The Inheritance

In this powerful novel, acclaimed Palestinian author Sahar Khalifeh examines the stark realities in the lives of Palestinian women. Through her protagonist, Zeynab, born to an American mother and a Palestinian father, Khalifeh illuminates the disorienting experience of living between two worlds, and the search for identity that mirrors the Palestinians’ own quest for nationhood. Set against the emotionally charged background of the early 1990’s when the Gulf War and the Oslo Accords fundamentally shifted the political landscape, The Inheritance takes as its subject the fate of young Palestinian women who supported their families for decades working elsewhere in the Middle East. In vivid prose, Khalifeh traces the disruption caused by the Gulf War on the life of these women, as Zeyneb returns to her homeland and tries to adapt to her new life on the West Bank after years spent in Kuwait.

In her previous novels, Sahar Khalifeh has established herself as the premiere female novelist of the Palestinian Diaspora; with The Inheritance, she breaks new ground in giving voice to these Palestinian women and their return to economic exile. With its critical portrayal of the Palestinian Authority, its mistakes, and limitations, The Inheritance offers a surprising look at the realities of Palestinian life and society. As the story of an immigrant torn between two cultures and struggling to adapt to both, Zeynab’s tale touches on universal themes that will resonate with readers everywhere. 

The Graying of the Raven

With a fine touch, Aida Bamia has explored the work of Muhammad bin al-Tayyib Alili (c.1894- c. 1954), a hitherto virtually unknown oral poet of Algeria, bringing to her analysis new understanding of folk poetry as part of a people’s collective memory and their resistance to colonisation. For Alili’s audience the despair and suffering faced by poor farmers before independence is embodied by the raven, grown old and gray with ceaseless frustration and humiliation.

Because of its oral - and all too often ephemeral - nature, the work of poets such as Alili could escape close scrutiny by French colonial administrators who sought to eradicate nationalistic and ethnic elements. With succinct commentary, Bamia presents an outstanding historical and contextual background for Alili repertoire, while she details the richness and variety of poetic forms that had developed in North Africa. In doing so, she shows an intimate grasp of the poet’s repertoire and technique, as well as of the colonial and post- colonial implications of Algerian folklore and poetry.

In their citation for the AUC Middle East Studies Award, the judges noted The Graying of the Raven’s “insightful perspective on Algerian society and the experience of colonisation as perceived by the individual folk poet.” 

The Image, the Icon and the Covenant

Documenting a historic struggle with fresh vision, Sahar Khalifeh has penned what is at once a recasting of the story of the Holy Family, a lyrical ode to Arab Jerusalem, and a call for liberation - not just of a nation, but also of its individual women and men.

After abandoning his beloved Mariam when she becomes pregnant, and escaping her brother’s bullets, Ibrahim abandons his own ideas and dreams of becoming a fiction writer, opting instead to follow the path of wealth and commercial success abroad approved by his father. Thirty years later, lonely and disillusioned, an older Ibrahim returns to Ramallah to retrace the past he tried to leave behind. He sets out on a long and frustrating quest to track down Mariam, which takes him from the West Bank to Israel. Along the way he encounters his son, Michael, a young man with spiritual powers that enable him to see what is unknown and find what has gone missing.

The novel weaves religious and political symbolism into a story of love and loss. At its core is Ibrahim’s, the Palestinian’s - agonizing but unrelenting search for a home, a centre, fulfillment that, despite material success, continues to be elusive.