Forest of Noise
3.490 kr.Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current assault on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house, pulverising a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety.
Not for the first time in their lives. Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems.
Uncannily clear, direct and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid and lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges and his daughter’s joy in eating them.
Here are poems to introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination — even as it is watched live. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
Who Will Tell My Story?: A Gaza Diary
3.990 kr.It was a sleepless night full of tears and fear . . .
I am not sure – if I make it out alive – if I will still possess what makes me, me. And I wonder: will I be there in the future, or will I be someone to be remembered in a diary or over a cup of tea by a friend after I am gone?
Who Will Tell My Story? presents an ordinary existence interrupted by unfathomably seismic and unjust events.
On the ground during the first months of the assault on Gaza following the events of 7 October, the author of this diary – first published in The Guardian – maps out the physical and psychological terrain of a life under siege. Traversing the bombed ruins of his country, we see him as he searches for foodstuffs and power to charge devices, maintaining contact with the outside world, checking in with his friends and family along the way; we see his heart swing between despair and faith, fear and optimism, his mind imagining different futures and confronting the brutal truth of his present. Shining a light on the fate of all those living through war and occupation, Who Will Tell My Story? conveys with astonishing clarity how seeds of hope might linger amid the most trying of times.
A River Dies of Thirst: Diaries
3.990 kr.Mahmoud Darwish Mahmoud Darwish was one of the most acclaimed contemporary poets in the Arab world, and is often cited as the poetic voice of the Palestinian people. During the tumultuous summer of 2006, as Israel attacked Gaza and Lebanon, Darwish was in Ramallah. He recorded his observations and feelings in writing included in A River Dies of Thirst, some of his last work.
In this collection Darwish writes of love, loss, and the pain of exile in bittersweet poems and diary entries leavened with hope and joy.
Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear
3.690 kr.These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack. Like Gaza itself, they are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.
Enter Ghost
3.490 kr.After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. On her arrival, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.
When Sonia meets the charismatic Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing with a dedicated, if competitive, group of men – yet as opening night draws closer, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life she once knew starts to give way to the exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.
Minor Detail
3.990 kr.Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history.
A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.
