Michelle Dsouza
The situation in Palestine, if it can even be called that, is not a war or conflict. It is a gross injustice. An ongoing erasure of innocent lives and entire generations by an occupying power that entered a land, was tolerated by its people, and then systematically displaced them. That is the context for this book. That is the only honest context.
Mornings in Jenin gives you the full weight of Palestinian life under occupation. Not just the loss, though there is devastating loss. You see the love, the laughter, the pride, the belonging, all of it existing alongside unimaginable pain. abulhawa does not let you look away from the abuse and systemic subjugation her characters face, but she also refuses to reduce them to their suffering. These are people trying to find meaning in days that keep being stolen from them.
This is not a book about war. It is a book about what happens when an occupier decides that a ten-year-old throwing a rock at a tank deserves collective punishment. It is about generations wiped out not because they fought back, but because they existed. The vengeance in these pages was not created by the occupied. It was created by the occupier.
The timeline and voice shifts do create moments of disorientation as the book moves across four generations and sixty years. But the pace justifies the urgency. The structure reflects exactly what it needs to: the emotional weight of a history too large and too ongoing to be told in a straight line. There were no storylines that felt unjustified or without impact. Every detail mattered to the larger picture, and the larger picture is the point.
Amal is the character who stays. She is the family's heart, the one who carries the most, the one through whose eyes the book sees most clearly. She is not a symbol of Palestine. She is a specific person: a girl who had poetry read to her at dawn by her father, a woman who found love and lost it, someone carrying a brother she never fully had and a home that no longer exists. abulhawa does not use Amal to make a political argument. She uses her to show what a life costs when it is lived under these specific conditions. That distinction is what makes the book work as literature rather than as testimony.
The Ismael/David subplot, the infant son stolen from his mother at birth and raised as an Israeli soldier, is where abulhawa does her most precise and difficult work. This is not a story about two sides. It is a story about what it means to have your identity constructed for you, and what happens when that construction meets the thing it replaced. abulhawa handles this without sentimentality and without easy resolution. That is the harder and more honest choice, and she makes it consistently.
The writing is lyrical without being ornate. She writes grief as landscape, as the smell of olive groves, as the specific weight of a mother's arms, as food made in kitchens that no longer exist. She writes violence without exploiting it. She writes hope without falsifying it. For a book covering this much history and this much loss, the emotional register is remarkably controlled throughout. Nothing is overstated. Nothing needs to be.
I already knew this history and I am still heartbroken. That is not a small achievement. It means abulhawa did not write a history lesson. She wrote a family, and through that family, something true and specific about what displacement means over time. Not as a political term. As a lived reality across generations of people who had names and lives and mornings.
Read this book. Read it openly and without apology. The people it was written about deserve to be read.
Four stars. I'm heartbroken and sad and I would not change a page.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
The situation in Palestine, if it can even be called that, is not a war or conflict. It is a gross injustice. An ongoing erasure of innocent lives and entire generations by an occupying power that entered a land, was tolerated by its people, and then systematically displaced them. That is the context for this book. That is the only honest context.
Mornings in Jenin gives you the full weight of Palestinian life under occupation. Not just the loss, though there is devastating loss. You see the love, the laughter, the pride, the belonging, all of it existing alongside unimaginable pain. abulhawa does not let you look away from the abuse and systemic subjugation her characters face, but she also refuses to reduce them to their suffering. These are people trying to find meaning in days that keep being stolen from them.
This is not a book about war. It is a book about what happens when an occupier decides that a ten-year-old throwing a rock at a tank deserves collective punishment. It is about generations wiped out not because they fought back, but because they existed. The vengeance in these pages was not created by the occupied. It was created by the occupier.
The timeline and voice shifts do create moments of disorientation as the book moves across four generations and sixty years. But the pace justifies the urgency. The structure reflects exactly what it needs to: the emotional weight of a history too large and too ongoing to be told in a straight line. There were no storylines that felt unjustified or without impact. Every detail mattered to the larger picture, and the larger picture is the point.
Amal is the character who stays. She is the family's heart, the one who carries the most, the one through whose eyes the book sees most clearly. She is not a symbol of Palestine. She is a specific person: a girl who had poetry read to her at dawn by her father, a woman who found love and lost it, someone carrying a brother she never fully had and a home that no longer exists. abulhawa does not use Amal to make a political argument. She uses her to show what a life costs when it is lived under these specific conditions. That distinction is what makes the book work as literature rather than as testimony.
The Ismael/David subplot, the infant son stolen from his mother at birth and raised as an Israeli soldier, is where abulhawa does her most precise and difficult work. This is not a story about two sides. It is a story about what it means to have your identity constructed for you, and what happens when that construction meets the thing it replaced. abulhawa handles this without sentimentality and without easy resolution. That is the harder and more honest choice, and she makes it consistently.
The writing is lyrical without being ornate. She writes grief as landscape, as the smell of olive groves, as the specific weight of a mother's arms, as food made in kitchens that no longer exist. She writes violence without exploiting it. She writes hope without falsifying it. For a book covering this much history and this much loss, the emotional register is remarkably controlled throughout. Nothing is overstated. Nothing needs to be.
I already knew this history and I am still heartbroken. That is not a small achievement. It means abulhawa did not write a history lesson. She wrote a family, and through that family, something true and specific about what displacement means over time. Not as a political term. As a lived reality across generations of people who had names and lives and mornings.
Read this book. Read it openly and without apology. The people it was written about deserve to be read.
Four stars. I'm heartbroken and sad and I would not change a page.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.