In June, I received an advanced reader copy of Palestinian writer Sara Abou Ghazal’s novel in translation, Dreams of Ayn Ara, from Feminist Press. The novel was published in August this year, and my review is long overdue. So, here it goes!

What role does memory play within a state of perpetual displacement? How does one resist forgetting under this precarity? And what does it mean to truly remember when memory is the space where catastrophe and pain reside?

Sara Abou Ghazal’s Dreams of Ayn Ara sits with these difficult questions, asking the reader to do the same. What we find in the process is that there are no easy answers here. The novel successfully moves beyond headlines, debates, historical records and social media reels by bringing us into the intimate sphere of a family affected by the lingering aftershocks of 1948. Across six interconnected chapters, we follow the dispersed Abu Sukkar family: Zein al-Abidin, who leaves Shatila at the age of thirty; his wife Zahra; their son Nidal, a nurse who settles in Sweden; and their youngest daughter Salwa, who stays behind in Lebanon, preparing to join her parents in Europe until she finds an unexpected, surreal portal back home, to Palestine. The Abu Sukkars are not an ordinary family; their extra-ordinariness, for which they never asked, was imposed on them the day the Nakba shattered their lives.

The novel opens in Stockholm, where Zein and Zahra have recently moved to stay with Nidal. We meet Zein as he visits the Lebanese embassy to sort out paperwork for his permanent residency. When the clerk tells him he’s in the wrong embassy, not the Palestinian, despite his frustration, Zein realizes that he never clarified his connection to London. But his faux pas doesn’t really matter; as the novel notes, “she’s forgotten that there are Palestinians living in Lebanon and are allowed to travel abroad.” Indeed, “I forgot are the exact words she uses” (7). Zein leaves rattled, and homesick for a café in Beirut he can still picture down to the street corner, the walk there, the regulars, holding onto the memory “as if he repels forgetting” (8). 

I found the first chapter quite disorienting, and it was difficult for me to focus. Are we in Stockholm? Shatila? Beirut? What is Zein thinking about? Now or the past? Without warning, the narrative shifts between first and third person, and this constant back and forth creates what I think is an intentional disorientation that mirrors Zein’s effort to “repel forgetting.” In a way, the novel lays out its cards from the very beginning: this is how memory is, circular and fragmented. So, through dreams and stories, the characters return, over and over, to places they are not physically allowed to visit, and the narrative folds in on itself, capturing a reality where time freezes and moves in ways that defy linearity. 

Nidal serves as a case in point. While his father clings to Beirut and to the idea of Palestine, Nidal has spent his life searching for an escape. He is exasperated by politics and history, a feeling captured when he wishes to tell a Lebanese friend how his heritage and Ayn Ara, his family’s village, keeps haunting him: “It was like Palestine had him surrounded, and all he wanted was to forget about it for a few hours” (52). His parents fail to comprehend his desire to leave, and they are befuddled when, later in Sweden, Nidal adopts a strict, prescriptive version of Islam. Nidal’s chapter is where the novel cuts deepest, laying bare childhood abuse by a neighbor, the restrictions of his upbringing and a repressed attraction to men that he brings himself to confront only once in Paris. In that very moment, after being mistaken for a pickpocket, he is told for the first time: “Go back to your country and rob people there” (57). Life issues him a warning in Paris, foreshadowing just how far he will drift from who he truly is and from any true sense of home. 

Nidal seeks distance, but his father’s generation holds on tightly, with an intensity driven by the fear that their identity is at risk of being fully erased. Theirs is a different kind of anxiety, the dread of homelessness and statelessness repeating itself across history. So, Zein remembers. He remembers his youth in Beirut and Shatila by mapping the city street by street—its alleys, corners, shops, names of regulars—as though forgetting a detail would entirely erase the place from his memory. His insistence on concrete detail is understandable; it stems from absences, or a constant fear of it. We learn that Zein’s mother fled Ayn Ara when he was young, which means he doesn’t have any personal memory of it. As Abu Ghazal notes in the preamble, Ayn Ara is an imaginary town “inspired by oral histories of the destroyed towns and villages of Wadi Ara.” Even though Ayn Ara represents the historical reality of many destroyed Palestinian villages, it is imaginary in the sense that it can only exist in the minds and memories of its characters. 

By contrast, the Shatila camp, established in Beirut in 1949, is painfully real. For Zein, it symbolizes both the reality of exile and the closest thing he has ever known to home. So he clings to its every detail. He remembersto such an extent, that simply hearing a familiar voice at an airport unleashes a flood of his memories, from Shatila’s earlier era of lush gardens and hope to “the war; the invasion; fleeing Beirut” (23). As the characters go back and forth in time, the novel reveals the quietly devastating ways in which memory and history collapse into one another. 

Through Zahra, we see how time meant for warmth and happiness is tainted by political precarity and violence. Her chapter, my favorite of all, poses a meaningful question: what does it mean to be an ordinary family? Under normal circumstances, ordinariness is all about simple routines—waking up, sharing meals, going to work or school, gathering for celebrations or funerals, and so forth. How does one reconcile with the reality that such stability is an unreachable luxury? In Zahra’s memories, domestic life is so intimately linked to the terror of violence that the cozy and the catastrophic are intertwined. Recalling the 2008 clashes in Beirut, she describes chopping tomatoes, heating fava beans and brewing tea while listening to the radio report that Hezbollah has surrounded Walid Jumblatt’s residence:

“I was frying eggs and waiting for the tea to boil, unable to comprehend how things had slipped like this, how suddenly we were in the middle of a war again, how it was men with guns who were in control of our lives again … like they’d just been playing with us since the assassination of al-Hariri, like we were lab rats” (95–96).

Preparing meals against the backdrop of gunfire and news bulletins paints a striking picture of how war insidiously pulls up a chair at the family table, eavesdrops on intimate conversations, enters bedrooms, and lays claim to memory, and how war, in this way, turns quotidian acts into courageous forms of endurance. The tension between the political and the personal reaches its peak when Zahra watches a news broadcast showing armed fighters force open the gate of her empty childhood home. What she witnesses sends her spinning back through an archive of memory: her mother still asleep within the house, her brothers waiting for a cone of chickpea powder, weddings watched from the balcony, grapes stolen off a neighbor’s vine, her own bridal procession to Hamad Mosque, seashells gathered at Ramlat al-Bayda and boiled clean to sit in a bowl in the living room (100–101). As she watches her old home get vandalized on screen, memory becomes Zahra’s last line of defense, and she makes her way toward the fighters. This scene is particularly gripping; we see here how easily a piece of property, which you once called home, can be seized, but this doesn’t change the meaning and warmth associated with it. 

Moments like this bring the novel’s central message to the fore: that remembering, however painful it may be, can be an act of resistance. As Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa’di write in their introduction to Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory: “Memory is one of the few weapons available to those against whom the tide of history has turned,” making visible how Palestinian memory is “dissident memory, counter-memory” (6). One critical way Abou Ghazal makes this “dissident memory” palpable is through her refusal of a linear timeline. History in this novel does not stay in the past; the 1948 Nakba, the Lebanese Civil War, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the 2005 assassination of Rafic Hariri are open chapters that spill into the characters’ present. And the Nakba is fixed as the novel’s point of origin, the date it all began. As Abou Ghazal explains in an interview, “The question of memory for Palestinians is a question of who we are. We always go back to the Nakba and remember it because it is the moment that explains why we do not live where we are supposed to live” (AlSalibi 2024). Historian Elias Sanbar articulates this temporal rupture in his essay “Out of Place, Out of Time,” marking 1948 as the moment when “a country and its people disappeared from maps and dictionaries” and “a long absence was beginning” (87). Dreams of Ayn Ara spends its final chapters within that long absence and shows us how its shape and form have shifted across three generations without ever closing. 

In the novel’s final three chapters—consecutively narrated by Salwa, the late grandfather, and her grandmother Nijmeh—the line between dreaming and waking reality blurs. During a trip to Amman, Salwa is visited in a dream by her long-deceased grandfather Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab Abu Sukkar, who was brutally killed in the Nakba of 1948. She returns home to Beirut, terrified that she is losing her mind. Her grandfather’s spirit, as we find out towards the end, has been striving to reach out to every member of the family since 1948. “What matters is that people remember,” Muhammed insists, “What matters is that we keep telling the story.” As he guides Salwa through decades of memory, he wants her to see the ruined home in Ayn Ara, his own murder and Nijmeh’s escape to Shatila, where the narrative becomes polyphonic, shifting from Salwa’s consciousness to Nijmeh’s and, finally to a collective voice: 

“I see Nijmeh walking with her little boy, counting who’s left, glancing at everyone and trying to remember who is left. Is there anyone left? Is there anyone left? She is walking with the boy and hears whispers that there’s a bus taking people to Lebanon — should she go? — tugs her boy along and counts who’s left. Is there anyone left?” (117–118)

Through these dreams and stories, Salwa comes to terms with the importance of carrying her ancestors’ memories as her own. She must remember, and if she doesn’t, what is the alternative? She understands that the alternative is permanent loss of memory, narrative, resilience, hope, and the claim to Palestinianness all at once. As a relative from Palestine reminds her, “They try to destroy memory because it’s their worst enemy. They know it’s our means of survival. Do you understand, Salwa? We are guardians of memory” (117).

So, Salwa is entrusted with this collective memory, since her generation bridges two realities; she is simultaneously the most susceptible to erasure and the most capable of dreaming beyond it. As her grandfather departs her visions for the last time, his final words linger: “Remember, Salwa. Dream, Salwa. Don’t be afraid to dream” (126).

I find it intriguing that Abou Ghazal ends the novel, which is essentially about loss, not with the expected “never forget,” but with an invitation to dream. Dreams and storytelling connect the Abu Sukkar family to one another and to Palestine: Zein’s memory of his father rests on stories; Nidal, raised on Nijmeh’s “dream stories,” meets his grandfather in his sleep; and both Nijmeh and Zahra receive dream visits from Muhammed. The characters continually dream, as in their sleep, to preserve memory, but they forget how to imagine new possibilities, how to dream beyond survival. The novel suggests that memory serves multiple purposes, and particularly for the Palestinian people, it needs to do more than just record past trauma. For the Palestinian people, it must also project future possibilities like a return home. 

First published in Arabic in 2022 and now available in Katharine Halls’s English translation, Dreams of Ayn Ara can be disorienting, but getting lost in its pages is well worth the journey. I don’t know Arabic, but Halls’s translation has an oral, poetic rhythm that honors the novel’s themes of memory and intergenerational storytelling. At roughly 150 pages, Dreams of Ayn Ara has the potential to develop into a major family saga like Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City and Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us. Although I found the ending abrupt and wanted to return to each character’s perspective at least once more, it’s definitely worth a read.