Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

The novel opens with Nahr in a concrete cubicle nicknamed the Cube, and shuffles between her present life as a prisoner of the state of Israel and her past life as a Palestinian living with her family in Kuwait, where working class refugees like herself constantly experience discrimination and abuse. Though not academically gifted, Nahr is just as determined as her mother to send her brother to medical school in Russia and enters prostitution—unwittingly at first—to augment her salary as a bookkeeper and manicurist at a hair salon. Life chugs on steadily, she marries a Palestinian man considered a hero in the occupied territories of Palestine, who later disappears without explanation.

After Iraq invades Kuwait, a decision supported by Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Nahr and her family immigrate to Jordan in the face of ferocious persecution of Palestinians in Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War. Unlike her mother and grandmother who have already endured displacement from their homeland, the sharp rupture transforms Nahr and her brother, forcing them to reckon with their identity in momentous ways. Nahr makes her first trip to Palestine to finalise her divorce but soon forges a close bond with her brother-in-law, a member of an underground movement seeking to end Israeli occupation.  

Abulhawa paints an unflinching picture of Palestinians lives under the brutal realities of occupation and as refugees. And as much as her gripping, vivid prose attests to the many wages of inhumanity, slivers of joy and hope still emerge amid the dark clouds of never-ending despair, oppression and destitution.   

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh

Between the Dutch government’s recent apology for slavery and the just concluded COP-15 conference on biodiversity, this book perfectly links Netherlands’ colonial era plundering and depopulation of the Banda Islands—an archipelago on the Indian Ocean once rife with nutmeg—to the present day motto of achieving economic growth at any cost despite its devastating impact on the planet. In clear, direct language, Ghosh dissects how indigenous cultures, knowledge and custodial protection of the land were lost to the conquering, grasping hands of so-called European civilisation, which disregarded the intricate relationship between human beings and nature by failing to understand that desecrating the latter ultimately spelt multi-dimensional disaster for the former.

The scourge of free trade, capitalism, war, and the unquenchable demand for fossil fuels are extensively tackled and counterbalanced with narratives of the growing calls to protect the environment from collapse, a threat the United States—which has the ignoble distinction of being the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels and carbon emitter—comprehends all too well given its extensive research on climate change. Yet, despite the fact the US has many of its military bases located on coastlines and islands, it only plans to deal “with the conflicts that global warming will create or exacerbate, for instance, struggles over water; regional wars; terrorism; and mass movements of people caused by hurricanes and desertification, droughts and flooding,” via military intervention. 

To be sure, consumerism feeds capitalism, and to ensure capitalism marches on unimpeded, industrial cities have sprouted up in Dubai, Singapore, Basra and the US to mitigate against logistical delays at the expense of workers cordoned off behind high walls and from their basic human rights, not so dissimilar to slave forts of yesteryears. Also, it’s no coincidence America’s dependence on fossil fuels coincides with its cluster of military bases along maritime chokepoints through which oil tankers traverse nor is its willingness to overlook Saudi Arabia’s poor human rights record a surprise. Similarly, given all international crude oil trade is conducted with US dollars, the world’s silence on America’s senseless wars and environmental pollution isn’t surprising.

It’s a grim image for humanity, one that undergirds the belief there can be no trade without destruction and vice versa, a belief that motivated Jan Coen, the murderous Dutch Governor-General of the West Indies, to sack the Bandanese from their Island in a bid to commandeer the lucrative nutmeg trade.

Island of Shattered Dreams by Chantal T. Spitz

Still on the theme of environmental defilement and destruction of indigenous knowledge and traditions, this novel renders a fictionalised account of the debilitating nature of French civilisation on the Polynesian island of Tahiti, where the intimate connection between its people and the land undergoes a slow but steady severance. The story centres on Tahitians and Tahitians with French ancestry, metaphors for the conflict bubbling between both cultures.

“We shared our land with them, the great house created by Ta’aroa so that all his children might grow up in its shelter,” explains the narrator. “We welcomed them, these strange brothers from another place… They took our land for themselves, with the help of some of our own people, thirsting after undeserved power. They shattered our established order, forcing their world upon us.”

This new world visits Christianity, capitalist greed, self-hatred, war and a nuclear, military outpost on the Mā’ohi. When Germany declares war on France, and after a French soldier breaks the news to the village head in a bid to rally soldiers to defend the “Motherland,” the villagers wonder who Germany and the Motherland are, why the soldier referred to them as her children, and what right he has to ask them to drive out his country’s invaders when France had occupied their island without permission.   

Spitz’s picturesque prose—which occasionally breaks into verse that infuses the narrative with a distinct melody—draws strongly from the Tahiti’s lush landscape, allowing readers to intimately feel an acute sense of loss towards the destruction of its pristine forests and waters. While less emphasis is placed on characterisation, in Spitz’s capable hands the Pacific island nation becomes an “emerald garland floating since the dawn of time on the limitless ocean” and the eyes of a Mā’ohi soldier recently returned from France’s war are “black pearls sunk into the mask he wears to reassure his family and to try to forget his wounds.”

And given the far-reaching, destructive tentacles of colonialism, those wounds never heal, not even when France mostly abandons Tahiti to its devices.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

Abulhawa’s debut novel, set mainly in a refugee camp in Jenin, follows four generations of the Abulheja family through loss, dashed hopes, separation, and the consequences of Israel’s occupation of their land. Two brothers end up in opposite sides of the conflict after an Israeli soldier kidnaps a baby from his family and raises him as his own, as a Jew. The incident sends their Palestine mother into a depressive spiral that truncates her love for her new born daughter, Amal, who fulfils her lost father’s dream of getting an education. That dream takes her to an orphanage in Jerusalem and then to America, “the land of privilege and plenitude,” for university, where her sanitised, stable life is in stark contrast to the tragic ebullience of Jenin. Here, Amal becomes Amy, a word “drained of its meaning, a woman emptied of her past.” Amy cloaks Amal as she navigates this new existence while keeping at bay her refugee past populated with soldiers, barbed wires and zones off-limit to Palestinians, that is, until a phone call from her freedom fighter brother pulls her back to herself.

Mornings in Jenin is fast-paced, flitting from one tragedy to another, leaving characters with little room to reflect on their experiences. The separation of both brothers is glazed over, and Amal’s reconnection with her Jewish sibling feels underwhelming. That said, the novel trills with poignant, soaring metaphors that, for instance, sketch a woman’s face as “hordes of laugher stolen from wherever it could be found” and Amal’s brother’s grief as “hovering over the graves like rain that cannot fall. His tears welled inside a loneliness that could not be drowned, rocked, or touched.” Indeed, one would be hard pressed to finish this novel without being drowned, rocked or touched by its sobering subject matter.              

My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance by Harry Belafonte

Civil rights activism, stardom, fortune, family drama, divorce, friendship and heartache all take centre stage in Belafonte’s entertaining memoir. It opens on the night he and his best friend Sidney Poitier are en route to deliver a bag of cash to students volunteering to register black voters down in Mississippi, the heart of darkness for the civil rights movement. The words leap from the page with a life and death urgency, one that makes Poitier warn Belafonte never to recruit him for such daredevilry again. This is just one of several electrifying anecdotes that animate the book along with lighter exploits both men share as twenty-somethings hungry to escape poverty’s maw by dint of their talents.

Labelled the King of Calypso at the height of his singing career—his fame towered Elvis Presley’s at some point—Belafonte’s philandering, frequent travels for work and activism, and long absences from home resulted in two divorces. Later, Belafonte would wholeheartedly embrace talk therapy to analyse his troubled childhood and current past, surprising for that time, and even recommend the same to Poitier as he struggled through his own divorce. He also gives a brief history of the origins of his characteristic raspy voice.

A secondary school dropout, Belafonte’s autodidacticism, his biting humour, strong-headedness coupled with his fearless sense of justice and unabashed support for socialism make his story a magnetic read. At times, though, the narrative slips into gossipy tones, like when he reports on Guinea’s first president Sékou Touré’s predilection for hawking up gobs of saliva that he aimed outside his car window. Thankfully, these moments are few and far between to ruin the fun.              

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