“‘Fairuz,’ he said, ‘Listen and remember us.'” Then this man, who has so little, unexpectedly runs back to give her the cassette tape that they had been listening to: He kissed his fingers that had touched hers and turned back to the wheel.” Nadia wished him good night and Allah’s protection. “His hands were large and shapeless, thick skin and calluses indistinguishable from each other. The taxi driver’s life is worlds apart from her own. While he’s driving, he plays a cassette tape with the melancholy, forlorn-sounding music of the famous Arab singer, Fairuz (Nouhad Wadie’ Haddad). She hesitated for a moment, then told him, ‘Ramallah.'” The Philistine, by Leila Marshy, p.195 The Philistine, by Leila Marshy, p.195 (Photo by Masha Raymers on ) She hesitated for a moment, then told him, ‘Ramallah.'”

‘Khalil,’ he answered, using the Palestinian name for Hebron. ‘From where?’ she asked him, pronouncing it with a Palestinian accent instead of an Egyptian one. Nadia didn’t want to say much because he had obviously assumed she was like him: dispossessed, troubled, a refugee, a native speaker. “‘I am Palestinian too,’ he said in Arabic.

An interaction with one of those itinerant Palestinians in Cairo is particularly well described – I read it a couple of times to savour the poignancy: Nadia takes a taxi home, and the driver is Palestinian, and she acknowledges that she is “Filistiniya”: The statelessness, or whatever you want to call it, of Palestinians living outside of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is an ever-present grim reality in the novel that the reader cannot just skim over. And then I had to reluctantly read about the Intefada of the Israeli–Palestine conflict, another depressing bit of fact-finding. Then I had to look up the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, since the novel is set during the period leading up to the event. I had to do a proper search to find a map showing the borders of this country. I found out that the “State of Palestine” is recognized by some nations’ governments – 138 of the 193 UN members – but others, like Canada, do not. I had to look up where Palestine is, not only because I’m hopeless at Geography but also because I have literally no connection with it. One theme is the existence of the “State of Palestine”. I had to find out more to make sense of it. I found that I could not ignore the socio-political themes, because they drive the plot and create a crisis for the protagonist, Nadia. What did I make of it, and why was it surprising?

Blob opera into the thick of it