What does it mean to imagine a future when everyday life is already dystopian and the opportunity to

What does it mean to imagine a future when everyday life is already dystopian and the opportunity to revisit your past has been taken away? Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba asks Palestinian authors to imagine the future, to take their uncertainty, their generational trauma, their memories, and present stories about what the future could look like for the Palestine people. This excellent collection edited by Basma Ghalayini features a dozen short stories, six of them in translation, all of them thought-provoking.The stories cover a wide range of forms and narratives, but the collection is unified by the common themes forged by the pain of the Palestinian experience. Multiple stories imagine technological ‘solutions’ to the crisis of ownership—a “transparent” wall keeping out Palestinians—splitting the city into two parallel worlds so that Palestine and Israel can occupy the same space, yet inequality persists—real walls that separate the two states in forced segregation. Stories explore the complicated role of collective memory: from a world in which the 'right to remember’ is taken away in order to enforce peace, to a world in which Palestinians’ memory is leveraged against them as they’re buried into a virtual utopia to keep them from realizing their dystopian truth. Silence is enforced, people bury themselves into virtual realities, forced forgetting fails to work time and time again. Most of the writers explore fiercely surveilled worlds—drones, spies, betrayals, are rampant.It’s hard to choose favorite stories from the bunch, but I had to try. Saleem Haddad’s “Song of the Birds” opens the book with its strong, terrifying concept of false utopia and ambiguity—Majd Kayyal’s “N,” translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes, looks at what a split universe could look like, shows the inequalities and pains that persist, shows the tricks and lies that continue to cause damage. Tasnim Abutabikh’s “Vengeance” shows a future where all citizens depend on life-masks which are deactivated if the government decides they are too unhealthy or close to death and so are a waste of the air. In “The Association” by Samir El-Youssef, translated by Raph Cormack, a journalist investigates the murder of a historian and uncovers a group of rebels trying to preserve the memory of the war that a treaty pledged to stamp out. And in the often absurd, surreal “The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid,” by Mazen Maarouf, translated by Jonathan Wright, the last Palestinian on earth holds all of the energy of his killed people inside of him—and if he dies, the energy could destroy them all.All in all, this short story collection was well worth the investment, and I’m thrilled to have it on my shelf.Content warnings for violence/gore, suicide, Islamophobia/xenophobia, forced relocation, violent repression of protest, use of the g-slur. -- source link

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