The Wind in My Hair by Salwa Salem and Laura Maritano

This powerful memoir of Salwa Salem, who was just eight years old when she and many other Palestinians were uprooted, of displacement and exile is in one sense the story of all Palestinians. After her family fled to Jaffa and then to Nablus, she spent the rest of her life in exile: in Damascus, Kuwait, Vienna, and finally, Italy. Salem's story; her account of her own political engagement and that of members of her own family tells the political history of an embattled people. If the particular pitch of this memoir derives from its deathbed narration (as Salem lay dying of cancer, she dictated the story of her life to Laura Maritano), it is the memoir's precision, its judicious balance of the personal and the political, that triumphs over any individual or national tragedy.Translated by Yvonne Freccero.

Year: 2006

Paperback