Wild Thorns

It is disappointing to say that I do not know much about the West Bank/Israeli conflict, which is almost embarrassing to say with all the turmoil and new coverage about conflict in this particular area. Upon reading Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh, I was motivated to find out more about this situation.

West Bank is a land locked territory that lies between the Jordan River and the Middle Eastern countries. Most of West Bank is under Israeli military occupation, and many of its citizens are Palestinians. It is not a country, simply an occupied territory, and its inhabitants are not citizens, they are just people without a homeland and permanently displaced from anything remotely similar to what one could call a homeland.


This idea comes to life vividly in Wild Thorns. The central character, Usama, returns home to West Bank, with the intention of becoming a martyr, blowing up the buses that shuttle Palestinian workers to and from Israel everyday. Upon returning home, he is greatly disturbed at what occupation has done to his family and to his people. At one point, he shouts "Oh what has happened to us?" in response to the environment he find himself surrounded in. His mother firmly believes that the occupation will be ended by God himself, but Usama isn't to sure about this.



I thought that Khalifeh did an excellent job in her description of what West Bank occupation is like. She captured the emotions of the characters through her vivid descriptions. There were several instances where she maintained a stream of consciences with both Usama and Adil that allowed us the insight into their minds. Adil was my favorite character. His struggles made you empathize with him, and he was a strong man, who took care of his family no matter what it took. He was a slave to the nine mouths he had to feed, plus the kidney machine that ran his fathers life, and he worked and sweated and bled for all of them, a characteristic that is rare now-a-days.