4/22: Ghada Karmi "In Search of Fatima" author, Thursday, UC Berkeley

keep thursday free for british palestinian author Ghada Karmi who will be on
campus this thursday to read a selection and discuss her book, "In Search of
Fatima"...

Ghada Karmi
Palestinian Brit Physician & author of “The Palestinian Exodus 1948-1998”.
Former Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs,
London.

Special Book Reading:
APRIL 22 THURS 7:00pm @ 2050 VLSB, UCB
Book sales and signing available.

“Karmi writes engagingly, weaving Palestinian political and social history
through her personal
recollections and giving the age-old émigré‚ dilemmas a timely
twist.”-Publishers Weekly

“Hers is a story of exile and displacement...rich in detail and human
experience.”-Edward W. Said

Book Description
Very few diaspora Palestinians have written memoirs as intimate as Ghada
Karmi's frank account of her life: her childhood in Palestine,
the flight to Britain after the catastrophe of 1948, and coming of age in the
coffee-bars of Golders Green, the middle-class Jewish
quarter in North London.

The intimacy of the book is set against the continuing crisis in the Middle
East. In her case it is not an account of physical hardships and
abuse. Her immediate family was lucky. But as she grew older, memories of the
lost homeland began to haunt her. Her anger grows at
the self-deception of most Israelis, who justify the appalling actions of
their governments by pretending that what is taking place isn't
actually happening.

In Search of Fatima reminds us that the only crime the Palestinians committed
was to be born in Palestine. (Amazon.com)

April 22, THURS 7:00Pm @ 2050 Valley Life Science Building, UCB
Sponsored by: NES Dept., Muslim Students Association, Students for Justice in
Palestine, Sacred Roots, Arab Student Union
ASUC sponsored; wheel chair bound accessible


inside book flap info:

"Fatima stood by the car which would take us away. For all her efforts at
self-control, tears were coursing down her cheeks. I cling to the material of
her caftan but she gently disengaged my fingers...Like a body prematurely
buried, unmourned, without coffin or ceremony, our hasty, untidy exit from
Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all
that we knew and loved."

The war that ended with the establishment of the State of Israel compelled
Ghada Karmi's family to leave Jerusalem when she was a child- to live,
ironically enough, in Golders Green, a well-known Jewish area of London. Her
attempts at assimilation into English society were gradually thwarted by both
internal and external influences: her mother's efforts at replicating
Palestinian social customs in a London household, which she found increasingly
frustrating, and political events in the world she had left- the Suez crisis
and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in particular- which prompted a growing sense of
Arab identity and a rexamination of her sense of belonging in Britain. In the
1970s, this disillusionment was channelled into political activism; she
established Palestine Action in London and became a regular visitor to the
Middle East, meeting Yasser Arafat and PLO officials, but still, as a
Westernised Arab woman, she never quite fitted in. Returning to Jerusalem in
the 1990s to find the house where she was born, the author must face an
unpalatable truth about herself...

In Search of Fatima is an intimate and powerful narrative, in which the
Israel-Palestine conflict is presented, unusually, from the point of view of a
Palestinian woman. A reflection of the author's personal experiences of
displacement, loss and nostalgia, it speaks also for the millions of people
all over the world whose lives are forever suspended between the old and the
new.

Students for Justice in Palestine, Berkeley, California
http://www.justiceinpalestine.org
info [at] justiceinpalestine.org

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