Tackling Israeli-Palestinian issues through fiction

One of the hardest things to do in fiction is tackle a complex issue and still deliver an engaging story.

Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Muslim of Palestinian and Egyptian heritage who grew up in Melbourne, has a strong literary track record of tackling the challenging topic of being a teenage girl of Middle Eastern descent in urban Australia.

Her breakthrough first novel, Does my head look big in this?, was a witty and enjoyable story about an Australian-Palestinian Muslim who decides to wear the hijab, and the courage it takes to display her faith.

Her follow up, Ten things I hate about me, was more about cultural identity (rather than religious), in which a Lebanese teenager in Sydney goes to great lengths to hide her ethnicity from her friends.

Now, Abdel-Fattah has gone a step further, using her gifts as a storyteller to present a Palestinian perspective on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Where the streets had a name features the likable narrative voice of Hayaat, a teenage girl whose face is scarred from an event we don’t fully understand until almost the end of the novel.

Hayaat is like most teenagers. She wants to be loved and accepted. She wants her family to be safe. She’s learned to live with the restrictions and curfews of the occupation and the bitterness of those around her who have lost homes and land to the Israelis.

Hayaat has no desire to cause trouble, but when her beloved grandmother, Sitti Zeynab, falls ill, Hayaat is convinced the only thing to lift her spirits will be to touch the soil of her village again. So she and her best friend Samy decide to go themselves, to bring back a jar of the precious dirt.

The trouble is, Sitti Zeynab’s village is on the other side of the giant concrete wall built by the Israelis to keep them separate from the West Bank Palestinians. What should only be a trip of a few miles will take Hayaat and Sami a full day, as they negotiate check points, roadblocks, unreliable public transport and Israeli soldiers.

Given the polemic nature of the Israeli-Palestinian situation itself, it’s a near impossible task to write a story about it with polarising people. But while the Abdel-Fattah’s sympathies lie with the non-violent men, women and children suffering under the occupation, she avoids the trap of painting a simple picture of villains and heroes.

This is a human story. It’s an attempt to show the human face of the occupation – on both sides of the wall. Both sides fear and mistrust the other, but – as this novel quietly suggests – there is hope on both sides too.

Hayaat is a Muslim, yet her best friend Samy is Christian and the difference in their faith appears to have very little significance to them or their community: they are all Palestinian and all living under occupation. And, interestingly, the men and women who help Hayaat and Samy the most during their journey (probably because they have the freedom to so) are Israelis, who – openly or otherwise – oppose the occupation.

Abdel-Fattah’s connection to the people and the place in this story allows her to capture the humour, spirit and humanity of a people whose plight is frequently over-shadowed by the violence perpetrated by a few, but ascribed to all.

Sitti, who has suffered the most in Hayaat’s family, also has the greatest capacity to laugh at the situation of her people.

To Hayaat’s sister, who is dieting in the lead-up to her wedding: “A little meat on a woman is nice. Do you want people to look at your on your wedding day and think you had a holiday in Gaza?”

But Sitti also carries the grief of a nation without a status. To the Israeli family who claimed her home as her own: “I’m sorry for what happened to your family and your people, but why must we be punished?”

And finally, it is Sitti who offers her granddaughter a glimmer of hope that one day the Israelis and Palestinians may find a way to live together: “Justice will come when those who hope outweigh those who despair. Hope is a force that cannot be reckoned with, ya Hayaat.”

Claudia Gray - the new Stephenie Meyer?

Given the phenomenal global success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, there’s a mad rush from publishers and publicists to find “the next Stephenie Meyer”.

Which is ironic, because it was only a year ago Meyer was being touted as “the next JK Rowling”.

I’m pretty sure authors themselves cringe at such comparisons, but in the current glut of urban fantasy, paranormal adventure and YA escapism hitting our shelves, they’re unavoidable.

Once author being compared to Meyer is Claudia Gray (the pseudonym of New York-based writer Amy Vincent). She’s currently two books into a planned four-book series about a gothic boarding school and the strange goings on there.

The Evernight series is told in the first person through the eyes of Bianca, a shy newcomer to the school who falls for fellow outsider Lucas.

For the first hundred or so pages, Evernight seemed to be heading into familiar Twilight territory. But then there was a very neat twist I hadn’t seen coming (having not gone out of my way to read too much about the series beforehand), which took the story in a new and interesting direction.

Without giving too much away, the series features vampires, vampire hunters and (in the second book, Stargazer), ghosts. It’s a kind of Twilight, Supernatural and Buffy hybrid, with a bit of Hogwarts thrown in for good measure.

Evernight introduces the main characters, establishes the mythology and sets the lines between the warring vampires and vampire hunters – which Gray then nicely blurs, ensuring the reader is never quite sure who's "good" and who's not.

Stargazer then ups the ante with more tension and twists as Bianca and Lucas try to make their relationship work, and new elements are added to increase the sense of mystery and menace. It’s these twists and turns, and the relative complexities of the relationships between a number of characters, that makes this series more than just another teen vampire love story. That, and the fact Gray is a good storyteller.

So … is she the next Meyer?

We’ve talked before on this blog about why Meyer’s novels have struck such a chord with readers. The appeal is undeniably the intense relationship between Bella and Edward, particularly the idea of a powerful, sexy vampire denying his very nature to love and protect the human he craves.

While the Bianca-Lucas romance drives the Evernight story, it’s as much a suspenseful gothic mystery as it is a love story. The relationships aren’t always healthy, and truth is never black or white, which makes the story all the more interesting.

Gray’s author bio refers to her lifelong interest in old houses, classic movies, vintage style and history, and she nicely weaves these elements into her narrative.

It’s not fair to compare Gray to Meyer. Gray is an unashamed fan of vampire stories – particularly those not mired in horror – and Everynight and Stargazer pay homage to that.

These YA books are fast-paced and suspenseful, and while there’s not the underlying sexiness of the Bella-Edward dynamic, there are plenty of hot and heavy moments with Bianca and Lucas (with their own complications, of course).

I have one last observation on the YA/vampire/paranormal trend, which I’ll save for another post – and then, I promise, I’ll write about something other than vampires for a while!

Young adult fiction - how do you define it?

How do you define young adult fiction (generally referred to simply as YA)?

It’s a question I’ve been mulling over in recent weeks as I’ve alternated between YA and general novels.

The formal definition (i.e. from Wikipedia) is that YA is "written for, published for, or marketed to adolescents, roughly between the ages of 12 and 18". The subject matter and story lines are typically consistent with the age and experience of the main character. Stories generally tackle themes relevant for a young adult audience (usually with a “coming of age” theme), told by a narrator in the same age group.

But YA is not, of itself, a neatly packaged genre. Books that sit on YA shelves can be fantasy, horror, science fiction, literature, romance, thriller, mystery ... or any other style. These days, YA books are also increasingly edgy.

They can be highly sophisticated in their storytelling (like Meg Rossof’s novels), so it’s not fair to say YA is generally less complex in nature. In fact, you’re likely to find some pretty heavy, and often controversial, subject matter (suicide, incest, isolation, cultural clash etc.).

And then there are those so-called YA books that transcend age–specific markets, like Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling (Rowling, in fact, is still often called a children's author, despite the fact children probably make up less than half her global market).

I recently read the first of a paranormal series by Kelley Armstrong (The Summoning). It was an easy read, plot-driven and concerned with issues relevant to teenagers. Every character of significance is a teenager. It's YA, and makes no pretence at being anything else.

Randa Abdel-Fattah's brilliant debut novel Does my head look big in this? is undeniably YA, and yet I know I’m not the only woman over the target age group who enjoyed this story.

Markus Zusak wrote four novels that comfortably fit on the YA shelf: Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolf, When Dogs Cry, and The Messenger. His fourth – and most renowned – The Book Thief, has also been categorised as YA, because it features a young protagonist (even though the narrator is actually Death). And yet, the latter is no more a YA novel than Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals or David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which each have young narrators but deal with concepts far beyond the life experience of those characters.(The same can be said about some so-called children’s novels, such as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.)

So, I wonder how publishers and book stores (and, for that matter, writers) determine what is YA and what is general fiction, when the lines are so blurred in the marketplace.

I’ve read quite a bit of YA in the last couple of years, sometimes intentionally, other times because I simply didn’t realise the book I’d picked up had been categorised as such. (Some of the most innovative and exciting storytelling is happening in this “genre”.)

But does the classification of YA put readers off picking up books that sit in a different part of the book store than their usual choices?

So, this week’s question: do you read YA? If not, is this a conscious decision? If yes, what have been your favourite reads?