Wild Thorns Book

Wild Thorns is a powerful novel by Sahar Khalifeh that captures the complexities of the Israeli occupied West Bank through the use of dynamic male characters such as Usama and his cousin Adil. The weight in the novel comes from the multiple layers of narrative that complicate simplistic views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Khalifeh's use of these male narratives allows readers to see two sides of the same coin. The novel opens with Usama's perspective as he returns to the West Bank in order to complete his mission of blowing up the buses that transport the Palestinian workers into Israel. However, when he comes back home, Usama realizes that the reality of life in Palestine is much different than what he envisioned from the outside. Usama represents the resistance of Israeli occupation from outside of Palestine. He believes in fighting for the nation of Palestine and actively resisting the Israeli occupation.
In contrast of Usama, Adil's narrative is one of a Palestinian worker who relies on his occupation in Israel to support his family. Adil's job causes him to lack the same hatred that Usama feels towards Israelis despite his people's suffering. Although both characters struggle with the same situation of stolen land, their perspectives produce widely different views of their homeland. Their narratives and the narratives of the other men in the novel complicate and challenge social dynamics surrounding the occupation of the West Bank.
However, Khalifeh's novel is not solely about the men and politics of occupied land. It is also about the Palestinian women and their role in the occupation. Khalifeh uses the male voice to her advantage by manipulating the men's narratives to depict their weaknesses, weaknesses of the system itself, and the strength of the women who run the households when their husbands are in jail.
Although Wild Thorns was originally written in Arabic for a primarily Arab audience, Khalifeh's choice to translate the novel to English creates a danger for it to be read through an orientalist lens. Khalifeh's honest and vivid portrayal of daily life in the West Bank makes it easy for the reader to become lost in the story of the novel as if they are getting access into the life of occupied Palestine. This consumability can be problematic because it gives readers an opportunity to further ideas that men's voices are the only voices with power, ignore women's narratives, and leave the reader with little understanding of Palestinian women's existence during occupation. However, Khalifeh uses frequent dialogue and change in narrators in order to subvert the consumability of the language and forces the audience to think carefully about the context and purpose of each man's story.
This novel is a valuable read for any class studying the complexities of Arab women writers or for any person seeking to understand the depth of the Israeli occupation in Palestine. I enjoyed the layers of Khalifeh's craft and the multifaceted narratives of each character. Wild Thorns is a novel that I appreciate due to Khalifeh's amazing artistry of language, dialogue, and poetry, but also for its ability to encourage an understanding of the Palestine's occupation through multiple lenses.