or as a collection of fragmented and fractious city-states (as in Ahmed Masoud’s “Application 39”), the stories strongly and clearly assert that this isn’t over and won’t be over until Palestine is truly free.
the standout by far for me was “Song of the Birds”, the first story in the collection, but the whole thing is well worth a read.
moods: dark, hopeful, reflective