Overview

"Janet Varner Gunn, from 1988 to 1990, took time out from university teaching to do human rights work on the West Bank. During that time she became involved with the case of Mohammad Abu Aker, a Palestinian teenager who was critically shot during a stone-throwing demonstration. The years following Mohammad's injury, during which he was deemed a ""living martyr"" of the Intifada and which ended with his eventual death at 19 in 1990, are recounted in this personal book. The author interweaves her account of Mohammad's medical struggles and the politics surrounding his symbolic place in the Intifada with her own story of loss and recovery. As a human rights worker for whom Mohammad initially represented a case, Gunn was involved in getting him the medical care he needed to survive. As a scholar, she became fascinated by the way Mohammad's injury and subsequent ""second life"" took in a larger significance because of its timing, which coincided with the declaration of an independent Palestine. This text contains accounts of the daily life in Deheishe, the refugee camp where Mohammad lived with his family. The author describes the laughter with which residents of the camp have learned to meet the violent disruption of their daily lives, hoping that her readers will be moved by the victimization of an appressive occupation, and the examples of hope in Deheishe."

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9780816625307

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Janet Varner Gunn teaches in the Department of English at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. She is the author of Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience (1982).

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