A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. A Palestine Story: Excavating the truth

“Forgive me, if what has seemed little to you, to me is all,” said José Saramago in his Nobel Prize lecture of 1998.

In this, the age of absolute and myopic certainty, it is increasingly the job of the writer – whether novelist, journalist, memoirist or commentator – to tell the stories so many of us want to avoid.

Nathan Thrall’s magnificent One Day in the Life of Abed Salama, is a non-fiction account of a tragic schoolbus incident in Palestine’s West Bank. It is also an incendiary indictment of the catastrophe that continues to unfold under Israeli occupation.

The book does what all good stories should do – it unfolds both minutely and epically at the same time. It does not moralise, and yet it does not shirk its responsibility to knock our sense of comfortable balance all to hell.

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Thrall, a Californian who has spent a considerable amount of time in Israel and Palestine, has written a piercingly forensic account that allows us to understand the political machinations of this region of the Middle East by excavating a single, intimate story of a horrific crash in February 2012. The truth starts locally. The story begins and ends with Abed Salama, whose five-year-old son is tragically killed in a fiery crash on “death road” in Area C of the West Bank, a territory under near-total Israeli control. Seven children burn to death when an 18-wheel truck, driven by a Palestinian but owned by settlers, slams into the bus, short-circuiting the fuse box and igniting a kaleidoscopic tragedy that will wring out the tired heart of any reader.

Thrall understands that facts are confusing b***ards. No need for a litany or a lecture or a history lesson. To make us sit up and take notice we must tell the human story first. When we begin to understand on an emotional level – when a man pulls burning bodies out of a bus, or when a small scorched backpack is found in the middle of the road, or when a paramedic turns a blind eye – we then allow the cerebral circuits to engage. The personal reveals the political. The political, in turn, shapes the personal. We are invited into the pulse of the moment.

The pulse of this particular moment is horrific. This is a world where schoolhouses are built out of discarded tyres, where mothers watch their pre-teenage children get arrested, where your whole life can swing on the whim of a checkpoint soldier who doesn’t even speak your language. The Wall casts its huge shadow over the living and the dead.

It is very difficult to write a paradiso, said Ezra Pound, when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

For half an hour the bus burns in sight of Israeli-manned checkpoints. Men and women cannot drive their burned children to hospital because they do not have the requisite identification.

Ashes can’t turn back into a bus, nor a backpack, nor a living boy. But Thrall still manages to carve some beautiful human moments out of the charcoal. He understands the power of love and tradition. He also understands the primal notions of belonging. He is forgiving, or at least doesn’t rush to outright cultural judgment.

This book will invariably annoy the Israeli authorities and other conservative elements around the world, including some here in Ireland, and a few readers will no doubt will try to poke holes in it. But there are always holes in an area that sometimes gets referred to as “swiss cheese” because of the cartographic manipulations. Some might even attempt to bully Thrall, but the humanity of the book, and its fealty to details, and its general lid-on-the-saucepan tone, make it stand out from other tomes on the shelves.

[ TransAtlantic, by Colum McCann ]

As a writer, Thrall reminds me of Patrick Radden Keefe: he has that cool moral equanimity about him. At the same time, he knows exactly what he wants – and needs – to say. He understands John Berger’s notion that never again will a story be told as if it were the only one.

The nature of injustice is such that we may not always see it in our own times, but history will hold us accountable. That’s why Thrall’s book, and those like it, are so important. It makes the argument that if we do not talk or think about these things, we will be lost not only to history but to ourselves. In telling stories such as those of Abed Salama, we prevent the truth from drifting into oblivion.

[ Colum McCann: ‘My mother will be jumping out of her chair’ ]

A slight quibble or two: the book slows and bloats a little in the middle as if it might be aware of the heat it is creating. At times the details are so intricate that only those with a specific knowledge of Jerusalem’s geography will understand where we are. The story of Abed Salama drifts out of sight in the second half of the book, slightly undermining the title. But so what? These slight imperfections operate like the wrongly tied knot on a carpet: nothing is ever perfect.

Books don’t change anything. But people read books. And then, hopefully, they go on to change things. It is a sad fact that little or nothing of good has changed in Israel and Palestine in recent times (the encroaching settlements, the swing towards the right, the gagging of progressive charities, the silence of the international community), but the telling of this story – and just the fact that it exists – still stands in defiance of a general complicit silence around the world.

At issue here is the human soul, which has to be continually shocked or seduced out of its stupor.

Where else can we meet but in our personal stories?

Colum McCann’s works include Apeirogon (2020), whose French translation won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger