This is a small book of only 112 pages. It focuses on the one character, Nabila, over two separate time periods. The first is when Nabila is a five-and-a-half year old in her village in Palestine, eager to go to school: the second is set in Australia in December 2023 when Nabila is now in her eighties, living alone in a small house in Sydney surrounded by her pot plants. The child Nabila had only just learned to write her name when the bombs dropped on her village, and she and her family were forced to shelter under the olive trees as the air raids continued, before being forced to move on. The older Nabila now goes weekly to the pro-Palestinian protests that take place each Sunday in the capital cities. The story is told simply, with short sentences and a focus on the human.
In her Addendum, Haddad cites Noam Chomsky who wrote in On Palestine in 2015:
The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story – hard to understand and even harder to solve
In her preface, she reveals that she wrote this book because so many of her conversations about Palestine ended with progressive friends and acquaintances saying “it’s complicated” before changing the subject. As someone who had grown up in a Lebanese pro-Palestinian family, it’s not complicated at all. The whole Israeli/Palestinian conflict can be played out within the life of one fictional person. There are old people alive today who themselves experienced the Nakbah: it’s not an age-old conflict whose origins are lost to time. She has used clear language, she says, “because the language of liberation is inherently simple: honest, transparent, direct”.
The story itself is simple, but in her addendum she places it within the history of the conflict, starting in the 1880s, going through to the present day, updated further to September 2024. She does not specifically reference October 7, seeing instead that current events are part of the continuing Nakbah that affects people- real, living people, each with their own lives of dignity and identity- individually.
This book can be easily read in one setting. It is named for the Palestine Sunbird, which was named as Palestine’s national bird in 2015, and an enduring symbol of resistance. Haddad places her book within this tradition.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: purchased e-book
Read because: it was one of the books distributed to Australian parliamentarians by a number of Australian authors as summer time reading
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 