Cactus Pear for My Lover by Samah Sabawi is a memoir that traces her Palestinian family history over more than 100 years from the post-war formation of the state of Israel to the Six Days War in 1967 which resulted in many deaths, ethic cleansing, and the exile of around 250,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Cactus Pear for My Lover is on family’s experience of that time and highlights the injustices of dispossession and oppression in Gaza.

They gave them everything. They gave them the official government buildings, the airports, the seaports, the military equipment and the training. Everything! And they gave us checkpoints, prison cells, torture chambers and targeted assassinations for any one of us who tries to resist.

Sabawi’s father Abdul Karim Sabawi, a renowned Palestinian poet, was the son of a highly intelligent man with a disability and a strong, loving and illiterate mother. We first meet Karim as an elderly man in Australia in 2018 when Sabawi says she wants to write his story. The narrative is told through Karim’s eyes as a child and young man between 1918 and 1967. It recounts Karim’s birth, education, marriage and his work as a journalist and teacher as well as his exile from Gaza after the Six-Day War for his part in the Palestinian resistance. It would have been too dangerous to stay.

It wasn’t until they had finished their dinner, and began sipping on their meramieh tea, that something shifted in the air. An unmistakable sense of foreboding hung thick in the spaces between them, and settled itself in the room like an uninvited guest who kept returning. Pride and joy gave way to an irrational but real fear of loss. That was how this family had become. That is what life had shaped them into. Happiness was always a reminder of grief; pride a reminder of disappointment; and joy always brought his evil cousin, foreboding.

Cactus Pear for My Lover is about day to day life, family, love, history, politics, conflict, resistance, displacement and exile. Sabawi uses fictional characters and dramatisation along with careful research to reconstruct the Palestinian experience of the time.

Sweet cactus pears are in season, and tonight I will personally peel them with my own hands the sweetest cactus pears for my beloved.

The characters in Cactus Pear for My Lover are rich and three dimensional with extraordinary resilience. It is an evocative beautifully crafted but heartbreaking story to read due to the immense human suffering depicted, suffering that continues to this day.