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The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials review
Raja Shehadeh – lawyer, activist and Palestine's greatest prose writer – has long been a voice of sanity and measure in the fraught, tendentious world of Arab-Israeli politics. His first non-academic book, When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, chronicled the 2002 siege of his hometown, Ramallah, while Palestinian Walks, which won the Orwell prize, traced how Israel's de facto occupation of the West Bank had fundamentally altered both its geography and its history. Last year, Shehadeh published What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, his first book since the attacks of 7 October. It was a work in two parts: the first, a characteristically measured analysis of how history led us to this point; the second, a bitterly furious record of the devastation wrought upon Gaza. The overwhelming impression was of a man who, after decades of engagement, had finally, tragically, succumbed to despair. So it is an unexpected relief to find in Forgotten something different: a Shehadeh who is engaged, forensic, alert to history's weight but unwilling to let it crush him. Perhaps this is due to the presence of his co-author, his wife, the academic Penny Johnson. The prose remains lawyerly, precise to the point of fastidiousness, but the collaboration lends it a quiet strength. The first-person plural voice used throughout the book is intimate yet resolute, while the occasional references to 'Raja' and 'Penny' in the third person suggest a certain distance – a recognition that they, too, are subjects in this vast historical tragedy, just as much as its narrators. The project of Forgotten echoes Palestinian Walks, but this time there is a clear objective to Shehadeh and Johnson's wanderings. They are searching for evidence of Palestinian history in the West Bank – traces both ancient and recent of the thriving culture that has endured here for millennia, and the memorials that bear witness to the suffering of those who call this place home. Again and again, I thought of WG Sebald as I read Forgotten. The resemblance lies not only in the mournful elegance of the prose but also in its method: a meditative excavation of history embedded in the landscape. Readers of The Rings of Saturn, in which Sebald wanders the East Anglian coast uncovering the buried violence of empire, will recognise the impulse. But here, in occupied Palestine, the violence is neither buried nor historical. It is immediate, ongoing. 'How many human lives and how many futures would have been preserved … had the Israeli government … prevented further settlements?', the authors ask. 'Thousands have died since, and so here we were, on our way to see how Palestinians memorialise their dead in Nablus.' At the heart of Shehadeh's work – and the conflict itself – is the idea of biopolitics, as explored by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Forgotten, like Palestinian Walks, examines the way geography and history are manipulated, controlled and erased. To move through Palestine is to navigate a web of restrictions – permits, checkpoints, detours – designed not only to obstruct but to exhaust. It is a book about memory and memorials, but also about the sheer difficulty of reaching them. 'Checkpoints, closures and a regime of exclusions have deprived new generations from gaining an impression of the country as a geographical unit,' write Shehadeh and Johnson. And that, of course, is precisely the point. The writers seek out the ruins of Kafr Bir'im, a Palestinian village in Galilee destroyed by the Israeli army in 1953, and the tomb of Mahmoud Darwish, Shehadeh's friend and Palestine's great poet. They visit Ottoman khans – way stations for desert caravans – and search for the remnants of ancient Gibeon and Qasr al-Yahud on the River Jordan, the site of Christ's baptism. They find a monument to a squadron of Turkish aeronauts and the only public memorial to the Nakba, the 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. Everywhere, history is distorted or obliterated, rewritten by Israeli power. And yet, for all this, Forgotten is a book of resistance – not just political, but existential. Shehadeh and Johnson, now in their 70s, offer a vision of Palestinian heritage that refuses to be erased, tracing a lineage that stretches back millennia and persists today despite the relentless attempts to efface it. History, like the land itself, cannot be so easily obliterated. Even after bulldozers and bombs, flowers bloom, trees reclaim razed earth, red anemones push through rock. Shehadeh and Johnson remain awed by the hills, by vultures and eagles wheeling above them, by the annual clouds of almond blossom. All this layered past, Forgotten insists, holds within it the promise of a future just as rich, just as enduring. In previous reviews, I wrote that Shehadeh's books are like beacons held up against the darkness of Israeli oppression. Forgotten is perhaps the brightest light of all. Forgotten by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson is published by Profile (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
On my radar: Raja Shehadeh's cultural highlights
Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian author and lawyer, and co-founder of the human rights organisation Al-Haq. He won the Orwell prize in 2008 for his book Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, and his new book, Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials, written with his wife, Penny Johnson, is out now. My garden in Ramallah (in the West Bank) I built the house and the garden around it in 1996, when Ramallah was less crowded. I have trees, shrubs, vegetables and flowers, roses, snapdragons and geraniums, which are very easy to grow in our part of the world. At the moment I am mostly pruning, which is convenient because I can do it standing up, only crouching and stooping a little. I consider pruning to be like editing – you decide how you want a shrub to grow. Every house here used to have a garden but now that land is so expensive it is mostly used for more buildings. Gardens are unusual, unfortunately. A Knock on the Roof by Khawla Ibraheem I saw this at the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh last year. It's a wonderful one-woman play about a woman living in Gaza and having to respond to the small warning bombs that the Israeli army throw on your roof to let you know that you have five to 15 minutes before they destroy your house. In the play, she practises how to react quickly, what and who to take. It's very tense and a very good account of life under these terrible conditions. It's about the earlier war of course, the 2014 war. I think they have stopped this practice – now they just destroy without warning. Palestine from Above This was on at the AM Qattan Foundation in Ramallah and is now at a gallery in Istanbul. The foundation is a philanthropic organisation and it does very good exhibitions. This one investigates the ways in which Palestine has been looked at from above – surveillance, cartography, photography – and puts this in context by showing, alongside those images, pictures, art and interviews by the people living there. Viewing Palestine from the sky has long been part of a colonial war of subjugation, and Palestinians try to escape and counter this through their own works. Behind the Symphony with Antonio Pappano: Mahler (Symphony No 1) (Marquee TV) I very much like classical music but I have never really appreciated Mahler and always felt as if I was missing out on something. This is a documentary about the life story, history and artistry of three symphonies, one of which is by Mahler. Antonio Pappano does a very good job of describing his Symphony No 1 and I found it enlightening. Before I didn't really understand what Mahler was trying to do, but when someone guided me through it step by step it was an entirely different experience. It grabbed me. I like Beethoven, Schubert, Bach and now Mahler! Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide by Atef Abu Saif I had been following the Gaza war and it got to the point where I couldn't take any more: news of one massacre after another. I was numb and started withdrawing, but then I picked up this book by the Palestinian Authority minister for culture, who went to Gaza from the West Bank to do an event there. He took his son with him so that they could swim in the sea, then the war started and they were stuck. He wrote this diary, which exactly evokes the feeling of life there under a war against civilians as well as Hamas. If you survive, it is by chance. Edinburgh This is a place I have been visiting since 1991 and that has been very kind to me. I come every summer for its culture and music, and to walk in the gardens and parks. Many of my books have been launched here and I have made friends and feel at home. It gives me respite from the rigours of the West Bank. It's a place where, if you love something, when you come back you find that it is still there, that it hasn't been destroyed. That's very comforting for someone who lives in a place that is constantly under attack.
The Guardian
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Andrew O'Hagan: ‘A kind of Dickens and Zola energy was pulsing'
Journalist, novelist and cafe owner Andrew O'Hagan, 56, grew up in Ayrshire and lives in London, the setting for his most recent book, Caledonian Road, now out in paperback. Shortlisted for last year's Orwell prize for political fiction, it follows 60 characters over 650 pages and has been praised as an 'extremely readable how-we-live-now novel' (Margaret Drabble) that 'captures London in all its messy, multicultural glory' (Yotam Ottolenghi) and 'instantly feels like a box set waiting to happen' (the Standard). Tell us how Caledonian Road came about. I was writing a lot of big stories for the London Review of Books – working with Julian Assange [on a memoir that Assange disavowed, an experience O'Hagan reported on], with another guy who claimed to have invented bitcoin, with people who were reinventing themselves on the net – and a lot of that reporting came together in the character of Campbell Flynn, a kind of falling man at the centre of modern London corruption. I got some insight into the British aristocracy's relationship with dirty Russian money, and following that money led to street gangs, migrant traffickers, fashion brands and high-street businessmen. In my head, a kind of Dickens and Zola energy was pulsing. The research became huge: I was at the polo in Windsor one minute, with the queen attending, or with rap gangs or inside Leicester sweatshop factories the next. I was sort of amazed at the real-life connections and wanted to give inner life to them. Are you still in touch with any of the people you spoke to during your research? A few. Some are dead, some are in jail, some have flown the country, and others are thriving in plain sight, so heavily disguised they didn't recognise themselves. Or chose not to. You'd be surprised how skilled people become at not recognising themselves. I haven't had a single complaint. You and Campbell have a fair bit in common… He shares the obvious things with me, which localises his experience in a way I wanted for the story, but there's as much of me spread over the other 59 characters. Many a good narrative wants a central consciousness, a central voice, and I enjoyed mapping Campbell's years on to my own – it felt natural – but his descent into mania is completely invented. It's a dance, actually, of the deeply personal and the wholly foreign, and that is the kind of thing I like. On stage at last year's Edinburgh book festival you said you've read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde maybe 35 times over the course of your life. Robert Louis Stevenson was a kind of spirit guide with this book. I love his style, how naturally he marries his personal fixations to a vision of otherness, and the Stevenson epigraph was there from the earliest draft. Campbell is divided, shadowed by a previous self, which might be awakening a capacity for disaster in him. Personally, I've always felt quite relaxed about the passing of time, and about where I started, but Campbell isn't, and my reading of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde over the years eventually triggered, I think, a dramatic sense of inward badness in Campbell Flynn, something that dramatically contradicts his easygoing nature. Given that you're also a reporter, how do you decide when you're going to write fiction? I usually know the form of a story as soon as I meet it. For instance, it never occurred to me for a second that the Assange story would be a novel by me. Its power, as I saw it, would flow in a piece of personal reportage. Later, Jonathan Franzen told me it helped him write his novel Purity, which features an Assange-like figure. He asked me why I didn't write it as a novel myself, and I told him, quite frankly, that I thought the story had more vitality as nonfiction. That will sometimes be true, sometimes not. You learn to sense it. If you're interested in writing well you never dress down; you work to find the sentences that suit the material, and if it's nonfiction you'll want them to stand up in court. But the quality of the writing shouldn't decline an inch. Name something you need in order to work. It's changed over the years. I pretty much wrote my first book, The Missing, in bed during a harsh winter, when I was in my early 20s. I began my novel Our Fathers [1999] in a rented house in West Cork that was loaned to me by the late Jenny Diski. But nowadays I'm at a desk. I like pretty lamps and old typewriters. I've made two beautiful writing rooms, one in London and one in Scotland, and filled them full of things that help me work. I love paintings and photographs. Not long ago I was gifted one of Evelyn Waugh's black desks. What have you been reading lately? Working on a family story set in the late 1970s, I've been revisiting things – Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Seamus Heaney's Station Island – while lingering over books that capture the radiance of childhood: The Little Prince, Charlotte's Web, A Child's Garden of Verses. Tell us the last book you gave as a gift. An anniversary copy of Golding's masterpiece Lord of the Flies, to my daughter Nellie. What led you to open a cafe five years ago? My friend Sam Frears and I had always dreamed of opening a great cafe. Sam is blind, and he has other complicated health issues, so we thought we'd do it close to where we both live in Primrose Hill, to make it easy for him to visit every day. It's become a huge magnet for the community, a hub for artists, writers, youthquakers and vintage talkers, and we love it. We spend everything we make on the staff, we fill the place with magazines and books, and we're open all day every day. I'm biased, but I think it's the best place to spend an evening in north London. Caledonian Road is published in paperback on 13 February by Faber (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
