Exploring occupation, identity, and resistance in Bassem Khandaqji’s A Mask, the Colour of the Sky

Last October, Palestinian novelist Bassem Khandaqji was released from prison as part of a prisoner exchange. It was during his years behind bars that he wrote A Mask, the Colour of the Sky (قناع بلون السماء), a psychologically layered novel that explores identity, erasure and the politics of narration. Written entirely in an Israeli prison, the book went on to win the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

At its centre is Nur al-Shahdi, a Palestinian archaeologist who comes across a blue Israeli ID card and slips into the identity of its Ashkenazi Jewish owner, Or Shapira.

Using this ‘mask’, he gains access to restricted archaeological sites to research a novel that reclaims Mary Magdalene from biblical erasure and modern sensationalism, while the story moves between personal survival and wider questions of history and power.

In this Q&A with The New Arab, Bassem reflects on using imagination to traverse the geography of a homeland he is forbidden to see, the concept of time under Israeli occupation, the search for an identity as boundless as the sky, and the power of literature to shatter the masks of the occupier.

The New Arab: The novel responds to The Da Vinci Code by borrowing the conspiracy and hidden secrets, but redirecting them towards Palestinian memory and indigenous knowledge.

Which specific elements of Dan Brown’s portrayal most troubled you, and at what point did you realise this structure could serve to expose colonial erasures and counter the cultural displacement his book performs?

First, we must acknowledge that the modern novel’s techniques, within the Arab context, were imported from the Western bourgeois tradition.

But this adoption is not mere imitation, but rather appropriation — literary appropriation carried out by the colonised in order to respond to the coloniser, but with different contents, in the language of Edward Said.

I do not believe my novel fundamentally responds to Dan Brown. My protagonist, Nur al-Shahdi, declares he will respond to Dan, but this is one character’s intention. When we examine the actual techniques, we find no resemblance to Brown’s breathless, detective-style pacing.

What concerned me regarding Dan Brown is the abhorrent, repeated use of Western patterns of knowledge linked to colonialism. He draws from 'Western centrality' — the assumption that the West can read and claim the East at will.

Dan Brown wrote with the luxury of visiting the Louvre, churches and other sites he described. You wrote this novel from prison. In your author’s note, you thanked fellow detainees from Jerusalem who helped with information.

Can you describe the mental process of reconstructing places like Tel Megiddo, the ruins of Al-Lajjun, and the kibbutz of Mishmar HaEmek — sites you likely could not visit freely — using only memory, stories, smuggled details, and imagination?

Certainly, Dan Brown had sources and databases available to him that will never be available to me, given that he exists in a world able to provide those tools.

As for me, writing inside prison has its conditions, motivations, and its particular fuel. The most important dimension that contributed to my writing inside prison was imagination — the ability to train the imagination, above all. I would wake up every day and perform training exercises, sending my imagination to distant places.

I nourished my visual imagination through testimonies and stories that fellow detainees provided about Jerusalem’s geography. What surprised me was that, when detainees were transferred from one prison to another, I saw these places that I had imagined through a gap in the bus window, and felt that I had been accurate to some degree.

Perhaps here lies the paradox: prison, despite being a place of detention, is also a place of liberation for imagination and for dreams.

Why Mary Magdalene? Of all the figures in history you could have chosen to centre a Palestinian narrative around, what drew you to a woman whose legacy has been suppressed, sexualised, and rewritten by religious and political authorities for two millennia? 

Do you see her contested and erased history as a deliberate parallel to the broader erasure of Palestinian history?

Mary Magdalene is the true mask in the novel, not Or Shapira’s mask. Her appearance in the novel was not merely to evoke historical seduction or controversy surrounding her personality.

As you mentioned, Mary Magdalene was subjected to historical oppression and transformed into a passive, sexual object. She was excluded from the Gospel context and relegated to a silenced history.

I attempted to resurrect her from this history, to rewrite her, and to introduce a symbolic dimension: Mary Magdalene is an expression of the Palestinian condition and of Palestine’s position in history.

Palestine is the 'present-absent' in history. By this, I mean the history that has been reimagined and rewritten through colonial, Western-centric knowledge.

Mary Magdalene represents Palestine as it was imagined by the West. Before the colonisers came to Palestine, they had preconceived notions of the land. They imagined it in distorted biblical and Gospel terms.

The West dealt with this image of Palestine, and with the East in general, as a passive object with sexual dimensions, subject to constant violation. From here, I tried to prove that nothing is outside colonialism, and nothing is outside that Western knowledge.

In the novel, Nur’s voice memos begin as planning notes for his Magdalene project and gradually turn into confessional outpourings, almost like therapy or a quiet form of resistance.

How did you arrive at this structure? And did writing from prison shape the way you portrayed narration itself as a survival tool, especially that moment where Nur compares it to Scheherazade’s storytelling to stay alive? 

I cannot deny that the use of voice memos has personal dimensions for me as a writer in prison who is constantly pursued by my jailer. These dense and concentrated notes are a reflection of writing under danger.

I was writing in secret, which requires intense concentration. It was a literal chase between the jailer and me, and this contributed significantly to the development of my style and narrative techniques.

I was not writing merely to surprise the reader, but writing for the sake of survival and salvation. I became one with this style, and it took on deeper dimensions while I was writing the novel.

The novel is divided into three parts titled 'Nur' (light in Arabic), 'Or' (light in Hebrew), and 'Sama’ (sky in Arabic).

What inspired this linguistic mirroring of light across Arabic and Hebrew, and how does that progression towards the sky reflect your thinking about identity under occupation?

There was no inspiration, frankly. There is no room for coincidence in the planning of the novel and in the naming of my characters. I treat names and titles as having specific semiotic and semantic dimensions, as well as a magical element that affects the reader.

Using 'Nur' and 'Or' highlights that they stem from the same linguistic root — Hebrew and Arabic come from the same Semitic tree.

As for 'Sama’, it represents identity for me. The sky is boundless; it is a space not limited by divisions between self and other, nor by preconceptions.

It is a space that holds room for everyone — for life, joy, challenge, anger, hope, and love.

Therefore, the choice of 'Nur' or 'Sama' is not merely about finding a companion or removing a mask. It is about the restoration of an identity that the Palestinian seeks to achieve, far from racism and fascism. 

You wrote Ayala with such specificity — her Sephardic background, her Zionism, her resentments, and her internal logic all feel fully formed.

At the same time, Nur objectifies her repeatedly, reducing her to a sexual fantasy even as he rejects her politics.

Was it difficult to inhabit her perspective and give her that depth, while allowing Nur’s gaze to distort and objectify her in ways that mirror the very colonial logic he is trying to escape?

I did not write Ayala from a Palestinian perspective, but rather from the point of view of a Zionist character, Or Shapira.

When Or interacts with Ayala, he sees her through his Ashkenazi, white, Zionist lens — superior and dominant. The Ashkenazi occupies the peak of the Zionist hierarchy, and he perceives everything around him as open to conquest.

At the same time, I cannot deny that Nur may have unconsciously influenced the sexual objectification of Ayala — his way of seeing her as a colonised Other, or as an Other similarly exposed to racism in the same context.

But in all cases, the one who objectifies Ayala is Or Shapira, not Nur al-Shahdi. Nur, as you point out, is also subjected to the same sexual objectification and racism.

You reference Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust and the idea that the Holocaust and the occupation are both ‘products of modernity’. 

Do you see the archaeological dig, with its scientific numbering and classification, as a modern tool of violence? Can science ever be neutral in a land where every stone is a political claim?

All sciences that emerged in the 19th-century Western colonial context are colonial sciences. Archaeology, ethnology, anthropology, and sociology were tools of control, seizure, and violation of spaces outside the Western centre. 

I always emphasise that nothing is outside colonialism, nothing is outside fascism, and nothing is outside genocide. They accuse us of not being neutral. I say neutrality is a myth, as modernity itself is a myth. There is no such thing as neutrality. We must be engaged and integrated with our texts. We must declare openly what we feel while writing.

The novel repeatedly returns to time as a site of violence: occupation colonises time, history contests time, and prisons rigidly control time.

How did your own experience of time in Gilboa Prison — with its enforced pauses, interruptions, and constant surveillance — shape the way you portrayed temporality as both a tool of domination and a space of resistance?

Time is not only a site of violence in the colonial sense; it is also a tool of exclusion and the dismantling of humanity.

When does a human cease to be human? When we extract them from their time, or extract their time from them. This is what happens in prison.

The fundamental goal of prison is to dismantle humanity, transforming a human into a mere being without temporal dimensions — without past, present, or future. What is required of the prisoner?

In my case, I chose writing. I found my own time in writing, a way to escape from prison. Imagination has time. Dreams have time. Narration has time. This is what writing achieved for me.

When I wrote, I felt completely free. I had shattered the jailer’s time, escaped it, and liberated myself from it. This is what my friend, the martyr Walid Daqqa, always referred to when he spoke of parallel time — time that unburdens one from the heavy load of prison, liberates from it, and travels to other places.

Every year outside prison, more than one hundred million hours of Palestinian time are erased at Zionist colonial checkpoints. All these lost moments and minutes are the result of a deliberate Zionist effort to dismantle Palestinian time.

The novel ends with Nur’s cathartic act of destroying the mask, only for rockets to fall and war to resume.

Given that this pattern of fragile reprieve, shattered by violence, is the ongoing reality for Palestinians, what place do you see for literature and the arts when survival remains the primary demand? What purposes do they serve in such circumstances?

Purification is not only about destroying the mask. Resistance — as a revolutionary act — is the true purification, in Frantz Fanon’s terms.

We cannot deny that resistance, most importantly resistance with a violent revolutionary dimension, is the first purifying act.

As a Palestinian, I was not born a killer, nor born to be killed. I was born to be free and equal to all people in this world. Yet the context in which I exist as a colonial subject requires me to shatter this colonial equation.

I have since turned to other forms of resistance, most importantly, cultural resistance. Today, we Palestinians are seeking to establish a cultural front founded on the concept of a “literature of engagement.”

Through this, we aim to illuminate the most important aspects of Zionist knowledge — its hidden dimensions and, above all, its literary representations. How do we confront this literature? How do we engage with it in order to reclaim narrative? How do we rewrite our story in a way that ensures we do not replicate the mistakes of the Zionist other — those fatal, racist, and fascist errors, the objectification of the Other, and the division between self and Other?

Therefore, I view literature as a Palestinian necessity. It contributes to restoring the historical role of the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom and liberation.

When the original Arabic edition, قناع بلون السماء, won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2024, you were still imprisoned. How did that moment feel — receiving such recognition behind bars?

And now, with the English translation reaching a wider international audience during the ongoing genocide in Gaza, what are your hopes for how the novel might be received, or what it might contribute to the global conversation?

I did not learn of winning the International Prize for Arabic Fiction directly.

In May 2024, while my people were — and still are — being subjected to genocide, an Israeli special forces unit raided my cell in Ramon Desert Prison.

Officers from the Zionist Shabak apparatus interrogated me. As soon as they began questioning and threatening me, I knew I had won. I said to one of them, “If I had known my writings would anger you this much, I would have written many more words.”

Later, a fellow inmate with a smuggled radio confirmed the news that I had won the prize. My feelings were mixed — between sadness and joy, pride and honour. I dedicated this victory — not merely a win, but a victory — to the narrative of my resisting, steadfast people in our land.

They beat and abused me repeatedly. They smashed my medical glasses. That moment taught me incapacity: to be shackled and restrained while someone removes your glasses, smashes them, and says, “I do not want you to see anything. I want you to see only darkness.”

But I did not see darkness. I saw light — and I still see light. I see the light in Nur al-Shahdi, in Sama’ Ismail, in all the Palestinian people, and in every free man and woman in this world who believes in resisting Zionist fascism and racism.

The English translation of A Mask, the Colour of the Sky will be published by Europa Editions this month, with the US release scheduled for 17 March

Fifi Bat-hef is a Kenyan book reviewer with a bias for literary fiction 

Follow her on Instagram: @fifi.bathef