REVIEW: “Final Warning” by Talal Abu Shawish

Review of Talal Abu Shawish, Mohamed Ghalaieny (trans.), “Final Warning”, in Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019): 161-169 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Every morning the citizens of Ramallah bathe their eyes in the rising sunlight. No one expects a morning to come when the sun doesn’t rise. There is no light, there is no power, electronics do not work, engines do not work, everything in the city has come to a standstill. Apocalypse has come.

But only to Palestine. A message comes to the region: “Cut it out” (p. 168). The earth’s rotation will be restored, the power of electron-based energy will be restored — but only when the borders are redrawn and everyone commits to justice. This isn’t just about Palestine, though: This is the only way to prevent the entire galaxy from succombing to nihilism.

Ramallah is a multi-faith city, filled with Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as athiests, and Abu Shawish explores the ways in which the end of the world is interpreted through each of the three lenses.

Two footnotes explain to the non-Arabic-speaking reader some terminology left untranslated.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Application 39” by Ahmed Masoud

Review of Ahmed Masoud, “Application 39”, in Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019): 117-141 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I said in the review of the anthology that as a whole, the stories are dark and not very hopeful. This is one that bucks the trend — alternating hopeful and hilarious — for the first half of the story, at least. Rayyan and Ismael pull a prank: They submit an application to the International Olympic Committee for the State of Gaza (by now its own independent city-state) to host the summer Olympics in 2048 — only eight years away. What neither of them ever dreamt is that the application would be taken seriously and be successful. For the first four years, planning goes smoothly, even ahead of schedule! But Gaza isn’t without its enemies, and in the final four years before the games, it becomes increasingly clear those enemies won’t let the games go off without a hitch, and both Rayyan and Ismael are caught in the center of it all. By the end of the story, it was no longer very hopeful at all.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Vengeance” by Tasnim Abutabikh

Review of Tasnim Abutabikh, “Vengeance”, in Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019): 103-116 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Ahmed is on a vengeance mission, to track down the descendant of the man who betrayed one of his ancestors. When he finds the man in question, Yousef Abdulqader, he plays the long game, seeking employment with Abdulqader (who makes prosthetic limbs and other devices) and gaining his trust, until one day he follows Abdulqader to a secret meeting with a terrorist leader, photographs him, and turns in the evidence to the police. Finally, he’s got this vengeance.

But of course, no story is ever as simple as that, and the complicating twist in this one is desperately heartbreaking.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Personal Hero” by Abdalmuti Maqboul

Review of Abdalmuti Maqboul, Yasmine Seale (trans.) “Personal Hero”, in Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019): 95-102 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I think I ended up reading this story three times over. The first time, every few paragraphs I paused and reread what I had just read, until I reached the end having read it twice, and then I went back and reread it in one go. For such a short story, it is quite complex; it took me awhile to realise that instead of looking purely to the future, as many of the other stories in the anthology do, this one also marches slowly but surely into the past. It isn’t quite time-travel but it is such that reading the story and rereading it is definitely recommended.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Digital Nation” by Emad El-Din Aysha

Review of Emad El-Din Aysha, “Digital Nation”, in Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019): 77-94 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story was a really interesting discussion of the role that Utopias play in society, and the question of why Muslims don’t really have Utopian stories (apart from al-Farabi’s The Virtuous City but “he got his inspiration from Plato” p. 82). At the very end of the story (don’t worry, no spoilers), one character says to another, “They had a Utopia, of sorts, at the time of their Prophet, then it all fell apart afterwards” (p. 94). Not only that, but no one ever tried, after that — until a man, known only as “Hannibal”, got involved.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Key” by Anwar Hamed

Review of Anwar Hamed, Andrew Leber (trans.), “The Key”, in Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019): 65-76 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Not all stories told in Palestine are stories of displaced Arabs…the Israeli settlers too have their stories to tell, and one of such story is Hamed’s. In his future, a novel solution to the Arab-Israeli tensions comes in the form of a gravitational wall: Invisible, but programmed to only allow those who have the right key embedded in their chips to allow them to enter and exit. Even though the wall is protected with unhackable encryption, it comes as no surprise to the reader that no wall is ever going to be a tenable solution in the long run.

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REVIEW: “N” by Majd Kayyal

Review of Majd Kayyal, Thoraya El-Rayyes (trans.), “N”, in Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019): 43-63 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story was a series of half-conversations, where we as the reader are only party to one side, needing to fill in the gaps in between. It’s another fairly critical view about Palestine’s future — even though the revolution has ended and an Agreement has been reached, it’s an Agreement that divided family and friends, wrought barriers rather than building bridges, and still, many years later, has long-felt consequences. I know the stories in this anthology are speculative in the sense that they speculate about possible future and options, but that doesn’t prevent individual stories, like this one, feeling much more like dim realism. But this story was sweet amidst its sadness, and full of love.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Sleep It Off, Dr Schott” by Selma Dabbagh

Review of Selma Dabbagh, “Sleep It Off, Dr Schott”, in Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019): 21-42 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: sexual harassment, sexual assault, alcoholism.

What an uncomfortable story to read, of a female scientist, Dr. Mona Kamal, trying to work in partnership with a male technician, Dr. Eyal Schott, to get a new piece of equipment up and running before the deadline, but instead getting serially harassed by him. I felt a lot of sympathy for Dr. Kamal, her outrage, her patience, her resignation, and I bet many women, especially fellow scientists, will sympathise with her plight too. I guess it’s too much to hope that misogyny will no longer be rampant in the 2050s.

The focal point of the story, though, is not actually either Dr. Kamal or Dr. Schott (despite the title), but Layla Wattan, a Recorder who “would’ve sold [her] kidneys for a job in the Enclave” (p. 22) where the two doctors work. She provides the framing and narration for Mona and Eyal’s interactions, and the story works in such a way that I got to the end, immediately went back and reread the first few pages, and got infinitely more out of it than I’d gotten the first time I read them.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Song of the Birds” by Saleem Haddad

Review of Saleem Haddad, “Song of the Birds”, in Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019): 1-19 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: Suicide.

This was a tough, raw, harsh story to open up the anthology with. At first, the future that Haddad imagines for Palestine doesn’t feel that much different from the present it is currently embroiled in, but as the story progresses, and we, like Aya the main character, learn more about what is actually going on, it gets even worse. This is not a hopeful story, not an uplifting story, but one weighed down by the burden of the inescapability of collective memory. Tough stuff.

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REVIEW: Palestine+100, edited by Basma Ghalayini

Review of Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine+100, (Comma Press, 2019) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This collection, similar to another of Comma Press’s anthologies that we reviewed back when this site was brand-new, is predicated on answering a single question, asked of twelve Palestinian authors: “What might your country look like in the year 2048 — a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba?”

Science fiction is not a popular Palestinian genre (“The cruel present (and the traumatic past) have too firm a grip on Palestinian writers’ imaginations for fanciful ventures into possible futures”, p. x), which makes this collection of specially-commissioned stories all the more intriguing and important. Basma Ghalayini’s editorial introduction traces the bare bones of the history of Palestine after the introduction of the Israeli state in 1948, in a calm, factual, and deeply uncomfortable way. Given the way that Jews across Europe were treated by the Nazis, it is hard to stomach reading how Israelis have treated Palestinians over the last 70 years. “Palestinian refugees,” Ghalayini tells us, are “nomads travelling across a landscape of memory” (p. viii). This collection is woven together by the thread of memory, but it is also future facing: What are the memories that may possibly be to come?

Why does exploring the future through science fiction matter? Because, as Isaam tells Rahel in Abu Shawish’s story “Final Warning”, “The history of science fiction tells us: Nobody comes this far without either a fight that they never win or to teach us something about ourselves that we desperately need to learn” (p. 166). At the end of her introduction, Ghalayini expresses a desire that readers in the West never experience the kind of oppression and occupation that Palestine has seen over the last seventy years. On the other hand, such readers cannot isolate themselves from these experiences if there is to be any hope of stopping or preventing these events in the future. Reading gives us a way of doing this: To experience without really experiencing, to learn, to empathise, to feel.

As is usual, we will review each story individually, and link the reviews back here when they are available. As disparate as the stories are, there are also many similarities — the idea of virtual reality as a means of escaping actual reality shows up in more than one story. As a whole, the stories in this volume are rich with pain, memory, hope, and uncertainty. They are, for the most part, dark, not hopeful.

Sara L. Uckelman13 Comments