Palestine -1, ed. by Basma Ghalayini
In Comma Press's latest anthology, 12 writers imagine the year leading up to the Palestinian Nakba
Palestine -1 presents 12 viscerally imaginative and real stories that ask us to tread lightly around the question of fact versus fiction, for stories like these do not manifest so binarily.
During a Q&A at this year's Edinburgh's Radical Book Fair, contributor to the book Mazen Maarouf stresses that “you cannot write fiction from a totally unimaginable place… you cannot manipulate facts.” In this collection, the writers’ use of the phantasmagoric and absurd are exact reflections of the vicious atrocities imposed by Israel, and manifest both in ghostly characters and settings, like the original Palestinian towns and places desecrated by the occupation. In the Introduction, editor Basma Ghalayini writes that it is our decision whether we “pay tribute to these original places (and their people) or be haunted by them.” Some pieces, like Abdalmuti Maqboul’s searingly satirical Eastwards, command hope in the wake of grotesque onslaught.
It goes without saying that this is a book of love, in its most courageous and bare form, with 'love' being the final word of the book itself, followed by a question mark. In these tales, harmony and uncertainty, like fact and fiction, go hand in hand. All 12 stories migrate through the connected and unspoken traumas of the land, its people, and their minds, working together to dismember the monsters of the past and present, and to restore a smiling promise of return.