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In Search of Fatima:A Palestinian Story
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Paperback (2009)
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An intimate memoir of the 1948 Nakba, exile and the dispossession of Palestinian lands
Born in Jerusalem, Ghada Karmi and her family were forced out of their home in 1948. They shared the fate of the thousands of Palestinians who, in the Nakba, were dispossessed and driven from land lived on for generations. In this moving memoir, Karmi charts their journey from Jerusalem to Golders Green, in north London, and their struggle to put down roots in alien soil. A quest for identity haunts her search for security far from home. Speaking for the vast number of people displaced worldwide, her story is a powerful exploration of the psychological pain of exile.
Reviews
Ghada Karmi’s stunning memoir is remarkable. Extraordinarily well-written, it is the amazingly honest story of a Palestinian woman of exceptional self-awareness. Hers is a story of exile and displacement ... rich in detail and human experience. Karmi is excellent on the quality of family and even communal life in Mandatory Palestine ... she also has a wonderfully subtle way of showing how in thousands of different ways the political and the personal intermesh, and this she does with a skill and insight that could be a novelist’s envy.
One of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement, which western power and its creature, Israel, have normalised.
Ghada Karmi writes simply and poignantly. Here is a story of our time, exile and dispossession, and how she has come to be neither British nor quite Arab.
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A very timely book in the current political situation ... This should serve to remind people just what the big fuss in the Middle East is all about.
, Times Literary Supplement -
... an engrossing and remarkably frank account ...
MultiCultural Review -
This is an important memoir, beautifully written by an intelligent, sensitive woman ... It should help those of us who do not understand why growing numbers of Muslims and not a few Christians have lost faith with Western pretensions of fairness.
Financial Times -
Keenly observed, fierce, honest and yet light of touch.
Economist -
Karmi’s great achievement is to humanise the Palestinian predicament. Violent uprooting and exile have permanent psychological effects, which, as the Jewish people discovered, are not necessarily assuaged by the passage of time. We need counter-narratives like this, because we have recently learnt that it is not only parochial but also dangerous to ignore the pain and rights of others.
Independent