Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
Mornings in Jenin, originally entitled The Scar of David, is not for the faint of heart. Susan Abulhawa wields a persuasive pen of anguish, brutality and destruction to force us to take a fresh look at one of the most tenacious and defining political conflicts of our time. A thought-provoking, moving and extremely powerful testimony to the Palestinian plight, it exposes the fragility of humanity in times of upheaval.
The story begins in Palestine, 1941. The Abulheja family are at home in the small, tranquil village of Ein Hod. It is ‘a distant time, before history marched over the hills and shattered present and future’: a balmy era of ripe fruit, marriages and harvests that will of course serve as a sharp contrast to the
devastation that is to come.
The story begins in Palestine, 1941. The Abulheja family are at home in the small, tranquil village of Ein Hod. It is ‘a distant time, before history marched over the hills and shattered present and future’: a balmy era of ripe fruit, marriages and harvests that will of course serve as a sharp contrast to the
devastation that is to come.
Sure enough, el nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, quickly unfolds. Israeli soldiers descend upon Ein Hod, forcibly removing its villagers and sending them to a refugee camp in Jenin. A mother has her six-month old son snatched from her arms by an Israeli soldier, who gives the child to his wife, a survivor of the Holocaust. The boy, renamed David, is raised an Israeli and unknowingly becomes an enemy soldier to his own blood brother who loses everything in the struggle for freedom. Yet Abulhawa chooses not to focus her story on what could be an original cross-faith narrative of these brothers’ conflicting perspectives. Instead, the story is exclusively Palestine’s, as events unfold through the eyes of these boys’ younger sister, Amal.
Born and raised in the refugee camp, Amal is injured by shrapnel in the 1967 war, leaving her physically and emotionally scarred. It is as painful to witness the continual dashing of her hope for her father’s return, as it is to see her disown her mother who has been left mentally vacant by the war. Orphaned, she moves to boarding school in Jerusalem where she meets friends who ‘shared everything from clothes to heartaches’ and then finds herself alienated and alone in the United States. On a visit to her brother in Lebanon she marries a Palestinian doctor and we have a momentary glimmer of hope of new beginnings as she becomes pregnant. Yet again her losses accrue once she is back in the cocoon of America, a helpless witness to the atrocities in her homeland.
It may at times feels as though Abulhawa is laying it on a touch thick; she extracts horrific eyewitness accounts from real sources giving the novel a documentary quality and making it a blatant diatribe against the Jews and the unresponsive UN. Yet the novel is essentially about love – love between a farmer and his land, a mother and her children, between lovers and friends. Whilst the novel is written according to Anglo-American conventions, the poetic prose that gives the book its Arabic edge resonates throughout. It is this blend of fact and fiction that is one of the novel’s strengths; like Amal, and indeed Abulhawa who was born to Palestinian refugees and later moved to the USA, this novel is a hybrid, caught as it is between two worlds. Mornings in Jenin is a discomforting read, but as it is based on real events and told with such passion and conviction, it is well worth the heartache.
Born and raised in the refugee camp, Amal is injured by shrapnel in the 1967 war, leaving her physically and emotionally scarred. It is as painful to witness the continual dashing of her hope for her father’s return, as it is to see her disown her mother who has been left mentally vacant by the war. Orphaned, she moves to boarding school in Jerusalem where she meets friends who ‘shared everything from clothes to heartaches’ and then finds herself alienated and alone in the United States. On a visit to her brother in Lebanon she marries a Palestinian doctor and we have a momentary glimmer of hope of new beginnings as she becomes pregnant. Yet again her losses accrue once she is back in the cocoon of America, a helpless witness to the atrocities in her homeland.
It may at times feels as though Abulhawa is laying it on a touch thick; she extracts horrific eyewitness accounts from real sources giving the novel a documentary quality and making it a blatant diatribe against the Jews and the unresponsive UN. Yet the novel is essentially about love – love between a farmer and his land, a mother and her children, between lovers and friends. Whilst the novel is written according to Anglo-American conventions, the poetic prose that gives the book its Arabic edge resonates throughout. It is this blend of fact and fiction that is one of the novel’s strengths; like Amal, and indeed Abulhawa who was born to Palestinian refugees and later moved to the USA, this novel is a hybrid, caught as it is between two worlds. Mornings in Jenin is a discomforting read, but as it is based on real events and told with such passion and conviction, it is well worth the heartache.
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