Middle East Eye
When Nahr, the thirty-something Palestinian protagonist of Susan Abulhawa’s new novel Against the Loveless World, is tried in an Israeli court, the trial is conducted entirely in Hebrew; Nahr doesn’t find out until she’s in jail what the nature of her alleged crime is.
As the trial takes place near the end of the book, the reader is already sufficiently acquainted with Nahr’s individualistic personality - and the pleasure she derives in throwing Israelis in particular for a loop by behaving in unconventional fashion - that her comportment in the courtroom doesn’t come as a great shock. She launches into a medley of Arabic songs, hoping to make her husband Bilal - himself a frequent prisoner of Israel and a model of defiance - proud, wherever he is:
"I started with ‘Yumma Mweil elHawa,’ to set the mood. The judge admonished me. I waited a while, then sang every Abdel Halim Hafez song I could think of. ‘El Hawa Hawaya’ followed by my favorite, ‘Qariatol Fingan.’ The judge was baffled, then irate, yelling at me, at the prosecutors, lawyers, bailiffs. She ordered the guards to silence me."
As she sings, Nahr - the first-person narrator of the book - summarises the function of her performance for the reader: “I colonised the coloniser’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.”
It turns out that Nahr’s words are fitting beyond the immediate context, as Against the Loveless World itself constitutes a defiance of colonising narratives and a reclaiming of Palestinian space - by both Abulhawa and her characters.
A Palestinian-American writer, human rights activist and biologist, Abulhawa hails from Jerusalem and currently resides in Pennsylvania. She is the author of several books, including The Blue Between Sky and Water and her acclaimed first novel, Mornings in Jenin - about various generations of a Palestinian refugee family - which has been published in more than 30 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide. Abulhawa is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an organisation that builds recreational spaces for children under Israeli occupation.
From her writings and public appearances, Abulhawa seems - much as the fictional Nahr does - as someone who doesn’t take nonsense from anyone, regardless of the effects on personal reputation or career. Case in point: some years ago she publicly took on Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School’s former resident cheerleader for Israeli war crimes, at the Boston Book Festival in 2010, calmly and collectedly tearing him and his arguments to pieces. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.
