Palestinian Sittis and the Inheritance of Memories
Palestinian Sittis and the Inheritance of Memories:
Emma Hardy In Conversation with Hooda Shawa
Hooda Shawa, the British-Palestinian author, has long been known for her great contributions to Arabic YA fiction. Next month will welcome the newest release of her work, the English language edition of The Necklace of Seven Souls. Originally released in 2019, this English translation has been brought to life by Nour Jaljuli and Sawad Hassain. The novel engages young readers with narratives of displacement and understandings of Orientalism and encourages the investigation of inherited memories and identity as it tells the story of a Palestinian girl navigating her work with precarious Parisian art dealers as she uncovers secrets of her family’s past that will prove to influence her future.
In this Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth) conversation, Shawa offers inspiring insight into her experience writing such a personal and powerful novel as well as herself as an author. – Emmy Hardy
If you could talk a bit about yourself as an author. What is your motivation for writing young adult literature?
Hooda Shawa: As someone who has navigated the realms of East and West throughout her life, I have always felt more aligned to my father’s Palestinian roots, particularly to Gaza, than my mother’s English background. Although I was born in the UK, my father’s career took him to Saudi Arabia during my early childhood, where my sister and I attended government Arabic schools. My mother, a stay-at-home mum in a strictly segregated Saudi Arabia in the seventies, quickly learnt Arabic and gained her guttural ghains and khas through immersion. Most of the welcoming wives who were her neighbors, quickly lost patience with polite conversation in English, and she would soon find herself lost amidst a babel of animated, fast Arabic gossip gatherings in the coffee mornings of those long, languid days in Riyadh, before cafes, malls, and mobile phones.
To survive, my mother mastered the Arabic language in a few months and learnt to cook Arabic dishes as delicious as theirs, using garlic and exotic spices such as cloves and cardamom, all which she had never tasted in middle England’s Derby. As for myself and my sister, we were immersed in the Arabic educational system, yet English was my mother tongue. One of my earliest memories of reading, was the excitement of receiving English comics by post and visiting libraries with my English grandmother during the long summer holidays we spent in England. We attended summer schools in the UK, and I soon discovered Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, and the pleasure of getting lost in a literary world.
Years later, married and settled in Kuwait, my daughters would come back from school with their backpacks full of required YA reading by authors such as Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson, with no Arabic counterparts. Arabic language was deemed difficult and boring. I knew I had to do something. It was almost a calling. To write in Arabic, the books I would like to see in school backpacks.
What was the translation process for this novel like for you as the author? To what extent were you involved and what did that look like for you?
HS: The original Arabic novel My Palestinian Sitti was published in 2019, and the translation project with Sawad Hussain and Nour Juljuli started in 2024. That provided a chance to revisit the novel, and working with Sawad was an exciting creative process. Sawad is not only a professional, tremendously talented, and generous translator; she is well-informed and understands the ins and outs of the publishing industry in depth. It was a pleasure working with Sawad and Nour, and their translation laid the ground for a publishing agreement with international publisher Restless Books.
The original title of the novel ستي الفلسطينية evokes a very different feeling than The Necklace of Seven Souls does. What was the decision behind choosing the title for this translation?
HS: When the Arabic novel was about to be published in 2019, a turning point happened in media as US congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was barred by Israel from entering the occupied West Bank to visit her 90-year-old grandmother. A hashtag #MyPalestinianSitty immediately swept social media by storm. Palestinians and supporters worldwide responded, sharing photographs and family histories in a global tribute to the power and resilience of Palestinian grandmothers. As my story was dedicated to my own two grandmothers, the Palestinian (from Gaza) and the English (from Derby, UK), both impactful and resilient matriarchs. The hashtag was almost like a sign, and I was determined to use it as a title.
With a new English version of the novel soon to be released, (in September 2026), the novel had shapeshifted to address an International English readership, providing a chance to revisit the novel and explore new developments. The English version rights had been acquired by the international publisher, Restless Books, and after a few Zoom meetings with the very adept editorial team, Jennifer Alise Drew and Lydia McOscar, the story morphed with added chapters, more plot twists and a new title. Its transformation required a tripartite conversation between author, translator and editor, and I am elated with the new version.
There is something quite distinct about intergenerational storytelling and understanding how experiences move through and impact different generations. It is particularly powerful when it comes to stories of the Nakba and the impact those inherited stories continue to have on generations of Palestinians. The novel is also dedicated to grandmothers, and to your grandmothers specifically. What does intergenerational storytelling mean to you and why was it important to dedicate this novel to it?
HS: To research this story, I immersed myself in oral Nakba testimonies of female ancestors, grandmothers and great-grandmothers; I heard oral histories of refugee women from villages that were wiped off the map and erased, testimonies of landowning families from Jaffa and Haifa who lost everything they owned, and the accounts of survivors of massacres who fled their homes in Palestine to dwell in make- shift refugee camps in Beirut, Amman, Damascus and Aleppo.
My own paternal Sitti wasn’t displaced in 1948, albeit she was forced to leave her house in Gaza after the Israeli invasion of 2006. She never returned to her town of birth, and died in Amman, Jordan. Amidst this sea of sad stories of displacement and dispossession, there were narratives of collective resilience from grandmothers, as the carriers and transmitters of Nakba narratives and histories. They were the holders of keys of homes lost, and keepers of memories and mementos. Their stories preserved Palestinian collective memory and formed an act of resistance against cultural erasure. Despite the ongoing generational trauma that continues to be transmitted to the fourth generation of Palestinians, I strongly believe in the power of this ancestral powerhouse of storytelling.
The novel felt like an educational tour for young readers, referring to significant figures and happenings of Arab history, literature, and art. Mentioning meaningful individuals such as Ibn Battuta, Asmahan, and Edward Said. Painting a picture of the memory of trains that once took passengers between and across Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Did you have a certain intention for how you would want your young readers to engage with these historical details and memories?
HS: I hope the novel offers a cinematic, rather than educational tour! By following the lives of two present-day young generation Palestinians, I attempted to weave art and history to explore the hidden secrets, repressed traumas, and pains of families of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba. But I also wanted to tell a story of an ongoing hope, and self-discovery through art.
Throughout the novel, the main character of your story, Farida, encounters and must navigate orientalism, particularly as an artist and within the world of art. If you could talk about approaching concepts of orientalism within your novel and your thinking behind challenging Farida in the way you did.
HS: I obtained an MA in Comparative Literature, and Edward Said’s Orientalism was, and still is, a major foundation of the post-colonial discourse of connections between literature, art and colonial practices. One of the essays I wrote for a course on Orientalism, was entitled Can the Odalisque Stand up? Women Representation the Other Woman in Art. The essay argues that the odalisque — the reclining, passive, sexualized female figure that was a stock motif in 19th-century Western Orientalist painting, such as the work of Jean Ingres, has been perpetuated rather than challenged by modern and contemporary Arab artists, who remain trapped in a “postcolonial exoticism” that recycles the same objectifying trope. In contrast, contemporary women Arab artists such as Afifa Aleiby, and Lalla Essaydi, actively subvert and dismantle the odalisque stereotype through more confrontational, assertive artistic techniques. In my novel, Farida first reinforces the act of self-orientalism by conforming to a male-dominated art market that peddles in a murky underbelly of Orientalist fakes. However, through a chance encounter with Mazen, a spark ignites in Farida to chart her own personal career course as well as her creative practice.
This translation will bring your book to a new English reading audience. What do you hope your new young readers will take away from this novel?
HS: I hope they will enjoy Farida and Mazen’s encounters in Paris as they navigate their shared pasts and plan their futures. I would also hope that young readers, who are lucky enough to have living grandmothers, will be encouraged to talk to them about their family history and the secrets they may keep, to ask them to share old stories, or to look through family photo albums together. And at its heart, it’s a story about the power of art, whether it’s a talismanic heirloom necklace that is handed down, or the quest for a lost painting, the novel highlights how art shapes personal transformation, and I hope that they are inspired by that!
Emma Hardy is a recent graduate of Boston University where she earned her B.A. in Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures, with a focus on Arabic. She is an editor for ArabLit and a continuous student of the Arabic language.