Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood | Ibtisam Barakat

Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood | Ibtisam Barakat | Choosing to Remember

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Tasting the Sky: A...

	Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood Ibtisam Barakat Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2007 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

?When a war ends it does not go away,? my mother says.?It hides inside us . . . Just forget!?
But I do not want to do what Mother says . . . I want to remember.

In this groundbreaking memoir set in Ramallah during the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Ibtisam Barakat captures what it is like to be a child whose world is shattered by war. With candor and courage, she stitches together memories of her childhood: fear and confusion as bombs explode near her home and she is separated from her family; the harshness of
life as a Palestinian refugee; her unexpected joy when she discovers Alef, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. This is the beginning of her passionate connection to words, and as language becomes her refuge, allowing her to piece together the fragments of her world, it becomes her true home.

Transcending the particulars of politics, this illuminating and timely book provides a telling glimpse into a little-known culture that has become an increasingly important part of the puzzle of world peace.

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Picking up the pieces

There aren't many books on the Palestinian situation available for children, and fewer still that are memoirs. I actually managed to pick up and read Ibtisam Barakat's, "Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood," without ever realized that it was more than mere historical fiction. As a bilingual author and poet, Ms. Barakat could have written a straight up autobiography, but somehow the memoir is just as moving and intense a portrait as anyone could ask for. It gives her struggles a weight, balance, and arc that wouldn't necessarily belong in a standard series of personal facts. Tracing her life from just before the Six-Day War when she was three to her state as a teenager, Ibtisam remembers her struggles in an occupied Palestine and draws strength from her past.

Facts guide Ms. Barakat's pen, and the horrors of the Six-Day War speak louder than anything else. If dehumanizing occupation is inherently political, then yes, there are politics in this book. More than anything, though, I was struck by Ms. Barakat's ability to write without pointing fingers or blame. Her primary goal is to attain peace in the land of her birth. Mentions of things like bulldozers are only brought up in the beginning. In the past, Barakat will show small beautiful things, like a fig tree with a single early ripe fruit on it. There is no mention of what might happen to that tree in the future.

The prose itself is pretty good too. An Israeli soldier butchering his Arabic pronunciations makes, "the words sound like they have been beaten up, bruised so blue they can hardly speak their meaning." When shouting down a well she says, "We called out one another's names; the echoes returned to us as though our voices had grown older than we were." I liked that the teenaged Ibtisam felt so claustrophobic under her mother's attentions that she wrote, "Mothers and soldiers are enemies of freedom. I am doubly occupied." You learn things too. At one point we learn that the Arabic word for "imagine" is "batkhayyal" which means, "to see the shadow of a thought."

Of course, you want to know more. If we understand that this book is a fictionalization of Ms. Barakat's own life then we want to understand how she came to be a resident of Columbia, Missouri after a childhood as a refugee. The answer to this lies in two parts. In a final note in the book that reads "Giving Back to the World" she writes, "Without the help of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency ... millions of other children and I would not have gone to school or learned to read, write, and use our pencils to clear a tiny path through the wreckage of refugee life..." Later in the backflap of the book we learn too that the author, "grew up in Ramallah and has a degree in English literature from Birzeit University in the West Bank. She came to the United States in 1986 for an internship at The Nation magazine." Considering the number of starred professional reviews (at least three as of this review) "Tasting the Sky" has received already, not to mention its inclusion more than a few Best Books of 2007 lists, Ms. Barakat might wish to consider penning a sequel to her story. Perhaps one that follows her heroine through her tricky years of a teen. Such a novel might make for a lovely companion to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, if nothing else.

Given the subject matter, I was intrigued by the suggested reading list at the back of the book. Barakat deals with some difficult issues, and I wanted to know which children and teen books she felt would best complement her own take on the conflict. The list consists of seven selections, both books and films, each one discussing the nature of peace and how to attain it. Each one also gives voice to the Palestinians living in the region, most also offering an Israeli perspective as well.

For many kids, the conflict in Palestine is a difficult topic to grasp. That probably goes for teens and adults as well, I'd wager. What Barakat's book offers is a modest introduction to the history behind some of the troubles via her own personal history. People who would like to include this in a unit for teenagers could consider pairing it with Joe Sacco's graphic novel Palestine for a more recent look at the problem. We may or may not see an answer to the hostilities in an occupied Palestine in our lifetimes, but at the very least we can know that there are voices out there like Ibtisam Barakat who are striving for a peaceful solution. As she says at the beginning, "Many countries have an intense involvement with the Israelis and Palestinians. But the approach of siding with one group or the other, caring about only one rather than both, seems to add to the strife." Let's hope she has more stories in her to tell.

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Choosing to Remember

This sweet memoir of Palestinian experience is written with so much creatively poetic description that one can get lost in the beauty of the words. The story of a little girl and her family set around the Six-Day War with Israel is a gently written narrative of displacement and loss, family ties, and Palestinian culture that is a rare look at a part of the world and a situation that we Americans generally know little about. I did wish to learn more about the parent's thoughts and how they avoided feeling hatred for their enemies. This is a nonpolitical story, however, and readers are left fascinated by the cultural details and impressed by the perseverence of this close-knit family as they struggle with the realities of war. The author chooses to remember in order to "give my story to the world in the hope that no others ever lose their home, and that the world would lend them a hand if they fell." Amen.

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Puts it all into perspective

If you've lived a middle class existence, this book will make everything you've ever complained about seem very small and ridiculous. No car when you were 16? Sharing a bathroom with your siblings? Boo hoo. Ibtisam Barakat grew up with real problems. Violence, war and famine were never very far from her front door.

Despite this, Ibtisam Barakat is able to recount her childhood growing up in Ramallah without an ounce of self-pity. What could be a maudlin tale is told from the eyes of a child who simply knows nothing else. She plays up the street with her brothers, has pets, and finds comfort and whimsy in a piece of chalk.

Barakat is also largely able to sidestep the politics that infuse the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and present a simple story--growing up as a child, surrounded by war and uncertainty.

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Maginficent

Ibtisam Barakat skillfully and meticulously described the typical life of a Palestinian child and the life of the Palestinian's living in the villages and towns of West Bank after the Israeli occupation.

If I wasn't sure Ibtisam is not one of my siblings, I would swear we grew up in the same house.

This book is simply magnificent. Thank you Ibtisam.

Must Read

This novel is very special in a lot of ways, and part of what makes it so touching is that it is true. You will love and feel for the characters, and above all you will share in their humanity. If any reader looks at Palestine as some kind of bizarre foreign country they will never understand, they will be surprised to discover a place where they feel right at home and a family that is just like any other family in the world but has to struggle through hard times.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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