A review by bookishmillennial
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

challenging dark emotional funny informative reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
disclaimer: I don’t really give starred reviews. I enjoy most books for what they are, & I extract lessons from them all. I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/bookishmillennial 

“We are not all blessed to receive a good education and inherit what it takes to live with some dignity. To exist on your own land, in the bosom of your family and your history. To know where you belong in the world and what you’re fighting for. To have some goddamn value.”

But I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.

This book centers around Nahr, is told in her first-person, past-tense POV, and takes us to Kuwait, Jordan, and Palestine throughout the 90s and early 00s. She tells her story to the audience from the Cube, her solitary confinement cell in prison as a middle-aged woman. This is a layered story of identity, growth, nationhood, freedom, self-worth, finding one's purpose and voice, resilience, friendship, womanhood, legacy, and love/intimacy. Sure, it is Nahr's story, but it is also the story of the people around her, such as Bilal, Jumana, and so many side characters that come in and out of Nahr's life.

Nahr's life is anything but predictable or easy. While she grew up in Kuwait, she never fully felt as if she belonged or as if Kuwait citizens wanted her or any other Palestinians there. When the US invades Iraq, Nahr and her family have to evacuate to Jordan, again becoming refugees.

Nahr also had married a man with a mysterious past, but when he abandons her to return to Palestine to find someone from his past, she is left to fend for herself. After meeting a woman, Um Baraq, who fosters a manipulative relationship with Nahr and basically brings her into sex work. Then, Nahr does finally go to Palestine to seek a divorce from her estranged husband, and ironically, she finally finds real romantic love with someone unexpected.

I really enjoyed Nahr's voice - she was funny, glib, and incredibly vulnerable with her ruminations. The ending also gave me a bit of hope and I was so proud of Nahr's inner journey and healing. She endured SO much, yet she maintained a bit of curiosity and hope as she pushed through towards her next challenge. Nahr was fierce, refused to let anyone pity her, and her growth was stunning. I loved the second half of this book, as Nahr spent more time in Palestine and began to recognize the power that she and her allies held in rising up and fighting back against the occupation. This was a powerful historical fictional novel and I highly recommend it.

cw: Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Miscarriage, Colonisation, Genocide, Police Brutality, Infidelity, Injury detail, Medical content, Death, Murder, Grief, Torture, War 

Quotations that stood out to me:
Mama was pregnant with me when Israel made her a refugee for the second time. After fleeing Haifa in 1948, she had made a home with my father in Sitti Wasfiyeh’s ancestral village, Ein el-Sultan. Fleeing once more in June 1967 with only whatever they could carry, they walked more than eight kilometers to cross the River Jordan at the Allenby Bridge.

Mama said to make me feel better, but she only managed to annoy me. I didn’t appreciate her speaking ill about Kuwaitis; but for her, everything came down to being Palestinian, and the whole world was out to get us. It wasn’t until I had survived time, war, and prison that I understood why.

Until I met Um Buraq, it had never occurred to me that patriarchy was anything but the natural order of life. She was the first woman I met who truly hated men. She said it openly and without apology. I found her persuasive.

No therapist or clergy can substitute for the confidence of a whore, because whores have no voice in the world, no avenue to daylight, and that makes us the most reliable custodians of secrets and truth.

“It’s not that Libya, Yemen, Morocco, and others are siding with Saddam. They just don’t want American military bases all over the Arab world.”

There was a deeply felt dignity in the sense that one’s shelter and sustenance were not mortgaged. We went where we could not have afforded before the invasion, walked into homes where we’d never have been invited, and into establishments that would not have welcomed us during normal times. No one was poor. No one was rich. We just were. And we shared. We ate. We drank. We laughed. We danced. We cried. We dreamed and imagined a better world. Then we waited for fate to fall on our heads from American warplanes.

Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.

Mama didn’t mind getting a visitor’s visa. “Let them think they own the land. I know better. I know the land owns us, her native children.”

“To tell you the truth, I hate that we even eat meat as much as we do. Sheep, cows, fish, whales, goats—they’re nations unto themselves. They too deserve to be free.” The primacy of humans was only one assumption I had never questioned until I met him.

It shocked me how many checkpoints there were just to go from one village to the next. It seemed Palestinians could not drive more than five minutes without having to wait at yet another. We had to go through two checkpoints on the way to the shop. The first we crossed by car. Typically the wait was about half an hour, but it could be as little as ten minutes or as much as two hours, depending on the mood of the soldiers manning it.

One of the first things I’d learned when I arrived in Palestine was the color code for license plates. White plates denoted Palestinians, restricted to driving on a few roads, most of which were disconnected and unpaved. Yellow plates were for Israeli citizens, some Palestinians with Jerusalem IDs, and tourists. One could travel anywhere with yellow plates

Israel’s occupation is pretty much what you see on the news. But they don’t show our weddings, cafés, nightlife, shopping, art and music scenes, universities, landscape, farming, harvests. It’s not what I imagined. At the same time, it is everything I imagined.

And as with thousands of Palestinians just like him, there would be no accountability for his killers. I bristled with rage that had nowhere to go. The ceaseless accumulation of injustice made me want to fight the world, to lash out somehow, scream. But all I could do was weep in my brother’s arms.

No one had ever kissed me with such love, and it occurred to me that happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.

“People don’t need to be told to dance. You just play music and their bodies know what to do. You can organize them all day to dance, but no one will move until you play the music. We just have to figure out what that music is that will compel individuals and small circles of people to act however they can all over the country, without trying to organize them in advance.”

There were others in the world who, like us, were seen as worthless, not expected to aspire or excel, for whom mediocrity was predestined, and who should expect to be told where to go, what to do, whom to marry, and where to live. Mr. Baldwin tells Big James: “Here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”
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