THE SUNBIRD by Sara Haddad tells the story of a young girl, displaced as a result of Al Nakba or ‘the catastrophe,’ the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Structured as a parallel narrative, the story starts in Palestine 1947 with five-and-a-half-year-old Nabila before moving in time and place finding the aged protagonist in Australia in December, 2023. Shifting from the precocious child impatient to start school to the matured woman soothed by birdsong permeating the hot suburban summer, Haddad amplifies the scars that Nabila carries from her past as she seeks consolation in the memories of her lost homeland.
The evocative description through the novel is compelling, contributing to a poignant story that elicits empathy for both the loss of young Nabila’s innocence amidst immeasurable destruction and for the dislocation that permeates her being as an older woman left aching with a deep sorrow that cannot be dislodged.
While this is a work of fiction based on oral and written histories, Haddad personalises this history, making palpable the experience of the dispossessed, where the ongoing traumas experienced by Palestinians resonates with experiences of dispossession around the world and through time.
Haddad’s language is eloquent in its simplicity, eliciting a sense of humanity as the story draws closer to the inevitable unfolding of tragedy that is left to haunt Nabila into the modern day.
The symbolism of the sunbird, the national bird of Palestine represents freedom and Palestinian resistance, and embraces the horror and the hope as the older Nabila finds strength to voice her own trauma through protests.
It’s a timely novella written by Sara Haddad who was motivated by her desire to spread understanding of the history of Palestine. Her personal connection to the subject matter is made clear in the author’s note at the start of the book, and the work she describes as ‘a labour of love’, is a heartfelt parable that seeks to demystify any suggestion that the question of Palestine is complicated. With that purpose in mind, Haddad has written a delicately brief story that when read in one sitting as Haddad intended, acts as a meditation on the current events that we watch unfold via the news every evening. It also acts as a tribute to the perseverance of the people who regularly attend protests in major cities across the world, determined to ensure that the plight and suffering of Palestinians is not forgotten or ignored.
Following the novella, Haddad includes an addendum which adds context to inform readers of the history of Palestine and events that have led to the current situation, up to the time of THE SUNBIRD’s publication.
