Comment
Forever bracing for a collision with truth
Comma editor and translator Basma Ghalayini ( 1) reflects on the challenges of publishing Palestinian books in the current political climate
R
eading books about Palestine (and, of course, publishing them) involves a very dramatic collision with the truth. There is no gentle way of sidling up to the realities of
77 years of occupation. When I first started work- ing with Comma Press, they had already published two major titles from Palestine: The Book of Gaza (2014), edited by Atef Abu Saif, followed by his acclaimed diary of the 2014 Gaza onslaught, The Drone Eats with Me. So, Comma had already collided with some of realities before I even joined the team. But having a born-and- bred Gazan in such a small team put Comma in a unique position as a publisher. Yet responding to this opportunity resulted in more collisions with reality. In 2019, I co-edited an instalment of Comma’s
Futures’ Past series called Palestine + 100. The stories in it were set a century after the Nakba [the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs] in 1948. This book proved to be Comma’s biggest seller in 2019 and has remained in our top five selling titles ever since. Its visions of the future ranged from the dystopian to the comic. Each story, although attempting to predict life in the year 2048, actually contains atrocities that have already come true. Stories in the book went on to be adapted into plays for stage and radio, and a short film. Despite its successes, the publication did not come without controversy. In the same year, we published Gazan author
Nayrouz Qarmout who was supposed to launch her debut The Sea Cloak at Edinburgh International Book Festival. Two separate visa applications failed, and only when some MSPs got involved did a third prove successful. Again, these were learning curves for us because nothing is easy with Palestine. But no collision with the truth was greater than what has happened since 7th October
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2023. In the first weeks of the onslaught, multi- ple members of my own immediate family were trapped in Gaza City. In the weeks that followed, countless members of my wider family were killed. My mother’s and grandmother’s houses were destroyed, as was my father’s fertility clinic. Everyone I knew was displaced. While I was unable to focus on anything but
my family's safety, my co-editor Ra Page threw himself into the déjà vu moment of editing Atef’s diaries during another onslaught, just as he had done in 2014, again getting the entries published in places like the New York Times and the Washington Post. When Atef finally got out on New Year’s Eve 2023, we published the diaries as Don’t Look Left, simultaneously with 14 other publishers around the world, with all proceeds going to Gaza relief charities. To date, it has raised over £180,000. But trouble follows us, as trouble always does when you publish, read or even try to think about Palestine. The very first attempt to launch this diary in
the UK – a staged reading of extracts featuring Kingsley Ben-Adir, Kamila Shamsie and Maxine Peake – met with a wave of accusations from lobbyists which resulted in the venue cancelling the event, only to later reinstate it following widespread protests. Likewise, when we tried to
take a version of this show to the Barbican in September last year, a legal organisation tried to get it cancelled saying that it was “illegal” based purely on what the Barbican had said about the event on their website. We expect similar pushback with our two
forthcoming titles: Voices of Resistance – a book of diaries by four women currently trapped in Gaza (with a foreword and introduction by Gillian Slovo and Caryl Churchill) – and Palestine Minus One, which is a horror-infused exploration of the Nakba itself. We look forward to more threats and accusations from lobby groups. We look forward to more truth-collisions for readers, too. Again, nothing is easy with Palestine.
Literature in the UK seems to shy away from certain areas of politics, always wanting to stay apparently neutral, at least at a marketing-level, to maximise its market reach. But in Palestinian literature the idea of politics-free adult fiction is frankly ridiculous. Indeed, the belief that you can, and should, separate politics from culture is arguably part of a system that keeps readers here in a bubble, cut off from all the things taking place in the rest of the world. So yes, nothing is easy with reading, writing
or publishing about Palestine. But that is all the more reason to keep doing it.
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Comment
Northern Powerhouse Focus
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