Bashir Abu-Manneh
The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
“A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere; in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to . . . use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace . . . with life.”1 Is this dream of the great Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, to be understood as merely that — a utopian dream? Or can fictitious worlds move us towards the realization of material improvements in human life by means of testimony to suffering and inequality and by inscribing a vision of change and hope? Certainly the writers discussed by Bashir Abu-Manneh in The Palestinian Novel respond to such questions in the affirmative.
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