Street olives

Author's name: Ibrahim Nasrallah

Ibrahim Nasrallah tackles the sensitive issue of bodily abuse, and he fully embraces it. The ways women are treated are one of the artistic justifications for creating a narrative text with its distinction, sobriety, and high narrative quality, for which Nasrallah is known as a novelist of a unique caliber. Three female characters play a prominent role in this novel, but the novel is a condensation of fifty years of the vicissitudes experienced by the Palestinian people outside their homeland, from before the year of the Nakba until the mid-nineties of the last century. It is a profound contemplation of the idea of ​​exile and persuasion, but the fundamental theme that occupies every page of this novel is the idea of ​​rape, within a narrative atmosphere capable of gripping the reader powerfully... and an atmosphere of intensity, resentment, and revolt that sometimes makes one feel unable to catch their breath. A novel that coexists and engages in dialogue with the most dangerous and delicate phases of this history, the stage in which defeat is internal, and factors of weakness come from the heart and brain, and elements of disintegration are present before our eyes, yet we neither notice nor wake up. An enjoyable novel in the artistic and aesthetic sense of the word, enjoyable for those characters who give us a sense of sanctification and love for life, enjoyable for those incomparable women, enjoyable for this unbearable longing for the homeland, enjoyable simply to read about those who lived and died and what the soil of their homeland embraced. An authentic novel, in experience, language, references and poetry, and that bold, courageous and successful attempt to blend the arts together, and triumph over generalization, marginalization and concealment, and the ability to speak in a time when even speaking has become persecuted or forbidden