Palestine - 1

About

Palestine - 1 is a daring response to the events of the last year, and the ongoing genocide taking place in Gaza, with an unexpected approach to the event that underpins the entire Middle East conflict: the Nakba of 1948. Instead of taking a semi-realist, autobiographical or non-fictional response to this event - all of which have been done many times before - this anthology asks 10 Palestinian writers, all of whose grandparents were forcibly displaced by the events of 1948, to re-imagine Palestine the year before this catastrophe, and to explore the events leading up to it, on a village-by-village basis. Every writer has been allocated a specific village to write about, and challenged to explore the atmosphere of this moment through fantastical, supernatural and speculative fiction devices. Rather like its counterpart anthology, Palestine + 100, it uses genre tropes to re-examine this experience, much as Guillermo Del Torro used horror to explore the Spanish Civil War in films like Pan’s Labyrinth, or Godzilla offered an SF metaphor for the trauma (and retriggered traumas) or nuclear warfare and arms testing in the 1940s and 50s.