Against the Loveless World
Winner of the Palestine Book Award
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them.
The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist, and a whore; some might call her a revolutionary, or a hero. But the truth is, Nahr has always been many things, and had many names.
She was named for the river her pregnant mother crossed when she fled from Palestine, but her feckless father called her Yaqoot, Ruby. For a time when she came of age she was Almas, Diamond, a girl who went to hidden parties in Kuwait with powerful men, who sold off parts of herself to keep her family together. She was a girl who learned, early and painfully, that when you are a second class citizen love is a kind of desperation; she learned, above all else, to survive.
She was a girl who went to Palestine in the wrong shoes, and without looking for it found what she had always lacked in the basement of a battered beauty parlour: purpose, politics, friends. She found a dark-eyed man called Bilal, who taught her to resist; who tried to save her when it was already too late.
Nahr sits in the Cube, and tells her story to Bilal. Bilal, who isn't there; Bilal, who may not even be alive, but who is her only reason to get out.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Abulhawa (The Blue Between Sky and Water) charts a Palestinian woman's gradual turn to sex work followed by violent resistance against Israeli settlers in this tragic and engrossing work. Middle-aged Nahr, the narrator, is in solitary confinement at an Israeli prison, where she recounts her life story. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian exiles in 1967 and named Yaqoot after her father's mistress, Nahr grows up with her mother, brother Jehad, and overbearing paternal grandmother. In 1985, she marries the gruff Mhammad, who abandons her two years later. Shortly after, Nahr meets a woman at a friend's wedding, who manipulates her into prostitution, which Nahr continues doing to help finance Jehad's education. When anti-Palestinian sentiment ramps up following the expulsion of the invading Iraqis in 1991, Jehad is arrested and tortured for collaboration, and the family flees to Jordan. The 1995 Oslo Accords allow Nahr to travel to Palestine and secure a divorce from Mhammad, and there she witnesses the injustices levied against Palestinians and joins in escalating acts of resistance until the eruption of the Second Intifada leads to serious danger. Abulhawa demonstrates the effect of trauma and helplessness on Nahr and others, leading them to violence. The detailed explorations of a woman's pain and desperate measures make this lush story stand out.
