Sahar Khalifeh

Sahar Khalifeh was born in Nablus, British Mandate Palestine, the fifth of eight daughters. Khalifeh reflects “I learned that I was a member of a miserable, useless, worthless sex. From childhood, I was taught to prepare myself for the risks associated with being a woman.”{{Cite web|title=My Life, Myself, and the World |website=Al Jadid|url=https://www.aljadid.com/content/my-life-myself-and-world|access-date=5 June 2024 |first=Sahar |last=Khalifeh}}

In childhood, Khalifeh found creative outlets like reading, writing, and painting. She was married off against her will shortly after finishing high school in Amman, Jordan. She describes her 13-year marriage as “miserable and devastating” and did not write during this period. She once again found refuge in books: “I indulged, just like anybody else in the educated Arab world, in the existentialist movement and existential intellectualism. Until the Occupation took place, I continued to be an existentialist.”{{Cite journal|last1=Johnson|first1=Penny|last2=Khalifeh|first2=Sahar|date=July 1990|title=Uprising of a Novelist: Penny Johnson Interviews Sahar Khalifeh|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4020815|journal=The Women's Review of Books|volume=7|issue=10/11|pages=24|doi=10.2307/4020815|jstor=4020815|issn=0738-1433|url-access=subscription}}

After the 1967 defeat of Jordan and subsequent Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Khalifeh began writing again. She began with “resistance poetry”, inspired by the works of Mahmoud Darwish before breaking from the limited female narratives typical in resistance literature. Her first novel, After the Defeat, followed the interactions of families in a Nablus apartment building after the war. The only manuscript of this novel was confiscated by Israeli authorities and never published. Khalifeh continued writing and We Are Not Your Slaves Any Longer, was published in 1974, followed by her best-known novel, Wild Thorns, in 1976. Wild Thorns explored class nuances under Israeli occupation. She published The Sunflower in 1980 as a sequel to Wild Thorns to focus on female narratives that were largely absent from the original story. In her autobiography, A Novel for My Story, she describes beginning life as a university student at the age of thirty-two alongside two other friends from Nablus.{{Cite web|last=Khalifeh|first=Sahar|title=University Student|url=https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/march-2020-womens-life-writing-in-arabic-university-student-khalifeh-hussa|access-date=2021-08-16|website=Words Without Borders|date=18 March 2020 }}

She continued her education in the U.S., receiving a Fulbright scholarship to complete her MA in English from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Women's studies and American literature from the University of Iowa. She returned to Nablus in 1988 after the start of the first intifada and began writing Bab al-Saha (Passage to the Plaza), a novel depicting women's lives against the background of the Intifada. In 1988, Khalifeh also founded the Women's Affairs Center in Nablus. She describes her work with women in Nablus in an interview with Penny Johnson “I didn't bring an image of an institution from abroad. I learned from ‘reality.’” Khalifeh has since opened Women’s Affairs Center branches in Gaza City, West Bank, and Amman, Jordan{{citation needed|date=November 2023}}.

Khalifeh has continued writing, one of her recent publications أصلٌ وفصل (Root and Branch) was published in 2009 by Dar al-Adeb and translated into English as Of Noble Origins in 2012. This novel, set on the eve of the Nakba of 1948 & the state of Israel’s establishment, explores the stories of characters confronting the British Mandate and the Zionist movement. Khalifeh’s most recent publication of 2010 My First and Only Love follows the story of a Palestinian woman who, after many years in exile, returns home to Nablus.{{Cite web|title=the glasshouse novel 1936|url=https://kfresh.ca/5qaqer3r/the-glasshouse-novel-1936|access-date=2021-08-16|website=kfresh.ca|archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20210816160255/https://kfresh.ca/5qaqer3r/the-glasshouse-novel-1936 |archive-date=16 August 2021}} This novel was published in English by Hoopoe in March 2021. Khalifeh has published eleven novels, all of which deal with the situation of the Palestinians under occupation.{{citation needed|date=November 2023}}

The following novels are available in translation into English:

• {{cite book |title=Wild Thorns |publisher=Interlink |date=2000 |oclc=42581514}}
• {{cite book |title=The Inheritance |publisher=American University in Cairo Press |translator-first=Aida A. |translator-last=Bamia |date=2005 |oclc=62887830}}
• {{cite book |title=The End of Spring |publisher=Interlink |translator-first=Paula |translator-last=Haydar |date=2008 |oclc=154799504}}
• {{cite book |title=The Image, the Icon and the Covenant |publisher=Interlink |date=2008 |translator-first=Aida A. |translator-last=Bamia |oclc=147985601}}
• {{cite book |title=Of Noble Origins |publisher=American University in Cairo Press |translator-first=Aida A. |translator-last=Bamia |date=2012 |oclc=748331417}}
• {{cite book |title=Passage to the Plaza |publisher=Seagull Books |translator-first=Sawad |translator-last=Hussain |date=2020 |oclc=1139137431}}
• {{cite book |title=My First and Only Love |publisher=Hoopoe |translator-first=Aida A. |translator-last=Bamia |date=2021 |oclc=1250276496}}

Other novels not translated into English:

• {{cite book |title=Lam na’ud ghawārī lakum |trans-title=We Are not Your Slave Girls Anymore |publisher=Dar al-Adab |date=1974 |script-title=ar: لم نعد جواري لكم}}
• {{cite book |title=Abbad al-Shams |trans-title=The Sunflower |publisher=Dar al-Adab |date=1980 |script-title=ar: عباد الشمس}}
• {{cite book |title=Mudhakkirāt imra’ah ghayr wāqi’īyah |trans-title=Memoirs of an Unrealistic Woman |publisher=Dar al-Adab |script-title=ar: مذكرات امرأة غير واقعية |date=1986}}
• {{cite book |title=Rabi’ Harr |script-title=ar:ربيع حار |trans-title=Hot Spring |publisher=Dar al-Adab |date=2004}}

• Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature by Salma Jayyusi (Columbia University Press), contains excerpts of her earlier work{{citation needed|date=November 2023}}

• 2006: Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant.{{cite web |title=Palestinian female novelist granted Naguib Mahfouz medal in Cairo |work=Xinhua News Agency |date=December 11, 2006 |url=https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA155758476}}{{cite web |url=https://aucpress.com/mahfouz-medal/ |title=The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature |publisher=American University in Cairo |access-date=5 June 2024}}
• 2013: The Mohamed Zafzaf Prize, Morocco{{cite web|first1=Sarah|last1=Irving|access-date=2018-11-29|title=Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh awarded Moroccan literary prize|url=https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/sarah-irving/palestinian-novelist-sahar-khalifeh-awarded-moroccan-literary-prize|website=The Electronic Intifada|date=1 July 2013}}

{{Reflist}}

{{Wikiquote}}

• [https://web.archive.org/web/20070401004645/http://adab.chez-alice.fr/Samed/sahar.htm Bio-bibliography (in French) on the site Samed devoted to palestinian literature]
• [http://www.arabworldbooks.com/authors/sahar_khalifa.html Arab World Books]
• al-Mallah, Ahmad. "Sahar Khalifa." Twentieth-Century Arabic Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 346. Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Gale. 17 Mar. 2009 [http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=wylrc_park Gale Literature Resource Center]
• [http://en.qantara.de/An-Appeal-to-the-West/16303c16506i1p77/index.html Who Is Hidden beneath the Burqa? An Appeal to the West] by Sahar Khalifa

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Category:1942 births

Category:Living people

Category:Palestinian feminists

Category:Feminist writers

Category:People from Nablus

Category:Birzeit University alumni

Category:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni

Category:University of Iowa alumni

Category:International Writing Program alumni

Category:Palestinian novelists

Category:Palestinian women novelists

Category:21st-century Palestinian women writers

Category:21st-century Palestinian writers

Category:20th-century Palestinian women writers

Category:20th-century Palestinian writers

Category:Arab people in Mandatory Palestine