A Single, Slow Exorcism: The Nakba Dreamed Backwards
A Single, Slow Exorcism: The Nakba Dreamed Backwards
On Basma Ghalayini’s Masterful Curation of ‘Palestine -1’
By Fifi Bat-hef
Palestine – 1: Stories from the eve of the Nakba, ed. Basma Ghalayini
Basma Ghalayini’s introduction to Palestine -1: Stories from the Eve of the Nakba (Comma Press, 2025) frames the anthology as both a prequel to the publisher’s acclaimed 2019 collection Palestine +100 and as a one-off “minus one” volume. Unlike the ongoing +100 series, this is, for now, the single mirror image companion that drags us back to the night before the catastrophe.
From the very first lines, Ghalayani thrusts us right into a hurried, pulsing Gaza. A passerby asks a Gazan sprinting down the street if something has happened. He answers, “no, but it might.” In that breathless reply, she traps seventy-seven years of anticipatory dread, making permanent that half-second before the missile drops. This perpetual state of being braced for a blow that has yet to land becomes the emotional spine of her introduction. The colonial dreams of Herzl, Sykes-Picot, Balfour, and Ben-Gurion are set against the waking nightmare of villages besieged, burned, and renamed.
Ghalayini insists that speculative fiction is the only sane response to an insane origin myth. By invoking names such as Deir Yassin and al-Lydd, she forces the reader to speak the places back into existence. Her final image of Palestine as a bride who “has been, and always will be, married to another man” is quiet, ancient, and defiant. It leaves no room for the comforting Zionist fiction that the land was ever empty, or waiting.
The testimony of Saffouryeh
No orphan, no UN mediator, no grieving mother is allowed to speak until the land herself has delivered her verdict. Yara El-Ghadban’s “The Forest of Saffouryeh” is the first story in the anthology. Once a thriving village of over 4,000 Palestinians, perched on a hill near Nazareth, this land of “lovers, rebels, poets” was depopulated in July 1948 during Operation Dekel. Its inhabitants were expelled amid aerial bombardments and ground assaults. Non-native pines were rapidly planted on the emptied village to “rehabilitate” the land.
El-Ghadban crafts a story that is equal parts elegy and accusation, weaving personal lament with collective trauma. Over and over, like a refrain, the land insists on her own name “me, Saffouryeh.” By giving voice to the land itself, she challenges the sanitized, official narratives and forces readers to confront the hidden history beneath every “carefully manicured green carpet.”
It is perhaps not surprising that this powerful charge sets the tone for the collection. The Zionist fantasy insists Palestine was “a land without a people.” El-Ghadban answers with a land that is a people, a land that still feels the violent wrench when empires came to “root them out and fill my belly with other lives, stories transplanted from cold lands abroad, lands of snow and pines.”
From the testimony of Saffouryeh, human voices rise. They speak of massacres that have stained not only soil but memory, too. From armed Zionist immigrant gangs aided by the British Mandate’s colonial troops in 1920, they gathered force in 1936 with the Arab revolt, became unmistakable in 1947, and broke open in 1948. In Dahmash Mosque, more than two hundred burned alive. At Tantura, more than two hundred were shot and buried beneath the dunes. At Dawayima, wells were filled with bodies, one atop the other, layer upon layer of silence. At Deir Yassin, 245 slaughtered. What one people were taught to celebrate as independence, another people learned, and learn still, to name the Nakba. Every speculative leap taken by the authors is a way of fighting the colonial fantasy with fantasy, of “fighting dreams with more dreams.”
To name is to resurrect
Seventy-seven years after the people of Tantura were marched to the beach, shot in rows, and buried by bulldozers beneath the dunes, the same violence found a six-year-old girl. On January 29, 2024, a photograph of Hind Rajab flashed across screens. Six years old, and with an endearing smile, her long hair falling in soft waves. Hours later, the same hair lay matted with blood inside a bullet-ridden car in Gaza. Her final plea, “I’m so scared, please come” still reverberates globally. Dedicated to Hind’s memory, Anwar Hamed’s short story “Trapped” begins where that recording ends. Hamed turns one girl’s death into three generations of inherited trauma.
A single recurring motif—hair—is the thread that ties together three generations of Palestinian women across eight decades of displacement and violence. Each life is shorter than the last, each death more ordinary, yet the hair endures. Braided. Loosened. Thinning. Regrown. The occupation unable to fully weed it out. Andrew Leber’s translation manages to preserve Hamed’s clipped urgency, letting every gunshot and every braid land with the same weight.
In this story, a deceased family attempts the journey back to Tantura, but finds even the afterlife has checkpoints. When the youngest of them, Hiba and Manar, give voice to what was meant to stay silent, the final wall collapses. Hamed suggests that liberation from being perpetually “trapped” lies in articulating a counter-narrative powerful enough to break the siege and reclaim their home. This narrative—braided across generations and spoken by the youngest tongues—must be articulate enough to open every locked gate and carry their family back home.
Such acts of naming and renaming are not isolated incidents. In “Trapped,” Hiba and Manar read aloud from the walls that bar return, while Ibtisam Azem’s mute survivor in her story “Ismail Al-Lyddawi” breaks seventy-seven years of silence to rename an Israeli square “Dahmash Mosque Martyrs’ Square.” Across the anthology, these moments function as incantations, purposeful and repeated. Each story opens with the name of a Palestinian village, except the last. Each of these villages no longer exist, save the one in the seventh story. The stories insist on original names as the first step of return. “If we don’t honour their original form, if we don’t remember their names,” Ghalayini warns in her introduction, “they have no choice but to haunt us.”
Minus one to infinite scattering
The anthology’s twelve stories unfold in deliberate waves. The first six coil tight around the eve of 1948; they are absurd, fever-dream horrors where fractured minds come apart amid mounting chaos and dispossession. Mazen Maarouf’s unnamed narrator in “A Chronicle of Grandad’s Last Days Asleep” captures this splintering at its most raw. A child who cannot tell lizards from frogs waits on limestone hills for a father’s promised return in a box—legless, perhaps already a corpse—while commanding his donkey with a bullet hole in his face to rise. His innocence is a fragile defense that holds his world together while everything else falls apart.
Then, halfway through the collection and without warning, the seventh story breaks the pattern. “Al-Shataat,” the Arabic word for diaspora, is not set in 1947 or 1948; it is not even set in Palestine. Lina Meruane conjures a dreamlike requiem for exile in a lyrical, stream-of-consciousness torrent, rendered with haunting clarity in Andrea Rosenberg’s translation. Adrift on murky waters, survivors watch their homeland burn “by the fire that fell scorching from the sky” and is now “cracking and yawning open,” consumed by a rising sea that sinks both occupied and occupier. What begins as human devastation escalates into cosmic erasure. The -1 here reflects the nonexistence of the homeland itself.
The central placement of this story does not feel accidental. It evokes the scattering of the diaspora at its core—neither origin nor endpoint, but the vast, adrift expanse. Survival means trying to map what has been flung across the world. From Chile’s enclaves, where Meruane’s own ancestral ties ground the story, to isbaniya memorials and scattered throughout northern amreeka.
The survivors are not fleeing 1948. They are fleeing now, carrying the trauma of Deir Yassin and Sabra and Shatila and Gaza in their bones. The cell phone mapping global Palestines is not nostalgia but a real-time navigation in perpetual exile. By placing a story of absolute aftermath in the anthology’s heart, the editor refuses to grant readers the comfort of historical distance. “Al-Shataat” becomes the book’s dark mirror. The earlier stories circle around the edge of disaster. Here, Meruane steps over the edge and shows us the rupture fulfilled.
Internal fracture and state-sponsored doppelgangers
From this submerged center, the collection resurfaces only to plunge inward, into the bodies of children, stripping them of their innocence. In Sonia Sulaiman’s “The Dragon,” ten-year-old Ahmed witnesses the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948—the deadliest atrocity of the Nakba. As his village burns, a saint’s curse temporarily petrifies him and permanently splits his soul. One carefree doppelganger remains forever ten years old, kicking a football among the ruins, and while the surviving Ahmed is freed from stone yet condemned to sleepless wakefulness, the “little dragon” of despair and vengeance growing inside him against his will. The story is rendered in a deceptively calm, fable-like prose that heightens the surreal horror of the allegory. Sulaiman illustrates the Nakba not just as erasure, but as a wound that festers in the child, threatening to birth monsters from the bodies of the oppressed.
What begins in Sulaiman’s tale as the splitting of one boy’s soul becomes, in Liana Badr’s “I Swear, This All Happened,” the systematic splitting of the Palestinian reality itself. Deir Yassin, the scene of the brutal massacre that traumatized Ahmed, now reappears as Giv’at Shaul. A psychiatric hospital sits squarely on the massacre site, Badr notes bitterly, “as if the killers themselves now needed a facility to take care for their own.” Every destroyed village is issued its official double. New settlements are built over the old. European pines are planted where olive groves once stood. Hebrew syllables are cemented atop Arabic ones. Saffouryeh becomes Tzipori. Yaffa, Tel-Aviv. Badr calls this imposed double Qareen: the folkloric subterranean twin that mirrors Palestinian existence only to smother it. While Ahmed’s internal splitting is an allegorical response to the trauma of the Nakba, the Zionist project makes the Qareen official state policy.
The anthology’s finale, “Flood” detonates this motif into its most daring form: the Qareen now speaks in first person. The story is “told to the author by Yehuda Dajaj, via broken Hebrew voice memos.” This framing instantly fractures the narrator’s identity. Is the sweating, catfishing, Florida-bred narrator the same man as Yehuda Dajaj, whose Hebrew is so bad the voice memos must be “untranslated back into his native English”? Or is Yehuda Dajaj the spectral middleman who survived (or invented) the dead American’s confession? George Abraham leaves all this unresolved. In literary terms, the character is an unreliable narrator. In Islamic cosmology, a Qareen. According to Abraham’s merciless naming, a clucking impostor.
Water is the collection’s quiet undercurrent, from Saffouryeh’s buried springs to the rising sea, and it becomes the deluge itself in “Flood.” Every encounter with an Arab body leaks from the same demon-haunted aquifer Tawfiq Canaan mapped a century ago, and it sits at this story’s epigraph: “..they come from the lower world… cracks, caves, springs, and wells.” On the morning of October 7, 2023, at a music festival in the desert, the long-repressed water finally breaks through in the very “flood” the title quietly names. The narrator is captured by resistance fighters and slapped through time, their scarves shifting from the white of Black Hand in the 1930s to PFLP’s red in the 1960s to the current Hamas green. Every blow forcing him to confront the century he helped keep underground.
Abraham’s style is pure provocation: raw, embodied, and deliberately obscene. Some will call the revenge scene too gleeful, or the eroticism too lurid. The Zionist colonial fantasy has survived an entire century precisely by demanding that its critics speak in measured, polite, “civilized” language. Abraham quotes an old Palestinian proverb – “I wish for you what you wish for Palestinians” – and then unflinchingly honors it. The oppressor is drowned in the same obscene overflow it spent decades creating, then pretending wasn’t there. Abraham’s daring is not the explicitness itself, but in the refusal to sanitize the moment when the dam finally breaks.
From Saffouryeh’s buried scream to the final, obscene flood, every story in Palestine -1 is placed with surgical intent. Basma Ghalayini’s editorial eye is merciless and loving at once. She lets the land speak first, splits the book open at its exact center with the diaspora’s drowning heart, and withholds the colonizer’s voice for last. A story about exile and the homeland’s submersion is ironically the sole story in the anthology tethered to a village, a city now, that still stands: Beit Lehem. Unbowed. The clash between erasure and resistance at the very center, the anthology’s spine refusing to snap. Every other tale is preceded by the name of a destroyed village, an homage to the 531 erased in 1948. The final story alone bears no name. It’s colonizer rootless, unclaimed by the land itself. What looks like an anthology is in truth a single, slow exorcism. Ghalayini does not merely curate twelve Palestinian voices, she stitches the severed body of her homeland back together, thread by thread, and in the pattern of the stitches, Saffouryeh hears its own voice returned.
Fifi Bat-hef is a literature enthusiast from Mombasa who revels in literary fiction and short stories, with a bias for postcolonial African and Arab narratives. Her reviews have appeared in Lolwe and Middle East Eye.
Read an extract from the collection at Wasafiri.