Against the Loveless World - Susan Abulhawa
I have spent the past three days walking around with this book in my hand and tears streaming from my eyes. If you only read one book of fiction this year you must read this one: it’s beautiful, heartbreaking, maddening, terrifying, stunning, and unputdownable. And it speaks to so much that has happened and is happening in the occupied Palestinian Territories, events that many of us in the US and Europe pretend haven’t really happened and/or are not happening.
We first meet Nahr in an Israeli prison cell otherwise known as the Cube. A place where the world, time, family, even books and news and natural light have disappeared. Nahr begins to tell us her story, starting in Kuwait where she was born in the 1970’s. She is the eldest child of Palestinian refugees who were violently removed from their homes, left searching for a place to call home while continuing to dream of the land that was their’s for as far back as history can remember. At that time Nahr lived with her mother, brother, and grandfather, and felt Kuwaiti, even though Kuwait refused to provide citizenship to Palestinians, even if they were born in Kuwait, even after years of residency. We follow Nahr along a path of restrictions and choices, of desires and violences imposed on her, through the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and her flight to Jordan, and then on to Palestine. While most of the novel is Nahr’s story leading to her arrest, it does bring us back to the Cube now and again, where we experience the psychological violence of her solitary confinement, where even her water is rationed and dispensed whenever her Israeli captors feel like it.
Susan Abulhawa has such amazing talent: her writing pulls you into the story from the first paragraph, her descriptions appear in front of your eyes, and her characters are so real: they could be you or me. I fell in love with Nahr, with her strength and her needs, her choices and her pain and her love. Her story may be fictional, but it is set in times that are real, amongst events that are real, and from a point of view that is so often erased, hidden. I am sure that there are real Nahrs, too many of them, and the author explains in her acknowledgements that she collected real stories from real women while writing this story.
It’s too easy to forget what has happened and continues to happen in Israel and Palestine, and too easy to focus on the heavy pro-Israeli press that surrounds us. I personally lived in Israel for over a year during 2003-2004 (when a lot of the last quarter of the novel takes place), and reading it brought me right back there, where you had to learn to read between the lines to understand what was really happening, and where I personally learnt that events are not always the way that you see them portrayed on TV. I loved Against the Loveless World as much as I loved Susan Abulhawa’s first novel, Mornings in Jenin, and I hope that everyone reads it.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in return for an honest review. And a huge thank you to the author for this amazing novel, for bringing us a character like Nahr, and for talking of the violence and erasure that an entire population continues to endure as the world watches on, indifferently.