No Ordinary Place: Writers and Writing in Occupied Palestine Suad Amiri, a West Bank Palestinian who writes in English, also highlights “what is ludicrous, brutal, ordinary, and fantastical about the situation of Palestinians in Palestine,” as described on the cover of her first book, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law (2006). The idea of the book started as emails Amiri wrote to friends during the 2001 Israeli incursion into Ramallah and the destruction of Yasser Arafat’s headquarters and then developed into diaries spanning from 1981 to 2004, beginning with her move from Amman to Ramallah. Amiri, an architect by profession, grew up in Amman, Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo, the result of her parents’ peripatetic life as refugees from Jaffa in 1948. She continues to have problems acquiring a Palestinian ID. Suad Amiri In the introduction, Amiri describes the sensibility of her book as “stepping out of the frame to observe the senselessness of the moment, a valuable self-defense mechanism against the occupation of our lives and souls. Only through taking ‘one step to the side’ could I observe and recount the absurdity of my life and the lives of others.” One absurd situation Amiri describes in “A Dog’s Life” involves the bizarre regulation that allows her pet dog to be issued the much-coveted Jerusalem ID. Amiri quickly schemes to use the dog’s ID in order to enter Jerusalem herself, and actually goes through an Israeli checkpoint explaining: “I am the dog’s driver. As you can see, she is from Jerusalem and she cannot possibly drive the car or go to Jerusalem all by herself.”
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 23:01:47 +0000
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