The Blue Between Sky and Water is a lovely book by Susan Abulhawa, the most widely read Palestinian author in history. Like Mornings in Jenin, The Blue Between Sky and Water is very pro-Palestine, understandably since Abulhawa’s father was a Palestinian freedom fighter, forced to immigrate to the U.S. when Israel took over the few remains areas of a free Palestine in 1967.
The Blue Between Sky and Water shows a side of the Israeli-Palestinian war that Americans rarely see on the evening news because the U.S. and Israel are such close allies. Along with the violence and aggression directed toward the Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, the book also shows the strength and integrity of the Palestinian people. Despite seemingly insurmountable devastation of their homeland, they persevere.
When a family is brutally forced from the village of Beit Daras, they struggle for survival in a Gaza refugee camp surviving rape and other forms of violence. In this particular family, the matriarch, Nazmiyeh, binds together a household of women and children whose lives are constantly barraged by military attacks (sniper shootings and bombings) and moments of personal crisis (a cancer diagnosis with no available treatment, Kaled (a son with locked-in syndrome in which he is mentally aware, but unable to move, speak, or interact except by blinking his eyes after being traumatized in an Israeli assault), and constant struggles for basic necessities like food and water.
I am generally not a fan of magical realism, but Albuhawa uses it here to great advantage. One woman can call forth a jinn for protection, and the locked-in Kaled lives in “the quiet blue, that place without time, where I could soak up all the juices of life and let them run through me like a river.” The novel moves freely through time and often has a stream-of-consciousness narrative. Abuhawa has a unique way of expressing herself that has an almost synesthesetic quality and that is gorgeous to read: “Mother and son held each other in the tight grip of sight”; “they consumed one another than night and cared with their mouths, teeth, and nails places of refuge in the other, where they left pieces o their heart in each other’s body”; and “time thinned out to a liquid that rushed over Gaza like a stream over rocks, smoothing the jagged corners and coating them with a new moss of life.”
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The Blue Between Sky and Water(Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, June 11, 2024) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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You can read my review of Albuhawa’s Mornings in Jenin here.
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