Lord, I Gave Birth to a Female

The novel “Lord, I Gave Birth to a Female” by the Palestinian writer Nardin Abu Nabaa tells the story of Maryam, that daughter who was born in exile to a Palestinian family. She used to follow her father from here to there, bombarding him with questions, to extract stories and memories from him, and cling to the tails of his words, as if she was following a homeland in the folds of letters. She listens to his stories about the harvest season, weddings, stories of resistance, and her uncle’s imprisonment in the occupation’s prisons. Years pass until Maryam is able to visit besieged Gaza, so she begins to write from there what stuck in her memory of her father’s stories about exile, and her uncle’s stories about imprisonment, and for what had accumulated in her depths for many years to explode in a moment, and for her to begin documenting her visit. Here I have a heart and lanterns of joy. In Gaza, I have a memory fragrant with the scent of stars. Here I learned for the first time the stories of roses and violets and flew towards the Pleiades without wings. I inhaled the fragrance of martyrdom and seized the loneliness (…) Here I gave my body a new spirit… Where my spirit was full of thorns… Lost in the orbits of alienation and darkness… I filled my soul’s jars with Gaza’s pearls to suffice me in my coming days

Age and insight!!! Today, Friday, I will carry Gaza’s eyelashes in my bag to plant them on my eyes when it gets dark, so I can return with insight…

In this story, the novelist uses the technique of internal monologue, and it is shown through the main character in the work who critically reviews the reality of the Palestinian cause and its present in relation to her life in alienation and in the homeland together, and where the novelist uses one narrator who narrates in the first person mostly, and uses the third person in other places, which is consistent with the narrative form of the autobiography, and the realism of the events comes to enhance this form, and whatever the case, the novel remains a narrative document of a stage of the Palestinian’s life in his alienation, which he still lives to this day, albeit with different tools and roles.