With fresh eyes in Gaza
tween sky and water, where all time is now”. Khaled, who can read the colour of people’s auras, becomes the inter-generational bridge between the women in the book. Colour is an important narrative thread, with Abulhawa challenging prevailing norms. “The idea that white is always good and black is bad is reversed in the novel.”
Reminiscent of Ben Okri and Toni Morrison, Abulhawa’s use of magical realism underlines the sense of predestination that permeates the book. It offsets the agonies her characters endure, and links members of this family who are separated by geography, circumstance and chronological time.
There is a delightful South African link in the person of Nzinga, a social worker who underlines the “natural connections between various black struggles and the Palestinian struggle”. (Abulhawa describes her visit a few years ago to Durban’s Time of the Writer festival as memorable and meaningful.)
Having spent time in institutional care, Abulhawa lets her personal history inform her writing. “I was privileged to have this really fucked-up life, because it exposed me to people at their truest. I also have this treasure of experiences of people — good and bad — that I am able to draw on.”
She is also an activist, but resists any imputation that her writing is an extension of this, fiercely declaring that her only loyalty is to her characters. Abulhawa did not set out to criticise Zionism in either of her books, for example, but merely tried to be “loyal to the characters, loyal to history and loyal to the reality”. She has been criticised for having no Israeli characters in The Blue Between Sky and Water, but she maintains that while it was feasible to do so in her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, which was set in the West Bank, in Gaza a sympathetic Israeli character would be “unreal, inauthentic and gratuitous”.
“Being an activist means that I feel a personal and passionate sense of responsibility toward truth and justice, and while that most certainly informs the content of my character and my art, it defines neither the totality of me nor my craft.” —