An Old Cart with Curtains

In this work, Palestinian writer and poet Ghassan Zaqtan takes a memoir-like approach, resembling the memoir of a returnee. It is preceded by the author’s dedication to Mahmoud Darwish, “I Write to Thank You,” and a long excerpt from Darwish’s poem, “At a Train Station That Fell Off the Map.”
The work presents the biography of a family within a vast time and space, under difficult social and political circumstances. The author embodies this through a journey brimming with detail, highlighting people’s destinies and their isolation in a world of threat and anxiety.
The novel features side trips and individual arrivals to the place: the mother’s visit to her destroyed village, the son’s incomplete and truncated return, and the fighter’s return to search for her brother’s grave. It is a journey of arduous searching embodied by the novel’s protagonists, through which the literary work is shaped to appear more effective and influential in relation to the past, present, and future. The work features various titles whose events can be read separately or interconnected: No Visitors Today, The Fat Man Who Cheats in Line, Did You Notice “Madame” and “Please,” The Moroccan Woman and the Driver Hassan, The Appearance of “The Railway” in the Mother’s Novel for the First Time, A Simple Need to Talk, A Constant Smile in the World of a Heart, etc. Under the title: Muhammad al-Qaisi Visits His Mother Hamda’s Home in al-Habzun Camp, we read: “When Muhammad al-Qaisi ‘returned’ to Ramallah with a ‘visit permit’ after thirty years of exile, his feet led him to the house where his mother had taken refuge after being deported from her village (…). He wanted to see the house to reassure himself of his childhood, and to remember his mother, whom he buried in her second exile on a hill covered in phosphate dust in Russeifa, Jordan (…). I think of my mother, Hamda al-Beik, and her poor grave on that hill in Russeifa (…).
This novel is a serious and committed literary work that embodies the tragedy of the land and the Arab-Israeli conflict through the twists and turns of the inner self. In this, our author differs from others and excels in conveying the tragedy through the inner voices of its owners…