Radwa Ashour; translated by Kay Heikkinen
The Woman from Tantoura by Radwa Ashour, translated from the Arabic by Kay Heikkinen, is a testament to the suffering of Palestinians forced into exile during the 1948 formation of the state of Israel and its aftermath.
The novel unfolds in the first-person voice of Ruqayya. She lives in Tantoura, a village in Palestine. At the tender age of thirteen, she witnesses the massacres in Palestinian villages by the Zionist paramilitary forces. She recognizes the bloodied corpses of her father and brothers piled on top of other corpses. She escapes to southern Lebanon with her mother to live with her aunt and uncle. But Lebanon provides only an intermittently safe harbor during subsequent years due to the Israeli occupation of Beirut, the massacres that take place in Palestinian refugee camps by Lebanese extreme right-wing forces, and the ensuing Lebanese civil war. She relocates to Abu Dhabi temporarily to live with her eldest son and his family before moving to Egypt to be with her adopted daughter while she attends university. Having successfully educated and raised three sons and a daughter, she returns to Lebanon as a seventy-year-old grandmother.
Ruqayya records the events in her life as a testament to the atrocities and violence she has witnessed. One of her sons is gathering evidence, interviewing survivors of the atrocities, and documenting testimonials with the intention of suing Israeli authorities in court for their crimes against humanity. Ruqayya’s memory leaps backward and forward in time, jumping ahead or going back to a previous thread to record something she has just remembered. Her story is heart-wrenching. Like many Palestinian women, she wears the key to her home in Tantoura on a chain around her neck to keep alive the hope she will one day return. She feels an outsider wherever she lives. The yearning to return to her homeland is ever present and is particularly poignant in the final chapters when she goes to the border with Israel and looks across at the land where she was born, where her ancestors lived for generations—a land she is now prohibited from visiting.
The story is one of survival and resilience. It gives an intimate voice to Palestinian women who have endured the loss of fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands. In spite of their suffering, the women endure. They nurture their surviving children, educate them, and try to provide a safe haven for them to thrive even in hostile lands.
In clear and precise prose, Radwa Ashour has written a powerful story exposing the horror and violence that occurred in the formation of the state of Israel and the traumatic impact of expulsion, displacement, and ethnic cleansing on the Palestinian people. Palestinian land may be occupied, but the memory of their homeland and their yearning to return endures in the hearts and minds of Palestinians.