THE SUNBIRD (UQP 2024) by Sara Haddad is a crystal-clear, sharp and resounding clarion call, a demand for justice, a cry for compassion and peace, a nuanced and intimate portrait of one Palestinian woman’s experience both now and in the past, all distilled into a delicate novella short enough to read in one sitting yet forceful enough to deliver a succinct and meaningful message.
Never before have I read such few words that explain so exhaustively the conflict between Palestine and Israel without hyperbole or over-explanation or complication; never have I read such a slim volume that packs such a punch.
The sunbird is a symbol for peace, cohesion and Home. A small bird that represents freedom, that stands against displacement, genocide, political weaponisation, torture, starvation and mutilation. The small book THE SUNBIRD delivers in so few words what many politicians struggle (and often fail) to articulate – the simple facts of a country stolen and a people who ‘just want to go home’.
Narrated by Nabila Yasmeen, now in her eighties, the story covers two timelines. The first is in 1947 / 1948 when Nabila is a young girl with dreams, aspirations and hopes, all dashed with the first dropping of the bombs. The second is an elderly Nabila, now resident in Australia, who buses herself to protest marches (holding the same stone she had in her hand that fateful day of the first bomb), and tends carefully to her 100 pot plants which she cannot bear to plant in the soil, because the very earth under her feet feels tenuous and unstable. A pot plant can be transported, should the need arise. She is a woman who remembers life in her village with acute and sensory reminiscences. Despite the more than 70 years that have passed since her initial awareness of the beginning of the conflict that destroyed her community, she remains hopeful, buoyed by the enthusiasm of young people and the collective memory of what has transpired.
Haddad bookends the novella with an Author’s Note explaining her own connection to Palestine, and an Addendum and Postscript which present updated factual details about the extent of oppression, the severity of injuries, the dwindling ‘Palestinian land’, the combined and extended aggression of major world powers, and the unacceptable use of illegal weapons; starvation; attacks on civilians, children, medical personal and journalists; and the cruel and increasingly brazen occupation of land. Her inclusion of a quote by Winston Churchill from 1937 at the front of the book took my breath away.