ralentina reviewed Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah
Palestine was lost
4 stars
A band of clumsy Jordanian-Palestinian journalists wants to interview an old man, one of the last survivor of the 1948 Nakba living in Amman. The man refuses, and a farcical quest to obtain his story begins. It's a comedy of errors: funny, at times almost slapstic, but also deep, in the sense that the author is exploring the distance between generations, the process through which personal (traumatic) memories become collective history. While I very much enjoyed the political satire, there was a whole other level of excess / caricature that I did not really get. The four protagonists are all insufferable and ridiculous, in extremely gendered ways. The man are arrogant and constantly horny. The women are manipulative and fall neatly into the all-to-familiar madonna / whore dichotomy. What was going on with that?