Book review: Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky And Water looks

Abulhawa gives us insight into the misery and resilience of Gazan life since the Nakba in 1948, writes Joseph Dana

Set in Gaza, the book shows what Palestinians have had to endure since 1948. Dieter Endlicher / AP photo

“What do you have?” I often found the bluntness of this question off-putting when overheard in conversations between Palestinian friends.

Thanks to the scattered nature of Palestinian communities around the world, the question of citizenship is never far off from Palestinian conversation. One can be a Palestinian with an American passport, a Jordanian travel document, a Chilean passport, or no passport at all, as in the case of many who languish in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.

Yet, national cohesion has remained ironclad – one of the first questions asked by many Palestinians meeting for the first time is: “What kind of citizenship do you have?”

These facets of life are often glossed over when discussing Palestinian politics. But this is changing, thanks to a slew of recent memoirs and works of historical fiction by Palestinian writers that highlight the seemingly mundane to demonstrate what statelessness really means.

Following her warmly received 2010 debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa's latest work is a perfect crystallisation of the recent trend in Palestinian literature of using family history to preserve something greater.

The Blue Between Sky and Water is an intimate account of one Palestinian family from Gaza from the 1940s up until today.

The book traces the Barakas as they are forced out of their ancestral village of Beit Daras during the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland when Israel was created in 1948 known as the Nakba, or catastrophe.

They relocate to the Gaza Strip, like so many other refugees, before members of the family spread out across the region, from Cairo to Kuwait and eventually to the US. But the family stays together and decades later, one of the granddaughters returns to Gaza after falling in love with a Palestinian doctor.

The story is told in a dense, detail-heavy style that brings to mind the epic Egyptian family sagas of Naguib Mahfouz.

Born in the 1990s, the narrator, a member of the youngest generation of the Barakas family, guides us through a family’s journey from Gaza and back again while describing in brutal detail Israel’s never-ending entrenchment of its control over Palestinian life and land. When occupying Israeli soldiers first arrive in the Gaza Strip after the 1967 war, Abulhawa has the matriarch of the family describe them with chilling accuracy to her granddaughter, the young narrator.

“The first one she saw up close wore thick-rimmed black glasses, an irrelevant innocence misplaced in malevolent militarism.”

But this novel is about much more than Israeli colonialism – it is also a meditation on Palestinian cultural history.

As Israel and much of the western world have turned their backs on the history of the Nakba, works of fiction that chronicle the lives of Palestinian families have become critical depositories for this neglected history.

In describing Nur, the granddaughter of the first generation of exiles, Abulhawa notes that “her life reflected the most basic truth of what it means to be Palestinian, disposed, disinherited and exiled”.

The Blue Between Sky and Water is an example of tried and true literary anecdotes to historical denialism that featured in attempts by colonial regimes to erase the history of indigenous people.

That the writer chooses to place the book in Gaza and illustrate the myriad wretched experiences Gazans have had to endure since 1948 makes the novel all the more timely but the real story is one of resilience.

While Gaza is beset by repeated Israeli attacks, every Palestinian feels its pain and can smell its salty air.

As the narrator brings the novel into the present day, Abulhawa’s leftist pedigree and work as an activist becomes unavoidable.

The book ends just before last summer’s war in Gaza. The writer uses this event to praise Palestinian resistance fighters for reflecting the will of the Palestinian people to die fighting rather than to continue living on their knees.

Regardless of how one feels about the role of a writer’s political views in a work of fiction, this novel is an ideal vehicle into the dynamic, resilient and multi-faceted nature of the Palestinian people.

Joseph Dana is an opinion writer at The National.