Describing the Past

Three survivors circle a village, a death, and one another. When he was seven years old, the acclaimed Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan moved with his family to a Karameh refugee camp east of the River Jordan. That camp—a fierce center of Palestinian resistance following the Six-Day War and the site of major devastation when Israel razed it following the Battle of Karameh in 1968—serves as the setting for Zaqtan’s first prose work to appear in English, Describing the Past. This novella is a singular coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of historic upheaval. It stands as an elegy for the loss of a childhood friend, and for childhood itself, brought back to life here as if dreams and memories have seamlessly merged. The result is a new state of being—an altered consciousness and a profound way of remembering the world.