Behind You Is the Sea

Starred review from November 1, 2023
A pregnant teen girl is ostracized by her family. A Palestinian American cop has divided loyalties. Refugees and their children alternately worship "America's glory . . . Macy's One-Day Sale!" and chafe at the rejection they experience. In this episodic debut novel, Darraj portrays the joys, resentments, and yearnings of three generations of a tight-knit Palestinian American community. The elders, the Sittis and Siddos, Babas and Mamas, struggle to maintain their cultural values, including ethnocentrism and sexism, and pass them on to children who either prefer assimilation or who resist the refugee legacy while discovering that the dream life of America conceals racism and exploitation. The offspring of fathers who amiably smoked water pipes together at the corner store now humiliate their compatriots at the bottom of the economic ladder because "sometimes your own are the worst." A teen theater-lover struggles to explain her discomfort with Aladdin to her beloved drama teacher, who remains deliberately oblivious. A father cautions his assimilated son: "Don't let them use you. You're Arab, first and always." "But see, Baba," thinks the son, "that's not what my birth certificate says." This son will return his father's body to their home village in Palestine on a journey that will unite past and present, refugee and homeland, reaffirming unbreakable generational ties. Marvelous and moving.

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December 1, 2023
Their homeland casts a heavy shadow in this poignant novel about Baltimore's Palestinian immigrant community. Taken from a famous saying by legendary commander Tariq ibn Zayid ("Behind you is the sea. Before you, the enemy"), the title of Darraj's novel aptly describes the situation facing her ensemble cast, which finds itself trapped between Old World expectations and the challenges of life in America. Like Zayid's soldiers, they have no choice but to fight to understand their places in the world. Young people are frequently the heroes here--in "A Child of Air," pregnant teen Reema Baladi braves shame to keep her baby, and in "Gyroscopes," brilliant science student Layla Marwan challenges her high school's choice of the stereotype-ridden Aladdin for its big drama production--while Darraj's older characters struggle under the weight of their disillusionment. In "Mr. Ammar Gets Drunk at the Wedding," strip mall owner Walid Ammar can't hide his frustration as his cherished son marries a blue-eyed non-Arab woman who has "transformed Raed, his football-playing, lawyer son...from a pathfinder into a mule that lowers itself to the ground for its back to be loaded." That wedding scene is masterfully choreographed in a book in which each chapter reads like a small masterpiece. In fact, as characters disappear and later reappear, the book reads less like a novel than like an interconnected series of stories reminiscent of Darraj's A Curious Land (2016). For example, readers meet Marcus Salameh, a 30-something police detective who endures the daily traumas of his job, the impatience of his girlfriend, and the iciness of a father whose bitter disappointment with life has frozen his relationship with Marcus and his sister. The novel culminates in the brilliant "Escorting the Body," in which Marcus honors his father's dying wish to be buried in Palestine. Darraj deftly captures the entire experience, from Marcus' jarring arrival in Palestine to the homespun humor of village life. When Marcus discovers a secret--that his father was actually capable of showing affection, just not to his children--he makes a startling offer that changes someone's life and his, too. A moving portrait of Palestinian families caught between the pressures of the Old World and the New.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 8, 2024
This potent novel-in-stories from Muaddi Darraj (The Inheritance of Exile) follows a group of Palestinian Americans in Baltimore. In “Ride Along,” Marcus Salameh, a U.S. Marine, is trying to mediate a conflict between his father and his sister, who’s graduating from college with honors after coming out of a rough patch following an abortion. “Escorting the Body” finds Marcus returning to Palestine to bury his father and reflect on how his Baba’s American dream had turned sour because of his inability to be more compassionate to his family. The title story looks at the power dynamics between rich and poor immigrants, as a young woman named Maysoon Baladi takes a job as a cleaner for the Ammars, a wealthy fellow Palestinian family. In “Gyroscopes,” high school student Layla Marwan, a cousin of the Ammars, expresses concern about the negative representation of Arabs in her school’s production of Aladdin, but is ignored by her adviser. Throughout, Muaddi Darraj brilliantly depicts complex characters reckoning with the costs of holding tightly to their principles. This is a beautiful portrait of a family reaching for their dreams while holding onto their roots. Agent: Thomas Colchie, Colchie Agency.