The other day at the Boston Book Festival, novelist Susan Abulhawa did what few have achieved over the years, and reduced Alan Dershowitz to a small pile of feathers. She did so by sticking to the truth of her own experience, keeping calm under his assaults, pointing out the infantile character of his insults, and even twitting him for his constant interruptions. He must be afraid of what I have to say, she said. And just what did she have to say? Abulhawa, the author of Mornings in Jenin, recounted the ordeal of the occupation in a forthright manner. Here are the author’s opening remarks at that discussion:
In his Nobel prize acceptance speech, John Steinbeck said, “literature grows from the human need for it”. Reflecting on another Nobel before him, he said that William Faulkner, more than most men, knew that the understanding and resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.
Ultimately, this is the underlying motivation for writing Mornings in Jenin. To me, literature is a place where we can all meet to rediscover our common humanity. And this becomes more critical when it involves a people, like the Palestinians, who are so demonized and dehumanized in this country, that few even think of us as anything more than a collection of miscellaneous crazy, irrational Arabs.
In truth, I come from an ancient people who are native to Palestine, who had lived in that land and cultivated it for centuries, if not millennia. We are Muslim, we are Christian, and we are Jewish. Some of us, as Mr Dershowitz points out in his book, are atheist Marxists. The Palestinian culture from which I come is beautiful, rich, intricate and complicated. It is a hospitable, generous, and distinct society, with its own unique dialect, food, traditions, and clothing. Like every society, we have our scoundrels and our saints; our immoral and moral; our mothers, spinsters, gossips, and whores; our violent and our pacifists; we have our thugs and loafers as we do our artists, dancers, writers, and musicians. We have children, whom we love and adore and for whom we wish to create a decent life.
This is the reality I know, that I wanted to convey through Mornings in Jenin. And this reality is incomplete without the reality that we are a people who are slowly being wiped off the map. A people who have and continue to be systematically expelled to be replaced; who live under one of the cruelest military occupations in the world. This is the reality that has mostly been written about Palestinians. And these narratives exist mostly in the realm of history texts – Like those by Israeli historians like Benny Morris and Illan Pappe, whose books I used as resources in my research for Mornings in Jenin. It’s the reality that continues to be featured in human rights reports, UN Resolutions, and UN investigations. Some of these are even quoted in Mornings in Jenin.
But a novel goes beyond these non-fiction narratives. It is where we can find each other in the fullness of our humanity, in both its wretched and noble manifestations. And so, Mornings in Jenin is a story for anyone who wants to know what the creation and ongoing expansion of Israel has meant to the native Palestinians.
I conceived of this novel when a massacre occurred in the refugee camp of Jenin; and so, part of this book was inspired by the people of that camp and the stories that emerged from there in April of 2002.
As far as how much of this is autobiographical, I think for a story to be authentic, a writer can only really write what he or she understand not just on an intellectual level, but also on a visceral level. At least that is what I find is true for me. I don’t think that necessarily means that a writer would have to have lived the experiences that he or she writes about, but it does mean that we are or become wholly attached to our characters; I think it is important that we understand and/or love our characters and even more necessary, that we do not judge them or judge their actions. Or to ascribe artificial motivations to their actions that might be self-serving to the writer. This pre-requisite attachment to our characters and the visceral understanding of them, I think is what gives some narratives an inherent authority.
That said, while there are certainly some parallels between my life and that life of Amal, the main character, particularly her coming to the US and becoming a single mother of a daughter, she is still very separate from me as all the characters are separate from both myself and each other. There is, however, one chapter in the book that is entirely autobiographical. The chapter is called The Orphanage. I put the lead character, Amal, into my life for the three years that I spent in an orphanage for girls in East Jerusalem. This institution, by the way, was established by a wealthy Palestinian heiress from one of the oldest and most prominent Jerusalem families – The Husseinis, to whom so many of us girls in that orphanage owe a debt of gratitude.
This brings me to another important point about the role of literature and writers in depicting conflict, whether it is overt conflict among people or internal conflicts of the heart. I believe that a writer’s first and foremost loyalty should be to the characters. To tell their story with intellectual and emotional honesty because the reader deserves to be able to trust the author, even if what they are reading is a work of fiction. The truth of a character’s heart might not reconcile with the truth of another character or even with the reader. That does not make it less worthy of telling. Novels, by definition, are meant to narrate a story; and all stories are told through the subjective lens of each person’s experiences. Separate from this, however, are current and historical facts. Although it may be inevitable that a writer might take liberties with some small or insignificant facts, like location, names of places, or names of people, I think a writer has a moral and ethical duty to present the larger facts of a conflict unblemished where they might arise in the backdrop or plot of a novel. Finally, and hopefully, a novel is told with an artistry unique to each writer, which provides a loftiness of language, and a human heartbeat to the story – these are things, in my opinion, that distinguish literature from other forms of writing, such that not all fiction can be considered literature, and not all literature is necessarily fiction.
Writing this novel has been a tremendous journey for me. One of the most satisfying rewards has been letters that I’ve received from readers of all walks of life and from all over the world in which they tell me how much this novel has impacted them. In most instances they relate to me Mornings in Jenin has opened their eyes and hearts and spurred them to do their own research – something I wholeheartedly encourage. I’m grateful and humbled by the reviews, which have mostly been laudatory. I’m also grateful for some of the criticisms, as they are also important and enlightening. There has been, however, one criticism that I’ve heard from a few readers, which I do not accept, nor respect. And it is that this novel is one-sided, as if such a criticism has any validity in a novel. As Palestinians, we are facing our own extinction. It is our right to claim our own space in literature. After multiple mass expulsions and persistent confiscation of properties, home demolitions, evictions, the building of illegal settlements and bypass roads, what remains to us now are isolated Bantustans, which comprised less than 12% of our historic homeland.
And in those small Bantustans, the well-documented grinding and systematic oppression, humiliation, and daily violence against us – what the UN Commission for Human Rights described as “grave breaches of the 4th Geneva Convention by Israel in the Occupied Arab Territories constitute war crimes and an affront to humanity”. This occupation is what spurred the moral icon of our time, Nelson Mandela to declare that “We know too well, that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. He made this statement in the same spirit that individuals, prominent and otherwise, organizations, churches, labor unions, municipalities, students, academics, artists and more who have joined the call to boycott and divest from Israel until it complies with international law and basic human rights. These are people of conscience. They include Christians, Muslims, Jews, Athiests, Agnostics, Buhdists, and Hindus. They include Nobel laureates and housewives; artists and writers and computer programmers. Holocaust survivors, intellectuals, European members of parliament and army colonels. They include young Israeli men and women who refuse to serve in Israel’s military in order to “expel, starve, and humiliate and entire people”. And they include veteran Israeli soldiers, who have been spurred by their conscience to speak out, forming a group called “Breaking the Silence” where they detail the crimes they committed or witnessed. All of these put themselves at great risk to speak out against this grave injustice – this ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide. Because what Israel has and continues to do to our society is contrary to nearly all tenets of international law, human rights, and basic human decency. I believe it is also contrary to the fundamental teachings of Judaism, which I know to be noble.
Jews are an important part of our history – not just our Palestinian history and heritage, but the history and heritage of every part of the middle east, including Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and even Iran. The middle east was the one place on earth where people of all three monotheistic religions lived in Harmony. I look forward to the day when the goal is to return to that ideal of pluralism, multi-culturalism, which had always been a reality in Palestine before we were expelled; our homes, history, and heritage usurped. Throughout history, writers, artists and musicians – from Thomas Paine, to Breyten Breytenbach, to Gil Scott Heron and Bob Marley – have always played important roles in struggles for justice, for the endless struggle we continue to wage as human beings throughout the world to implement the concept of equity and lives of dignity for us all. I hope that Mornings in Jenin plays a role, however small, to help bring about understanding that leads to justice. Because, the path to peace is only ever through justice. To quote a letter to Israel from the acclaimed South African writer Breyten Breytenbach, “There can be no way to peace through the annihilation of the other, just as there is no paradise for the martyr.”
In closing, I would like to address all the readers who have written such lovely letters to me, whether privately or through the guestbook on the book website; and to my countrymen in Palestine and Israel, I leave you with these words from a work of literature that is certainly Non-Fiction, called The Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela:
“There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.”
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling , but in rising every time we fall.”
