A LONG WALK FROM GAZA

A tale of trauma.

Alatawna, a Palestinian Bedouin and now a French citizen, makes a stirring book debut with a coming-of-age novel set amid Middle East turmoil. Translated by Nasrallah and Hartman, the narrative begins in Europe, where the unnamed protagonist has for two years been struggling to get a residence card to enable her to stay in France. The process is dehumanizing, she admits, but nothing like her experiences in what she calls the “open-air prison” of Gaza, where she grew up, victimized and oppressed by her family, a patriarchal society, and the Israeli military. Her father, she reports, “regularly beat me into submission, turning me black and blue as he tried to quell my constant rebellion”—refusing to wear the hijab, for example. “Where we lived, even the smallest thing frightened us,” she reveals. “We were afraid of dying, afraid of worms eating away at our flesh. Rumors instilled a fear in us that even the Israeli missiles couldn’t, though we were well aware that these might fall from the sky at any moment and decimate us.” After being suspended from college for her defiance, she found work at a Spanish news agency where she met José, a non-Arab Muslim who helped her escape. In 2001, she was in Madrid but soon left, beginning a yearslong flight from Spain to France, as she ran “from one country, one emotional state to another,” finally ending up in a women’s shelter in Toulouse, so traumatized that she could not speak. Most of the novel recounts a past from which the narrator can never escape: humiliation at the hands of the occupiers, feuds and racism within the Afro-Palestinian community, loss and betrayals, and unremitting violence.

Sadly, a timely look at a brutal reality.