Book Review: Stella Prize shortlistee #3

The third book I read in my Stella Prize shortlist adventure was Samah Sabawi's Cactus Pear for My Beloved, which I very much enjoyed (see review below!)

As a reminder, here is the shortlist. I'm highlighting books as I read them (the review of The Burrow is here and Theory and Practice is here). I have a library loan of Translations, and I bought myself a copy of Black Witness, so I'll probably double-hand those two next. The prize is announced on 23 May, I'm busy as heck between now and then, and I haven't yet been able to source Black Convicts, so I am not convinced I am going to fulfill the full brief of getting them all read prior to, but it's still be a good exercise to try! I have already discovered one very good book and two outstanding books through the process, so I have no complaints. 

At the halfway mark, of the three I have read, I would give the prize to The Burrow, but honestly I wouldn't be mad if either of the other two were successful instead. I certainly haven't hit a stinker or even a mid book yet, which is a testament both to the healthy state of women's writing in Australia and the good taste of the judges!

• Translations by Jumaana Abdu (Novel)
• Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser (Fictionalised Memoir): 8/10
• Cactus Pear for My Beloved: A Family Story from Gaza by Samah Sabawi (Memoir / Family History): 9/10
• Black Witness: The Power of Indigenous Media by Amy McQuire (Non-Fiction)
• The Burrow by Melanie Cheng (Novel): 9/10
• Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe (History)

Samah Sabawi's book is a warm and engaging family memoir with fictionalised elements, but that is not all it is by a long chalk. 

It is also a potent political history of Gaza from the post-war formation of the state of Israel until the 1967 Six Days War and its aftermath, which resulted in the exile of almost a quarter of a million Palestinians from their homeland. 

Telling this story through the experience of one family (her own), Sabawi is able to highlight the injustice and the horror of what happened in Gaza in that time, which inevitably casts light on what is happening now, and the deep existential injuries and losses that led to the current dreadful situation. 

Sabawi's grandparents and parents are the focus of the book, and she brings them to life with such a vivid, loving touch that I feel like I know them as people from having read the words. While Sabawi was an infant herself when the family left Gaza, the depth of her understanding and commitment to place hangs in every word she writes. An exile from a particular space she may be, but it is clear that she is not exiled from community or culture.

In particular, her father Kasim, a noted poet, springs up from the page in technicolour. His intellectual, political and emotional journey is riveting, from a loving, poor, but mostly secure childhood as the eldest son of a disabled but noted local sheikh, to his young adulthood as a wooer of his childhood sweetheart, poet, teacher, journalist, resistance fighter, and eventual exile. It is Kasim that provides the beating heart of the book, and is, ultimately, its first and last voice. Perhaps this review should end, then, with an extract from the poem written by Kasim as his first in exile, which closes out the main part of the book:

Don't ask us where the wind is blowing
Don't ask about a house
Or windows 
Or trees
The Bulldozers were here
The Bulldozers were here
And the houses in our city
Were devoured by the monstrous teeth.
They haven't colonized Mars yet
And the moon in barren
Uninhabitable
So carry your children
Your memories
And follow me
We can live in the books of history...

This is not just a great read, it's an important one. 9/10 from me.