Review By Judith White
Here is a new book that has to be one of the finest of the year. It takes us to the heart of Gaza and to incontestable truths about the suffering and resistance of the Palestinian people.
Cactus Pear for my Beloved (Penguin Australia) is by playwright and poet Samah Sabawi. It reads like a novel but is in fact the story of her family. The idea for the book began in a conversation with her father Karim in a café in Brisbane, his place of exile. Sabawi then spent four years working with him and researching background to reconstruct the first 25 years of his life, from his birth in 1942 to his forced exile in 1967, the year she was born.
Karim grew up in Gaza in poverty, living through the successive traumas of the Nakba, the Suez crisis and the Third Arab-Israeli War (known in the West as the Six Day War). Sustained by a family that valued education and culture, and a community united in resisting the attacks by the state of Israel, he became a respected poet and editor of the local paper. He worked with writers of great stature, including the leading novelist and political leader Ghassan Kanafani who was later assassinated by Mossad.
Read More https://www.cultureheist.com.au/2024/10/21/for-the-love-of-gaza/
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