💡 In an unrestrained memoir, Palestinian-Egyptian writer Mai Serhan writes to her late father, reimagining his past intertwined with the Nakba — a history he spent his life trying to escape. I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir envisions a posthumous reconciliation with her stoic father, who quietly carried his grievances to his untimely death. This deeply personal memoir portrays a layered account of identity, displacement, fractured family relationships, and the burden of loss.

Intergenerational fragments. Through a non-chronological narrative, Serhan explores a complicated relationship with her Palestinian father, Nizar Serhan, set against shifting backgrounds of Cairo, Beirut, Palestine, China, and Dubai. As a child of the diaspora, Serhan describes a nomadic existence, constantly moving between Cairo, where her mother’s family lived, to Beirut — with her father’s exiled family from Acre — and China, where her father traveled for work. She endures a turbulent lifestyle, never truly feeling like she belongs in one place. Interwoven into the story is Serhan’s long and distinguished family lineage, before and after 1948, tracing relatives who held prominent roles in their communities.

A love letter — and a lament — to her father. She directly addresses him as “Baba” as she recounts both painful and joyful stories from his past — ones that predate her own life — in an ultimately futile attempt to help him reconceptualize his unspoken trauma. She is at once ashamed of him, resentful, ambivalent, and deeply attached. Although she recalls difficult memories with her father, her tone conveys an urgent tenderness to accept his weaknesses and comfort him through the only thing they truly own: memory.

Serhan’s words are sharp, each moment emotionally charged. She shares her own poetry and often repeats certain moments to uncover new meanings. The disordered narrative reflects the instability she experiences in her life, and the uncertainty that comes with being part of a displaced people.

Although intimate and emotionally nuanced, the memoir speaks to the universal struggle of exile and the ongoing feelings of loss and fragmentation that come with it, especially the enduring Palestinian one. Serhan’s act of remembering, in opposition to her father’s act of denial, in itself grants her, and the Palestinian plight, a measure of catharsis.

WHERE TO FIND IT- You can find the memoir in paperback at Diwan and Bibliothek or pre-order the eBook on Amazon.

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