This mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians - which began decades earlier and continues to this day - would become known as the Nakba, “the catastrophe,” commemorated by Palestinians every year on May 15, the day after the state of Israel was officially established. So risking backlash from not only members of her community, but her own family, too, Rum chose the latter.įrom 1947-1949, more than 700,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were forced from their homes in order to form the state of Israel, a manifestation of the political ideology known as Zionism, which is the belief that Jewish people are a race deserving of their own state. She felt she needed to be honest about the complex systems of transgenerational trauma and patriarchy, and how these systems lead to cycles of abuse. When Etaf Rum was writing her debut novel, A Woman is No Man, she had a choice to make: would she tell a story that carried on what she refers to as her community’s “code of silence” regarding issues of misogyny and domestic violence, or would she challenge her people to evaluate their blind spots, hoping it might move them forward toward true liberation? Rum wanted to be careful her book would not be used to perpetuate racist, anti-Arab - specifically anti-Palestinian - attitudes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |