Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood
SynopsisPlot
In this groundbreaking memoir set in Ramallah during the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Ibtisam Barakat captures what it is like to be a child whose world is shattered by war. With candor and courage, she stitches together memories of her childhood: fear and confusion as bombs explode near her home and she is separated from her family; the harshness of life in the Middle East as a Palestinian refugee; her unexpected joy when she discovers Alef, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. This is the beginning of her passionate connection to words, and as language becomes her refuge, allowing her to piece together the fragments of her world, it becomes her true home.
Story
About this book
Tasting the Sky is a memoir by Ibtisam Barakat about her childhood in Ramallah and the years following the 1967 Six-Day War. The book opens with a scene set years later, then moves back to the war itself, when Barakat was a young girl. She recalls the confusion of bombs falling near her home, a frightening separation from her family, and the displacement that followed as her family became refugees. The memoir traces everyday life under occupation through the eyes of a child trying to make sense of events far larger than herself.
A central thread in the book is Barakat's encounter with the Arabic alphabet. She describes discovering Alef, the first letter, and the effect this has on her. Learning to read and write becomes a way for her to organize a world that has been broken apart. Language offers a kind of stability when almost everything else around her is uncertain. The memoir is built from fragments of memory rather than a single continuous narrative, and Barakat is direct about the limits of what a child can understand during wartime.
The book received the Arab American National Museum Book Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature. It is set primarily in and around Ramallah, in the Palestinian territories, during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
