Phil Chetwynd reviews Indigenous Soul by Nada Shawa (Main Point Books, 2024).

If you want to know what sumud means, you’ll find it here. Nada Shawa embodies this quality of calm resilience in her very existence. Disabled from birth, she came to Scotland from Gaza at the age of seven to gain an education that her parents deemed impossible in Gaza. She dances with supreme grace in her wheelchair, sings in Scotland’s largest community choir, and writes beautiful poetry, some of which is included in this book.

But it is her various experiences travelling between Scotland and Gaza that form the main subject of the book. In many ways, her story is an ordinary one of a loving daughter returning home to visit her family. It becomes extraordinary, however, when we hear of the endless hindrances and unspeakable cruelty that she had to experience on her journeys home.

Nada is not an angry person – far from it — but you can feel the rage in her words when describing the petty bureaucrats who insisted that she drag herself through the Erez checkpoint without the use of her wheelchair or crutches on her way back from seeing her dying mother. What kind of a security threat could the anonymous officials there imagine that this woman might represent!?

Nada asks the obvious question “…if over 30 million US dollars have been spent on Gaza’s border crossing….could they not obtain sophisticated screening equipment to be used on people with disabilities that would avoid such a gruelling and humiliating process?”

But well aware of the psychological tactics used by the Israelis in trying to crush the Palestinian spirit, she sure doesn’t allow these to get her down. Her resilience shows through at every stage. Nada and her family have experienced four Israeli bombardments and invasions over the past 10 years. She reminds us that “it didn’t just start on October 7th”. Before that, of course, came 75 years of oppression. Yet her obvious love of her family and land shines through. She even holds out the hand of peace to those that strive to annihilate her people:

I do not hate you and do not wish, to be made to hate you.

Indeed, last year, she performed with Jewish musicians from Scottish Jews for a Just Peace in solidarity with Palestine in a production entitled “Crossing Borders”. This is no embittered soul but one who speaks for her people clearly and without rancour. May her light and that of her people shine on!

Buy Indigenous Soul from the publisher, Main Point Books.

Phil Chetwynd is an erstwhile clinical psychologist who took up photography when he retired some 25 years ago. He is a member of the Network of Photographers for Palestine.