A Palestinian American Sex and the City

Betty Shamieh's debut novel is a rebellious rom-com.

- By Gal Beckerman

My local independent bookstore has a corner devoted to what it calls "Palestinian Stories." The small display of books, which went up in October 2023, is a grim collection of mostly nonfiction titles, such as Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 and Ben Ehrenreich's The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. The smattering of novels are largely by Palestinian American writers, among them Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin and Hala Alyan's Salt Houses, both bleak multigenerational epics of exile and grief.

You can feel the weight that these books have to carry, each bearing the "pressure" to tell "the human story that will educate and enlighten others," as the British Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad recently wrote in her book Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Because Palestinians are a people frequently reduced to a problem, the impulse to testify on their behalf is natural. But art that begins with such a mission is not art that is likely to surprise or entertain. Didacticism often results in fiction mostly inhabited by heroes and beautifully tragic figures: the Palestinian grandmother who tightly grips the key to the ancestral home that she lost; the young Palestinian American woman who returns to the occupied lands and feels, for the first time, her people's struggle; the deracinated doctor in Beirut or Kuwait or Paris, unmoored and overwhelmed by longing.