Apparently, there were fought other independence wars too in the year 1947 beside the independence war of India and Pakistan from the British raj. Palestine and Israel, the two most restlessly conflicted countries as we know them, also came into being during 1947 when, there too, the British left after realizing they could not longer rule over the region.
The question of why do powerful countries like United Kingdom, Russia, or United States, tend to implement their rule over the rest of the world still baffles me. Technological advancement, a literate population, or military power shouldn’t give one country the entitlement to rule over other rather unsuccessful and struggling countries, seeing them as a lower breed or innately mediocre.
Maybe the answer lies in the international relations, connections between the countries of the world, where through the United Nations while peace seems to be the priority, a much more complex and mind-bending power game is going on in the background. The Goliaths, it seems, always look down on the Davids, and want to rule over them.
But while these independence wars might have been, literally, the making of countries like Pakistan, Israel, or Palestine, and is celebrated with huge enthusiasm and pride every year as the ‘Independence Day’, upon a closer look we would see many little tragedies and doubts that those tragedies then beckon to rather an eventful, celebration-worthy day. While we are presented with big and rather deceitful numbers during or after any war: ‘1 million dead, 5 years, thousand migrated, hundreds of families destroyed, and so on’, each of these numbers have a whole history behind it.
A history of family, of love and memories, and then the unwanted and cruel pain of having now lost that person, the place, that connection that you had with that history. Pain is then felt instead of love upon looking back.
Shibli’s novella is a brilliantly written story in two parts, where the first one takes in the August of 1947 in the deserts of Israeli-Palestinian border; it follows the capture, gang-rape, and murder of a Palestinian teenage girl by an Israeli commander and his men. Part two tells the story of a Palestinian journalist who comes across this incident in a newspaper and is shocked to see the coincidence that this rape-murder took place exactly twenty-five years ago on her birthday.
Intrigued, she finds out that she can get more detail into the story by visiting a museum over in the Israeli region; a thrilling and desperate search begins which takes us into the oppressed lives that people live in these two countries, always in fear, bombs going off, building falling, the scorching heat…
Although very different from her
previous novella ‘Touch’, whose exquisite and arresting prose left me awe-struck,
this novella is more literal and important in that it brings us to question if
wars are really worth-it and how brutal it can be. While the first half of this
novella was an uneasy read for me, probably because of the plot: desert, heat, sweat,
rape, murder, soldiers, spiders, bites… the second half just blew me away!
Shibli is immensely capable of writing vivid, thrilling, satirical, and piercing
prose.
Ratings: 4/5 **** June 25, 2021_