Goodbye War Goodbye Peace

“Qad Ghashaha Habban” is the second novel by the writer Nardin Abu Nabaa after “Rabb Inni Waddaha Athna” (My Lord, I Have Given Her a Female). As usual in everything she writes, the narrator does not hesitate to present narrative material that is fundamentally related to the textual structure of the title. In this narrative, the story is focused on two fictional characters, as the writer paved the way for the events of this novel to be real… It is inspired by the diaries of two wives of Palestinian resistance fighters. These are the first signs of the title’s presence in the course of the story, and the first factors that reveal its ambiguity. In the novel, there are two narrative lines that alternate in presence and intersect, until they seem like two novels, not one. They may appear in the heroine “Wedad”, so it seems that the focus from which the narrative emerges is one, and that the center around which the events revolve is also one. The two parallel lines are represented by the legendary hero “Yahya Ayyash who was martyred in 1995 and the hero Mohammed Al-Daif” the most mysterious legend about whom the novel says, “The man who directs combat operations while sitting in his hole… the most elusive, cautious, careful, skilled and dangerous sheikh”, while the second hero “Al-Daif” kept the secret of survival that enables him to remain terrifying even though: “He lost one of his legs, one of his eyes, and sits in a wheelchair, and moves in the underground sector to direct resistance operations against the Zionists. He is one of the wanted men whom Israel is unable to capture or assassinate”. With these specifications at the level of the story and discourse, for the history of the Palestinian cause, and its symbols from the resistance, Nardin Abu Nabaa was able to weave a beautiful and profound narrative text, in form, content and purpose. The novel was a blatant testimony against the occupation, injustice and oppression of the reality in which the Palestinians live.