Review: Cactus Pear For My Beloved by Samah Sabawi

This family history full of warmth evokes life in Palestine, and specifically Gaza, around the founding of Israel. It begins in 2018, in Queensland, with the author going shopping with her father Abdul Karim, a “poet, revolutionary, entrepreneur, sheep farmer” who is “always somewhere else”. She’s startled to find the people who know him call him George, and perhaps views it as an erasure of his history. She asks him if she can tell his story for her PhD.

Abdul Karim is born in Tuffah, Gaza, in 1942, under British administration since World War I. Some Palestinians are hoping Hitler defeats the British, but others warn that “we cannot rely on one occupation to free us from another … freedom will not come to us through an external power. We have to earn it ourselves.” His mother, Khadija, was born in Jaffa, her husband, known as Sheikh Hussein, in Tuffah. The sheikh, unable to walk as a child, taught himself to read and by age 10 had started a school for local men. Sabawi evokes the hardship of life in a poor neighbourhood, but also the spirit of family and community that sustains.

At five years old, Karim and his family are forced out of their homes during the Nakba, the violent displacement, theft of livelihood and mass murder of Palestinians at Israel’s bloody birth. They flee to southern Gaza, before returning under Egyptian administration. Karim’s youth is a period of hope, fuelled by learning at school, where he is a precocious student, love for the girl next door Souhailah, and resistance to Israel’s predations, becoming an acclaimed poet by his teenage years. Sabawi’s portrait of her family is as lovingly drawn as it is evocative, whether Karim’s forays into the city’s festivals, his fraught wooing of Souhailah’s family, or his grandmother’s horror when she catches him plucking chickens:

no man in all of Palestine had undertaken such a lowly task as plucking chickens for their wife.

The cactus pear of the title is used for fencing in the neighbourhood; it’s spiky fruits offered peeled by Karim to Souhailah a demonstration of his love. Known as sabr in Arabic, “enduring patience”, it is Sabawi’s symbol of Palestinian identity with family, land and resistance. 

Sabawi constructs her history from her father’s testimony, and it is shaped by her family’s words, beliefs and values. Aspects have been fictionalised; to compress detail and contextualise, challenging conceptions of facts and truth. In the ongoing genocide, facts in Gaza are relentlessly challenged, as borne out in media prevarication on the number of people killed by Israel. The Israeli government and its diplomatic efforts is waging its war partly through information, whether redefining anti-Semitism or facts on the ground in Gaza. Sabawi writes back against such efforts, and the shifting baseline of life in Gaza. Through her family she shows a time when people made their lives in the city, and offers a vision of how they could again.

Gay rating: not gay.