FICTION
The Age
Saturday March 27, 2010
THE broad sweep of history and tradition gives Mornings in Jenin its majestic tone. It is majestic not because of some conflated view of Palestinian history but because of the book's recognition of a genuine history, simply told.Susan Abulhawa starts her novel by describing Ein Hod, "a small village east of Haifa" with "figs and olives, open frontiers and sunshine". She tells her story through four generations of the Abulheja family who must endure the major Israeli-Palestinian conflicts that are soon to come.Yehya, the patriarch, along with his children and grandchildren, are driven from Ein Hod and sent to a refugee camp in Jenin. It is 1948, the year Israel declared statehood."So it was that eight centuries after its founding . . . Ein Hod was cleared of its Palestinian children." Yehya calculates that that is 40 generations of "childbirth and funerals . . . of cooking and toiling . . . of rain and lovemaking".This is a highly political novel. Abulhawa has personalised what has previously been a remote, public affair. She is the daughter of refugees of the Six Day War and says her book is a response to the lack of the Palestinian narrative in literature. She writes with great compassion and fervent imagery, turning what could have been a soulless polemic into a powerful novel.
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