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A review by ulanur
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
5.0
Nahr is the daughter of Palestinian refugees, named after the river her mother crossed to escape Israeli bullets. She tells her story from "The Cube", an ingenious Israeli solitary prison cell that doubles as psychological torture. Journalists come to visit her, to see how well Israel treats their prisoner, ask her questions to fit the narrative they want to write. Erase her identity.
Growing up in Kuwait, she carries the weight of being born a refugee and never being claimed by the country you grow up in and love. After a less than ideal marriage, she inadvertently gets pulled into prostitution to help support her family. The night Saddam Hussein invades, it saves her from being gang raped. A detail as small as that tells you how brilliant a writer Abulhawa is – Nahr is so thankful to Saddam because as far as she's concerned, he saved her from being brutalized, she doesn't care about the war in that moment. She's human. Nahr is one of my favourite protagonists ever. Absolutely steel-spined, zero bullshit, stubborn, and held on to her unbreakable spirit through every horror in life. A refugee once, twice, three times over, Nahr is one person, but also every Palestinian refugee, every native chased off their land by colonisers with guns and tanks, never even allowed to dream of living on it with dignity again.
When she is drawn back to Palestine, she finds herself for the first time. The sublime landscape, where the cancer of coloniser settlements isn't encroaching, the ancient way of life, the spirit of resistance, and love. She finds family and camaraderie, she finds a purpose. The constant humiliations at the hands of their colonisers feeds the slow rage inside her. She finds herself in love, through love, and it's so unspeakably beautiful.
Courageous, vulnerable and easily, EASILY, one of my favourite books of all time.
TW for rape, sexual assaults, forcible abortions, imprisonment, descriptions of torture and about a million other things.
Growing up in Kuwait, she carries the weight of being born a refugee and never being claimed by the country you grow up in and love. After a less than ideal marriage, she inadvertently gets pulled into prostitution to help support her family. The night Saddam Hussein invades, it saves her from being gang raped. A detail as small as that tells you how brilliant a writer Abulhawa is – Nahr is so thankful to Saddam because as far as she's concerned, he saved her from being brutalized, she doesn't care about the war in that moment. She's human. Nahr is one of my favourite protagonists ever. Absolutely steel-spined, zero bullshit, stubborn, and held on to her unbreakable spirit through every horror in life. A refugee once, twice, three times over, Nahr is one person, but also every Palestinian refugee, every native chased off their land by colonisers with guns and tanks, never even allowed to dream of living on it with dignity again.
When she is drawn back to Palestine, she finds herself for the first time. The sublime landscape, where the cancer of coloniser settlements isn't encroaching, the ancient way of life, the spirit of resistance, and love. She finds family and camaraderie, she finds a purpose. The constant humiliations at the hands of their colonisers feeds the slow rage inside her. She finds herself in love, through love, and it's so unspeakably beautiful.
Courageous, vulnerable and easily, EASILY, one of my favourite books of all time.
TW for rape, sexual assaults, forcible abortions, imprisonment, descriptions of torture and about a million other things.