Rubble. Dust. The cries of children, the screams of mothers. These are the harrowing images we have come to associate with Gaza as Israel continues its relentless attacks on the Palestinian people. But Cactus Pear For My Beloved, a narrative memoir written by Palestinian academic, playwright, author and poet Dr Samah Sabawi, reminds us that throughout the decades of occupation and war its people have endured, there has also been beauty, love, laughter, community, and hope, too.
Cactus Pear For My Beloved could not be published at a more harrowing time.
In the first three months after October 7 2023, Israel displaced 83 per cent of Gaza’s population. It’s projected that Israeli forces have killed more than 180,000 Palestinians in Gaza in the year since, though the true death toll is impossible to verify due to the decimation of health and government services, the slaughter of journalists, and the unknown number of Palestinians ‘missing’ and trapped under rubble. The destruction is intense, unfathomable. The past year has since been referred to as the second Nakba because of the sheer scale of it.
Despite the horrors, Samah Sabawi refuses to despair. She knows Palestinians have survived ethnic cleansing and genocide before, and her latest book is a love letter to their tenacious spirit — a call for optimism and hope at a time where despair is all around us.
Cactus Pear For My Beloved centres on Sabawi’s father Karim, a young, bright boy who, against all odds, not only survives the Nakba of 1948, but makes a name for himself as a talented poet calling for peaceful resistance. But despite the epic feel of his underdog story, Karim is denied the hero’s journey he is so obviously destined for. Instead, like many Gazans, he is displaced, his potential ripped away from him after he is forced to flee to Queensland where no one knows the significance of his name or his famous, rousing poems.
In the time it took Samah Sabawi to interview her father and write Cactus Pear for my Beloved — the book itself being a result of her PhD research in post-memory, collective trauma and identity — Gaza endured three wars. Many of the landmarks written about in her memoir were destroyed in the last year of assaults, only enduring in memories of those determined to keep their home alive. Memories like Sabawi’s.
Donning bright coloured earrings and dressed in Palestinian colours, Samah Sabawi was a beacon of vibrance and Palestinian pride in our blurry Zoom call.
“My primary source was the Palestinian lived experience,” she tells me of the research for her novel, noting that this hasn’t always been the case in academia’s exploration of Palestinian trauma.
“It was intuitively important for me to tell the story of my people, to gather oral testimonies, to write them down, because there were too many blank spaces around me where these stories should have gone.”
Reading like a blend of epic historical fiction and narrative memoir, Cactus Pear For My Beloved explores the Palestinian experience not only through the lens of generational trauma and exile, but through joy, courage and resilience — traits of Palestinians that can sometimes be lost amidst the fetishising of suffering.
Sabawi grounds her story not in the historical events she expertly navigates, but in the moments in between — a dinner with neighbours, the gossiping between mothers, the shyness of young love as a boy peels a cactus pear for his beloved. What makes Gaza is not only its land or borders, but the people that reside within it — and where they endure, Gaza remains.
“When you talk about Gaza, you think of the rubble, you think of the wars… If you ever actually go to Gaza, it’s breathtakingly beautiful. The coastline is gorgeous. The Mediterranean Sea really embraces the city that grows all along the coast,” Sabawi says, her eyes lighting up as she describes her ancestral homeland.
“It’s got the green hills and fields and, you know, the plants. It used to be a lot greener than it is, than it was, and definitely than it is now after a whole year of destruction by the Israelis.”
Cactus Pear For My Beloved is, in many ways, a love letter to the Palestinian experience. It doesn’t shy away from the horrors Gazans endure, but instead tells these stories with humanity, compassion and warmth. In one of my favourite scenes, the Nakba is described from the perspective of Karim as a child.
“That’s what the adults were saying: ‘everything is lost’. What was everything? The children did not understand. Their mother’s dress was there, their parents were there, everyone they know from Tuffah was there, baby brother Muti and the donkey and Abu Sa’adah.. and .. everything,” Sabawi wrote in Chapter 12.
“There’s a lot of moments that can pull you into really hard despair, but they’re immediately followed by moments of hope, love. Life goes on,” Sabawi tells me of her depiction of Gaza.
“There’s a wedding, there’s a birth. Life is ferocious. Palestinians are resilient.
“When you read the book from beginning to end, and you see these ups and downs and wars and occupation, there’s a little bit of hope sprinkled here. Israel withdraws in ‘56 and comes back in ‘67 and Gaza just keeps being on this path of constant renewal, rebuilding, resurrection. It puts things in perspective.”
Even the memoir’s title — named after her father’s romantic gestures to her mother in which he would peel cactus pears for her so she could enjoy the flesh without the thorns — points to Gaza’s spirit of resilience and love. The cactus pear, after all, is a native plant, prickly on the outside, but when peeled, sweet and nourishing within.
“There is an incredible amount of love, and that’s what drives us to live, to defy the universe in trying to stay on the land,” Sabawi says.
“I don’t know what Gaza is going to look like tomorrow or after this is over, but I know that this land can only be loved in that way by its people, and these people will find a way to love the land again and to rebuild again and to replant again.”
Sabawi solemnly notes that “Israel is not at war with the Palestinian people. Israel is at war with history.” And so, she believes, the tide is destined to turn.
“I’m really sad that a lot of Gaza has been destroyed. But hey, you know this cycle will end,” she said.
While it’s a truth that perhaps hasn’t come to fruition yet, Sabawi says we must believe. We must have hope. After all, as Karim notes, how can everything be lost when the people are still there?
Feature image credit: Andrew Campbell at The Melbourne Headshot Company via Penguin