Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood

There aren't many books on the Palestinian situation available for children, and fewer still that are memoirs. I actually managed to pick up and read Ibtisam Barakat's, "Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood," without ever realized that it was more than mere historical fiction. As a bilingual author and poet, Ms. Barakat could have written a straight up autobiography, but somehow the memoir is just as moving and intense a portrait as anyone could ask for. It gives her struggles a weight, balance, and arc that wouldn't necessarily belong in a standard series of personal facts. Tracing her life from just before the Six-Day War when she was three to her state as a teenager, Ibtisam remembers her struggles in an occupied Palestine and draws strength from her past. Facts guide Ms. Barakat's pen, and the horrors of the Six-Day War speak louder than anything else. If dehumanizing occupation is inherently political, then yes, there are politics in this book. More than anything, though, I was struck by Ms. Barakat's ability to write without pointing fingers or blame. Her primary goal is to attain peace in the land of her birth. Mentions of things like bulldozers are only brought up in the beginning. In the past, Barakat will show small beautiful things, like a fig tree with a single early ripe fruit on it. There is no mention of what might happen to that tree in the future. The prose itself is pretty good too. An Israeli soldier butchering his Arabic pronunciations makes, "the words sound like they have been beaten up, bruised so blue they can hardly speak their meaning." When shouting down a well she says, "We called out one another's names; the echoes returned to us as though our voices had grown older than we were." I liked that the teenaged Ibtisam felt so claustrophobic under her mother's attentions that she wrote, "Mothers and soldiers are enemies of freedom. I am doubly occupied." You learn things too. At one point we learn that the Arabic word for "imagine" is "batkhayyal" which means, "to see the shadow of a thought." Of course, you want to know more. If we understand that this book is a fictionalization of Ms. Barakat's own life then we want to understand how she came to be a resident of Columbia, Missouri after a childhood as a refugee. The answer to this lies in two parts. In a final note in the book that reads "Giving Back to the World" she writes, "Without the help of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency ... millions of other children and I would not have gone to school or learned to read, write, and use our pencils to clear a tiny path through the wreckage of refugee life..." Later in the backflap of the book we learn too that the author, "grew up in Ramallah and has a degree in English literature from Birzeit University in the West Bank. She came to the United States in 1986 for an internship at The Nation magazine." Considering the number of starred professional reviews (at least three as of this revi

Ibtisam Barakat's "Tasting the Sky," is written with both a backward glance toward lost innocence, and an eye toward the future, as she offers her hope, extended without reservation, for a just and lasting peace for all people in Palestine/Israel. Her words describe what she saw with her eyes and felt with her skin as her childhood erupted in the violence of war. Despite the shattering of any remaining innocence by being hauled into a detention center during her high school years, Ibtisam responds without malice or hatred. She became determined to succeed in obtaining her education, and she has triumphed with her bittersweet memoir. She has somehow recaptured the elusive innocence of her youth , nurturing her memories, fond and stark alike, into letters, (like alef, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet) and then forming the letters into words that are coaxed onto the page. Barakat's yearning to tell her story was formed at a very young age and has become a reality in "Tasting the Sky," despite all the obstacles and hardships she faced growing up under illegal military occupation. Her memories are rather like the wild, red poppies that push their way up through the thin, rocky soil of the olive groves in the hills surrounding Ramallah....they are beautiful and delicate, with odds against their surivival, yet they are indomitable! Having recently journeyed to Ramallah and surrounding villages, the images conveyed in Barakat's gently-woven tapestry of language were all the more vivid and compelling. What a pleasure to read it and to see hope and future possibilities for her homeland through the author's eyes.

This book is wonderful, sad, heartening, and just plain lovely. I was so moved by it, I bought 4 copies to pass on to friends. My best friend picked it up today and couldn't put it down. I want everyone to read it.

"Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood" is splendid. Like Annie Dillard's "An American Childhood," the writer travels back to that vantage point of childhood that we all are hungry to remember. The young girl in "Tasting the Sky" has a quiet eye that takes in the world with poetic intensity. And although she starts her story with a wrenching episode of abandonment, this girlchild of war does not react with despair or hate. Instead, like children everywhere, she finds fountains of strength in the tiniest of corners, in the friendship with a goat, even by making an imaginary friend of a piece of chalk. Like this piece of chalk, this little girl is so short and easy to overlook. And, like the piece of chalk, she can be huge as she seeks to create and save a world through her writing, so beautifully employed in the service of memory, healing and peace.

Tasting the Sky is an unforgettable story of love, hope and hardship. It is a spectacular testimony to the power of the human spirit. This book is written with an inspiring sense of empathy and humanity. Although there are many heartbreaking moments in this story, due to war and loss, this is a book that is written without a hint of blame. The narration is so incredibly beautiful that it took my breath away. And the girl in Tasting the Sky finds the place within herself that so many of us spend a life time searching for. I did not want this book to end. I look forward to hearing more from this brilliant author!