Summary

Told in the first person, Asma Al Atawna’s debut novel captures with beautiful and surprising honesty the life of an eponym young woman. The novel, is in two parts. The first part, entitled “Go away” starts with the tale of her escaping the open air prison that Gaza in Palestine has become. The second part, “Come back”, goes over her childhood and late teens, until she decides to escape.

In the first part of the novel, Asma describes the way in which she was able to leave, with the help of her boyfriend Jose, a Spanish archeologist. The young couple lives in Madrid with Jose’s parents, until he decides to become an Imam, and to marry her. Feeling trapped, and thinking that she did not leave one prison for another, Asma seeks help from her French friend Jean-Jacques, a correspondent she had helped back in Gaza.

Eventually, Asma finds her way into French society. But whoever she is with, Asma seems to represent the Palestinian cause: Some feeling obliged to express their sympathy, others feeling the need to tell her that Israelis are also entitled to a life, and that the only solution to the conflict is the two-state solution. Though of course she is a supporter of her people’s cause, Asma is not a hero who fled home to speak for her people or to find a solution to the conflict. A rebel since her childhood, Asma wanted to escape her father, his public beating and humiliations, her prying neighbors, and her older sister’s fate. She wanted to live her life the way she wanted, in a small space she could say was hers.

The second part of the novel brings us back to the mid 1980’s, where we meet Asma as a 9 or 10 years old child. A tomboy, Asma is part of a boy’s gang. They meet in a nearby orchard in secret. There, she rides on Rami’s motorbike, as she proudly tells the girls at school, and climbs on trees. She usually succeeds in concealing her whereabout, and cunningly escapes her mother’s surveillance, but not always. In these cases, the beating gets severe…

Both enlightened by her ultimate successful escape, childhood dreams and sweet friendships, and saddened by poverty, despair and the violence of the Israeli occupation that reverberates all the way into intimate human relations, Al Atawna’s novel is a surprising read: honest, lucid and perspicuous. The author captures details of daily life that flesh out the people and the life in Gaza extremely vividly. As if always slightly offbeat, Asma provides us with a precious insight. Through Asma the adult, the reader gets a grasp of the humanity and individuality of emigrants. Through Asma the 10 year old, the reader gets to experience the great injustice inflicted upon children and especially girls, in the most mundane details of life in some parts of the world. An unusual bitter-sweet coming-of-age novel.