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Review

Sand-Catcher: Palestinian resistance and the pain of remembrance

Omar Khalifah's latest novel, Sand-Catcher, is concerned with memory, victimhood, and who is able to determine how we speak about a traumatic past.

Photo: IMAGO / UPI Photo

Omar Khalifa is a Jordan-based fiction writer and professor of Arabic literature. In his latest novel, four Palestinian-Jordanian journalists have been promised an interview with an elderly Palestinian man, the last member of his family to have survived the 1948 expulsion from Israel known as the Nakba. To the journalists, this interview promises a kind of absolution in their tortured and increasingly distant relationship to their locked-away homeland. But everything goes wrong, and things soon spiral out of control: the four resort to increasingly hare-brained schemes to try to make the old man say something, anything, that will save them.

Khalifa depicts how the Palestinian diaspora has suffered not only the brutality of Israeli dispossession but also the exploitation of Palestinian bodies and memories in the 80 years since. The old man’s refusal to talk about his past – which frustrates his family as much as his erstwhile interviewers – rejects the self-mortification that has been demanded of Palestinians, with no justice given in exchange. “Don’t be like us. Don’t give them any stories,” he tells his grandson. All that matters to him is this: “Palestine was lost.”