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mali99 's review for:

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
5.0

I often think about a line from a review for Framing Britney Spears, that talks about the empathy of telling a story chronologically.
This book conveys incredibly well the growing hopelessness and despair and powerlessness that allowed the Hamas' rise to power. And then this ever extending sense of being in limbo, this unpermanent situation becoming permanent. This old culture, with its long standing tradition and values that becomes something new in exile, almost a shadow version of itself, of longing for how it used to be, something most people have no first hand memories of. And then how do you preserve and pass on those memories? Like, of course some people get radicalised in a powder keg like that!
It can veer into trauma porn territory, but the historical grounding and the way she writes about joy in Palestine, and the sense of community saves it for me.  
And although the main character is female, I found the depiction of masculinity incredibly interesting, in a (it seems to me) patriarchal culture, how does that affect men to have so little power, to be systemically subjugated like that. 
I've seen some backlash, that the book fails to really tell both sides of the story, of being overly sympathetic to Palestine at the expense of Israel. I think that's what-about-ism; probably a lack of nuance on how we view Israel.
I don't know what empathy for Israel looks like in a book like this; and I don't know if we need all stories to be equally empathetic to both sides. 
But yeah, I read this for the first time probably 10 years ago at this point and it has stayed with me since, and I'm really glad I reread it.