Sahar Khalifeh

A young Palestinian named Usama returns from working in the Gulf to support the resistance movement. His mission is to blow up buses transporting Palestinian workers into Israel. Shocked to discover that many of his fellow citizens have adjusted to life under military rule, Usama exchanges harsh words with his friends and family. Despite uncertainty, he sets out to accomplish his mission … with disastrous consequences. Originally published in Jerusalem, Wild Thorns was the first Arab novel to offer a glimpse of social and personal relations under Israeli occupation. Featuring unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, its deep sincerity, uncompromising honesty and rich emotional core plead elegantly for the cause of survival in the face of oppression. Sahar Khalifeh was born in Nablus in 1941. She entered into a traditional arranged marriage at eighteen, and after thirteen years left her husband and began writing. Her first novel was confiscated by Israeli authorities; the second was published in Cairo. She taught at the University of Iowa and at Palestine’s Bir Zeit University, and founded the Women's Affairs Centres in Nablus, Gaza City and Amman. Wild Thorns is her third novel.

A deeply poetic account of love and resistance through a young girl’s eyes by Sahar Khalifeh. After many decades of restless exile, Nadal 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 Rabie, a freedom fighter. He was her first and only real love―him and all that he represented: Palestine in its youth and spring, the resistance fighters in the hills, the nation as embodied in her family home and in the land. Years later, Nidal and Rabie meet, and he encourages her to read her uncle Amin’s memoirs. She immerses herself in the details of her family and national past and discovers that her absent mother had been nurse and lover to Palestinian leader Abdel-Qader al-Husseini. Set in the final days of the British Mandate, Sahar Khalifeh spins an epic tale filled with emotional urgency and political immediacy.

C'est, dans la partie arabe d'Israël, la vie de tous les jours qui nous est décrite ici, faite de déchirements et de drames, de craintes renouvelées et d'espoirs déçus, de résignation patiente mais aussi de violences infligées ou subies. Si les hommes, tels Bassel al-Karmi, révolutionnaire sorti de prison, et son frère Adel, journaliste, cherchent à atteindre par des voies différentes le même but, l'indépendance et la paix, la condition des femmes nous est montrée dans sa plus grande complexité, incarnée par la jeune Rafif, amoureuse d'Adel, collaboratrice à la même revue, et qui ne peut supporter d'être traitée en quantité négligeable par les hommes dont elle partage les risques. À cette figure typique de notre époque fait pendant celle de Saadieh, la paysanne, qui a tout perdu en perdant son mari et qui, travaillant pour élever ses nombreux enfants, est en butte aux sarcasmes et aux calomnies de ses voisines. Saadieh n'a qu'une idée en tête : gagner assez d'argent pour acheter un terrain dans la montagne et y construire une petite maison. Et c'est là que nous nous trouvons soudain confrontés aux brutalités des occupants qui, à coups de bulldozer, dépouillent et chassent les paysans, méprisent la loi et font régner le droit du plus fort. "Les choses n'ont pas qu'un seul aspect", dit l'un des personnages. Aussi le mérite de ce livre est-il de nous montrer les malheurs des paysans, le désarroi des intellectuels, la cruauté du fait accompli qui n'apporte aucune solution durable, le conflit entre les moeurs traditionnelles et la pensée moderne avec une profonde sensibilité et une lucidité toujours en éveil.