You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times (en Inglés) - Saeed Teebi

“If people witness the disposability of their bodies enough times, perhaps they come to consider their national consciousness disposable as well—something that can be shuffled at will by the colonizer.” (p. 53) This thoughtful memoir traces the distinct victories of two men: a father and his son. The author’s father, Dr. Ahmad Teebie, confronted exile head-on by refusing to cave. He redid his medical studies from scratch and went on to become a world-renowned physician. His young son, however—eager to integrate into his new world—experienced a different kind of exile, one impossible to study one’s way out of. Instead, he endured a slow psychological crawl within an environment saturated by sophisticated Zionist propaganda. Teebie examines the language-based mechanisms of colonization that invert reality, recasting Zionist aggressors as beleaguered victims while assigning blame to those they dispossess. The late Dr. Ahmad Teebi might have admired the surgical precision with which his son excises propaganda’s shameful, malicious obfuscations. One passage among many stayed with me: “When the literate are oppressed, they always resort to books, because that’s where the loneliness of their misery finds companionship—and where despair can be quelled through understanding and triumphing in the experience of others.” A riveting, unflinching, and meaningful memoir I could not put down. Free Palestine. Eleanor Cowan, Canadian writer