Safe Weddings

Dear friend Ibrahim Nasrallah, greetings from Jerusalem, as if you live with us, touching our pain and worries. What is also wonderful is that you write about a stage that we are still living in. You have made the right choice, deciding to write (Palestinian farce) from many different aspects. Soon you will be a pioneer in this field, and your successive novels will be a contemporary epic for the Palestinian people in a constantly renewed artistic framework. In your novel (Amna’s Weddings): You chose a difficult topic, which is death and martyrdom, a topic that tempts wailing, crying, lamentation and melodrama, but you skillfully moved away from all that, and began to internalize the Palestinian condition that lies between the borders of joy and sadness, the wedding and the funeral, and you began to dialogue with death deeply and intelligently, to illuminate a new aspect of the Palestinian experience. Your novel moves forward smoothly and competently, and assigning the heroism and narration to women added splendor and beauty to the novel. Rand, Lamis, Amna, the grandmother and (the two angels) are unforgettable characters. Likewise in (Under the Midday Sun), you succeeded in depicting the crisis of this ambiguous stage, and in monitoring the character of the doctor, who is a convincing scourge, as one cannot forget the two children, Nimr and Numan, nor can one forget Umm Al-Walid, Noura, Naim, Yassin, Salim, and the doctor. And Warda is also a charming and fertile female character. You talk about us in a captivating style, and see us in a beautiful and accurate way, and I see that you complete what Ghassan Kanafani could not complete, wishing you a long life to accomplish your great novelistic project. Mahmoud Shukair