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Dreams of Ayn Ara by Sara Abou Ghazal
$ 17.95
"A gem of a book, fierce and tender, devastating and exhilarating in one swoop. Abou Ghazal takes the Palestinian story of wordlessness and stages it in the trials of a single multigenerational family in a single refugee camp to gift us this glimpse into the unlikely persistence of a distinctly Palestinian time. This book is a testament--in its very form--to how Palestinian time may have been interrupted, but it has never been fully conquered. This time endures and persists in the forms of life in exile, in the work of dreams, in the memory of muscles and nervous systems, in the insurrections of mothers and daughters, and above all in our eternal returns. A time that persists despite the betrayals of a world that has no place for it. Abou Ghazal lays bare the full tragedy and majesty of Palestinian life at its boiling point--a rebellion at once against and for the world in its entirety." --Nasser Abourahme, author of The Time Beneath the Concrete
A dizzying, immersive portrait of a never-ending Nakba, as lived and relived by one displaced Palestinian family.
In Stockholm, Zein al-Abidin shivers, far from the warmth of revolt that simmered all those years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his parents' phone calls. Grandmother Nijmeh struggles to distinguish reality from dreams, and it's left to fearless, level-headed matriarch Zahra to try to keep the family together. But Salwa, with guidance from beyond the grave, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can't go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family's ancestral home in Palestine.
Sara Abou Ghazal is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Beirut and now lives in Belgium. Dreams of Ayn Ara is her first novel and English-language debut.
Sara Abou Ghazal's English-language debut traces the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family in the wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. At every turn, their hopes of an ordinary existence are brutally thwarted by false friends, renewed violence, and memories so vivid they refuse to be consigned to the past. Building to a surreal crescendo, Dreams of Ayn Ara maps the cosmic upheaval in which Zionist settler colonialism denies Palestinians not only a homeland, but a future.
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