Nada Shawa is a Palestinian poet and dancer who moved to Scotland alone at the age of eight to receive treatment for her cerebral palsy, and has lived here ever since. Indigenous Soul moves between Gaza and Scotland, memoir and poetry, warm love and crushing grief, family stories and grave injustices, with an impressive succinctness and clarity.
he book is peppered with moments of humour, intimate anecdotes of a happy childhood, and later moments, such as the music Shawa and her sisters play to her mother while she is ill. It also features images, mainly of people, but also of a jasmine plant that Shawa’s mother rescued from the rubble of their family home.
The final poem, ‘The Future’s Past’, and the accompanying dedication, explain the horrific killing of members of the family, and other Gazan people, at the hands of Israeli soldiers in the past year. The closely drawn portraits are sadly inextricable from the stories of the military occupation and genocide, but together they depict a people who, although made ‘powerless’ by ‘imprison[ment]’, ‘collective control and punishment’, resist by preserving their national identity and continuing to live. Shawa and her sister are even able to laugh at an absurd situation they are put in by the cruelty of the border guards.
Some of the most affecting moments in the memoir are the stories of Shawa’s attempts to cross the border when travelling in and out of Palestine, as a Palestinian and a wheelchair user.
At one point she is told ‘They want you to enter the next security section without your wheelchair or crutches, or you will not leave Gaza.’ She does so, and is refused crossing anyway. Shawa is a dancer as well as a poet, and her wheelchair becomes a powerful symbol of her autonomy, dignity, and freedom.
The three sensitively written prose pieces and six poems here comprise a complex, deeply personal story which paints a distinct picture of a resilient and caring author and her family. At the same time, Shawa’s unwavering love for and commitment to her home country express solidarity with the struggle of a people under attack and their relatives and friends in the diaspora, who long to return safely.
Copies of Indigenous Soul can be ordered from Main Point Books here.
Fifty percent of profits from sales of Indigenous Soul will be donated to the Gaza Culture and Development Group, an organisation founded by the author’s mother.
