Reviewer’s note: This review is less like a traditional review of a novel, as it is a semi-memoir and one cannot similarly critique the depiction of real lives as if they are made-up characters.
“You want to reconstruct my life with your words?”
This is what author Samah Sabawi is asked when she invites her father to be the subject of her PhD research project. This exchange frames the prologue of Cactus Pear For My Beloved (2024) as Sabawi’s father, Abdul Karim (or Karim), accepts, allowing Sabawi and us to take a trip to Gaza, and dive into a personal and national history from 1918 to 2018.
Sabawi takes a leap of faith in publishing her project to a larger audience beyond academia, and it pays off. We are taken by the hand to navigate the many lifetimes of a family in Gaza, as recounted between a father and daughter, storyteller and writer, observed and observer.
By rooting the book in standpoint theory and oral testimony, the audience is immediately positioned to recognise that personal stories do not belong to the eye of the beholder — or the person who experienced it — rather it is part of a “tapestry”.
The cactus pear appears at both bitter and sweet moments, the most prominent when Karim’s family is escaping the violence in their village and they walk through a cactus bush. Additionally, the word for cactus in Arabic is sabr, synonymous with the virtue of patience.
We witness the family members processing the violence around them, believing it will end soon, and dispelling any fears of the alternative. Yet the reader knows that will not be the case, and knows how grand of a tragedy the events of 1948 were. Sabawi notes that Karim, like many of the youth at the time, would later come to recognise these events as Al Nakba.
As such, we see up close how the personal interacts with key political events marking the years of displacement and loss, including the presence of British and Australian soldiers during World War I, the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, the subsequent British mandate, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the formation of Zionist terrorist gangs such as the Haganah, and the early Palestinian resistance during Al Nakba. One simple description of the presence of “English hats, Turkish fezzes, Islamic veils, Jewish kippahs, and Western-style clothing” is able to convey the many peoples who have traversed the land of Palestine, and the accompanying years of empire, mandates and occupation.
We also hear the perspective of Palestinians who felt let down by the lacklustre support of Arab governments during 1948, which led to Gaza becoming subject to the control of the Egyptian army before Israeli control.
Sabawi depicts the joys and tribulations of growing up from relationships, love, fertility, mental health, education, to eating too much za’atar sandwiches and too little falafel, eldest child syndrome, the power of storytelling, working from a young age, and political involvement including skipping French class in solidarity with Algeria.
The way the book is written, we follow stories of multiple generations and only realise who Sabawi’s father is Karim, once Karim’s childhood and adolescent years are at the forefront. This not only meant that the reader becomes attached to each family member’s story, but that the book surpassing its function as a documentation of lived histories because we are able to live with them and momentarily share a single space.
One such instance we are made to reckon with the specific violence experienced by Palestinians is when Karim and his siblings force themselves to refer to their own father as “mashlool” or disabled for the first time, so Israeli soldiers would search their home and leave them alone.
Naturally, this book required much reconstruction of events and rewriting dialogue based on personal recounts. In fictionalising some details of the stories of Karim’s loved ones, there were shades of fiction such as the death of Karim’s grandmother Aziza upon staying in her home and being shot dead by Zionist militias, Sabawi sought to reflect the multiple realities of the Palestinian experience, even if it meant changing the course of some her family members’ lives on paper.
Sabawi deliberately stopped at the year of 1967, when she was born as anything after meant detailing another tale of immigration and exile, including the fact that her family’s are a “colony of survivors [and] victims of colonisation”, now living in Australia.
Through her writing, we also get to know Sabawi herself, even if just in snippets at the beginning and end. As a child, she states, “I know better than to rush [my father]. I wait.” I was intrigued by her curiosity that was punctuated by patience and emotional intelligence. While this book was about her father, I do hope that someday she considers sharing her perspective with us because her words are precious.
Cactus Pear For My Beloved is a culmination of four years of research, two years of editing, many references, 60 hours of taped interviews, a trip to Gaza, and one PhD. Sabawi’s storytelling will no doubt stay with you as a steadfast form of literary resistance as a genocide continues to be committed with full impunity.
By the epilogue, the reader has come to know more about the Sabawi’s relatives than Sabawi, yet who will continue to hold the keys to their journey? This family from Gaza will.
Cactus Pear For My Beloved (2024) is out now.
