A tug at the heart

I really don’t want to review this book. Not because I don’t like it, but because I want to savour it in my mind and heart for the sheer experience of reading it. Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin is a story which makes the reader live through the horrific uprooting of Palestinians from their homeland by Israel, pegging it in an authentically researched historicity, but also twisting the gut of the reader’s being with a narrative that evokes in all humanity the step by step dehumanisation of a people.

The Abulheja clan living in idyllic Ein Hod is forced to flee to live the rest of their tortured lives like refugees in Jenin. Dalia, a feisty Beduoin girl, Hasan’s wife, has one of her twins, Ismael, snatched from her while they flee to presumed safety. The story changes its course, becomes an interplay of complex layers of loss, death, destruction, rootlessness, immeasurable pain, mutilated bodies and spirits, as the conflict between Israel and Arabs intensifies. Amal is born to Dalia and from this point onwards, she narrates the story through her eyes. Hasan reads to his daughter at dawn break and each morning is special, steeped in the smoke of honey apple tobacco. Verses from Rumi and Gibran sink into her psyche along with her father’s larger-than-life heroic grain and texture.

The book works as a travelogue, a sort of an epic journey through the ages while Amal grows up with her childhood friend Huda, surviving 1948, “the year … Palestine fell from the calendar into exile” and then being scarred for life while living through the six-day war in 1967, trapped in a kitchen hole with the “odor of burning flesh, fermenting garbage, and scorched foliage mixed with the smell of our own excrement in the dust”. From then on, this was every characters story, each one going through his own set of experiences but as a “single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one’s humanity… of being left without rights, home, or nation while the world turned its back to watch or cheer the jubilation of the usurpers proclaiming a new state they called Israel.”

Dalia steels herself and though she loves Amal as a daughter, she withdraws into a self imposed exile, living her life in an abyss of loss, isolating herself from the present and holding on to eternal past – a past where she grew roses and had not lost her son Ismael who was now, unknown to all, being raised as a Jew and would fight against his own blood, Yousef. She had willed herself to believe in one firm diktat, “Whatever you feel, keep it inside.” Amal grew up on this. The PLO was formed under Yasser Arafat in 1967 and Yousef joined in to fight the Battle of Karameh and is always in the thick of skirmish. A chance meeting with David (Ismael) leaves in Yousef a hope that his twin will return one day. Amal moves to an orphanage cum college to finish her education and on to the US on a scholarship.

Not for a single second does the struggle and living hell of the Palestinians leave her and it continues to dot her life. Yousef does marry Fatima and finds in Majid, a groom for his precious sister, Amal. For a moment’s relief in the hectic grievous pace of the plot, there is some relief, some joy which the reader lives with Majid and Amal. From generation to generation, the tragedy of perpetual fleeing, of death and loss is bequeathed as inheritance. Amal’s daughter Sara must also live with it.

The book leaves the reader sorrowful but yet not wanting to turn the last page. The prose is lyrical, fluid with human emotion conveyed with a turn of phrase which tugs straight at the arteries of the heart, making it thump with their heart beats, rising and falling with their joy and grief. Abulhawa’s characters, from Hasan to Dalia, to Haj Salem are bold daring sketches etched by her in sharp, sweeping and definitive lines. There’s isn’t a single character, including Yousef, Amal’s brother, Huda, Fatima, Yousef’s lover, who isn’t palpably real, vibrant in their joys and heart wrenchingly grieving in their sorrows. They learn to endure, find freedom in martyrdom because that is the only way they find air to breathe.