70. Things I Left Behind | Shada Mustafa
translated from the arabic by nancy roberts
I am looking for a home. Not a house, but a ‘home’, somewhere, or someone to belong to. I have a house, but not a ‘home’.
Translated from the Arabic by Nancy Roberts1, Shada Mustafa’s debut novel was shortlisted for the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Young Author.
This is the story of two Palestinian sisters, the imprisonment of their father in an Israeli jail, the divorce of their parents and the difficulties of crossing through the checkpoint to travel between homes (the Qalandia checkpoint23). Mustafa doesn’t address the occupation directly, but uses words and phrases such as “occupation”, “checkpoints”, “occupation authorities”, and “occupation prison” within the novel, and they form the background to the narrative. At its heart, this is a story of a young girl struggling with her parent’s divorce but added to that, the unnecessary obstacles imposed by the Israeli occupation.
“We talk about the complexities of the political, historical and legal problems with Israeli occupation of Palestine. But what about ‘small’ family issues, children who pass through checkpoints, and fathers who come home from Israeli prisons?
How do they fare?
How does the cause impact them?
How do they pack their tragedies into suitcases to try to leave them behind?
Do they succeed in actually leaving them behind?”
"Sometimes I wonder how the Palestinian cause relates to individual people's lives or the life of a family. Where does it fall on the scale? Which carries greater weight? The person, or the cause? I want to care about the cause , but I can't. All I can think about when somebody talks about the Palestinian cause is the fact that it stole my dad from me. I keep going back in time and thinking: If he hadn't gone to prison, would he and my mom have gotten divorced? Would I be able to look at my dad now and not find mountains between us? If it weren't for the cause, migth I have a father I loved, and who loved me? Would I have a happy family? And then I think: Which is more important? The human being, or the cause?"
some other things:
🍉 qalandia 2067 by wafa hourani
Nancy Roberts is an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction into English. Roberts has translated a number of fiction works by Egyptian authors, including The Mirageby Naguib Mahfouz, Salwa Bakr's The Man from Bashmour, (commended for the 2008 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation), Mohamed el-Bisatie's Over the Bridge and Hala El-Badry's Muntaha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalandia_checkpoint
I have this on my shelf - did you enjoy reading it? xx