[Dublin] An evening with GHADA KARMI to launch her new memoir ‘Return’ (IPSC & AFP)

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | event notice Thursday August 18, 2016 16:38 by IPSC - IPSC

On Thursday September 8th 2016 you are invited to spend an unforgettable evening with acclaimed Palestinian author, academic and activist Ghada Karmi as she launches her latest book, ‘Return: A Palestinian Memoir‘ (Verso, 2016).

The event, jointly hosted by the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Academics for Palestine, will take place in the Ballroom in Wynn’s Hotel, 39 Abbey Street Lower, Dublin 1 at 7pm. Entry is free.

Ghada Karmi will be in conversation with well-known academic and journalist Harry Browne, and there will be time for questions from the audience.

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Copies of the book will be available for purchase on the evening and the author will be pleased to sign them.
About the Book

An extraordinary memoir of exile and the impossibility of finding home, from the author of ‘In Search of Fatima‘ (Verso, 2002) and ‘Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine‘ (Pluto, 2007)

“The journey filled me with bitterness and grief. I remember looking down on a nighttime Tel Aviv from the windows of a place taking me back to London and thinking hopelessly, ‘flotsam and jetsam, that’s what we’ve become, scattered and divided. There’s no room for us or our memories here. And it won’t be reversed.’”

Having grown up in Britain following her family’s exile from Palestine, doctor, author and academic Ghada Karmi leaves her adoptive home in a quest to return to her homeland. She starts work with the Palestinian Authority and gets a firsthand understanding of its bizarre bureaucracy under Israel’s occupation.

In her quest, she takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the heart of one of the world’s most intractable conflict zones and one of the major issues of our time. Visiting places she has not seen since childhood, her unique insights reveal a militarised and barely recognisable homeland, and her home in Jerusalem, like much of the West Bank, occupied by strangers. Her encounters with politicians, fellow Palestinians, and Israeli soldiers cause her to question what role exiles like her have in the future of their country and whether return is truly possible.
Praise for the Book

“Not just life writing but writing that is alive. With perfectly attuned fidelity to the experiences it narrates, it offers a deeply engaged and engaging meditation on what it means to stay together as a people. Revolving this question in ways both existentially Palestinian and universally human, it is a literary memoir to be placed alongside those of Mourid Barghouti and Mahmoud Darwish.” – Caroline Rooney, Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Kent

“’In Search of Fatima’ was a beautifully written and moving narrative… Return is both a sequel and a stand-alone memoir.” – Avi Shlaim, The Guardian

“Personal, warm and accessible, Return describes a life trajectory that captures the story of modern Palestine in a most unique and sensitive way. Beautifully written, it brings to the fore the human being behind the colonized, occupied and fragmented realities of present-day Israel and Palestine. It is an individual journey into the heart of the occupation’s darkness, where people, and not abstract ideas, are struggling with the impossibility of leading a normal life, or any life at all.” – Ilan Pappe, author of The Idea of Israel

“Eloquent and moving.” – David Shulman, New York Review of Books

Organised by the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Academics for Palestine.