I didn’t know I was writing a book until I was knee-deep into it. I just kept writing I didn’t know what else to do. And the next day, I just got up and started writing about what I had seen in Jenin. It was December 22, a few days before Christmas, and I was terrified. Ev entually I was laid off from my job, so the decision was made for me. So they started moving me from one lab to another. At the same time, I’d been writing articles that were getting picked up by major papers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer - which, unknown to me, was irritating a lot of the Zionist bosses where I worked. I wasn’t making much money working for a pharmaceutical company.

And when I came back, the disconnect between the life I was living, the job I had and what I had just witnessed was profound. Death, rotting corpses everywhere, pulling corpses from the rubble after Israel had bulldozed people inside their homes. I mean, as Palestinians, we grow up knowing a lot of these horrors, but it was another matter to see it up close and smell - to smell it - that was the overwhelming impression. SA: I was one of the international eyewitnesses to the 2002 massacre in Jenin. Susie Day : How did you come to write “Mornings in Jenin”? But being a writer - I thought that was like wanting to be the q ueen of England, right? So I went into science, because, you know, I had something to prove. For a lot of Arab families, and immigrant families in general, being a doctor or a lawyer is really prized. I think my uncle was the first person to go to college. My dad barely finished middle school, and my mom went to a trade school after high school. I started by asking her how she became a writer. need to know more about Palestine we also need to know about Susan Abulhawa. But now, Palestine Writes has become a real-life literary festival, to be held this September in Philadelphia. Abulhawa has written two novels since, with another on the way.Ībulhawa is also a veteran activist, essential to creating and organizing Palestine Writes, a conference that, due to COVID-19, happened online in December 2020. Translated into 32 languages, it became an international bestseller. “Mornings in Jenin ,” Abulhawa’s 2010 breakout novel, depicts a Palestinian family’s survival through several decades of Israeli rule. Although in school she was tracked into science, she began writing fiction in her 30s. Born in 1970, Abulhawa grew up in Kuwait, Jordan, Jerusalem, and since the age of 13, has lived in the United States.

She does this by telling us stories.Ībulhawa’s parents came from Jerusalem’s Al-Tur neighborhood, but were forced out by the 1967 War. But Susan Abulhawa, descendant of generations of Palestinian refugees, is doing all she can to talk about Palestine. Here, in the United States, we barely talk of this. And, given Israel’s “most right-wing government in history,” what had shown no signs of stopping is now getting worse. What began in 1948 as the Nakba has taken on force, ramped up control, occupied every aspect of Palestinian life. In Palestine - a country whose existence goes unrecognized by most of the West - Palestinians are arrested, humiliated, beaten, killed by Israeli military or settlers every day, if not every hour. Note: This is a slight edit of an interview that first appeared in Counterpunch, Aug.

Boy soilder kite runner book