Brave testaments to human courage in times of war
THE TALE OF A WALL
Nasser Abu Srour Other Press, €23.99
THE CAVE
Amani Ballour with Rania Abouzeid
National Geographic Society, €25.99
It is estimated that over 9,300 Palestinian “security prisoners” are presently languishing in Israeli jails. One-third are detained without trial, while many experience violence, torture and psychological stress. Nasser Abu Srour dwells among them. In January 1993, he was given a life sentence for the murder of Israeli security agent, Haim Nahmani. The details of the case are available online. But the specifics of it are avoided in The Tale of a Wall.
The original manuscript of this memoir was smuggled out of an Israeli jail and ended up in Beirut. Other Press took on the task of translating the original Arabic version into English.
The New York publisher’s blurb of the book claims the author is serving a prison sentence for a crime he was forced to confess to under torture by the Israeli authorities.
“You are surprised to discover that you wrote a confession and offered the evidence they needed to convict,” Abu Srour informs us.
The story is told in the second person. This has some advantages. It gives the writing a certain freedom, which at times feels closer to magic realism or surrealist poetry. The Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, is clearly an influence too. The book’s abstract tone leaves the reader asking many questions, though. Most importantly: is Abu Srour innocent or guilty? He never tells us.
What is clear, however, is that discrimination and humiliation have been constant themes in the author’s tumultuous life, which began in a refugee camp in Bethlehem in 1969. Most of the camp’s residents ended up there after the First Arab-Israeli War (1948), which took place after the UN recognition of the state of Israel, in May 1948.
Growing up under the Israeli-occupied territory of the West Bank led Abu Srour to partake in the First Intifada. The civil disobedience movement began in 1987 and saw Palestinian youths throwing rocks at an Israeli military with superior weapons.
The international sympathy for Palestinians that followed played some role in helping negotiations that led to the Oslo Accord in 1993. The progressive peace plan marked the first time Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) formally recognised one another. It also saw Israel release many Palestinian prisoners. But not Abu Srour. In protest, he went on hunger strike.
“In prison it is as though you have no self,” he writes.
A lot of negative navel-gazing and soul-searching follows. The mood lightens in the second half of the book when love enters the equation. Nanna is a Palestinian lawyer who begins visiting Abu Srour in Hadarim Prison in 2014. In no time the two are smitten.
Over a five-year period, they correspond endlessly. The love letters we read here between them are touching. But their romantic dream is destined for failure. With no prospect of a proper future with her potential lover, Nanna opts to end their complicated courtship. The memoir ends in despair.
“This is my cell, this is my tomb, here are my words,” the author concludes. Embittered and broken, he signs off in July 2019.
The Syrian doctor was given the prestigious humanitarian award for running a makeshift hospital for five years in Syria. Hidden underground, it became known as The Cave
In January 2020, Dr Amani Ballour was awarded the 2020 Council of Europe’s Raoul Wallenberg Prize.
The Syrian doctor was given the prestigious humanitarian award for running a makeshift hospital for five years in Eastern Ghouta, Syria. Hidden underground, it became known as The Cave.
This was also the name given to Feras Fayyad’s documentary that was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2020 Oscars. Ballour and her medical team featured as the main protagonists. The Cave, the memoir, offers Ballour the chance to present a more detailed version of her story.
Co-written with Lebanese-Australian journalist, Rania Abouzeid, it begins in 2011. The Arab Spring was then erupting across the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians, like their neighbours in Egypt and Tunisia, began demanding basic human rights: like dignity, freedom, opportunity and justice. But Syria’s ruthless dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was not for turning. So the country descended into civil war.
Ballour’s hometown of Kafr Batna, in Eastern Ghouta, remained, at least for some time, a strong pocket of anti-Assad resistance. This made conditions for running a hospital there particularly difficult. Especially after August 2013, when President Assad launched a chemical attack there against his own people.
Then US President, Barack Obama, famously called it “a red line”, but followed up by doing nothing. “It was a defining moment,” Ballour writes. “I became consumed with thoughts of death and was overcome with the feeling that we were going to remain trapped there.”
They nearly were. The rest of the book provides a brilliant – and harrowing – account of the five-year siege of Eastern Ghouta. Aerial bombing was constant.
The hospital’s medical staff even had to build an underground tunnel to the town’s cemetery.
Ballour and her team moved on from The Cave in 2018, as it was deemed too dangerous to stay. Her exit from her homeland began with a risky journey to nearby Damascus. From there, she continued on to Turkey and then Germany. Today, Ballour resides in New Jersey in the USA, where she is happily married and has a son.
This brave memoir is an incredible testament to what human courage can achieve when up against brutal forces of evil. “Individual efforts can snowball into group efforts,” as the author puts it. “And group efforts can change the world.”