Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa, is the story of one Palestinian family over four generations. It can be argued, however, that it is also a story about any and every Palestinian family. The novel begins in the picturesque village of Ein Hod in the north of Palestine. The Abulheja family leads the simple life that most Palestinian farmers led before their tragic dispossession in 1948. Love was plentiful in Ein Hod. Love for life, for family, for God, and for the land. This was the essence of a farming society for generation upon generation.
The Abulhejas and their countrymen are forced out of their villages and homes only to find refuge in foreign towns and lands. They find themselves in a refugee camp in Jenin, their lives totally turned upside-down after losing everything they knew in their simple but beautiful, Palestinian village.
As they struggle in the refugee camp, in the early period after their exile, olive harvest season approaches. Haj Yehya, the family's patriarch, sneaks across the armistice line to tend to his olive groves despite the threat of death from an Israeli bullet. When he returns to the camp in Jenin where his family anxiously waits, he brings them the fruits of his labor, and the labor of generations before him, plucked from their trees in their village. Nothing could stop this old man from returning to his village, but on his next trip, he never made it back to Jenin.
That was the last time any Abulheja attempted to return, but the dreams of return only grew stronger. Amal, with a long vowel (a name meaning "hopes" in Arabic), was born in the refugee camp of Jenin to Haj Yehya's son Hasan. Her older brother, Yousef, spent his early years in Ein Hod before the Nakba. Another older brother, Ismael, was taken from his mother's arms during the exodus from Ein Hod. It would be through Amal's eyes, however, that the family's story is told.
Susan Abulhawa's masterful writing is delightful to read. She writes with an element of metaphor, undoubtedly owing its origins to the Arabic language, which brings color and feeling to every page of this novel. The characters are well-developed and one cannot help but grow attached to them. After each tragedy, be it 1948, 1967, and 1982, a new generation of the family is born, providing hope not only for the characters, but also for the reader who will inevitably experience a sense of depression in parts of the book.
Amal is born into refugee life. She grows up in the shadow of a mother that was devastated by the loss of a child. In 1967, Amal experiences 6 days of horror in a hole in the ground that will forever change her family's life. The father that read poetry to her in the early hours of the morning, the scenes that lend the book its title, is never seen again. Her mother slips into dementia, and her brother Yousef will soon leave to join the resistance.
She grows up away from Jenin, and seeks an education in the United States. Her father's wish was that she be educated and a scholarship makes this possible. In her ghorba (life away from home) Amal experiences western life and the contradictions it poses for Palestinians like herself. She will eventually travel to a refugee camp in Lebanon to reconnect with her brother. In Lebanon, she remembers her past, her love for the land and her family, and starts a family of her own. And just as stability seems to be coming back to her life, anchored by the cornerstone of family, tragedy strikes again. The massacres at Sabra and Shatila will devastate the Abulhejas in 1982, just as 1967 devastated them in Jenin, just as 1948 devastated them in Ein Hod.
Amal raises her daughter, Sara, as a single mother. She wants her to have nothing to do with Palestine, politics, and the wars that scared Amal literally and figuratively for decades. But a twist of fate, which brings Amal's long-lost brother back into her life, sparks an interest in Sara who is now old enough to start hearing about the secrets of her mother's past.
Ultimately it will be Sara, and her generation, which will carry the hopes of Palestine and Palestinians after Amal is gone.
Mornings in Jenin is a must read. It is sure to be an eye opening experience for those who know little about Palestine and an eye-watering experience for those who do. Abulhawa's style is magnificent, descriptive and passionate. While the story is fictional, it is built on entirely plausible circumstances and entirely factual events and places.
Many have waited for a literary contribution capable of explaining the Palestinian experience to the West. The wait is over, Mornings in Jenin is it.
Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Center. This book review may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the Center.
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Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.Highlighted by 324 Kindle readers- “No one can own a tree,” he continued. “It can belong to you, as you can belong to it. We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her.”Highlighted by 264 Kindle readers
- The irony, which sank its bitter fangs into my mind, was that Mama, the mother who gave birth to David, also survived a slaughter that claimed nearly her entire family. Only the latter occurred because of the former, underscoring for me the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust. Jews killed my mother’s family because Germans had killed Jolanta’s.Highlighted by 227 Kindle readers
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This multigenerational historical fiction starts with Israel invading Ein Hod, a small town in Palestine. People are forced to seek refuge in Jenin camps after losing their homes in the Nakba to zionists. Amal is born to Dalia and Hasan in the refugee camp, and she fails to understand why her mother is dead inside even when she is alive. As Amal grows, she realises her father, a man filled with compassion, love and happiness, also hides arms in their kitchen to protect her family. As the atrocities by the IDF intensify day by day, her family shatters away. Her brother Yousuf leaves for Lebanon as the leader of PLO while she makes it to the UN-funded school for orphaned Palestinians. Their destinies bind them back to Jenin as David (Ismael), their long-lost brother taken away by a Jewish soldier, returns home after learning his history.
I can't believe that as I read this book and try to review it, millions of Palestinians are living its horror in real-time. What destroyed me more than the book was the realisation that it took me an escalation of genocide to notice that such books existed all along, and I had never known about them. This book talks of the pain and anger of living as a refugee in your own land, watching it being taken away by intruders, living through multiple bombings to see your near-and-dear ones dead and destroyed, and being called a terrorist for resisting and fighting back and above all calling the oppressor 'a victim'.
One can't turn deaf to the cry of Palestinians - their homes ravaged, their skulls dented, their abdomens split open to kill the fetuses that weren't assured of safety. It's hard not to notice their sorrows, pain, rage, and, above all, their strength and resilience. Even amidst all this, their hearts are full of love and patience, and I loved those beautiful moments filled with hope in the book. Even as a few helpless Jewish friends watched their Palestinian friends fall, the history they shared in the same land stood tall against the evil. Their love for the homeland binding them together even when faced with oppression is sure to sweep the readers away.
Like Khaled Hosseini's 'The Thousand Splendid Suns', the sorrow and rage in this book were so palpable that it left me fuming. It shook me how the people of Palestine were anaesthetised to bombings and cruel murders that they accepted them as a part of their daily lives. From this book, it was clear that, indeed, they murdered them all and buried them in their headlines.
With the current situation in Gaza and the West Bank, this book is a must-read to understand what goes behind these people's history and strengths in the face of terror. I cannot recommend this book enough.
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