Wild Thorns
By Sahar Khalifeh
Translated by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea Saqi Books
ISBN: 978-0863569869
208pp.

Last month, London-based Saqi Publishers re-released the English translation of the Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh’s novel Wild Thorns (Al Subar), first published in Arabic in 1974. The new edition comes with a compelling introduction by Mohammed Hanif, the Pakistani novelist, journalist, screenwriter and essayist.

Like Khalifeh’s, the protagonist Usama Al-Karmi’s world is fired by anger and tempered by hope in a crucible of loss and resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine: its contingent violence, defines the humiliation, and the abiding indignity of no citizenship and no sovereignty in a once “green and beautiful land” that is the Palestinians’ home.

Born in 1941 under the so-called British Mandate in Nablus, Khalifeh’s writing resonates with one question: is there any hope of deliverance from the Occupation?

She was seven years old when 56 percent of Palestine was wrested from the Palestinians for the new Jewish state of Israel. Khalifeh lived through the Nakba (catastrophe), where Israeli militias drove out over 750,000 Palestinians — nearly half the Arab Palestinian population.

A re-release of the English translation of a 1974 Palestinian novel is a stark reminder of the brutality of the Israeli occupation and the courageous resistance to it

She has said in an interview that her characters can and do vary, “…but as for the landscape, there is no difference. It is always Palestine, Palestine under occupation. Whether this occupation is British or Israeli, it is all the same, same atrocities, the same cruelty and the same rebellions and revolutions.” She adds that she “remains obsessed with the occupation… I live it.”

In Khalifeh’s novel My First and Only Love (Hubbi al-Awal), first published in Arabic in 2010, the protagonist Nidal recounts her life from the early 1940s, first under occupation by the British followed by Israel in 1947, and her return as an artist (after long years in exile) to Nablus under Israeli Occupation.

It is not a fiction that while any Jewish person can enter Palestine under an imagined ‘right-to-return’ to a so-called God-given homeland — systematically fed by Zionism since 1897 and violently asserted in Israel — to return home, Palestinians must have a permit.

In Wild Thorns, Usama has applied to the Family Reunion Program. While he is being interrogated, he can hear a woman scream and cry out as she is subjected to an invasive body search.

Khalifeh has described how she experienced the degradation of women, which burnished her into a feminist. Fifth in a line of eight sisters with one brother, she grew up undervalued as a daughter. Her father cast aside her mother for a much younger woman after the death of their only son.

After high school, Khalifeh was forced into marriage, which she left after 13 years — and took her two daughters with her. Through long years of humiliation, books, reading, and storytelling became her refuge. She tells us that when she started writing, writers of fiction usually had to subsidise their writing with another career — so she went to university.

Other loves that come alive in her writing are the flora and fauna of Palestine — the white lilies, pansies, damask roses, the giant jasmine tree ‘abloom’ in her mother’s garden in Nablus — the breathtaking view of the mountains and the distant coastline at night. There is a sense of warmth in sharing food and making it go a long way — she knows that, when all else fails, a story, a poem, or a song are the most efficacious balm.

After a drive through the heady smell of pine forests, Usama arrives in Nablus, to the familiar aromas of roasted coffee, and crushed olive pulp from the soap factory, melding with the rancid stench of garbage. Shop fronts are stacked with Israeli-made goods, and trays of local knafeh. Newspapers announce that Kissinger has found a solution to Palestine’s problems. People are going about their business buying bread (made in Israel), selling fish and bananas from Gaza and Jericho, and oranges from Jaffa.

In the market, Usama bumps into his cousin Adil, who ostensibly is managing the family farm; he must feed nine mouths and pay for running a kidney machine for his father who has renal colic. Usama discovers that the resistance guerrillas took shelter in the farm and the Israelis burnt it to the ground. The farm is mortgaged and the huge mansion in which Adil and his family dwell belongs to the whole Al-Karmi family.

Adil’s deluded father lives in the past: all day he drinks coffee with foreign journalists and holds forth. He has no idea that his son travels by bus in darkness to Tel Aviv to work as a labourer in an Israeli factory. Adil’s secret journeys to Israel present a dilemma for Usama, who has returned to blow up transport carrying Palestinian labourers to Israel.

At home, Usama’s widowed mother smothers him with kisses and prayers — especially for his marriage to his first cousin, Adil’s sister Nuwar, who has “milky white skin.”

On his visit to the family mansion, Usama observes Nuwar perform with quiet dignity the tasks of three (now unaffordable) servants to run the mansion and keep her father and his foreign guests supplied with coffee. She is training to become a teacher. Usama figures out that she loves Salih, a well-respected freedom fighter, whom she visits in prison.

It is not a fiction that while any Jewish person can enter Palestine under an imagined ‘right-to-return’ to a so-called God-given homeland — systematically fed by Zionism since 1897 and violently asserted in Israel — to return home, Palestinians must have a permit.

Disappointed to see how his family and community have adjusted to life under the Occupation but as his cousin Adil’s life unfolds before him, Usama understands what the blight of Israeli settler ideology after the 1967 war means for Palestinians. Even before the Nakba, Zionist-funded projects aimed to exclude Arab labour from the agricultural and urban labour market.

Adil’s fellow labourer, Abu Sabir loses two fingers of his right hand, and it seems he will bleed to death. There is an ambulance, but the Israeli owners do not allow Abu Sabir to use it, because he does not have a work permit and is not covered by insurance. Abu Sabir thinks he will bleed to death, and asks Adil to tell him a story — he understands, when all else fails, stories are the most powerful elixir.

Nuwar’s younger brother Basil, who chants in support of Yasser Arafat and the revolution, gives her the courage to speak boldly to their father and declare that she will marry Salih and only Salih. Basil understands why “Educated people leave the country and only workers and peasants remain” — and declares, “…that’s exactly what Israel wants to happen.” Nuwar dashes her father’s hopes when she refuses a proposal from Dr Izzat Abdu Rabbah.

Unsurprisingly, young Basil is arrested. He finds in prison a space of camaraderie, where he sings anthems of freedom with his comrades, as some of them dance the traditional dabke:

“No, we’ll not die, but we’ll uproot death from our land/ There, over there, far, far away/ The soldiers will bear me, my friends/ Casting me into the evil gloom/ They searched my room, brother/ But they found only books/ And my little brothers starved and weak/ They woke them up with their kicks/ And lit up anger in their eyes/ My mother gave a long groan/ And my brothers screamed around her/ And my brothers screamed around her/ And our neighbours crowded around them/ Each with a son in gaol/ And still, my father’s face appears/ Before me, arming me with hope.”

As Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza continues under the full gaze of the world, Wild Thorns is a chastening read. With searing clarity, Sahar Khalifeh has continued to tell us her stories full of poetry and songs of resistance to the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The reviewer is a historian, a screenwriter, a translator and rights activist.

X: @NasreenRehman1

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 28th, 2024