CHICAGO: In a long and arduous journey for a woman who has four names, that begins in the Hawalli neighborhood of Kuwait and moves through Jordan and Palestine, comes the heartbreaking, yet fiercely resilient novel, “Against the Loveless World,” by author Susan Abulhawa.
Confined to a tiny cell with only spiders for company, readers first meet Nahr, a young woman jailed in an Israeli prison. With no idea of how long she has been imprisoned or for what crime, Nahr recalls her life, her four names, the multiple places she has called home, and how she has had to fight for love and belonging in a world that wants to give her neither.
Abulhawa’s main character has as many names as she has homes, moving from place to place as a child of exiles and becoming one herself during the Gulf War. With her mother, brother, and grandmother Sitti Wasfiyeh, Nahr navigates a life through Kuwait, Jordan, Palestine, a home she knows so little of, and then an Israeli prison. She learns early that she has little control over her life, especially when the very politics of her existence are in the hands of everyone else but her. But she grows up in Kuwait with stories of her homeland told by her mother and Sitti Wasfiyeh, who is constantly traveling through Ein Al-Sultan in her mind.
On the brink of poverty and shouldering the responsibility to keep her family afloat, Nahr must do whatever she can to ensure survival, and allow her brother Jehad to study at university.
With dreams of marriage, of her own children and of freedom, Nahr’s fight to survive a world that is intent on testing her lands her in situations that could break the weak. But Nahr is strong and chooses to fight, balancing a lifetime of exile and refugee stories on her back. Within her young character’s life, Abulhawa writes of an eternity, as Nahr has lived more life than most.
In an unthinkably harsh reality, and one that is a continuous experiment in resilience, Abulhawa pushes to the fore themes of identity and adaptability, posing the question: How can an oppressor know roots when they live by unearthing trees?
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