I Can Imagine It For Us: Mai Serhan's heartfelt memoir to her father about loss, identity, and Palestinian history

"I have never been to the place where I am from, but I can imagine it for us, Baba, for you and me," writes Mai Serhan at the start of her dazzling new book, I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter's Memoir.

The book borrows its title from that evocative line addressed to her now-deceased “Baba”, or father. Growing up with a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, mostly in Cairo, but with stints in Abu Dhabi and Beirut, Mai's sense of belonging and identity was in constant flux.

In this memoir, published on 14 October by the American University in Cairo Press, she uses an epistolary format to address her often complex relationship with her father, who had moved to China at the turn of the millennium for work and who “didn't speak much at all” about Palestine.

"It hurt him so much and he had carried so much anger,” Mai says, particularly after the family was expelled from their hometown of Acre during the 1948 Nakba, when her father was only four years old.

“I wanted to be the generation that would break that cycle,” Mai tells The New Arab, “to register presence, to speak against silence, against erasure.”

As the writer pieces her family’s transnational history together and engages with tales untold for so long, she tells a broader story of Palestinian identity that invokes intergenerational trauma and this sense of not belonging anywhere: one deeply imbedded in a sense of place, in which archiving stories is fundamental as a means of survival, but also one marked by fragmented and often repressed memories.

When Mai writes to her dad that she “can imagine it for us,” she is not thinking of an imagined future where her family can return to Palestine, but about a history that has been suppressed for so long.

“It's a return to a place in the past, looking at something that's completely cracked and trying to capture it before it completely slips,” Mai says.

“If the past really made the future of my father outside Palestine so unbearable, then how about if I go back and mend it, repair the whole thing, and see whether his future would have looked better, healthier, safer, calmer…”

Belonging in pieces and places

Mai grew up rather detached from her Palestinian identity, and it was only when she was 32 that the now 48-year-old really engaged with her family history, while reading the seminal book on Palestine, Gate of the Sun, by Elias Khoury.

In it, Khoury mentions Mai’s grandfather, Faris Serhan, and his influence not only in Acre but also in much of northern Palestine at the time.

“There, on the page, our small village. I found al-Kabri,” she writes.

“There, right there, a connection was materialising in a way I never thought vital to my existence. I continued to read, to leave the edges and be drawn into the centre, to the origin story, my story.”

It was thus through literature, Mai admits, that “I really came into my own identity.”

Though there is a strong lineage of books on the Palestinian experience, particularly those inspired by family stories on exile and resistance, whether it be the essays of Edward Said or Ghassan Kanafani, the novels of Mourid Barghouti or Susan Abulhawa, or more recent works by Ahed Tamimi and Mohammed El-Kurd, very few compare to Mai Serhan’s new book both in terms of scope and style. After all, few memoirs focus on a Palestinian father and daughter arguing in communist China.

But what makes I Can Imagine It for Us truly unique in terms of style is its distorted structure, without any spatial or chronological order, jumping from varied fragments of memories addressed to her father.

Readers travel every few pages from Abu Dhabi, 1981, to Cairo, 2000, then to Shenzhen, 2000, and Beirut, 1994, going as far back as Acre, 1897.

“To stop is to know I am out of place, so I move from place to place,” Mai writes, channelling her inner Edward Said.

Not only is the structure unorthodox, featuring many cliff-hangers interspersed with fragments of different memories, but the language is intentionally written in an often childlike tone, reflecting a young woman who was then unaware of her rich Palestinian heritage.

“I wanted to destabilise the narrative, also to reflect that experience… It's very fragmentary,” she says of the structure, though she could easily be speaking about her memories of her surreal time in China with her father.

“It was like piecing this puzzle together. This book was written from a place that I wasn't very conscious of. I just tapped into that voice inside, and I let it move through me.”

Tracing roots through loss

Though the writing style often reads like a stream of consciousness, Mai includes a great deal of detail from her younger life, as well as stories about Acre, well before the Nakba and even before the British Mandate was established in 1917 through the Balfour Declaration.

To learn these stories, she visited her father’s Palestinian family and elders who knew her grandfather in Acre, and who are now exiled in Beirut and refugee camps outside the Lebanese capital.

Mai’s father passed away in 2003 from severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), at only 57 years old, and though the author amusedly recalls that she never saw her father read a book in his life and that he probably wouldn’t read this one if he were still alive, she says “he would be proud of me for sure,” not only for becoming an acclaimed writer, but for inheriting his “tenacity with work.”

I Can Imagine It for Us thus marks itself as a definitive work in the genre of Palestinian memoirs, that will not only attract readers of Said or Kanafani, but also fans of Joan Didion, Hisham Matar, Ocean Vuong, or James Baldwin.

And of course, it is sure to connect with anyone who has a complicated relationship with their father, and who strives to see this vulnerability not as a weakness, but as a strength.

As Mai Serhan says about dedicating a book for her “Baba,” well over 20 years after his passing: “Maybe there can be healing even after death.”

Alexander Durie is a journalist working across video, photography, and feature writing. He has freelanced for The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The Economist, The Financial Times, Reuters, The Independent, and more, contributing dispatches from Paris, Berlin, Beirut, and Warsaw

Follow him on Instagram: @alexander.durie