The Blue Between Sky and Water
Susan Abulhawa
From the internationally bestselling author of Mornings in Jenin, a novel about four generations of powerful Palestinian women in Gaza. Violently pushed from their ancient farming village of Beit Daras, a Palestinian family tries to reconstitute itself in a refugee camp in Gaza. The men here, those who have escaped prison or the battlefields, worry over making ends meet, tend their tattered pride, join the resistance. The women are left to be breadwinners and protectors, too. Nazmiyeh is the matriarch, the center of a household of sisters, daughters, granddaughters, whose lives threaten to spin out of control with every personal crisis, military attack, or political landmine. Her brother’s granddaughter Nur is stuck in America; her own daughter’s son, traumatized in an Israeli assault, slips into another kind of exile; her daughter has cancer and no access to medicine. Their neighbor, the Beekeeper’s wife, will extract the marijuana resin to shrink her tumor, but it is also Nazmiyeh’s large heart and zest for life that heals, that will even call Nur back from the broken promise of America and set her on a new path. All Nazmiyeh’s loved ones will return to her, and ultimately journey further, to that place between the sky and water where all is as it once was, and where all will meet again. Born of a troubling history that continues to rage forth and claim its dead, The Blue Between Sky and Water is a novel of survival and of the vivid, powerful women who manage to enlarge and enliven the everyday. It is a novel for our time—and one that is also timeless.
Publication Year: 2015
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0“Stories matter. We are composed of our stories. The human heart is made of the words we put in it. If someone ever says mean things to you, don’t let those words go into your heart, and be careful not to put mean words in other people’s hearts.”
In The Blue Between Sky and Water, Susan Abulhawa explores in a masterfully family saga the consequences of the brutal mass evacuation from Palestine across other continents throughout many generations, following at the same time the stories of some brave women who manage, with great sacrifices, to inspire some magic into their cruel present.
I must be honest, I went into this book not knowing much about the plot or the synopsis, but I really liked the cover and then I found out it was about the Palestine war with Israel and about the refugees taking shelter in Gaza. Therefore, we follow this particular family from around 1948 until 2010. And I thought the book would historical fiction, but the author chose to add some magical realism elements to her story which I found unnecessary and didn’t like them as much as I wanted to, but the characters of this book saved it entirely.
We see a very close-up picture of this family’s struggle with the relocation to Gaza, to adapting to a new place that will never be quite their home, to managing the small amount of rationalization they were receiving and to the fear that they might be bombed or shot at any time. Despite all these struggles and fears, Nazmiyeh and her husband manage to form a family of their own in this new location and to be part of a community. I liked that the author focused more on the women’s destinies in this novel, rather than the men’s because we also caught a glimpse at their restrictive social norms and religious traditions which were fascinating to someone who is from a totally different culture.
My favorite part of the book was the storyline focusing on Nur and the lengths it took for her to finally find a place where she felt like she belonged. We see her flourish and showing incredible strength despite not having the happiest childhood and I was really happy to see her evolve and develop throughout the years. The dynamics between these characters were sometimes very juicy and funny, while the other times they were emotional and moving. I loved them so much.
Even though I didn’t like the magical elements of the book and the fact that they became quite a big part of the story in the second half of the book, I really liked the pace of the plot and the amazing and complex characters. The book isn’t very political because it focuses more on the destiny of this family, rather than the political climate between Palestine and Israel at the time which makes the reader suffer, but also laugh alongside these characters!
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