Bøger af Sahar Khalifeh

A deeply poetic account of love and resistance through a young girls eyes by acclaimed writer, Sahar Khalifeh, called the Virginia Woolf of Palestinian literature (Brsenblatt)Nidal, after many decades of restless exile, returns to her family home in Nablus, where she had lived with her grandmother before the 1948 Nakba that scattered her family across the globe. She was a young girl when the popular resistance began and, through the bloodshed and bitter struggle, Nidal fell in love with freedom fighter Rabie. He was her first and only real lovehim and all that he represented: Palestine in its youth, the resistance fighters in the hills, the nation as embodied in her family home and in the land.Many years later, Nidal and Rabie meet, and he encourages her to read her uncle Amins memoirs. She immerses herself in the details of her family and national past and discovers the secret history of her absent mother.Filled with emotional urgency and political immediacy, Sahar Khalifeh spins an epic tale reaching from the final days of the British Mandate to today with clear-eyed realism and great imagination.

In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha's abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women's lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife. In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity--both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large--will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.

Wild Thorns is a chronicle of life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Written in Arabic and first published in Jerusalem in 1976, Wild Thorns, with its panorama of characters and unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, is the first Arab novel to give a true picture of social and personal relations under occupation. Its convincing sincerity, uncompromising honesty, and rich emotional texture plead elegantly for the cause of survival in the face of oppression.

In The End of Spring, Sahar Khalifeh chronicles the struggle of the Palestinian people with a humane depiction of Palestinian resistance fighters during the 2002 siege of Yasir Arafat’s official headquarters. Khalifeh’s tender and moving portrayal of her protagonists delves into the inner consciences of the men and women and children who were involved in the actual resistance—or were simply caught in the middle. These characters come alive through Khalifeh’s use of Palestinian colloquial diction, as does the setting, through her measured attention to the details of the natural surroundings in which the characters live, fight, and die. The End of Spring is a riveting novel that captures the reader’s attention from beginning to end. It gives a heart and a face to the Palestinian struggle.

The Qahtan are a Palestinian family that claims to have originated in the Arabian Peninsula, descended from the family of the Prophet Muhammad. This connection has given its members a certain ascendancy in their society, and has influenced their cultural and political choices.The true test occurs when the Qahtanis, like other Palestinians, confront two enemies after the First World War: the British Mandate and the Zionist movement. Observing the gradual and increasing illegal Jewish immigration and land appropriation, the Palestinians come to realize they have been betrayed by a power that "fulfilled their promises to the Jews and reneged on their promises to the Arabs."Sahar Khalifeh brings to the forefront the inner conflicts of Palestinian society as it struggles to affirm its cultural and national identity, save its threatened homeland, and maintain a semblance of normalcy in otherwise abnormal circumstances.