This Is Not a Border

June 1, 2017
Two co-founders of the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), mother and son, collect an array of emotional pieces from this international gathering of writers begun in 2008.Editors Soueif (Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, 2014, etc.) and Hamilton (The City Always Wins, 2017, etc.) begin and end the collection--she with an introduction and an essay; he with the longest piece, which encapsulates the conference since 2008. There are some poems, as well, including Suheir Hammad's affecting "The Gaza Suite," whose sections are distributed throughout. The collection includes plenty of notable writers familiar to Western readers: the late Henning Mankell, Geoff Dyer, Alice Walker, and Chinua Achebe, whose offerings range from tributes to the PalFest itself to accounts of their own experiences attending. There is also a touching account of Richard Ford's nearly breaking down while reading a Seamus Heaney poem. Most of the writers, though, are from the region, and their messages--oft repeated--are clear: Israel is, in their view, basically running an open-air prison; countless innocent civilians, including many children, have died; Israel is in the process of erasing the evidence of many generations of inhabitants. These, of course, are not messages that will attract Israel's many supporters, but others in the West--who, as some of the authors here point out, know little about the conflict--will no doubt be alarmed at the vast array of grim detail and example. Although the writers concur that Israel is doing something awful, there are few allusions to a violent response. Instead, the writers express the belief that words will be the things with feathers that will eventually bring attention--and peace. Other notable contributors include J.M. Coetzee, Raja Shehadeh, Michael Ondaatje, Claire Messud, Teju Cole, Pankaj Mishra, and Kamila Shamsie. A chorus of lyrical voices singing hopefully about a most contentious, divisive, and violent situation.

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Starred review from July 1, 2017
Commemorating 10 extraordinary years of PalFest, the Palestine Festival of Literature, mother-son cofounders Soueif (Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, 2014) and Hamilton (The City Always Wins, 2017) gathered 47 literary luminaries to create this essential testimony, including Suad Amiry, J. M. Coetzee, Teju Cole, Claire Messud, Pankaj Mishra, and Alice Walker. Instead of using Tel Aviv's modern airport, PalFestivalians try to travel in the same manner as its Palestinian audience, arriving in Jordan and enduring border crossings that take hours instead of minutes, invasive searches and detainment, and dangerous roads. One of the most indelible experiences inspired the title; as Soueif explains in the introduction, the majority of the barriersthe wall and their checkpoints . . . are not in fact borders; they do not separate Palestine' from Israel'; mostly they cut through occupied Palestinian land, separating communities from each other. As PalFestivalians visit seven cities in five days with their cultural roadshow, Hamilton describes harrowing details; for example, a sliced-open onion lessens tear gas effects. Throughout this gathering of essays, poetry, reportage, and confessions, certain wordsapartheid, erasure, pain, powerlessness, complicity, waiting, wasting, humiliation, absurdityrepeatedly resonate. But what linger longest are hope, expectation, and the demand for peace.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)