Harare Review of Books

224 pages. Published December 3, 2024 by Coffee House Press. Fiction.

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I like to sit with the elderly and hear their stories of the past. It’s partly from my respect for the orality of our tradition, but also because I want to record and pass on all I can to future generations. The last time I sat down with my gran, though, she got quite short with me—although she did keep telling her story. I didn’t take offence, because I recognised her pain in the retelling, along with her relief and the compulsion of unburdening. I understood that the more painful the story is, the more difficult it is to share.

Sand-Catcher, a charming and delightful book, does not go at all as you might expect. A group of young Palestinian journalists—two men and two women who work for a Jordanian paper—is convinced there’s a fairly easy and important story to be got out of an old man who experienced the Nakba. He, on the other hand, has never spoken of his experience, and does not ever want to. His son has been grieved by this reticence his whole life, helpless in the face of the old man’s implacability. The old man’s loyal grandson, although somewhat curious, will do anything to protect his grandad from ever having to speak of it. So the young journalists wade unthinkingly into this complex and longstanding tangle.

It’s a comedy of errors; using this, Khalifah maintains a level of dark absurdity that makes the grief at the heart of the story even more piercing. The old man’s heart is completely broken; that’s why he will not speak, not even for the historical record. As the story progresses and becomes ever more farcical, readers will understand that sometimes there are more important things than information, and will see the gap between generations: lived experience, versus the told or inherited one.

The book stopped me in my tracks towards the end, when there’s page after page after page of repetition of a singe line. It’s devastating; there’s nothing Khalifah could have written better to demonstrate just how much the old man has lost. And finally, then, it becomes clear that the old man is the true symbol of the people of Palestine, that his experience is something the young people will never completely comprehend.

Sand-Catcher is the story of Palestinian exile, the diaspora, and the discontinuity of narrative from generation to generation. It’s sharp, and cutting, a gift to make you laugh while it breaks your heart. Very highly recommended.

Thank you to Coffee House Press and to Edelweiss for DRC access.

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