Blabbering Blurb - Love, Trees, and Resistance
Unasked for book reviews of 'Against the Loveless World', 'As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow', and 'Japan at the Crossroads'
Hi, welcome to what I’m gleefully calling ‘The Blabbering Blurb’. This will be a space within punktopus dedicated to all the books I’ve read, am reading, and the hundreds taunting me on my dusty TBR. It’ll come out at the end of each month (this is May’s) and will include what I’m planning on reading for the next.
I’ve been sitting on this idea for a while - so, why start now? Well, recently some BookTok creators started the hashtag #pagesforpalestine to encourage people to read books by Palestinians. I wasn’t able to participate in it at the time, but I want to use my voice - regardless of how many people it reaches - and my immense privilege to speak out too. This also coincides with ‘Authors for Palestine’, a group of over 50 authors who are making their works available from the 10th of June to the 20th in exchange for donations to Palestinian families. So, one of the books for every Blabbering Blurb piece will be by or include Palestinian voices. There are also links attached for Operation Olive Branch, Authors for Palestine, and other groups helping Palestinians and applying pressures on our governments to end this genocide. In the future I will try to open up this space more to talk about other important movements. We can only be free when every(body) is free.
I want this to be a communal space for sharing bookish love and opinions. Hopefully, as punktopus grows, there will be more people to share their recommendations and thoughts too.
Anyways, without further ado, here are this month’s books:
Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian author with multiple award-winning books focusing on experiences that are common to all Palestinians. She understands themes of generational trauma, constant displacement, the loss of loved ones, and more, because she and her family have experienced it firsthand.
Against the Loveless World is not an autobiography, but the story told by its protagonist Nahr contains multitudes of experiences that are obviously inspired by Abulhawa’s life, and painfully relatable for all Palestinians. Nahr, a Palestinian woman locked inside a dehumanising Israeli prison cell that she aptly calls ‘The Cube’, decides to tell her own story, on her own terms, all in spite of the loveless world she has come to know. It is a world that refuses to see her and her life as anything but a story to be manipulated so that it fits the predetermined beliefs of the reporters and spokespersons who come to see her. So that audiences in the West can remain comfortable in their complicity with Israeli apartheid and colonisation.
To narrate her life, Nahr has to start with the story of how her family were driven out of Palestine. The generational trauma of displacement is so inherent to who she is that she cannot describe her own life without first running off the list of grievances against her grandparents and parents. Even her name - which means ‘river’ and is a reference to the River Jordan that her pregnant mother had to cross after persecution during the 1967 Six Day War - is a reminder of all that has been stolen from her and her people. The River Jordan is a geographical border for what is Israeli occupied Palestine. So as long as she is beyond that River, she is without a home.
The characters Abulhawa creates are vividly complex and multidimensional. Nahr herself has a complicated relationship towards Palestine, having grown up in Kuwait where the only exposure she had to it was from her grandmother’s stories and being bullied for it in school. She goes from feeling a mutedness towards her heritage and a desire to hide it, to an enlivening adoration and yearning for the land after returning. Abulhawa is able to explore the struggles of women in the Middle East without falling for orientalist traps. She creates a diverse cast of women, all with different backgrounds and morals - but all of whom are ultimately just trying to survive. The book is a real feminist gem. It explores heavy topics like sexual assault, whilst also showing how sex work can be immensely liberating for some women.
Ultimately, Against the Loveless World is a scathing criticism of the silence and complicity of the Western world in the suffering of the Palestinians. And it’s all captured in the romances, friendships, successes and failures, of Nahr’s life. A life whose ending is left open, but is still trapped within the dehumanising cage that is ‘The Cube’.
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, by Zoulfa Katouh
I read As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow more than a year ago, but was constantly reminded of it as I was reading Against the Loveless World. It’s a testament to how struggles against oppression across the world are echoed within each other, strengthening the volume and harmony of their songs through their intersectionality and collaboration.
The book is set during the ongoing Syrian civil war, a year after Salama, an 18 year-old pharmaceutical student now volunteering at a struggling hospital, lost most of her family to a bomb. Her only support in a house - barren of the basic necessities and one of the few left standing on its street - is her pregnant sister Layla. Salama is forced to navigate treating victims of war at the hospital, finding food, looking after Layla, and the bittersweetness of a seemingly (ill)fated romance that blooms in a warzone - all while debating whether she should flee Syria to save herself and her pregnant sister, but in the process abandon her homeland and its revolution. Oh, and she’s haunted by Khawf, a manifestation of her fear that Salama can’t figure out whether he is real or a nightmarish trauma response.
Katouh wrote the book out of frustration over the lack of awareness and outrage towards the brutal war that has been raging in Syria since 2011. It’s easy to disconnect ourselves from suffering in the rest of the world. To tunnel-vision in on our own struggles instead. But reading works like Katouh’s reminds us that we can’t turn a blind eye to any of the suffering in the rest of the world. It can be difficult and overwhelming, but we have to find the small actions that we can take part in and the ways that we can use our voices. The first step is becoming aware and educating ourselves. The next is dependent on what you're comfortable with. All Eyes On Rafah, yes. But All Eyes On Syria, On Tigray, On Xinjiang, On Kanaky … as well.
One of the most prescient links to Against the Loveless World was that between the presentation of lemon trees in Katouh’s book, and olive trees in Abulhawa’s. Each tree is a symbol of hope and of eventual return for Syrians and Palestinians to their respective homelands. The persistence of each tree to keep growing in their native land is shared with the resistance of its people. The roots become the rootedness of the land’s people; its foliage and fruit become a promise of the justice and prosperity that could be. Katouh chose lemon trees because of their association with hope and resistance, especially in Homs, where each house is said to have a lemon tree that has grown there for centuries. In Palestine, olive trees have been, as Nahr puts it, “the mainstay and centrepiece of (Palestinian) social, economic, and cultural presence for millennia''. Juxtaposing this is Israel’s targeted destruction of Palestinian olive groves, combined with a colonial campaign, masquerading as environmentalism, in which the mass planting of European pines has been used to steal Palestinian land.
I long for the kind of connection to the land and its non-human inhabitants that many indigenous people in other parts of the world possess; I feel that we’ve lost that connection here in the UK, and I think part of the reason for that is a mix of capitalism and the colonial mindset that persists in our societies. We view the land as nothing but a trove of resources to be exploited. To be used and abused. Often when we engage in fruitful activities, or conservationism, it’s only to maintain balance long enough for us to keep up the exploitation.
The association between the ability of trees to grow back and the persistence of indigenous peoples to remain in their homelands is an ancient one. The oldest example I can think of comes from Herodotus’ The Histories and his description of the first sack of Athens by the Persians. While burning the entirety of the Acropolis to the ground, they also incinerated an olive tree inside a temple dedicated to Athena and Poseidon. However, two days later, some Athenians sent by their Persian occupiers discover that another olive tree has already sprouted from the stump. This miraculous defiance of Persian occupation alludes to the Athenian victory at Salamis and their reclamation of their beloved city.
Japan at the Crossroads, by Nick Kapur
If I had started at university this year, I would’ve taken part in the student protests that have erupted across the world. Seeing as that was impossible though, I decided to research other student movements - to better understand how they can be effective. One of my favourite authors is Murakami (although, it’s a complicated relationship because of how much I despise his open misogyny) and a recurring reference in his books are the student protests in Japan during the 1960s, so I decided to start there. The only book I could find on the topic was Japan at the Crossroads, which although it didn’t cover the protests in the way I was expecting, it was still a fascinating read.
The book focuses on a brief, but massively influential, moment in Japanese history. In 1959, protests began to simmer across the country in opposition to the Security Treaty imposed on Japan by the US after WWII. The treaty was signed in 1951 and was opposed by individuals across the political spectrum from the very beginning due to the autonomy it stole away from Japan and placed in the hands of the US instead. Tensions between the Japanese people and the US, especially its military presence on the archipelago, eventually forced President Eisenhower to open negotiations in 1958 for a revised treaty. Japan’s prime minister at the time was Nobusuke Kishi - one of the few people to go from being an imprisoned Class A war criminal to the leader of an entire country. Yup, you read that right. In what can only be described as one of the most successful rebrands in history, Kishi, who had previously been known as the ‘Monster’, was pardoned by the US and somehow managed to successfully worm his way into national politics… again.
The Anpo Struggle, named after a shortened version of the Japanese word of security treaty, is a valuable example of how to grow and sustain protest movements. However, it’s also very controversial, as despite their large size, the protests ultimately failed to stop the treaty being resigned. Nonetheless, the protests agitated a significant change in US-Japanese relations and defined a generation of Japanese culture and politics. This single spark of revolution illuminates so much about how to cultivate campaigns for substantial change. Its successes and failures are worth learning about, and ‘Japan at the Crossroads’ lays them out in a very digestible way.
If you've read any of these books, let me know your thoughts! And please leave any recommendations and thoughts too <3