









Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation (Hardback)
Raja Shehadeh (author)- We can order this

An elegy for a vanished cityscape and a profound meditation on the unexpected avenues of change, Going Home is Raja Shehadeh’s bittersweet tour of Ramallah, his hometown and tinderbox of the West Bank. Intensely personal and reflective yet unflinching in its portrayal of the everyday iniquities of occupation, Going Home charts the shifts in Palestinian culture, religion and society and asks searching questions about the nature of political progress. Required reading for anyone keen to understand the beating human heart amidst the power-plays and rhetoric of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In Going Home, Orwell Prize winning author Raja Shehadeh travels Ramallah and records the changing face of the city.
Walking along the streets he grew up in, he tells the stories of the people, the relationships, the houses, and the businesses that were and now are cornerstones of the city and his community.
This is, in many ways, an elegy. Green spaces - gardens and hills crowned with olive trees - have been replaced by tower blocks and concrete lots; the occupation and the settlements have further entrenched themselves in every aspect of movement-from the roads that can and cannot be used to the bureaucratic barriers that prevent people leaving the West Bank. The culture of the city has also shifted with Islam taking a more prominent role in people's everyday and political lives and the geography of the city.
As he grapples with ageing and the failures of the resistance, Shehadeh notes the ways that the past still invades the presence from the ruins of the compound that was Yasser Arafat's home to the power of emigrated families to reshape neighbourhoods by selling their long-abandoned homes. This is perhaps Raja Shehadeh's most painfully visceral book.
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781788163064
Number of pages: 208
Weight: 392 g
Dimensions: 222 x 144 x 25 mm
Edition: Main
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