John Kennedy Sometimes Hallucinates Brings A New Spin to Shireen Abu Akleh’s Journey

By Mohammed Omer

INSIDE A GAZA CAFE, Yusri al-Ghoul envisions another world where the events of his new book—a collection of short stories, which he describes as a “story sequence”—take place. The stories are linked by a common denominator; the main characters are historical figures who departed the world following assassinations in their respective contexts.

He summons these characters to reformulate and retell history, adapting the text to intertwine the bitter Palestinian reality, with all the onslaught committed by the occupation.

Al-Ghoul, an award-winning Palestinian writer and storyteller, was born in Gaza in 1980, where he also had his education. Al-Ghoul just released a new series of stories in his book John Kennedy Sometimes Hallucinates, published by the Beirut-based Arab Institute for Research & Publishing. The book, written in Arabic, evokes the media blackout of Palestine by reimagining a naked fiction infused with a reality that is hardly covered in Western media.

“Sometimes we have to dig deeper than headlines to understand what actually happened” he tells the Washington Report in an exclusive interview as he adjusts himself struggling for warmth against the winter cold.

The book, released in 2023, has not yet made its way to Al-Ghoul himself. Usually, it takes a year before he can get his hands on a physical copy of his work. This is due to the Israeli blockade imposed on the coastal enclave, which effectively restricts the movements of individuals and the shipping of most items, including books.

However, Al-Ghoul knows that his book is out there breathing freedom away from his Gaza hometown, which is surrounded by gunboats, military fences and automated gun machines.

In his book, he summons international personalities who have been assassinated and questions them about whatever he wants to know, as he becomes part of the text in a balanced manner. In many situations, the writer is a customer in the fictional café that overlooks a river inside the virtual world after death.

The series of stories reformulate history differently from the real facts that caused the assassinations, in an attempt to convey a message that the truth may not have been fully told in the media narratives of assassinated personalities such as John Kennedy, Pablo Neruda, Salvador Allende, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, Che Guevara, Shireen Abu Akleh and others.

The book has been welcomed by not only Palestinians, but also the broader Arab public, who immediately zoomed in on the story of the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the PalestinianAmerican journalist who served over 25 years as an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent, and is recognized as one of the most well-known reporters across the region. Over her career, she reported on major events affecting Palestinian lives, as well as Israeli politics.

A New York Times investigation found that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh was fired from the approximate position of an Israeli military vehicle.

Commenting about Al-Ghoul’s postdeath assassination narratives, the Iraqi novelist Diaa Jubaili endorsed the collection of stories as often “non-traditional and nonintentional, nearly a symbolism that attempts to deliver messages that one can feel after reading each story.”

In that virtual café, Abu Akleh meets Colombian Nobel Prize winner novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who, according to the story titled “Márquez Applauds Warmly,” believes in the justice of the Palestinian cause, telling her “There must be a revolution in the face of tyrants.”

Correcting The Course Of History

The idea of the story series was born in AlGhoul’s mind while he was reading about famous assassinations. He did not like “many endings of the lives of political and literary figures throughout history.”

At that time, he asked himself, “Why don’t I reformulate history?” He says during the Washington Report interview, “The occupation and other oppressive regimes...[y]ou write and lie…and this writing will one day turn into a forged history, and we must play a role in correcting the course of history.”

The storytelling of oral history is a fundamental art among Palestinians and it is being passed from one generation to the next, carrying the story of Palestine and its people. The tradition used in the writing of Tales from a Thousand and One Nights is not an exception. In each Palestinian village, the hakawati are known as itinerant storytellers who would visit villages to tell a story from the history of Palestine. This type of story is ever stronger among the Palestinian diaspora that started to learn the taste of freshly baked loaves of bread in the old days when Palestine was free.

When Books Become A Target

Coming back to reality, the Palestinian book industry in Gaza was crushed by Israeli military attacks. The largest and most famous bookshop and publishing house, Samir Mansour Bookshop, was reduced to rubble in May 2021 after an Israeli airstrike during the 11-day onslaught on Gaza. Mansour opened 23 years ago and was a beloved part of the local community. He published books by local authors such as Ghareeb Asqalani, Yusri al-Ghoul and Mosab Abu Toha. Mansour lost more than 90,000 books in the bombing. A global campaign raised $250,000 to help rebuild the store, plus donations of 150,000 books. The bookshop was rebuilt and reopened last February thanks to the contributions, plus tens of thousands of new books donated by global citizens around the world. Al-Ghoul, whose books were among those printed locally by the Mansour bookstore, admits that sometimes Palestinians have to work around policies that do not allow shipping books into the Gaza Strip. Sometimes they just have to do the work themselves—like publishing.

A Better Ending To Her Story

Al-Ghoul goes back to the Abu Akleh story describing the scene, “The flags and banners are flying over the café, as if the crowds were preparing for this great festival, even Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet-diplomat stood on the table to dance, while American novelist Ernest Hemingway is shooting in the air with an old gun to celebrate the occasion, and Márquez warmly applauds and applauds for a girl that has been exhausted by the long journey.”

When asked if he was given 30 seconds to tell something to U.S. President Joe Biden, what would that message be, he paused for a moment before uttering, “At some point, you will be out of the context of time and place—if the U.S. is truly a champion of civilization and human rights, then you should refrain from using the American veto to block the Palestinian rights.” ■