Palestine -1: Stories from the eve of the Nakba

Gaza has been subjected to genocide by Israel and its allies for two years. In a time when the present eludes articulation and the future is still being fought for, this panel asks us how fiction can help us imagine a time before the ceaseless Nakba in Palestine.

Basma Ghalayini, editor of the book Palestine - 1, and writer Mazen Maarouf, discuss their contributions to the book, the stories of Palestinian villages in the year before the Nakba, and the place of history in constantly 'unprecedented' times.

-- The Book --

Palestine - 1 is a daring response to the events of the last two years, and the ongoing genocide taking place in Gaza, with an unexpected approach to the event that underpins the entire Middle East conflict: the Nakba of 1948. Instead of taking a semi-realist, autobiographical or non-fictional response to this event - all of which have been done many times before - this anthology asks 10 Palestinian writers, all of whose grandparents were forcibly displaced by the events of 1948, to re-imagine Palestine the year before this catastrophe, and to explore the events leading up to it, on a village-by-village basis.

Every writer has been allocated a specific village to write about, and challenged to explore the atmosphere of this moment through fantastical, supernatural and speculative fiction devices. Rather like its counterpart anthology, Palestine + 100, it uses genre tropes to re-examine this experience, much as Guillermo Del Torro used horror to explore the Spanish Civil War in films like Pan’s Labyrinth, or Godzilla offered an SF metaphor for the trauma (and retriggered traumas) or nuclear warfare and arms testing in the 1940s and 50s.

-- Our Speakers --

Mazen Maarouf is a Palestinian storyteller, poet and translator. Born in Beirut in 1978, he holds a master's degree in chemistry from the Lebanese University. He worked in the scientific field for a period before moving into journalism. He has written on literary and art, theatre and contemporary dance for a number of newspapers and cultural periodicals in Lebanon and the Arab world.

He has published three collections of poetry: As if Our Sorrow Were Bread, The Camera Does Not Capture Birds and An Angel on a Clothesline.

He has published three collections of short stories: Jokes for Gunmen and The Rats That Licked the Karate Champion's Ears and Sunshine on the Substitute Bench. He also published a novella entitled ‘The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid’ . He won the Letteratura Poetry Prize, awarded by the city of Lana (Italian Alps) for poetry in 2014. He also won the Al-Multaqa Prize for Arabic Short Stories in Kuwait (December 2016). The English edition of Jokes for the Gunmen was longlisted for the British Man Booker Prize in 2019.

He has translated a number of Icelandic short stories, novels and poetry into Arabic.

Basma Ghalayini is an editor and translator, born in Khan Younis and raised in Gaza City. She is the editor of Palestine +100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba and Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide. Her translations have been published by Commonwealth Writers, Deep Vellum Press and Comma Press in books including Banthology, The Book of Ramallah and The Book of Cairo. As a journalist, she has written for the New York Times and Wasafari.