“I know my city; it comes from the womb of a horizon; it comes coloured in blue with windows open to show my stories; there the houses are the colours of sand; there was the touch of my hand as a child looking for warmth while unaware of a tomorrow that was waiting to come to throw me far away.”
The lines are taken from Dora, a novel by the Palestinian writer Bushra Abou Sharar, and they read like a manifesto for a literary career shaped by exile, memory, and return. Over more than two decades, Abou Sharar has built a body of work that circles relentlessly around Gaza—its streets, its women, its absences—writing a city into being even as it is erased.
With more than 15 published volumes, including novels and short story collections, Abou Sharar has returned again and again to the lived experience of Palestinians enduring a Nakba that did not end in 1948 but has unfolded across generations. Many of her books are dedicated to her mother and grandmothers, an explicit recognition of Palestinian women as custodians of (re-)memory and transmission, carrying the story forward when geography and politics have conspired to sever it.
Born in Gaza, Abou Sharar spent her childhood and early youth there before moving with her family to Egypt. The rupture of that departure—and the longing it produced—has marked her writing ever since. Home, in her work, is not a static place but a state of return enacted through language.
“My letters come from my soul; when I write I am back home,” Abou Sharar said. “My yearning is a wound that does not stop bleeding but this wound is a sun that cannot be eclipsed – ever.”
Abou Sharar does not remember Gaza; she re-memories it. The term, popularized by Toni Morrison in her 1987 novel Beloved, describes the act of reliving past trauma as a present reality rather than recalling it as a settled past. While first developed to grapple with post-slavery memory in the United States, the concept has since been invoked by figures such as the creative director and German International University professor, Kegham Djeghalian, the grandson of Gaza’s first photographer—who carried the same name—to think through Palestinian loss and inheritance.
In Abou Sharar’s work, Gaza is not recollected from a distance but re-entered, through streets now buried, homes still warm to the touch, and a city that refuses, despite a two-year-long Israeli genocide, to remain in memory alone.
“Every night before I fall asleep, I see my city and I recall the roads that are now under the rubble; I recall my path to my grandmother’s house in Al-Shujjaiyah; I recall [my] school that carries the name of Martyr Moustafa Hafez,” she said. “I go back there because there we shall rise from underneath the rubble.”
Displacement—its repetition, inheritance, psychological toll—forms the spine of her most recent novel, Maraya Al-Roh (Mirrors of the Soul), published in 2024.
The book traces the Palestinian diaspora, scattered across neighbouring Arab countries, holding on to a homeland carried internally rather than possessed. It appeared 21 years after her debut novel, Awwad Thiqab (Matchsticks), published in 2003, which followed Palestinians moving precariously between Gaza and Egypt.
The two novels mirror each other across time. Matchsticks was written as a tribute to her brother Maged, who fought in the resistance against the occupation. Mirrors of the Soul broadens that tribute, honouring the endurance of Palestinians who navigate successive displacements while bearing, as Abou Sharar puts it, both pain and hope.
“We are forced to live away from our land but we carry this land in our hearts; for me Gaza is the long dream that should come into a reality again – one day,” she said.
For Abou Sharar, literature is not a refuge from politics but one of its most enduring forms. The persistence of Palestinian suffering, she argues, is matched only by the persistence of Palestinian narration.
The Palestinian wound and the Palestinian hope, she said, survive regardless of time or place. “Writing about this pain and this hope is in fact an act of resistance against the Zionist entity that is stealing our land and our heritage.”
That act of resistance, she situates within a long lineage of Palestinian women’s writing. “It is an endeavor that Palestinian women writers have taken since the 1930s until today,” she said, citing figures such as Nagawa Qawar, Asma’ Khouri, Fadwa Touqan, Salma Kheder, and Sahar Khalifeh.
Born in the first decades of the 20th century, in pre-Nakba Palestine, those writers documented dispossession as it unfolded, ensuring that Palestinian experience was recorded from within rather than overwritten from without. Their work, Abou Sharar said, stood against any attempt to normalize or sanitize occupation through competing (counter)narratives.
“We live under the spell of Palestine; we write Palestine and we draw it as the beautiful icon it is in the heart of every Palestinian wherever he or she might be,” she said. “Palestinian literature is the imprint of the Palestinian story; it is the collective Palestinian memory.”
That collective memory reached global audiences through writers such as Ghassan Kanafani, among the most translated Palestinian novelists, and Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry carried the Palestinian voice far beyond the Arab world. Yet Abou Sharar is equally attentive to quieter echoes, stories written without international recognition but no less urgent or profound.
Among them is the work of her brother Maged, who, shortly before his assassination, wrote a story documenting the pain of exile. Published in the Doha Magazine's 73rd edition in 1982 under the title Al-Rahil (The Departure), it read: “Here I have a house but I do not have a land; There I had a past where every day was mine; I planted the dreams that grew into shining suns to bring warmth in every tomorrow; Here I am without a past and my day is just a black paper.”
After Maged’s death, she recalled, Darwish wrote: “Good morning Maged; raise up and read the verses of the returnee.”
For Abou Sharar, that exchange captures something essential: that Palestinian literature, like Palestine itself, refuses closure. The story does not end with loss, but remains unfinished, waiting—like the city of her childhood, like Gaza—to rise again from underneath the rubble.
*A version of this interview was printed in Al-Ahram daily
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