Pay No Heed to the Rockets
Life in Contemporary Palestine
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"With humility, respect, and great sensitivity, he seeks out writers, people skilled at telling stories, and asks them to narrate their own situations. The result is a document that captures not only the manifold sorrows and injustices of Palestinian life but something of its beauty, its joys, and its yearning." —Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring
Taking the long route through the West Bank, into Jerusalem, across Israel, and finally into Gaza, Marcello Di Cintio meets with Palestinian poets, authors, librarians, and booksellers to learn about Palestine through their eyes. Pay No Heed to the Rockets offers a look at life in contemporary Palestine through the lens of its literary culture, one that begins with art rather than with war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Di Cintio (Walls: Travels Along the Barricades) offers a powerful and perceptive reflection on Palestinian culture in a memoir that mixes travelogue and literary appreciation. He is surprised to travel through Israel and the occupied territories and discover so many "brokers of beauty": poets, playwrights, and novelists producing stories of growing up, falling in love, disapproving parents, having conflicts over religion, and breaking rigid gender roles. Di Cintio writes, "The women of Gaza write themselves a life on the page that Gaza itself denies them." Di Cintio also explores the works of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and dives into caf culture, interviewing a new generation of writers who discuss over coffee and shisha, or hookah, their nuanced feelings about occupation, cross-generational trauma, the burdens of history, and their insistence on writing works that privilege storytelling over revolutionary rhetoric. Di Cintio's prose is wonderfully descriptive, whether portraying libraries and bookstores dedicated to preserving and promoting a cultural history threatened with elimination or recounting stories of novels being written in prison on cigarette wrappers. This is a refreshing and hopeful reminder that on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are countless people who wish to live their lives free of the hatred borne of geopolitical conflict.
