A Long Walk from Gaza

Alatawna debuts with a harrowing look at a Palestinian woman’s lifelong struggle for liberation. The nonlinear narrative begins in the early 2000s with the unnamed protagonist attempting to secure asylum in Toulouse, France, where she’s treated poorly but not as badly as she was in Gaza. She reflects on both colonial and patriarchal oppression as she recounts growing up in a refugee camp in the 1980s, where she was treated like a “rat” by her teachers and physically abused by her father, and lived in constant fear of the Israeli Defense Forces (“Kidnappings and theft were on the rise. Israeli soldiers started barging into people’s houses.... Local people whispered that occupation soldiers were raping Palestinian girls”). There’s not much of a plot; instead, Alatawna’s narrator paints a potent picture of continual migration. In 1986, her mother takes her and her sisters from Gaza to join their father in the Emirates, where he’s found work. The girls are plagued by heat and boredom before the family returns to the Gaza camp a few years later. It’s a convincing depiction of the way displacement fractures one’s memories, and an unflinching look at the painful reality of life in Palestine. Readers will be gripped. (May)