“Mined Paradises,” a 400-page novel by Palestinian writer Nisab Adeeb Hussein, published by Toubad Publishing House in Ramallah, explores the contradiction embedded in its title: the enduring natural beauty of Palestine as a refuge for love and emotion, alongside the danger and fear that permeate everyday life.
اضافة اعلان
Set in 2017, the novel spans a wide geographical landscape encompassing Palestinian cities and villages across the West Bank and Gaza, particularly Tulkarm and Nablus. The setting is not merely a backdrop to the story, but an active force in shaping the characters and their destinies.
The novel brings together 14 Palestinian characters as part of a field research project, alongside a journalist from Gaza and a Jerusalem-based tour guide. The characters embody a range of psychological and human contradictions: a Jerusalemite faces circumstances different from those confronting someone from Gaza, while a Palestinian from inside Israel grapples with questions unlike those faced by someone from Hebron or Rafah.
Against this backdrop, identity becomes an everyday question: Who am I? Where do I belong? And what remains of a person’s identity when the place around them changes or is taken away?
The novel also uses ordinary human relationships as a different lens through which to understand the complexity of Palestinian life. Love, for example, is not presented as separate from politics and geography. A checkpoint, legal classification or geographical affiliation can intrude on a romantic relationship and alter its course.
Among the novel’s notable themes is the experience of former prisoners after their release, along with the impact of war, martyrdom and psychological trauma. It also explores life in Gaza, checkpoints and the separation wall, approaching these issues through the perspective of people living with their consequences in everyday life.
In doing so, the novel moves beyond the narrow boundaries of political fiction to become a broader human narrative rooted in a deeply complex social environment.
From a literary perspective, “Mined Paradises” does not follow a rigid traditional structure centered on a single protagonist and a unified plot. Instead, it relies on multiple voices and characters, with different times and places intersecting throughout the narrative.
Hussein employs shifting narrative perspectives, moving between first- and third-person narration and bringing the past into the present. This gives the novel a multilayered structure that reflects the diversity of experiences within its dramatic framework. The author also gives each character space to express themselves and contribute to the narrative.
Excerpt from the novel
“Whenever my mind wandered, I found myself looking at the engraving carved into the opposite wall and seeing it exactly as it was. I do not know whether it stirs pain in me or brings me comfort.
Since I was fifteen, I have helped my father in this bookstore. Now I have lived as many years as it has, and whenever the bookstore falls quiet, its visitors and customers gone and I grow tired of reading, I realize that I am sitting here once again, facing the same engraving.
It is true that during those years I studied at university, got married and became a father, but it is as though time has not passed—not over the engraving outside, nor over this bookstore.
I close my eyes and listen to the neighbors talking in the market, the cooing of pigeons at the window, and a young man suddenly passing by in his cart, shouting, ‘Watch out, watch out.’
I raise my eyes to the shelf above the door. The books resting there are the same ones my father placed on it, to make sure they would never be sold.”
