Soul in Exile: Lives of a Palestinian Revolutionary Book

Poet and essayist Fawaz Turki begins his search for answers in the hallways of the 1983 Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers. He then recalls his family's flight into Lebanon when he was eight, childhood in a refugee camp and the streets of Beirut, and years spent in Australia, France, and the United States in search of his identity, both personal and national. In describing this journey, Fawaz Turki also relates the stories of family, friends, and comrades, those who fought the battles and those who walked away from them. Together, these episodes comprise a panoramic history of a generation formed in exile, of a homeless people caught in the violent storm of Middle East politics.

Publishers Weekly

Palestinian activist Turki has written a sequel to his 1972 memoir, The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile, but unlike that work, this slim volume fails to convey the anguish of the refugee or the reasoned analysis of the committed revolutionary. With the 1983 Palestine National Congress in Algiers as its departure point, the book relates, in a series of flashbacks, Turki's childhood and adolescence in Beirut and his early adulthood as an expatriate in Australia. Moving to Paris six years later, he becomes involved in the Palestinian cause and, after the publication of his first book, moves to the U.S. in 1973. As a publicist and organizer for the cause, he is close to the movement's leadership and provides some insights into its strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, this chronicle is marred by an insistent style bordering on agitprop, an outdated counterculture vocabulary, and an indulgence in four-letter expletives to emphasize disdain for another's point of view. Even the highly evocative reminiscences of childhood are spoiled by awkward prose (``Except for him we were all now going to school, but we had learned by this time how to swing our proud Palestinian egos around''), while descriptions of Palestinian leadership are particularly shallow (``Arafat has an intuitive, aboriginal grasp of the Palestinian psyche''). (April)