The Hindu Business Line

The story begins in 1941, and Abulhawa grabs your attention from Line 1. “In a distant time, before history marched over the hills and shattered present and future, before wind grabbed the land at one corner and shook it of its name and character, before Amal was born, a small village east of Haifa lived quietly on figs and olives, open frontiers and sunshine.”

But soon the world of plentiful harvests and abundant, juicy olives is shattered. By 1948 there is talk of establishment of a Jewish State in the region and the young Hasan seeks his Jewish friend Ari’s views on it. Responds Ari: “I think it’s wrong. But you don’t know what it was like before (during the holocaust). It killed us… have you ever noticed how empty my mother’s eyes are?”

As Ari struggles to explain what Europe did to the Jews in the Nazi era, Hasan intervenes: “exactly Ari. What Europe did. Not the Arabs. Jews have always lived here. That’s why so many more are here now. While we believed they were simply seeking refuge, poor souls, they’ve been amassing weapons to drive us from our homes.”

Soon enough Hasan’s family is driven out of home, but in the melee his younger son Ismael is snatched out of Dalia’s arms by Moshe, an Israeli soldier, whose wife was spared in the holocaust as she had to serve the sexual needs of the SS. She can’t bear a child, and Moshe asks himself angrily why the Arab woman should have two while his Jolanta can’t have even one.

After losing Ismael, Dalia is never the same, and little Amal, who is born later, faces the brunt of the pain, blame and emptiness that rule Dalia’s world after losing Ismael, who grows up as David in his new home, never losing the distinct scar he had got as a baby.

As a life of searches and checkposts, harassment and retaliation begins for the Palestinians, Amal’s elder brother, Yousef, who is held captive by the Israelis, has a confrontation with David at a checkpost. David is furious at fellow-soldiers making fun of his resemblance to the “bloody Arab”, and beats him almost to pulp.

As the resistance starts Yousef enrols and goes away from home, leaving behind a letter for Amal, explaining why he is breaking the promise he had made their father that he would always take care of her. “They’ve taken everything Amal. And still they take more. I can’t sit by and watch helplessly any longer… forgive me for leaving. I’m going to fight. It’s my only choice.

They’ve scripted lives for us that are but extended death sentences, a living death. I won’t live their script.”

Through Yousef’s refusal to lead “an eternal refugee’s life of subjugation and shackles”, the author gives us a quintessential sketch of the angry, defiant and frustrated Palestinian youth who find little choice but to pick up arms. Outmanoeuvred and outnumbered by the might of the Israeli army, they choose the path of militant confrontation… of bombs and blasts… a path where neighbouring Islamic countries play roles of both support and treacherous betrayal.

After losing her mother, Amal lands in an orphanage in Jerusalem, gets an education in the US but keeps returning to Jenin where she finds love. But tragedy is always a step behind. Just like Khalid Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mornings in Jenin is a heartrending story of the devastation that conflicts and wars wreak on the lives of women. The men pick up weapons and either kill or get killed, but it is the women who die repeatedly as unimaginable horror and violence rip through their lives.

An excellent and powerful book on the misery, trauma, heartbreak and hopelessness that dominate the Palestinian camp related through the eyes, hearts, tears and screams of women.

Read it for an excellent narrative of the history and the beginning of the crisis in the West Bank. And find yourself asking, along with Yousef, why the Arabs (Palestinians) are made to pay the price for the horrors suffered by the Jews in the holocaust unleashed on them by Germany and most of Europe.

Woven into the narrative are real incidents, such as the raid by Ariel Sharon’s army, in defiance of an existing ceasefire, of the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Abulhawa quotes from an article by the veteran West Asian correspondent Robert Fisk, who along with other western journalists, was given access to the Shatila camp two days after the carnage. He writes: “They were everywhere, in the roads, the laneways, in the backyards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses — women, young men, babies and grandparents — lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine gunned to death.”

Luckily, despite such horror stories, the book doesn’t paint all Israelis black. Watching the unfolding events, Moshe reflects that “he had not wanted all this. He had wanted wholeness: a home, a wife, a family. He had fought to save the Jewish people. But at the heels now were the awful evictions, the killings, the rapes.”