DREAMS OF AYN ARA, never to forgive! never to forget!

DREAMS OF AYN ARA
SARA ABOU GHAZAL (tr. Katharine Halls)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Stockholm, Zein al-Abedin shivers, far from the warmth of simmering revolt years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his father’s phone calls and dousing his desire for Bassam back in Lebanon. Salwa, refusing to leave Beirut for Sweden, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine.

Invoking the long wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, Sara Abou Ghazal webs the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family. At every turn, Ayn Ara disrupts their otherwise “normal” days in new terrains through memory, pain, and strange magic—culminating with a journey into both the past and a parallel present of Zionist settler violence.

Be it through a ghostly return to the brutal event of the Nakba, or grandmother Nijmeh’s psychic drift from land to no-land and back, Dreams of Ayn Ara portrays time as a false phenomenon for people ripped from their rightful place—and points to fissures in the fragile reality that denies Palestine to Palestinians.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Chilling, sobering, appalling, revolting.

Under 150pp telling most of a hundred years of historical dispossession, repression, genocide sounds...and is...ambitious, requiring time-jumps and dreaming visitations and other such narrative flummery that distracts from the core of the story: My home was forcibly taken from me. I do not have access to my family's source of identity. I live in a world without my roots, epiphytically resting on the place I am without a way to reach into it and root myself in welcoming soil.

It is ever and always the problem of the Othered. It is the reason ghettos exist, for the inhabitants; the sounds and smells of home plopped atop foreign soil. For the foreign-soil owners, it's crowd control, easy honeytrapping concentration without the bad optics of the word "camp." Not like this Palestinian family in these pages escaped the spaces where the word "camp" was le mot juste for what they were confined to. It's appalling that those confining them there were themselves the survivors or children of survivors of the same treatment....

Stories like this are proof that generational trauma is real. Damage done in malice survives and thrives and metastasizes and entumors its poisons like the body does when protecting itself. Stories like this are the pearl versions of the tumor-forming process, wrapping severed bits of essence in layer upon layer of nacreous story.

It's not long, it's not exhaustively researched and fact-checked. It's the living memory of a family victimized to redress wrongs done by others, done to strangers, and made into their problem by colonizers. Tale as old as time, then.