TEHRAN - “Close your eyes, imagine Palestine 100 years after the Nakba, and now, describe it as a story.” This was the request of Basma Ghalayini, editor, to twelve famous writers, which was published in the book "Palestine +100" in 2019 by Comma Press.

Writers such as Selma Dabbagh, Mazen Maarouf, Emad El-Din Aysha, Amir El-Youssef made this amazing adventure and tried to portray Palestine in 2048 from their point of view in a short story. A century on from the Nakba of 1948, which marked the violent expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and the founding of the Israeli regime.

The book follows on from the success of Comma’s "Iraq+100" (2016), set a hundred years after the U.S. invasion of 2003; year 2103.

Stories in “Palestine + 100” range from Majd Kayyal’s depiction of a futuristic solution to the Palestine-Israeli war, in which two parallel worlds occupy the same geographic space, to Saleem Haddad’s Matrix-like concept of a “right to digital return”.

More than a fiction

In almost all these stories there is a doubled, troubled vision, that never resolves so much as it fractures further. The themes of technology, violence, and memory are central to all the 12 pieces of the collection.

Dabbagh's inventive story, “Sleep it Off, Dr. Schott”, is one of the 12 entries in “Palestine+100.” The story takes place on June 15, 2048. A high-speed, underground shuttle is about to be launched, carrying goods from Gaza to neighboring affiliated countries, in exchange for much-needed materials. Paid for by a cryptocurrency, it's the brainchild of Professor Kamal, who lives in The Secular Scientific Enclave and is the creator of Body-Bots – a semi-indestructible fighting force who have triggered severe bombardments.

In an interview with the Tehran Times, British-Palestinian writer and lawyer Dr. Selma Dabbagh explained that the use of science fiction is not very popular in Palestine. Instead, there is a prevalence of poetry, short stories, memoirs, and increasingly more novels. These novels are not usually fantastical but are literary responses that depict Palestinian realities. 

“I would say the collection 'Palestine +100' is more one of speculative fiction, in the sense that it's more concerned with human actions and responses to a new, futuristic situation driven by scientific innovation, rather than the scientific innovation itself,” she added.

Palestine, a dystopia in reality

Basma Ghalayini, the editor of the collection, writes in her introduction that science fiction has never been particularly popular for Palestinian authors, because “it is a luxury, to which Palestinians haven’t felt they can afford to escape”.

“Not that the disguise of science fiction would be that drastic a costume change for Palestinian writers, especially those based in Palestine. Everyday life, for them, is a kind of a dystopia,” she writes.

Dabbagh stated that Palestinian reality is so harsh, the technology is so dehumanizing that she is not sure that we need to step in to the future for it to seem like science fiction. 

“My friends who managed to leave Gaza last year, after walking from north to south in November and December, described it as being like a dystopian movie set. They reported seeing burnt-out buildings, iris-scanning checkpoints, and dead bodies scattered everywhere.”

The last living Palestinian

The writer noted that what she found exciting about contributing to the collection is that it opened up her imagination to visualizing the future. “I was a little disappointed by how in my story and all of the stories set in Gaza, we all had the siege continuing. It made me think about how blocked our mindset has become.”

Dabbagh also told the Tehran Times that although the writing in “'Palestine +100” is mainly quite pessimistic, none of the writers imagined anything quite as horrific as the current genocide in Gaza, except Mazen Maarouf perhaps in his story where the last Palestinian on earth is kept in a glass box.

“Curse of the Mud Ball Kid” by Mazen Maarouf is the most surreal and tragic of the stories. The story, set in the aftermath of a nanobot attack in 2037, is narrated by the last Palestinian left alive, whose body is so affected by radiation that he is kept in a glass box, but cannot be killed.

Mazen Maarouf, a Palestinian-Icelandic writer and poet, was another writer of the book “Palestine + 100” who was interviewed by the Tehran Times. Regarding finding the subject for his story, Maarouf said that he couldn't think of any idea for the first few weeks until he decided to decline the call. “That's when an old and tasteless sarcastic joke came to mind, taking a serious and horrific real face. Could Israel kill every Palestinian until only one is kept alive?” he added.

Surreal realities

Even though Dabbagh believed that Maarouf's surreal story somehow has a theme of the current terrible conditions in Gaza, Maarouf said that no fictional imagination could have matched the level of crimes and atrocities we are witnessing nowadays in Gaza.

Maarouf also explained his story style. “I think I wrote the story with the same sense that I feel towards the situation. The story of Palestine has never been less surreal at any time in modern history. It is a story of twisted reality, injustice, evilness, and theft.”

Man Booker International Prize nominee mentioned that the world has been pulled into dystopia long time ago, through barbaric capitalist practices that destroyed the lives of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa but also in Europe and the U.S. as well.

Nakba at the center

When Palestinians write, they write about their past through their present, knowingly or unknowingly. Their writing is, in part, a search for their lost inheritance, as well as an attempt to keep the memory of that loss from fading. In this sense, the past is everything to a Palestinian writer; it is the only thing that makes their current existence and their identity meaningful. And the Nakba, of course, sits at the heart of this.

Maarouf noted that Palestine was the first and longest continuous practice of real stories, and visualization. “The first thing I thought of is to return to the roots when I was writing the story. So, I had to go back to the starting point and re-construct the place from scratch, with the people there.”

The writer highlighted that what disturbs the colonizer is the memory that is inherited and relived. “I met people in Lebanon, refugees from Palestine, like me who were my age and amazingly I found out that we all have same memory about Palestine, as if we were friends there, except that we had never been there.”

He said he had heard stories about Palestine from different Palestinian refugees when he was a child. “Slowly, Palestine was constructed through oral narration and imagination. We had very limited visual materials,” he added.

Science fiction as a special genre

Maarouf also told the Tehran Times that if he were to write another story about the future of Palestine, he would still choose a fictional approach that draws direct inspiration from the Palestinians' current suffering in Gaza.

Dabbagh explained that there is an ability in science fiction to exaggerate or extrapolate a current reality in order to make a point. “Writers who, over the centuries, have written under political censorship have used more fantastical forms to create allegories that the reader will understand what is being criticized without the writer putting themselves at risk.”

She also mentioned, the genre is like a double-edged sword.  “I agree that there is potential for use of science fiction for exposing the current situation in Palestine, it is a malleable form; but the genre also can be used to further narratives of conquest and domination.”

“My interpretation of “Star Wars” for example was that it was a kind of U.S. propaganda set during the Cold War,” she added.

Dabbagh believed that there is a need for artists and writers to visualize better potential future, to develop credible, attractive futures that we can work towards. “I hope that there is more Palestinian fiction of this kind being written. We may need speculative fiction more to envision 'the day after,' and our ambitions for a new Palestine free of discrimination based on race, religion, or ethnicity.”

The writer said she is actually more interested in the past rather than the present and is writing a novel set in 1930s Jerusalem. “I find it hard to write about current events as they are changing so quickly. I am following developments closely and work in this area as a lawyer, but I live in London and it really is the responsibility of those of us in the diaspora to broadcast the voices of those who have experienced the genocide.”

Photo: Palestinian-Icelandic writer and poet Mazen Maarouf (L) and British-Palestinian writer and lawyer Selma Dabbagh

AH/SAB