Saja Hassouneh
21210344
Mornings in Jenin
The novel, Mornings in Jenin, starts with prolepsis scene when Amal, the protagonist (dynamic character) and also the autodiegetic narrator, was 47 years old. The novel opens with a stunning prelude set in Jenin in 2002. Amal, the granddaughter of the founder of the family Yehya, looks directly into the soldier’s eyes. He is about to kill her as she thinks while he is pointing his gun towards her front head: ‘’He had killed before, but never while looking his victim in the eyes. Amal saw that, and she felt his troubled soul amid the carnage around them. She knew, from the soldier’s blink, that she would live. The petitions of memory pulled her back, and still back, to a home she had never known. ‘’
The prelude sets up the novel giving readers a view of events that will happen later in Amal’s live: providing a background, which is Jenin in 2002; revealing what’s going to happen to Amal in the future and what got her to this current moment; establishing the tone of the work; and introducing the theme of the novel which is the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. Moreover, the author reveals Amal’s character as an American citizen (and not as a Palestinian) to disclose to the readers if the officials might express regret for killing Americans unlike Palestinians. The prelude doesn’t tell whether the Israeli soldier got the guts to kill Amal or not but at the end of the novel she got shot and died while protecting her daughter to preserve the greatest love she has.

In Jenin, the confrontation, depicted in the prelude of the novel, is tragically resolved. It gives strong impact on the readers and foreshadowing what is going to happen later, rather than starting it with the beginning of Abulheja Family. The prelude immediately engages the reader who meets the Abulheja family in 1941 enjoying their annual harvest in a distant time before history marched over the hills and shattered present and future, before Amal was born.
Eventually, however, Amal faced the soldier holding a rifle to her head with ‘’a mother’s love and dead woman’s calm’’ (page 305 line 28). She has been through similar situation when she was younger. In America in 1973 at the time when she got rubbed at convenience store in West Philly ‘’frightened teenagers with a gun, who once held up the store for forty dollars, weren’t scary at all.’’ (page 176 line 22). Courage and bravery are two aspects that characterize Amal’s personality. Therefore, she wasn’t afraid at all; her biggest fear was nothing compared to that teenager, ‘’I felt no fear in the darkness of West Philly. The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys.’’ (page 176 line 20). Amal now is accustomed to the rifles aimed towards the Palestinians’ bodies. Perhaps, the tension coming from the soldier consolidated her to be tougher than him, or her maternal instinct motivated her to stand calmly to face him. The difficulties she experienced enhanced to build an iced cover to enwrap her heart, preventing her to taste the pain again. Her 6 days experience in the kitchen hall with her friend Huda, her baby-cousin’s death between her arms, her father’s disappearance, her mother’s death, her husband’s death, her friend Fatima’s murder with her niece, and her big brother Yousef’s death are more than enough reasons to make Amal a passionless women who lost her survival instincts. However, the only thing which kept her hanging to life was her daughter.
Israel was the fruit of the World War II. The irony is that Palestinians suffered from Jews because Jews have had suffered from Germans: ‘’Jews killed my mother’s family because Germans had killed Jolanta’s.’’ (p 273 line 8).
The author had a balanced perspective. Although she is clearly angry and describes Jewish people as thieves, murderers, and terrorists; she also includes a few Jewish characters that are kind and compassionate. Susan Abulhawa seeks to understand why Jewish people have taken her land, and concludes that it was because they themselves had been mistreated and without a home; she attempts to have a merciful, balanced perspective. But she is still overtly angry, and she definitely led the readers to understand why she is so angry.
Americans helped the Jewish people to return to their homeland, as they acclaim, ignorantly. That’s what the American citizens think, yet the USA government had hidden interests to establish Israel instead of Palestine in the center of the Middle East which is breaking the Arabs’ unity.
The war bounded every country’s inhibitions to volunteer to protect their lands. Objectively from any nation, Liked it or not, It’s a commitment. Every individual have to pay for it whether paying by their souls, their money, their homes, or their families.
To conclude, every nation has the right to establish their state but that doesn’t mean it has to be at the extent of the lives of others.