L’ultimo romanzo di Sahar Khalifeh, pubblicato da Dar el Adab nel 2009 in arabo, come descritto nel breve focus in inglese dell’agenzia letteraria che la rappresenta, Pontas. Sahar Khalifeh è la più grande scrittrice palestinese vivente. Chissà se questo ritratto del mondo palestinese, prima della nascita dello stato di Israele, riesce a mostrare uomini e donne che, seppur quasi sconosciuti all’Occidente, in quella terra c’erano. Dimostrando, dunque, che quella non era una terra senza popolo.
Roots and Branches can be read as an autobiography and at the same time as the story of a whole society, of the origins and roots of a drama that will go on for more than a century.
Sahar Khalifeh starts by describing her Grandma’s ability to tell tales that can carry her listeners to the old ages of Scheherazade, Ala’ El Din and Hassan the Clever. Her Grandma’s gifts also include her ability to see fortune: through a mirror, she sees what is going to happen. Through the lives and involvements of Grandma’s family members, the reader gets involved in what was going on in the Palestinian society in the 20s and 30s of last century: how people behaved, worked, loved, get married or divorced; and, above all, how they treated women.
Sahar Khalifeh starts by describing her Grandma’s ability to tell tales that can carry her listeners to the old ages of Scheherazade, Ala’ El Din and Hassan the Clever. Her Grandma’s gifts also include her ability to see fortune: through a mirror, she sees what is going to happen. Through the lives and involvements of Grandma’s family members, the reader gets involved in what was going on in the Palestinian society in the 20s and 30s of last century: how people behaved, worked, loved, get married or divorced; and, above all, how they treated women.
In a simple style, poetic at times, with cynicism, bitterness and dark humor, Sahar Khalifeh shows both sides of the everlasting conflict: the Palestinian and the Jewish; the Palestinian traditionalism and scattered society on the one side, the Jewish pioneering attitudes and organized entity on the other side.
This novel is the first installment of an epic trilogy that will cover the lives of Palestinians in a huge, scopic portrait and that will confirm once more Sahar Khalifeh as the great chronichler of Palestinan society.