This happens not only to individuals but also to the culture at large too. Such conditions stunt the mind and starve it. So for people living there, minimal attention is paid to one’s own inner life, dreams, culture, relationships and personhood. Part of the dehumanization of the Palestinians is the obsession with the occupation, because the basic survival of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza depends to a large degree on what the Israeli army does or does not do. I consider the occupation a dehumanizing fact of Palestinian as well as Israeli lives. I wanted to write from the personal experience and not have the story be a political argument in order to blame this side or that side, or to justify anything. So as much as I could in Tasting the Sky, I took the narrative focus off the occupation. Palestinian life under Israeli occupation is drenched in politics to a suffocating level. In writing this book, I finally could own a piece of my childhood, which itself felt like a piece of Ramallah, in the form of story.Īside from a brief historical note, there is little discussion of history or politics in the narrative–was this a deliberate decision? When I lived in Ramallah, there was the sense that anything I loved or owned could be taken away from me in an instant. So I wrote Tasting the Sky as an exercise in freedom and as an expression of it. I grew up in a world that ached for freedom but could not touch it.
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