Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights Under Siege by Amira Hass (tr. Maxine Nunn)

drinking the sea at gaza book on blue blanket

a nutshell: an Israeli reporter reflects on what she saw and heard while living in Gaza, from moments of abject grief to resilient humour

a line: at one point Hass describes leaving her friends’ house in Khan Yunis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, where her friends had no running water during the day and only a limited supply of salty water at other times; she reaches the Israeli settlement of Neve Dekalim and drinks from a restroom tap – “Sweet and refreshing, the free-flowing water still had an aftertaste, the bitter flavor – I couldn’t help but imagine – of apartheid”

an image: Hass describes mangled heaps of rubble (homes demolished as a ‘deterrent’) as bearing witness to the ravaged lives of Gaza’s people like the rings of a tree trunk marking the passage of time

a thought: the chapter about the agony of obtaining exit permits for families suffering with ill-health is harrowing to read, particularly the sections on injured/unwell children in need of treatment

a fact: Hass’s desire to live in Gaza stemmed from the dread of being a bystander – a legacy of her mother’s memory of some German women looking with indifferent curiosity as she was herded from a cattle car to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in 1944; to Hass, Gaza embodies the central contradiction of the State of Israel, that is, democracy for some, dispossession for others

want to read Drinking the Sea at Gaza? visit here

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli

TW – this review contains references to sexual assault

a nutshell: a short, narrative nonfiction book bearing witness to the suffering of undocumented children navigating the US immigration system, drawing on Luiselli’s work as a volunteer court translator in New York

a line: “It is perhaps not the American Dream they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born”

an image: the writer describes seeing child migrants enter the court system as like being stood with hands and feet tied, powerless, watching kids try to cross a busy avenue with cars speeding by

a thought: rather than writing off these children as “illegals” or “aliens” we should regard them as refugees of a hemispheric war (in which the US has long been complicit), Luiselli argues, all of whom have the right to asylum

a fact: the writer notes the horrifying reality that 80% of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the US border are raped on the journey

want to read Tell Me How It Ends? visit here

The Beekeeper of Sinjar by Dunya Mikhail (tr. Max Weiss & Dunya Mikhail)

TW: distressing content, including sexual violence

a nutshell: this devastatingly vital book records the experiences of Yazidi women who managed to flee abduction and enslavement as sabaya (sex slaves) by Daesh across Iraq and beyond, many of whom escaped with the help of beekeeper Abdullah Sharem & his network

a line: “Friendship was our only hope … ‘Like we promised,’ I reminded her, ‘either we die or we get out of here together.'” – Nadia, a young Yazidi woman whom Daesh stole, auctioned, and repeatedly raped in front of her children, grew close to another female captive and held off the rescue until they could both flee along with their children

an image: for the first time in this project I’ve found it impossible to isolate just one image – there are too many examples of individuals quietly risking everything to save loved ones or strangers alike, casting a glimmer of light against Daesh’s abject cruelty

a thought: Mikhail also documents the broader picture of Daesh’s genocidal persecution of the Yazidi people – the expulsion from their ancestral lands in Northern Iraq, the systematic mass shootings of men, the live burial of elderly, the exploitation of children to build weapons, the brainwashing of boys to make them “martyrs”, the horrifying list goes on…

a fact: an award-winning poet & journalist, Mikhail was born in Baghdad in 1965 and relocated to the US thirty years later after facing censorship & interrogation; in the course of writing this book, she returned to Iraq for a visit to meet Abdullah

want to read The Beekeeper of Sinjar? visit here

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiutė (tr. Delija Valiukenas)

a nutshell: a desolate piece of Lithuanian survival literature in which Dalia recounts her deportation, aged 14, to a Siberian gulag and the years of gruelling manual labour that followed in the Arctic tundra

a line: “Images from the past can be more painful than a branding iron. They tear me apart. But they’ve also done me a favour. They’ve ignited a furious desire to live, to persevere…”

an image: Dalia’s appalling descriptions of gangrenous, immobile deportees disintegrating on their pallets or freezing to death with hallucinations of hot coffee in tortuous blizzards sear themselves onto the memory

a thought: reading her memories of such brutal suffering, it’s sad to note that Dalia never saw these pages come out into the open; fearful of the KGB, she buried the scraps of paper in a garden and it was only in 1991 – four years after her death – that they were found

a fact: most of the fellow deportees depicted by Dalia are women and children, reflecting how 70% of the 130,000+ people among the Soviet mass deportations from Lithuania were women and children

want to read Shadows on the Tundra? visit here