[This 2020 novel is written in sections, and I read a few at a time. I wrote about what I had read before reading further, so I never knew where it was heading. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
21 March 2023
I, Kuwait and II, Iraq
So far, this is a bitter and unforgiving novel. The title is a clue—there’s no way we’re going to get a lot of laughs. The narrator begins her story from a three-metre cement cell, ‘The Cube,’ and if the framing chapters remain fixed there to the end, I can’t imagine it becoming any less bleak. She’s in solitary confinement, has been since long before she gave up counting the days, and admits to an appalled admiration for the effectiveness of the cell’s design. She knows nothing of the outside world, even down to the passing of the seasons. Over months and perhaps years, she has received extremely rare visits, during which she usually sabotages her visitors’ attempts to gloss over the inhumanity of her plight or their insinuations that she must have played a part in her own conviction for terrorism. She has no interest in their agenda except to undermine it, and the visits are only useful in helping her to glean what season it might be.
The first visitor she tells us of is a ‘Western’ journalist—the narrator, Nahr, is Palestinian in an Israeli jail—and, among other things, the woman suggests the cell is a ‘nice room.’ Nahr is already exasperated by her assumptions, and meanwhile the woman is frustrated by what she obviously sees as a determination not to co-operate or speak with courtesy. She doesn’t realise that Nahr already despises her, not least for starting the interview by asking about her ‘sexuality.’ What the woman really wants to focus on are the allegations of her prostitution and a supposed ‘gang rape’ on the night Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. As Nahr tells us, ‘They all want my pussy’s story,’ and she asks the woman why her questions focus on this. As if she didn’t know.
Nahr stonewalls from then on, until the woman gives up. As she is about to leave she turns to Nahr with, ‘I just want you to know that my grandparents—’ but Nahr finishes the sentence for her: ‘—died in the Holocaust.’ It might be my favourite line in the book so far. Of course, the woman isn’t using her family history as any kind of justification. Except that Nahr’s response tells us that’s exactly what she is doing. But something useful comes from it. The interpreter—Nahr speaks English but isn’t going to tell the woman—tells her in code to expect a message. It arrives with her food later, and confirms what we have already surmised.
‘Stop speaking to reporters. Israel is selling a story that Muslim men abused you your entire life, then forced you to join a terrorist group. They claim Israel saved you, and prison has given you a better life. You’re the only prisoner who gets international visitors. They’re allowed into your cell. That’s unheard of! Think about it. They’re publishing pictures of you in a clean cell with a lot of books to show that Israel is a benevolent nation, even to terrorists. Your family is well. They send their love. We are still fighting to get them a chance to visit. Eat this note.’
This is clearly going to be a novel about different versions of how political events come about, different perceptions of the ‘truth.’ Interestingly, Parts I and II, about one-third of the novel, seem to confirm the lurid details of Nahr’s past mentioned in the warning note. But ‘prostitution’ is an ugly word, used to demean the lives of women who find that selling their bodies for men’s gratification is the only way to survive. And a gang rape is a horrific crime, not a subject for sensational reporting. What I’m speculating is that by the end, Nahr really can be seen as having arrived in her bare Israeli cell through choices she has made. But, and I’m guessing again, Susan Abulhawa wants to show how in the lives of some people, ‘choices’ are never made freely. I think she might want to set out how an ordinary young woman can, step by (almost) inevitable step, become radicalised.
Of course, the term ‘radicalised’ is now always used to describe young people groomed cynically by those who need foot soldiers to further their own ends. But dreadful experiences can radicalise anybody against the culture that brings them about, and Parts I and II have led me to wonder if this is the real agenda of this book. So far, Abulhawa has set herself the task of telling a version of recent Palestinian history that is a long way from anything most Western readers will have encountered before. A novel like this becomes a lesson in the history of people we know very little about.
Part I, Kuwait, is about the lives that Palestinians were forced to make for themselves as permanent exiles following the Six-Day War in 1967. Nahr had been an infant then, and she considers herself Kuwaiti as a child. Her academically gifted brother is able to progress through the education system just as anyone born in Kuwait could do… but all the time, they feel much more secure than they really are. A man that Nahr meets much later has made his way in Kuwaiti society by robustly concealing that he is Palestinian. And gradually, it becomes clear to Nahr that she, her family and all Palestinians aren’t equal citizens at all. Abulhawa never makes the comparison with the way Jews were assimilated into other countries in previous centuries, but there’s definitely an echo of their experience in the way all pretence of the Palestinians’ equality evaporates in a crisis. After Saddam invades Kuwait and is quickly expelled, the Palestinians suffer torture and death. It’s like a pogrom, and we begin to understand why Nahr had sarcastically finished the journalist’s sentence for her. To a Palestinian, such trauma-signalling, or whatever it is, counts for nothing. But I’ve leapt forward to the end of Part II, and I should rewind.
We don’t know at first why Part I opens with Nahr telling us about her ability to dance—beyond the fact that it seems to be the only thing she can do. She has none of her brother’s academic promise, in fact nothing beyond the dancing to make her anything but an ordinary girl growing up. Her widowed mother tries her best for the family, while her grandmother, traumatised by the loss of everything she ever had in Palestine, has nothing but complaints and criticism to offer. In other words, the broken old woman is presented as Nahr perceives her as she grows up. Nahr is entirely unremarkable, and her limitations are part of the effect Abulhawa is seeking. We quickly begin to understand that whatever happens to her is through a combination of her inexperience, naivety, and the impossible life decisions she is forced to make.
In ordinary times she might have been OK, but these aren’t ordinary times. Kuwait in the 1970s and 80s is presented as a grotesque place for a girl like her to grow up in. Not only are she and her family second-class citizens, she’s also female in a toxically male society. The problem for her isn’t that her brother is the favourite, because he’s Nahr’s favourite, too. He’s the bright one in the family, and she completely accepts the idea that for both her and her mother his academic progress is paramount. The dream is that he could become a doctor, although they realise it would be impossible to raise the money for the fees.
It goes without saying, like so many other things, that Nahr will never amount to anything in this society. She doesn’t see it that way as a sixteen-year-old, instead talking with her friends about sex and marriage. What else would they be talking about? And what might anyone expect when Mhammad, well-known for his activism in Palestine, takes an interest in her? She’s married at seventeen, imagines all the pleasures a silly girl would yearn for—and is brought crashing down to earth on the wedding night. This attractive young man, who had seemed so considerate and interesting, is suddenly neither of these. That first night, he calls out the name of another woman, Tamara, during the sex that she finds painful and unpleasant. And almost from then on he does nothing to hide that whenever they have sex after that, it isn’t Nahr he’s thinking about.
There are other issues. This charismatic, well-liked man is making her feel unbearably inadequate. There is nothing she can do to make him treat her like a real wife, and he leaves pretty soon anyway. They divorce—which leaves her worse off than ever. What to do…? Time for another plot event, when an older woman appears to be offering her a way out. The reader is immediately suspicious, but Nahr isn’t. She only realises what she has agreed to when she and two other young women with showgirl stage names—Nahr, all unsuspecting, has agreed to be known by the Arabic word for Diamond—arrive at an all-male party. Um Buraq, the older woman, is clearly in the business of selling sex, and she is grooming Nahr as she has already groomed the other two. But Abulhawa wants to steer away from a glib condemnation of Um Buraq. When Nahr, shocked, refuses to go along with one of the men’s advances, the older woman does not cause a big scene. Which is when Nahr’s superpower, her dancing, saves her. She is so good it is enough, for now.
Things carry on like this for a while, but the men’s advances, and sometimes more than that, are too much. She goes back to her ordinary, ill-paying jobs… but things have moved on for Jared, her brother. He has the chance to go to university if money can be found… and we can guess where this is going, because Nahr knows how she can make plenty of money. She keeps up with the lie she’s been telling that Um Buraq had advised her how to invest her savings, and that this is now accumulating rapidly. If Jared gets a university place, she will find the money, and this becomes the driver of all the decisions she makes before Saddam invades.
The next plot event is her encounter with another unsuitable man. He is the Palestinian making money as a businessman by hiding his background, and selects her to be his mistress. He has enough property for her and her family to move into a high-class apartment. He’s worse than unsuitable, he more or less stands for all that is worst in toxic masculinity in this part of the world.
Or maybe not the worst. There is a night when Um Buraq breaks her own rule, and is not present at the venue where Nahr is to dance. The men are particularly drunk and see no reason not to do whatever they like. ‘I began silently praying, begging God, the angels, the heavens for help. The men ripped my clothes and pinned me down. Four or five of them. One of them lifted his dishdasha, lowered his sirwal, and pushed himself between my legs….’ In fact, the man is too drunk to achieve an erection but we learn, in very graphic terms, that the others have no such problems. She fears for her life, and as they hold her she digs her long nails into whoever she can: ‘“Whore, daughter of whores!” one of them cried, slapping me so hard the room spun. It was no use. I stopped fighting, thinking I had a better chance if I didn’t resist. I lay there, tears falling down the sides of my face. I watched the second hand of a clock on the wall …. One hundred thirty-two seconds ticked on the clock until—’ until the men hear the voices of soldiers, and flee. Two minutes and twelve seconds into the gang rape she has always denied, Saddam Hussein has saved her. This is the unsavoury truth the sensationalist hacks want to know about.
There’s a short-lived return to normality after Saddam’s expulsion. But with the arrival of American troops and a new dynamic in Kuwait, the Palestinians suddenly find they aren’t equal citizens after all. The US ‘liberation’ unleashes a storm for them that is eye-opening for a Western reader. It’s what I meant when I wrote about how similar it is with to earlier Jewish experiences of assimilation, which was had never been any such thing. And by the time Nahr and her family flee to Jordan, she has started to become a Palestinian Everywoman. At the beginning she couldn’t be more ordinary, but we can begin to see how what she has been learning about the way the world works…. It isn’t so much a radicalisation process as an education through bitter experience. But she is receiving the beginnings of a political education through Palestinian activists in Jordan, some of whom are apparently in contact with her estranged husband. But she hasn’t met Bilal yet, whoever he might be, a man the interpreter had not mentioned in her note. In fact, Nahr’s only regret about the note is that here is no news of this man. We hadn’t been told at the time who he is or why he is important—and by the end of Part II we still don’t know.
26 March
III, Jordan and IV, Palestine
These sections are very different, broadening out what Nahr, and Abulhawa, have to say about women’s experiences. After Kuwait, life in Jordan seems second-rate to Nahr. The influx of ‘half a million’ Palestinians means that there is little or no work for her. Her legitimate jobs in Kuwait as an office worker and freelance beautician are simply not available, and she is forced to spend more time in their tiny flat. Her mother is able to get work—Nahr realises for the first time that the extraordinary embroidery skills she had always considered old-fashioned are good enough for her to be regarded as an ‘artist,’ able to take commissions for wedding gowns and the like. Nahr regrets having gone for a modern style at her own ill-advised wedding.
Meanwhile, her grandmother’s fantasy of being able to move in with her Jordan-based daughters proves to be just that. We are only given Nahr and the grandmother’s view of them, and they are presented as snobbish and unsympathetic. Luckily, the grandmother refuses to listen to any of their gossip about what Nahr got up to in Kuwait—and she tries not to think about how the old woman would have behaved if she had known the truth. Whatever, after having moved in with the daughters, the grandmother gives up after a single day, and Nahr is the one who fetches her home. And when her mother and brother get a short-term visa to visit Palestine, Nahr and the old woman find themselves becoming almost close.
Obtaining a visa has become possible following the Oslo Accord of 1993. On the world stage, this had been presented as a triumph of Western diplomacy, leading to Nobel Peace Prizes for the Palestinian and Israeli heads of state. On the ground, it was seen very differently. Despite the two states’ nominally equal status, there were still severe restrictions on travel for Palestinians. These and other truths are slowly introduced into the narrative as Nahr, still somewhat naïve, tends not to dig too deeply into why things have suddenly become more straightforward. Her family persuade her that she really should now press for the divorce that Mhammad wouldn’t contest, so she will travel to Palestine. I forget what strings her politically more astute brother pulls to get her a three-month visa, but he does. And it’s time, for this reader at least, for the most interesting section yet.
We find out more in Part IV, Palestine, than in any other single section. Abulhawa has a lot of ground to cover in getting both Nahr and the reader up to speed regarding the geopolitics, as one activist casually calls it. Nahr meets a cell of activists there, but it isn’t until she’s had a month of consciousness-raising from Mhammad’s rather attractive younger brother Bilal—yes, him at last—that he judges that she’s ready to join them. We see the realities of the Jewish settlements, falsely described as temporary by the Israelis, that spring up. These are on Palestinian land, including where Bilal works as a shepherd and lives in the remote family home with his mother. Nahr knows nothing about Bilal and his activism, except that he was forced to leave university, and can only continue in Palestine if he renounces any political activity.
But Abulhawa wants to keep it grounded in the lives of these people who she presents as ordinary, doing no more than going about their lives. I don’t think it matters that for me, she isn’t as good at this as she is at keeping the politics to the forefront of everything. It’s some time ago that I decided this book was worth reading because of what I would learn, but Abulhawa does her best to show that Nahr doesn’t simply represent ‘the refugee experience,’ or some other catch-all phrase. She has been given a family history, that her mother and grandmother brought with them as they fled when their part of Palestine was annexed. She has never really seen the point of dwelling on the past, just as she never saw her mother’s skills with the needle as in any way important…
…but she learns how it feels in a telling incident outside her the house her mother’s family lost. She is being driven around a restricted part of Palestine by one of Bilal’s friends—her visa allows this—and she stops at the house. She knows all about the trees planted for her mother and her siblings, and how they carved their names into the bark. There they stand in the garden and, impulsive as ever—did I mention that Nahr often acts before thinking first?—she enters, and starts to climb into the little tree she thinks was her mother’s. She picks some figs, and is shocked by the vehemence of the Jewish woman who raises the alarm that a filthy Palestinian (I’m paraphrasing) is stealing from her. This is the reality of what expulsion feels like, but Nahr isn’t dwelling on that. Instead, she beats the woman to the ground, and the driver is only just able to get her away before the police arrive. It’s lucky that it has fake plates, one of the perks of being in a resistance movement.
Over a longer period, in fact from the moment she arrives in Palestine, she has also been learning about a sense of belonging that she has never known before. She was too young ever to feel a sense of loss and, at first, has no sense of there being anything for her in Palestine. But she starts to get an inkling of what it means, from Bilal on their long walks and from his mother in the house. The old woman is blind, but her sense of belonging to this place, and to the family rooted in it, seems almost visceral. And that’s what Nahr learns over these weeks. Only familiar with a noisy urban life before now, she starts to feel the value in enjoying a land and its people for what they are.
Nahr is learning a lot about what, essentially, is a police state. Our understanding of how she is a woman put under all sorts of social and cultural pressures seems to fade into the background during these weeks as she talks to Bilal. She realises his life has been as badly affected as hers, in ways she is only just beginning to learn about. Over time, both he and, later, his fellow-activists, assume that the consciousness-raising is all one way. They seem to assume Nahr is a tabula rasa who can be persuaded to act on behalf of the cause. But, now that she understands that for a month they—including Bilal—have been testing that she really isn’t some kind of informer, she feels increasingly uncomfortable.
And the other thread, the experiences specifically of women in a time of upheaval, comes shockingly to a head. I feel that Abulhawa sees this as important a point as any other she makes in the novel, because she has Nahr make it, quite devastatingly, in perhaps the best set-piece scene so far. Nahr, already feeling like an outsider in Palestine—it’s a given in the refugee experience—refuses to participate in a highly dangerous gun-running expedition which, because of travel restrictions, nobody else can do. She feels betrayed that they have had her under surveillance, and isn’t ready for such a huge risk. Which is when the only other woman in the room, a steady, older-sister type, makes offhand comment about her ‘honour.’ Nahr is mortified that her reputation has preceded her, as though she can’t hide from her shame. But why should she feel shame at all? She turns it around on her hapless accuser in a magnificent (and, sure, rather implausible) tirade about the experience of refugee women. And it culminates in an uncomfortable, incontrovertible fact: ‘Some of us, Madam Honour, end up with little choice but to Fuck. For. Money.’
So if we begin to think, as I had been doing, that this is going to be a simple and inevitable path to Nahr’s radicalisation, Abulhawa wants us to see that things are never so simple. Nahr has always thought of Mhammad as the bad guy—but he had taken the rap for the shooting of some Israeli soldiers when the inexperienced Bilal opened fire on them in the forest. This news begins a kind of coda, when her visa has run out and she must leave Palestine. She hopes for a future reconciliation with Mhammad, now she understands both his sacrifice for Bilal and his determination not to deny his own homosexuality. Bilal seemed to be doing it for Mhammad, his brother, hoping to protect him.
26 March
V, Jordan, Again and most of VI, Palestine, Always
Nahr isn’t back in Jordan for long. The bureaucracy isn’t quick, but almost as soon as she can, she returns to Palestine. By this time, she’s realised there’s nothing left for her in the expatriate community she grew up in. After the two months or so that she had been away, her mother and grandmother seem transformed—one by the sense of purpose she achieves through a job managing a small enterprise (or something), and the other because her daughters are being nice to her. The title of the section is Money Softens the Heart, the money being an unexpected inheritance or some other rather implausible windfall the grandmother has received. The heart in the section title is the previously stony one shared by her daughters, who suddenly want to see much more of their mother. She still doesn’t like their company much, and refuses to live with them, but she loves the attention.
Meanwhile, for Nahr… nothing much. She is impressed that her brother’s new IT expertise seems to bring him enough work to live on, but she can’t help him with that. She misses everything about Palestine, especially Bilal, and she also realises that none of the family need her in the ways they used to. Abulhawa has arranged things so she can apply for a new visa with a clear conscience. She won’t be as free to roam as her visitor’s visa had allowed, but now she has residency…
…which is why the longest section in the book is Palestine, Always. Earlier, I had been musing on the idea of Nahr being a kind of Everywoman, but now Abulhawa goes much further than that. It seems that everybody Nahr knows in Palestine is Every-somebody, and everything is Every-something. Bilal isn’t just an activist, he and his friends are Every-activist, at the cutting edge of disruption. They aim to become a national focus of revolution, and that’s the way things go for them. The Israeli settlement encroaching upon the family land is every stealthy incursion in the country, the neighbours and their unshakeable solidarity are every Palestinian…. Everything about what Nahr encounters in their company—the proud sentimentality of their celebrations, the mutual respect, the food, the kindly, formulaic Islamic greetings—is a thumbnail of the Palestinian people.
What am I saying? Something like, it’s clearer than ever what was evident from the start. The novel is agenda-driven, Abulhawa’s main motive being to educate readers like me about what goes on in a world we are ignorant of. It’s the book’s strength—I haven’t changed my mind that it’s a real eye-opener—but it also leads to a weakness. I mentioned before that there’s something schematic about the characterisation, and the same might be said of the plot. I accidentally looked at the Acknowledgments, and realise that Abulhawa, aside from her early experiences and at least one long visit at the time of the second (I think) Intifada, has relied on the testimony of a lot of Palestinians. Through conversations and other contact made while she has been in the USA, she knows about a lot of real activities and events. Her own childhood matches Nahr’s, to an extent, and I’m sure she’s used as much autobiographical material as she can…. But she has a lot to pack into a single woman’s experience.
So there’s a lot of plot. We find out, because our little band of brothers and sisters are right in there, about gun smuggling. We also find out about the unreliability of the supply chain—most of the Russian weapons are useless. Particular activities—the making of crossbows, the irrigation fix that allows Bilal to retrieve water stolen by the Israelis and later poison their water—sound like anecdotes Abulhawa has picked up along the way. The shooting of a lovely shepherd they know is the kind of atrocity that no doubt took place, often in reprisal attacks disguised as self-defence. A well-hidden website and illicit communications hub, created and administered by Nahr’s brother Jehad (based in Jordan) is no doubt based on a real one. The family grove set alight at the end of a glorious, mutually supportive day of harvest—yes, I know—is, I’m sure, based on real events. Only its fortuitous rescue by torrential rain is implausible, the work of an author who couldn’t bear her characters’ pain.
There have to be back-stories to bring in different elements. A particularly elaborate one of these explains the debt Bilal owed to his brother Mhammad, and the true story of ‘Tamara.’ Bilal tells it to Nahr, at a time when they both realise how much they mean to each other. She can’t quite get over her suspicion of all men, and what on earth binds him to his brother Mhammad. His story kills several birds at once. When he was young, he had followed Mhammad and discovered him meeting his lover Tamara in the woods. Tamara, real name Itamar, is not only a man, but an officer in the Israeli army. He can see why they have kept it secret—a known dissident in an illegal gay relationship with an army man pushes Romeo and Juliet a long way into the shade. So when first some Palestinian activists and then some Israeli soldiers happen upon them, it gets messy. Bilal has to do something. He has a gun, so—what? I can’t remember the details, but a Palestinian and an Israeli soldier are dead. Did Bilal shoot the Palestinian to save his brother before the soldiers arrived? He then certainly shot at the soldiers….
Somehow, between them, they concoct a story in which a Palestinian had done the shooting (but not Mhammad), and the brave Tamara/Itamar had saved the day by shooting a Palestinian. One is a national hero, and one is a revolutionary hero…. Luckily, Mhammad avoids execution. Later, he is freed in an amnesty, and is exiled to Kuwait and meets Nahr, and… and the rest. It isn’t important, but Bilal’s radicalisation is. He had always admired his brother’s activism, and now had become known as an activist himself while Mhammad was in prison and then in exile. He is imprisoned, is forced to leave university, and has to live with his mother. He’ll be back in jail if he tries any of that dissidence nonsense again.
That was the past, but now it’s time for some present-day activity. Bilal and the others plan and execute enough high-profile acts of sabotage and protest for him to be imprisoned, again—he’d been in jail for eighteen months before being sent to his mother’s—and he isn’t released until a weeks-long hunger strike provokes international condemnation of how the Israelis are treating him. He’s outstripped his brother in terms of national hero status, but physically he’s almost broken by the time he reaches home. All of this also takes a toll on his mother. She’s suddenly looking old and frail, and the celebratory harvest that was supposed to heal everyone is sabotaged by that arson attack. She becomes ill, has a stroke and, in hospital, insists on going home to die.
Only the love between Bilal and Nahr makes their sadness bearable…. But can she stand the idea of sex any more? He’s so wonderful—did I mention how superhumanly considerate he is in every single way?—that on their wedding night he’s fine with the idea of them just lying next to each other in bed. Time to read to the end.
10th April
The last part of VI, and all of VII, Between Freedom—to the end
There aren’t many pages left by the time we’re near the end of Part VI, so we know Abulhawa has some deft wrapping-up to do. First, she has to get Nahr arrested, despite Balil’s best efforts to save her—he tells her that her grandmother is dead, so that she will accept the lift out of Palestine before all hell is let loose. She, like Bilal, had been planning for the biggest Intifada yet, and is reluctant to leave. But she does, and is arrested before she reaches the checkpoint. Then…
…we know. Torture, noise, sleeplessness, until everybody’s sick of it, the guards as much as she is. She doesn’t go quietly, defiantly singing and shrieking like a siren when she has the energy, quiet only when she is thoroughly exhausted or has a gag in her mouth. When she’s taken to court, she tries to hum through the gag she’s still wearing—her noise and non-cooperation is grist to the mill of Israeli justice—and she is condemned to the Cube. She doesn’t know yet how long she will be there but, in the first chapter or so of the short final section, she finds out that by the end it is sixteen years.
In the first chapter of Part VII, set as always in the Cube, she comes to understand that some political activity a million miles away has led to an unthinkable possibility. She is going to be freed. She has told her story—a sympathetic woman she met in the Cube some time ago collects up the ‘three thousand’ hand-written pages we have been reading—and, before the end of the chapter, she is being escorted out.
Abulhawa must have spoken to enough prisoners for the account of Nahr’s release and her subsequent sense of disorientation to seem all too plausible. Nahr is surprised, but not overwhelmingly interested, by the way that fashions and technology have moved on. She is unused to being with people, is well into her forties now, and her hair is grey. What on earth does life have to offer now in Jordan, where she will live with her mother? She knows that her grandmother had died some years after Balil’s well-intentioned white lie had failed to get her away fast enough, so she only has her mother and the aunts she has never liked.
It’s a slow process. The chapters headings, Week Two, Week Three, Weeks Four and Five, give an idea of it… but Abulwaha must feel that her hapless protagonist has suffered enough. Nahr already knows that Balil is alive, somewhere, and a figure from the past returns. She is able to spend time with a woman who, before the time in prison they had both spent, had been pulling what few strings she could to ease things for Nahr. Um Buraq was never really a mother figure for her in the way that Balil’s mother became in Palestine, but she was the most savvy of all of them. She is older and more frail when they meet again, and helps Nahr to start to come to terms with life in a place that no longer seems to offer anything. Um Buraq is good for Nahr, but she hasn’t very long to live, and what will Nahr have then?
Joy, that’s what. It’s the title of the final short chapter, and Abulhawa seems determined to put an end to the idea that Nahr will never again lead a full life. While she and Um-Buraq are in the bathhouse, a mysterious letter comes her way. It seems like a silly fairy-tale story, but then Nahr has an inspired thought. What if…?
Using an eyeliner, the only way she has of making a mark, she begins to decode the letter in the same way she decoded the note in the Cube in the first chapter. And she is eventually able to read it:
my … darling … wife … I … have … spent … these … years … trying … to … make … my … way … back … to … you … if … you … will … have … me … I … will … come … to … you … there … is … a … tree … in … the … valley … where … you … go … and … sit … tomorrow … I … will … leave … a … letter … under … a … rock … there … enshallah … we … will … meet … again … my … love.
‘I crumple on the bench, sweat and tears pouring down my face. I am overwhelmed by the possibility of seeing Bilal, electrified by the thought of him. Bilal is alive. Israel knew it all along. They’ve been trying to find him all these years. It’s why they made me their special prisoner. Why I got the Cube. Why they displayed me to the world. I was the bait then, and I still am. Um Buraq watches me knowingly. “It’s him, isn’t it?” she asks, but she can see the answer on my face.’
We’re in the final paragraph now, and it’s—what?—bittersweet. ‘I don’t know when and how I will see Bilal, though I know we can’t ever be together openly. I may never find a place in this world, but for now, in this moment, I feel the purest, most perfect joy.’
So what do I feel about it all? I’m really glad I read it, even though I don’t think I gauged immediately what it was really about. I always knew that I was going to learn a lot, and I’m happy with that. But there is always a question hanging in the air when a respected activist like Abulhawa turns to fiction. Why do it? It answers itself in one way—it’s the only way that comfortable Westerners like me are going to get involved in the experiences of people like Nahr and Balil. But the answer isn’t a no-brainer. Without the urgent issues at the heart of it, this novel is nothing. I have attended a group discussion of it, and all we really talked about was what we had learned. For me, this meant that the further I read, the less interested I was in the plot and characters. Reading it became something of a duty, and I’m sure this comes across in what I’ve written.
But the fact remains that it’s an urgent and important novel. Everybody should read it.
We can read it for you wholesale 