Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir

The Center for Arab Unity Studies has published Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Salman Abu Sitta (translated by Hussein Abu Sitta).

In this memoir, the Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta draws on memories that have been stored in his subconscious since childhood and that stretch into the later years of his life. Over a journey of more than eight decades, he takes us into the world of everyday life and upbringing in the community of Al-Ma’in, one of the towns of Palestine, in the 1940s. At that time Palestine still lived with its Arab identity, even though it was under the British Mandate and its colonial projects, and the promised Zionist entity had not yet been established.

Abu Sitta traces the course of developments and events in that community, including the course of his own life, with all the details of his relationship to the people and the place. He expands his description to the general social and economic conditions and the circumstances of life in the wider circle beyond his small community, reaching to the limits of the broader homeland of Palestine. He moves beyond his personal memories and the lives of those around him to the full map of the homeland, and to the history that toyed with its lines, borders, landmarks, and place names. The author then crosses into the memories of his youth, during the hardest period in Palestine’s life: the establishment of the Zionist entity there, and the start of the Palestinian people’s ordeal of uprooting, displacement, exile, and life as refugees. He has spent his life in exile striving to regain his right and his people’s right to return to their land, and to recover a heritage that was taken from them in a moment of historical aberration.