Thyme is much more than a staple in Palestinian food. It’s historically crucial given that the Israeli occupation of Palestine has eliminated access to the land in which Palestinians grow the herb, affecting their livelihoods. For refugees, the herb has become symbolic of a hope to return home. There’s also a popular slogan that says, “we will stay on our lands as long as there’s thyme and olives.” So the pun in the title of this anthology is appropriate to a showcase of some of the best diasporic voices writing SF today.
In the last few years, a whole different set of people has woken up to the reality of lived lives in Palestine. It’s cried out on social media for help, tried to awaken the seemingly sleepy world, reminding them of being witnesses to genocide. It’s looked at the videos of death and destruction, and many a time it has numbed itself to get through the days helplessly, watching the news that pours in. Oftentimes with incorrect headlines. The politics of the world at large, and those of the youth across universities internationally, have been laid bare. But is catastrophe the only legacy of a land?
Standing on the shoulders of anthologies such as Palestine +100 (2019), edited by Basma Ghalayani, and Reworlding Ramallah, edited by Callum Copley (2019), Thyme Travellers is edited by Sonia Sulaiman and haunts readers with its themes of belonging, returning home, and the future as an inference of the past. This anthology presents fourteen stories by diasporic writers imagining the future—which in itself is a political act, for they dare to imagine a different reality. In this way, writing becomes at once an act of resistance to the colonial forces that aim to annihilate Palestinians, and an assertion of the writers’ Palestinian roots, identity, and presence across the globe.
In the preface to the book, Sulaiman states that her call was for “fiction that features a departure from consensus reality.” This leads to stories that surprise, create voids, and bring immense joy in futures where Palestinians are more than numbers and death tolls. The introductory story “Down Under” by Jumaana Abdu, for example, raises the question that’s bound to disturb the reader throughout the anthology and then some more: Who are Palestinians? Abdu’s story is set in Australia (hence its title), where the protagonist Nouran begins to dig the ground to find a way back to Palestine, a place she knows nothing about. Nouran tells us:
Outside of my own family, I wasn’t in communication with any Palestinians. Even of my own Palestinian-ness, I knew close to nil. It was not something my grandparents had wanted to pass down, or perhaps they had not been able to bear dredging it up, or perhaps they had convinced themselves that it was uninteresting. By the time I had grown conscious enough to wonder about the histories that had led to my life, they were dead. (p. 10)
As she meets a fellow digger, Haya, on the way, she begins to question her identity. Haya, confident in her inheritance, in contact with Palestinians across the world, speaks fluent Arabic. Meanwhile, Nouran speaks with an accent, which becomes the deciding factor in her ability to survive the journey: Do you look or sound too different to re-enter the land your ancestors once had to flee? How does the world look at you, how does the IDF look at you, what do you hear in your language? These questions decide whether Nouran and others live and die; in them lies Palestinians’ fate.
Ziyad Saadi’s haunting story of desensitisation towards dead bodies of Palestinians, “Third or Fourth Casualty,” reads like the coping mechanism to which many must adhere to get by in this context, like a wake-up call to a humanity that has numbed itself to so many casualties. Saadi writes, “Death will not propel this story,” but death does propel many stories in this anthology without depicting the traumatic images of physical destruction we see in reality. These include the death of a grandmother who has left behind her memories in a will or a mother abducted by Israelis for standing up for her daughter—and whose body is never returned to her family.
Should Palestinian writers only set their stories in the land of their ancestors, or should they exercise their agency to write a different story? Should the author be Palestinian, or the story? The question of what is Palestinian is beautifully tackled in this anthology, which not only brings forth the stories of return to the land but also stories that have gone past the land. Karl El-Koura sets his story “Cyrano de AI” in a futuristic Canada, showcasing cybernetic augmentation as conflict and resolution, and drawing a balanced approach to its use. The story follows the life of a young man who refuses to let go of his augmentation, Cyrano, which helps him make friends and brings his best self out from an early age. He becomes dependent on Cyrano to pacify arguments, keep the peace in relationships, and excel at work. But the story is also a tender depiction of a father-son relationship, the distance between them that was introduced by the father working long hours on developing Cyrano in the first place—returning home only to test the augmentation on his son. This creates an absence in the son’s life that is only ever partially filled by Cyrano. Sometimes, it is only the people who equip us with grief who can free us from it, even when the grief takes the form of something as useful as an AI.
In another heart-touching story, “Remembrance in Cerulean,” Elise Stephens shows the hostility of humans towards an alien species, the flaws of an individual who would rather annihilate an entire race than be accountable for his actions, and how one person’s efforts for understanding and reconciliation can change the route of humanity. It’s a story that depicts the breaking of a generational curse and argues that every generation can either question their past or carry it forward.
As the present generation transiently moves between known and unknown territories—and surprising pasts and futures—it also expresses concern for queerness and acceptance. In “Generation Chip,” Nadia Afifi skilfully creates futuristic agents of passed-down memory that showcase that queerness existed in the past even when there was no agency to come out in public with it. Similarly, Sara Solara, in “In the Future, We Can Go Back Home,” uses nostalgia and belonging as magic dust, to let the story’s protagonist know through a vision of the past unfolding in the ruins of her ancestral home that her queerness will be accepted by the people who also openly accepted her return to the land of her grandmother. These stories with similar themes are in dialogue: What was asked in one is answered in the other.
In a dynamic anthology such as this—in which the past, present, and future transgress into each other, and where remembering is almost always equivalent to creating a new reality while also returning home—it’s rather difficult to highlight one story. Yet, in the times in which we live, when our patriotism is often questioned and punished through the cowardice of institutions acting under the fear of the rising right-wing, one story—“Gaza Luna” by Samah Serour Fadil—stands out. It depicts the life of a kid who sees his house blown up and is sent abroad with a new identity, to be taken care of by his aunt. When the reality of his being a Palestinian comes to the forefront in his adopted home, he is stripped of all his accolades and achievements, and returns to the land where any show of a Palestinian flag is met with death along with the burning of the flags. This is an out-of-this-world story, bigger than every history and reality, in which the child flies a rocket into space based on a the model created by his grandfather—and frees all the Palestinian flags. For everyone who knows what it feels like to perform patriotism—who might feel it in their hearts, but for whom it is suffocating at a time when the world, and their nation, is a worse place than they remember it—this story is ecstatic.
Sonia Sulaiman does a fantastic job in assembling these fourteen spectacular stories, each of which demand that readers reflect on their responses to genocide, challenge their imaginations of Palestinians, and, despite the serious subject matter, entertain. Speculative fiction is here a political act where writers defy reality and dare to dream bigger, through alternative dimensions, futures, and pasts. Within it all lies loss, grief, acceptance, and joy. However long, however ephemeral.