Marginalia: reading and parenting whilst thinking about Palestine

I still think reading can be a radically hopeful act.

Last May, reeling after reading accounts of the tent massacre in Rafah, I pulled together an emergency issue of Crib Notes entitled ‘Reading, Parenting and Thinking about Palestine’. I wrote the following words:

‘My sons are not more entitled to this happiness; this safety, to their lives than the children of Palestine. It feels incomprehensible to me that my life — the daily work of looking after my children; the small joys and the mundanities — can simply continue, whilst such horrifying, genocidal violence is being committed in Gaza’.

It is devastating to me, that almost exactly one year later I am once again writing about the jarring experience of parenting my sons in safety and comfort, whilst thousands and thousands of children suffer in Gaza.

Of course, I do not believe one needs to be a parent to despair at the atrocities we are witnessing through our phones, but I find that being with my children makes things feel horrifyingly tangible. I read recently that children aged between 6-12 are most likely to die in airstrikes because they cannot run as fast as older children but are too heavy to be carried whilst running. I was chilled by what I immediately knew to be the truth of this statistic: I have a six year old; I know I could not carry him whilst running. On the day I read about Dr Alaa al-Najjar, a paediatrician who lost nine of her ten children in Israeli airstrikes whilst she was at work in hospital, the image of her hugging their shroud-wrapped bodies returned to me every time I held one of my children.

I feel so much rage for the parents in Gaza who are trying desperately to protect their children against starvation and violence. Because we, as parents, do not fucking bring our children into the world for them to be needlessly taken from us like this. If I was a parent in Palestine trying day after day to keep my children alive – or if my child had been killed – I would want to know that we had not been forgotten by the rest of the world.

And so I feel compelled to write once more about reading, parenting and watching genocide go unchecked in Palestine.

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Over the last few weeks I have, at times, found it impossible to focus on reading.

I have begun and discarded the three novels on my bedside table. Two of these books had shades of the dystopian, and – unsurprisingly – I found I did not have the appetite for them. But, somehow I found that I didn’t want a fuzzy blanket of a book either.

I am, as you know, a big advocate of using books as a refuge, and a retreat at times when we need to tend to ourselves. (If this is you right now, then click here for my list of what to read when hope feels vanishingly small.)

Sometimes, though, when I feel angry and helpless, I find it more of a balm to read something which gives those feelings a purpose.

Over the last eighteen months I have found that reading has often given me a means of holding Palestine in my mind, books deepened my understanding and enabled me to better bear witness to the atrocities unfolding there.

In particular, two novels by the audaciously talented young novelist Isabella Hammad have been particularly essential to me — her debut The Parisian and her Women’s Prize Shortlisted Enter Ghost. Both were engrossing and shaded in the gaps in my knowledge of Palestine in fascinating, elegantly wrought detail.

The Parisian rewinds the clock to 1914. Midhat Kamal, a young man from a wealthy Palestinian merchant family travels to France to study medicine, where he falls in love with a French woman. So begins the story of a young idealist, living through a turbulent era in Middle Eastern history, from the final days of the Ottoman Empire, through to the Palestinian struggle for independence and the rise of nationalism. Like the best novels of this kind, The Parisian is both intimate and epic, a richly immersive and deeply personal story, set against the sweeping tide of sociopolitical history. Unsurprisingly, Hammad does not hold her readers’ hands – The Parisian demands the readers full attention. But trust me – it is worth it. I listened to the vivid and evocative (thirty-three hour) audiobook. I also downloaded the book on my kindle so I could double check references to political figures and the shifting landscape of the Levant, but this is a sumptuous and enormously rewarding novel.

Hammad’s second novel, Enter Ghost is about Sonia, a British Palestinian actress who visits her sister in Ramallah, and is drawn into a stage production of Hamlet in Palestine’s occupied West Bank. As Israeli authorities attempt to obstruct the play, and tensions simmer between the cast members, Sonia is startled into political awakeness. As I wrote in my review, ‘Enter Ghost is a powerful and passionate novel, delving into questions about political engagement, art as resistance, and how we hold on to humanity amid conflict’. Enter Ghost was one of the best books I read in 2024, and I would go as far as to say it is one of the best books I have read in the last five years. (Read my full review here).

***

A few nights ago, unable to sleep after all I had seen on social media and not knowing what to do with the churning grief and rage I felt, I returned to this idea of reading as an act of resistance.

I turned again to Isabella Hammad, this time picking up her lucid, passionate and moving Recognising the Stranger: On Narrative and Palestine, an essay which uses the novel form as a lens for considering how Palestine is perceived, and what it takes for these narratives to shift. Hammad writes that the opportunities we have to acknowledge and empathise with Palestine’s struggle for freedom are ‘repeatedly overwhelmed by the energy of a political establishment that tells the onlooker this is not what it looks like. It is too complicated to understand. Look away.’

This is unquestionably true for what we have seen over the last eighteen months. We have been told again and again and again by the powers that be – our governments and the media – that what we are seeing is somehow justifiable. It seems to me then, that ignoring what we have been told, and instead embracing storytelling which shines a light on the Palestinian experience, is an act of resistance.

***

Still feeling angry and heartbroken, but a little galvanised by Hammad’s words, I picked up Adania Shibli’s acclaimed novel, Minor Detail.

I read the novel in a single sitting, staying up past midnight, even though I knew my eldest son would likely wake before 6am. The novel is a concise 112 pages long. The narrative is split into two linked halves. The first half is set in the summer of 1949, and is a stark, unembellished account of a young Arab woman who is captured by Israeli soldiers, raped, murdered and buried in the desert. The second half of the novel takes place many years later; a woman who comes across this ‘minor detail’ from history and feels compelled – to the point of obsession – to discover the truth of what happened. To do so, she must traverse occupied Palestine’s various zones, and is only able to do this by borrowing an identity card belonging to a friend. Crossing numerous check points, horror rises up in her continually as she contemplates being found out.

Minor Detail is unlike many of the novels I recommend in Crib Notes. It is not the kind of classic storytelling which can be dipped into whilst sitting in soft play. Reading it late at night, however, when no one else might require my attention, I found it haunting and almost hypnotically absorbing. Again and again, elements of the first narrative surface momentarily in the second – this is subtle, initially, but becomes increasingly chilling. Minor Detail is an acutely realised portrait of the psychological realities of living under occupation – the continual sense of erasure and dispossession, and the ever present hum of fear. Minor Detail might sound like a bleak book – and perhaps it does not carry that fierce note of hope found in Hammad's writing – but I did not feel bleak after reading it. Instead, it seemed that in reading, I had opened up a space in which I might hold these difficult feelings. Within this space I could honour those lives which had been destroyed and violently taken.

***

Can reading really be an act of resistance?

Sometimes recommending books feels like such a flimsy, inconsequential thing to be doing. It feels so fucking small. Like, sure, reading might make us feel more for Palestinians, but will it actually change anything? In response to this argument, Isabella Hammad writes affectingly, ‘It’s true that emotion and understanding are not the same as action, but you might say that understanding is necessary for someone to act?’ If reading moves us to share what we have learned, to speak up in protest and to keep doing so even when we are told we will achieve nothing, is this not resistance?

I do think that choosing to engage with different narratives about Palestine, rather than allowing ourselves to be gaslit by our government, might be considered an essential act. In choosing to believe Palestinian voices are we not, at the very least, telling them they are not alone?

I will admit that when I began writing this, I felt far more despairing than when I wrote about the same subject last year. There have been moments over the last few days when I have considered abandoning this newsletter, wondering whether I really have anything to say at all. But I also know it is a dangerous thing for hope to calcify into resignation and numbness. The perpetrators of this genocide want us to feel hopeless; they want us to believe that we are powerless so that we do not try to stop them. ‘We, who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we disassociate to cope?’, asks Hammad. Reading is one way that we can expand our empathy, and thereby hold on to our humanity.

And so, though the odds may appear vanishingly small, I am choosing to believe that sharing books and storytelling might still be a radical and essential act.

I would love to know whether you have been reading anything which has helped you to engage with the current crisis.

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A few other good things I read on parenting and thinking about Palestine:

• Grace Pengelly on Polycrisis Parenting

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslet in the Guardian ‘As Gaza’s children are bombed and starved, we watch – powerless. What is it doing to us as a society?

• Yasmin Khan’s ‘A Letter to My Friends Still Silent on Gaza’.

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Marginalia is my front-line-of-motherhood round-up of the things I have been reading whilst looking after my two young sons. Usually it is for paid members only, but this one is free to all.

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