Raja Shehadeh: When the Bulbul Stopped Singing

Reviewed by KAPKA KASSABOVA

The introduction to Raja Shehadeh's first memoir, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, asserted that this was not a political book - yet in a hundred different ways it was political. Indeed, for most Palestinians and Israelis, the fabric of everyday life is indistinguishable from politics.

Since Shehadeh's first book, things have been steadily deteriorating, with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and the beginning of the second intifada three years ago, heralded by the first Palestinian suicide bombing in 1994.

Shehadeh is a lawyer and founder of the pioneering Arab organisation for human rights, Al-Haq, and since his family's forced resettlement to Ramallah and his return from studies in England, has been living in that Palestine city and bearing witness to the harsh reality of lives there.

"I had made a conscious decision to be a self-exile here," he states in When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, which is based on his diary during a month of Israeli occupation early last year.

The occupation was a knee-jerk response to a particularly bloody series of suicide bombings. Despite the author's non-involvement in politics since the Oslo Accords, this is a political book by default, since it deals with the raw material of life under siege and the indignities it wreaks on a population unprotected by international law or its own ineffectual authorities, and fully at the mercy of an occupier's law.

Shehadeh's prose is by necessity unadorned - he simply writes down what he sees and feels - but it is full of insights and piercingly immediate images of psychological and physical terror.

For all his attempts to distance himself from the hysteria of military occupation by sticking to a routine of writing and cooking ("I will not be a man reduced"), he is unable to suppress all the powerful emotions of someone subjected to yet another humiliation.

His phone keeps delivering bad news: his brother's house is occupied by soldiers pointing guns at the young family, his mother's suburb is being shelled, his friend's office is ransacked, with computers and photocopiers smashed and records destroyed.

Meanwhile, Shehadeh watches the events unfold on television, the nation's lives becoming a reality show, Palestine "once again ... being turned into a symbol". But the world feels far away for those sitting under curfew unable to bury their dead, or those having to risk snipers fire to get to a hospital to give birth.

The lonely wretchedness of Palestinian civilians under continued occupation is impossible to forget as Israel pursues its course in the Middle East. This slim book is well worth reading, not only as an infuriating document of a political and moral breakdown, but as an intelligent, intimate reflection on human resilience, Palestinian character, and hope against hope.

Profile Books, $24.95