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Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s compact novel calls into question the ways in which we define ourselves and the methods we use to do it. If one cornerstone of modern identity is our relationship to a nation-state, then what happens if someone is not only a non-citizen, but if their parents are not who they had always thought?

In this sharp-tongued and fearless novella, action circles around Jumana, who learns that her larger-than-life Palestinian father might not be a blood relative. And who is she, if she’s not Palestinian?

This question is not just for Jumana. Al-Hayyat’s characters, mostly Palestinians, are in a constant fight to define themselves, their bodies, and the scope of their lives.

Jumana’s father was a PLO fighter in Beirut in the early 1980s when he took her and her sister away from their Lebanese mother. After this, they were raised in Amman, Tunisia, and finally in Palestine. However, post-Oslo, the two young women remain in a precarious position.

The novel opens in Jerusalem in 2007. Their father is dying, and the Israeli state has granted Jumana’s sister Yara only limited access to the hospital.

"Resistance is central to this book, which itself resists being packed down into the traditional form of a novel. Everywhere, in small spaces, stories push out"

The novel, originally published in 2013, wasÌę in Hazem Jamjoum’s English translation, which captures al-Hayyat’s inventive, muscular prose.

The action opens as Jumana is washing the body of an acquaintance who has just died. And just as the novel takes identity and makes it strange, so it also defamiliarises the body.

We are always zoomed in just a little too close. In the opening scene, we’re faced with the old woman’s “two pale breasts floundering,” and her face “yellowed on the left side from exsanguination.” The body has been dead for a while now, but it continues “resisting.”

Resistance is central to this book, which itself resists being packed down into the traditional form of a novel. Everywhere, in small spaces, stories push out. They sprout strange and beautiful growths of vivid description, sudden humour, and storylines that grab the reader and haul them in a new direction.

If the traditional novel is a form with distinct boundaries, identities, and settings, then al-Hayyat’s is a different sort of border-subverting fiction. Extreme closeups of the body and historical events mean we look so closely that, under a microscope, we can see that absolute borders are a lie.

Who was Jumana’s father?

The novel’s driving force is Jumana’s relationship with her father, who the narrative reveals in spurts and flashes. He was a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army in the late 1970s and early 1980s, serving in Lebanon. When his Lebanese wife left him, he snatched his two daughters and deposited them with his sister in Amman, before later bringing them to Tunisia, and still later Palestine.

The book takes place in all these settings. It is narrated not just by Jumana, but also by her sister Yara, both her parents, her mother-in-law, and a ghost.

When it opens, Jumana’s father is silent. Once a loud presence in her life, he is now “a large mass of surplus flesh with two oxygen tubes holding back his snores.” It’s at the end of this chapter that Jumana’s husband-to-be notices something strange: “Your father’s blood type is O positive, and yours is AB positive. That can’t be right.”

The narrative then whisks us back to Amman in 1986, when Jumana was taken from her mother and left with an aunt who didn’t want her. Next, we spend successive chapters in Tunis with Jumana’s father and sister before travelling back in time to Beirut to meet Jumana’s mother. The final chapters return us to Jerusalem, in 2011 and 2012 when Jumana is still considering whether to test her DNA against her sister’s.

Refusing chronology, refusing borders

Again and again, the narrative circles back to the question: What if Jumana isn’t her father’s daughter? As an adult, she goes to meet her Lebanese mother, but this is not the panacea she imagined as a girl, nor a wellspring of identity. After all, whatever her blood says, she has been shaped by Palestinian communities in one sort of exile or another.

Choice also seems to be a factor. Jumana’s sister Yara fears losing her little sister to a new identity. Yara recalls the story of their aunt Dima, who married her father’s brother. After getting a divorce, Dima left her son to be raised by his grandmother, started rumours that she wasn’t really Palestinian, and married a Lebanese man. “Dima chose a new story for herself, a story she’d tailored to her needs,” Yara recalls. “I’m afraid that Jumana will do that someday.”

Jumana does look into getting a DNA test for a definitive answer about who she is. But what could this tell her about a constantly moving, changing target? The novel doesn’t give definitive answers; indeed, it eschews signs, borders, and grand conclusive narratives.

At the very end, Jumana and her small family are on a car trip. Her husband must pull over near an Israeli settlement because their daughter Shireen needs to pee. And right there, “under the big road sign pointing to the Modi‘in settlement,” little Shireen pees, “like an Olympic champion in the sport of roadside urination.”

This is our ending: not a big act of resistance, but a small and subversive one.

M Lynx QualeyÌęis a writer whose primary focus is Arabic literature and its translation. She publishes in The Guardian, Qantara, The Chicago Tribune and on the daily blog she edits,Ìę

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