This is the first volume of the autobiography of an eminent and educated Palestinian woman who recently disappeared. It tells the moving tale of a childhood and adolescence confined by rigid family rules. With the intensity of her poetic inclination and the help from her brother, the great poet Ibrahim Touqan, she gains personal liberty and is able to express solidarity with her worn and weary people.
Fadwa Tuqan (born in Nablus in 1917 and died in the same city in 2003) is one of the great female voices of Palestinian poetry. In her poems of struggle (such as “The Martyrs of the Intifada”), she evokes the suffering of her people and the harshness of the occupation. Her memoirs allow us to follow her from her childhood, stifled by patriarchal rules, to her years as an activist, when she strove to serve the Palestinian cause through her encounters and her widely recognized literary work.
Benoît Tadié is a lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. His research focuses on three areas: the American detective novel, Anglo-American modernist journals (from 1900 to 1939 approximately) and the work of James Joyce.