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As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present. In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again.

Also available: A conversation with Otoniya J. Okot Bitek for BookRising.

We will gather to talk about two powerful works: Isabella Hammad's Recognizing The Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative (2023) and And Still We Write, a chapbook featuring Palestinian writers in and from Gaza.

You can also read Mohammed Hanif's introduction to the novel's re-release on ArabLit here.

About the novel
Published in 1976 as Al-Subar, Wild Thorns is the third novel by Sahar Khalifeh. A young Palestinian named Usama returns from working in the Gulf to support the resistance movement. His mission is to blow up buses transporting Palestinian workers into Israel. Shocked to discover that many of his fellow citizens have adjusted to life under military rule, Usama exchanges harsh words with his friends and family. Despite uncertainty, he sets out to accomplish his mission but with disastrous consequences. Wild Thorns features unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, its deep sincerity, uncompromising honesty and rich emotional core plead elegantly for the cause of survival in the face of oppression.

About the author
Sahar Khalifeh is the author of 11 novels and the winner of many international prizes, including the 2006 Naguib Mahfouz literature medal. She is easily one of the most important living writers today. Khalifeh was born in Nablus in 1941. She entered into a traditional arranged marriage at eighteen, and after thirteen years left her husband and began writing. After the 1967 defeat of Jordan and subsequent occupation of the West Bank, Khalifeh began writing again. She began writing “resistance poetry” but broke away from this genre to focus on stories exploring the lives and worlds of women. Her first novel, After the Defeat, followed the interactions of families in a Nablus apartment building after the war. The only manuscript of this novel was confiscated by Israeli authorities and never published. Khalifeh continued writing and her next novel, We Are Not Your Slaves Any Longer, was published in 1974, and was followed by her best-known third novel in 1976. Wild Thorns that explored class nuances under Israeli occupation. She published The Sunflower in 1980 as a sequel to Wild Thorns to focus on female narratives that were largely absent from the original story. She taught at the University of Iowa and at Palestine’s Bir Zeit University, and founded the Women's Affairs Centres in Nablus, Gaza City and Amman.

Do you refuse to laugh at offensive jokes? Have you ever been accused of ruining dinner by pointing out your companion’s sexist comment? Are you often told to stop being so “woke”? If so, you might be a feminist killjoy—and this handbook is for you. In this book, feminist theorist Sara Ahmed shows how killing joy can be a radical world-making project.

About Ghassan Kanafani's "Men in the Sun"
Originally published in 1962, "Men in the Sun" tells the story of three Palestinian refugees who take on a clandestine, humiliating and dangerous journey from refugee camps in Iraq to find work in Kuwait. The refugees belong to three generations of men who have endured the loss of their homeland, Palestine, and alternate between despair, hope and resilience as the journey unfolds. While themes of exile, resistance, displacement and masculinity seem prominent, Kanafani demands we ask urgent political questions about the aftermaths of the Nakba of 1948: what could have been done? Why were Palestinians abandoned without any allies? Why is everybody immune to Palestinian suffering?

Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) was a writer, activist and a prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He was an advocate of the notion of "resistance literature" for Palestinians and declared that literature was the motivating spirit behind his politics. Kanafani began writing fiction while working as a teacher in a refugee camp and many of his works feature a child's perspective. He had a prodigious output of short stories, essays and novellas. Kanafani was uncompromising and vocal about his commitment to the cause for the liberation of Palestine. In 1972, he was assassinated by the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, in Beirut who planted an explosive in his car instantaneously killing Kanafani and his young niece. He was only 36 years old.

This session was recorded but was not made public. Please email us at decolonizethat@gmail.com requesting a link and explain why you hope to view it.

Also available: A conversation with Tsitsi Dangarembga on BookRising

VIRTUAL book club
November 19th, Saturday, 12pm New York | 5pm London

IN-PERSON: New York, Philadelphia and Johannesburg.

NEW YORK: November 17th, Thursday, 6.30pm
Meet Suchitra Vijayan, Michael Busch and Greg Pierrot
Mika Bar, 25 Thames Street, Brooklyn.

PHILADEPHIA: November 17th, Thursday, 6.30pm
Meet Meg Arenberg and Chris Rogers
Paul Robeson House and Museum, 4951 Walnut Street

JOHANNESBURG: November 19th, Sunday, 1pm
Meet Will Shoki and Sohela Surajpal
Breezeblock Cafe, 29 Chiswick Street, Brixton

Also available: A conversation with Chineo Okparanta for BookRising.

Also available: A conversation with Véronique Tadjo for BookRising.