Book Review - Crossing: A Love Story Between Italy and Palestine

Sabrin Hasbun’s Italian mother, Anna, and Palestinian father, Rami, met in Florence when Rami was studying art and Anna was training as a nurse. In her bittersweet tracing of her parents’ relationship, Hasbun recounts their early years, courtship and marriage: her mother’s lontananza, the longing for “a larger life”, and her father’s commitment to art as a form of resistance.

Now UK-based, Hasbun was born in Ramallah in 1989 during the first intifada (uprising) against Israeli occupation. Two years later, amid the subsequent crackdown, Anna’s application for a residency permit was denied and, fearing for her children’s safety, she returned to Italy. Rami joined them soon after.

Following the 1993 Oslo Accords, Rami went back to Ramallah, often working for months at a time on his art projects. Hasbun and her siblings grew up between Palestine and Italy, visiting their father whenever possible. She explores how her parents’ marriage survived these long separations and poignantly recalls her own childish attempts to explain her father’s absences to schoolfriends – once falsely claiming her mother was pregnant (“If a woman was pregnant that meant that everything was OK”).

Hasbun was prompted to write Crossing after her mother’s death from cancer in 2012. Each chapter references food: a potent marker of Hasbun’s dual heritage, the intersection of cultures, an expression of shared memories and love.

As well as coming to terms with her identity – “the desire to belong and yet to be elsewhere” – Hasbun vividly conveys what it is like to live under constant occupation: “Violence does not surprise you... it only varies in intensity.”

Writing in English, Hasbun never names the oppressor yet her anger against Israel is palpable. The book is her own attempt to resist erasure, echoing her parents’ philosophy: “The way we love cannot be taken away from us  … how we use that love is our revolutionary act.”

Originally published by The Observer