Sanna Nimtz Towns & Joseph Towns, Coalition for Palestinian Rights (Minnesota) April 8, 2007

Susan Abulhawa’s first novel, The Scar of David, is an intricately woven tapestry of historical fiction chronicling the Palestinian Abulheja family over four generations. The novel begins in Ein Hod, the village where patriarch Yehya Abulheja, a peasant olive farmer, and his family, wife Basima and sons Hasan and Darweesh, live. This land of olive trees has been nurtured by Yehya’s relatives and ancestors for over forty generations. We witness the simple and charming life of these peasants when son Hasan, on errands for his father to the Old City in Jerusalem, meets with his best friend Ari Perlstein; both boys share their lives, families and dreams with each other.
Through the Abulheja family, we come to feel and relive the various meanings and stages of dispossession and displacement of the 21st century’s largest refugee population. For these refugees, to return is ultimately an unfulfilled dream.

Having contested the myth of racial purity or unity, especially in the body of David, the novel almost subconsciously supports the argument for the one-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The characters unavoidably transgress cultural, ethnic or national boundaries; David is a Palestinian raised as a Zionist Israeli. Abulhawa provides transcultural narratives that never rest in the security of cultural homogeneity, that false security offered by the present-day Israeli Separation Wall and other forms of apartheid, racialized nationalism, or religious fundamentalism.

Abulhawa’s novel attempts to intervene in this sorry media environment by providing history where history is repressed, marginalized, or made irrelevant. While documentaries and sympathetic news stories of the Palestinian tragedy serve to inform and educate us, to Abulhawa’s credit, The Scar of David invites readers to enter and become emotionally invested in the history and humanity of its characters.