Jaffa A Tale of Absence and Rain

Description

From the balcony of Jaffa, the Palestinian city, Palestinian novelist Nibal Qandis presents her novel, “Jaffa: A Tale of Absence and Rain,” to tell us the story of Jaffa, a Palestinian girl, and the great story she carries hidden behind her isolation. This woman is no ordinary woman. One who isolates herself from people for ten years must surely carry within her a heart the size of… her homeland, and a love story told with tears as she awaited her beloved. He was absent for twenty-five years, alone in exile, carrying the cause of his country and living it with both pen and weapon. After decades, he returns to her as a revolutionary and journalist, joining forces with Jaffa on a joint project that encompasses his memoirs and hers in a single novel. This is what happened today: the book signing. We arrived at the hall at precisely four o’clock in the afternoon. The hall was packed with attendees: readers, writers, media figures, journalists, photographers, wives and mothers of martyrs and prisoners who had seen the episode and decided to attend the book signing and obtain a copy… These details are brought to life by the narrative on more than one level; The narrative is both external, addressing the external events related to the setting and the movements of the protagonist and other characters, and internal, where memory recalls past experiences and beautiful, evocative details, some building upon others and provoking each other in a dialectical movement. The narrative shuttles between the external and the internal, between the past and the present. The author has dedicated ample space to dialogue, analyzing the emotions, feelings, and stances of the novel’s characters. She moves from the general, “national,” to the specific, “personal,” reflecting a transitional phase experienced by the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people amidst multiple dichotomies, some of which are refuge and homeland, occupation and independence, diaspora and return. Thus, in Nibal Qandis’s work, discourse complements the story, and the story of Jaffa—a story of absence and rain—becomes the story of every Arab.