Novel
Wild Thorns
الصبار
Sahar Khalifeh · 1976
Synopsis
Usama returns from the Gulf to Nablus, in the occupied West Bank, by way of the Allenby Bridge and its interrogations, charged by the resistance based outside with stepping up the struggle. He finds his cousin Adil, who has left the family farm to work in Israeli factories, without his father's knowledge, in order to feed a large family. Endless quarrels arise between the two men, and Usama discovers that each endures the occupation in his own way, between courage, cowardice and compromise.
Context
Published in 1976 in Jerusalem by Galileo, the novel was translated into French as early as 1978 by Catherine Lévy and Jamel-Eddine Bencheikh, for Gallimard, then into English in 1985 by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. Emile Habibi reproached it for softening the image of the occupier and passing over the harshness of work in Israel; the author replied that the poverty of the West Bank drove workers towards these jobs. The novel had a sequel, Abbad al-shams, in 1980.
Who it is for
For reading daily life under occupation, through the rifts within a family of Nablus.
Prizes and reception
Nasreen Rehman, in Dawn in 2024, hails the burning clarity with which the author writes the occupation.
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