Isabella Hammad in The Yale Review:
A few years ago, I taught the Lebanese American writer and artist Etel Adnan’s short novel, Sitt Marie-Rose (1978), as part of an undergraduate literature class in the Occupied West Bank. Composed in French over a single month (“end to end,” Adnan said) in 1976, Sitt Marie-Rose tells a fictional version of the story of Marie-Rose Boulos, a Syrian Christian woman kidnapped and killed for helping the Palestinians during the first phase of the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975. The book was among the class’s favorite texts on the syllabus, and when I asked why they liked it so much, one student raised his hand and replied: “She said what needed to be said.”
Over the course of the past year, my reading habits have narrowed. As Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza expanded to Lebanon with the complicity and support of many of the world’s great powers, I found myself passing over books that failed to offer me a route into thinking about the great brutality of the period through which we are living.
More here.
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