Umm Saad

About this book

Here, in these pages, you do not merely read a novel; you listen to the pulse of the land speaking through the tongue of a woman. Umm Saad is not a paper character; she is the school from which dignity graduated before dictionaries knew it. The tale begins from a dry vine that Umm Saad plants at the doorstep of the house, telling us that life springs from nothingness when we possess the will, and that grapes do not need much water as much as they need the certainty of roots. The lines carry you on a wondrous human journey: from the obscurity of the camp and its heavy silence that followed the setback, to the inspiration of resistance born from the womb of misery. You will smell the scent of the Palestinian countryside wafting between the words, and the coldness of the mud encircling Umm Saad's dress, but in her eyes you will find a sparkle no storms can extinguish. She is the mother who pushes her son toward the borders not because she does not love him, but because she loves him enough to make him free. With his celebrated mastery, Ghassan Kanafani did not write about poverty to make people pity it; he wrote about the poor because they are the front rank of the battle. This work is a cry in the face of defeat and a call to pride in the rough palms that knead bread and carry hope. It is a novel about the essential difference between one tent and another, and about the moment a human decides to stop being a victim and become the very road to dawn.