By Sarah Ayoub
MEMOIR
Cactus Pear for My Beloved
Samah Sabawi
Penguin, $36.99
If a single book could challenge the phrase “A land without a people for a people without a land” – once frequently invoked by Zionists and their supporters in the lead-up to the creation of the state of Israel – then Samah Sabawi’s memoir Cactus Pear for My Beloved would be a strong contender.
The award-winning author, playwright and poet’s new book firmly places her father, and his father, and his father before him in Palestine, their family just one of many that lived in this supposedly uninhabited piece of land that is still being fought for today. And yet, the book is not just a personal story – one that traces more than 100 years of her family’s life – but a historical one: charting the day-to-day lives of Palestinians who lived under the Ottoman Empire, during the British mandate, and through the 1948 Nakba and beyond it.
We meet Sabawi’s dad Abdul Karim (who died in October this year) and his siblings, born to a disabled, highly intelligent and well-regarded father, and an illiterate, fierce and doting mother. We follow their humble, tight-knit family through the streets of Gaza as they play, dream, learn and work, making ends meet while building friendships across cultural, class and religious lines, a testament to the diversity of Palestinian society before the “Jewish gangs” terrorising its inhabitants upended it. Abdul Karim is a six-year-old when the Nakba, or catastrophe, occurs, his coming of age and his path to adulthood intertwined with stories of people massacred, ethnically cleansed from their villages, and displaced, living out their days cold and hungry in refugee tents as more of their ancestral lands are occupied.
As the young family grows, and the aspirations of their people to return to the homes they’ve been expelled from becomes more difficult and dangerous, so does their passion to liberate their nation. Some, like Abdul Karim, resist in non-violent ways; others, like his brother Muti, take up arms. In this vein, Sabawi’s story demonstrates the breadth of Palestinian outlook, politics, and resistance movements, all of which are seen as a threat to the occupying forces, who soon come for Abdul Karim and his young family, who are forced to flee for safety in Jordan. At gunpoint, he signs away his right to return.
Sabawi with her son Nahed in Gaza last year.
And though the focus is on the family’s story – their relationships, their internal lives, their sufferings and joys – their experiences are inextricable from that of all Palestinians. Abdul Karim’s grandfather Ahmed, a man “who foolishly believed that if he, and others, fought alongside the British against the Ottomans, His Majesty King George V would reward this show of solidarity with freedom and independence” dies just as his son is born, his “blood utterly wasted at the altar of British colonialism”.
Sabawi wrote this book as part of her PhD research into “post-memory in the context of generational trauma and exile”, and travelled to Gaza in July 2023 to visit with family and reacquaint herself with the landmarks that are integral to her father’s story. It’s vulnerable, formidable and necessary, depicting countless injustices over multiple decades and capturing the pervasive sense of abandonment Palestinians must have felt on the world stage. Sabawi takes us through the early days of the “Arab-Israeli conflict”: the Nakba, the Suez crisis and the Six-Day War are all backdrops for the narrative, but the story doesn’t feel political.
Her writing feels sparse and matter-of-fact for a poet, but it’s undoubtedly intentional: although there’s a tenderness for kin, culture and country that’s apparent throughout – in her vivid descriptions of her homeland, and in affectionately portrayed, well-rounded characters – it’s almost as though she’s demonstrating that the Palestinian claim to the land is so concrete, so rational, so inarguable that it needs no embellishment.
That said, it was a hard read, not because the subject was difficult to comprehend or the prose unengaging, but because the empathy it generated for me as a reader was so powerful. And yet, for all the struggle, anguish, dispossession and injustice that it captures, there is also fortitude, faith, resilience and strength.
With millions of displaced Gazans, the death toll in Gaza exceeding 40,000 and increased attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, this book could not be more urgent. But it’s also emotionally resonant; not just a story of what has been, but what is still ongoing, and in our power to change.
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