In his debut novel, Thaer Husien remixes genre and takes readers on a psychedelic ride through a dystopian yet disturbingly familiar future Palestine.
November 22, 2024
Source: Africa is a Country
Set in a hauntingly plausible future, where Israel has marked a century of Palestinian occupation, Thaer Husien’s debut novel, Beside the Sickle Moon: A Palestinian Story, opens with a poetic, sonically disorienting line: “I hear the rhythmic pin-drop of muffled revenge from tunnels being dug 20 meters beneath my feet.” This is the world of Laeth Muhammad Awad, a convenience store owner in a town just outside Ramallah. For a fee, Laeth has allowed Hamas to connect his store’s backroom freezer to the group’s vast underground tunnel network, an artery of resistance running just beneath the surface of daily life under Israeli occupation. The store, which Laeth inherited from his father (who now lives in Michigan), symbolizes the immense network of forces shaping our protagonist’s life. It connects him to the Palestinian resistance and a world where political distance is possible. As Laeth listens, so do we. Sound stretches across the novel like a vibrating membrane sliding between scales: the personal and political, the intimate and the epic.
As a novel of the future, Beside the Sickle Moon is, unsurprisingly, preoccupied with temporality, attempting to reconcile the vastness of macro-historical events with the immediacy of everyday life. Sonic frequency plays a crucial role in this mediation. Laeth’s world is textured with sound: global news reports (“another thousand climate migrants killed at the US-Mexico border,” says one radio broadcaster) intermingle with jazz tunes, death metal hits, Arabic love ballads, rock and roll records, the Beatles, and even the YouTube mix, “LoFi Beats to Study and Relax to,” which Laeth sardonically calls a “classic.”
Husien has structured the novel like a vinyl record; its two parts, named “Side A” and “Side B,” gesture to the illusory simplicity of binary choices. When one side is heard, the other is always just beneath. Husien highlights this tension throughout Beside the Sickle Moon, exploring the interdependence between personal and historical time, and between the competing sides within the Palestinian resistance movement, while stressing the inevitability of having to choose.
If the novel’s music spans from the past into the readerly present, its technology extends across our present into the future. Beside the Sickle Moon’s tech is eerie in its believability. Water is so scarce that the wealthy wear VitaStim wrist implants, gills that pull moisture from the air. Holograms walk among the living, advertising products, reading the news, or appearing as deceased loved ones. And the infamous sport Gladium, where players interact with androids made of ballistic gelatin, is banned by the United Nations for facilitating human cruelty beyond imagination. Yet, amidst these disconcerting advancements, Palestinian life under occupation remains disturbingly unchanged: the same long lines at Israeli Occupation Force checkpoints and the soldiers’ capricious cruelty, the same scarcity of fresh produce, the same dishearteningly fractious political landscape.
In the bewildering complexity of late capitalism’s economic organization, a striking theory has emerged from Marxist literary criticism: Futuristic science fiction may be the most fitting genre for the historical novel today. (See Frederic Jameson’s “The Historical Novel Today,” in Antinomies of Realism, Thomas Laughlin’s essay on Antinomies, and Ian Duncan’s “History and the Novel After Lukacs.”) In 1937, Georg Lukács argued that the finest historical novels center on characters whose culture, psychology, and actions emerge organically from the specific historical conditions shaped by broader social, economic, and political forces. Lukács was, in part, responding to a literary shift after the 1848 wave of European revolutions, when the bourgeoisie quietly abandoned their universal liberal ideals to consolidate dominance over the working class. He criticized generations of bourgeois authors for sidestepping their own complicity in this power imbalance by reducing historical periods in their literature to mere aesthetic backdrops, rather than engaging with them as the material conditions from which human experience, cultural forms, and social drama arise. When making this argument, Lukács was grounded in a European context where power resided within the nation-state, cementing the historical novel as a genre focused on realism and a national perspective.
Since Lukács offered this thesis, the nation-state has become an increasingly insufficient category for comprehending these broad networks of power. Contemporary writers like Husein are inventing new vantage points from which we can analyze individual human experiences about a wider totality. Science-fiction, with its “view from the future,” allows a critical historicization of our contemporary moment. It lets us see the forest as well as the trees, revealing opportunities to challenge hidden oppressions, and forcing us to confront the dangers of staying the course.
Beside the Sickle Moon chronicles Laeth’s uncertain journey through complex political terrain, depicted from the perspective of the Fanonian “native intellectual.” Though he spent his youth immersed in local activism and organizing, Laeth reflects that the “lessons from Jung and Marx,” which he encountered at university, “only helped me understand my deepest flaws, not withstand them.” (Husien leaves open the question of whether this intellectualization is to blame for Laeth’s political deflation.) Unable to bear the human toll of endless struggle, Laeth wonders if survival—perhaps even through surrender—might be the last remaining hope for Palestinian resistance. His friends, aligned with various resistance factions, bitterly disapprove. In “Side B,” Laeth embarks on a controversial path, ultimately assuming an unexpected historical role.
One of the most chilling features of Husien’s novel as history is the world’s renewed abandonment of Palestine. In a future of systemic global crisis, nations have closed ranks and shut their eyes. Israeli mines run on the slave labor of Palestinian captives, and refugee camps have become invisibilized death zones, whose existence Laeth explains here:
Once the US pivoted to ground colonization in Gaza, Israel ran into a problem. Jordan, having spent a century playing along for better oil deals, couldn’t take in more refugees. So, taking a cue from the CCP’s “cleansing” of Uyghurs, Israel set up “vocational training centers.” Four in Gaza at first, but with the world’s attention pulled to the Great Climate Migrations, they could operate in the shadows. A boost to the black market for organs kept certain pockets happy, and without any expansionist agenda, no nation dared intervene. Genocide quietly carried on.
Although sober, dryly ironic passages like this appear in Husien’s novel as descriptive context, they are crucial to the text as a historical novel. Here, Husien deftly connects the dots between international power struggles, the global political economy, and the disastrous consequences of unchecked climate change. He lays bare how national sentiment is, in the last instance, determined by the economy. Beside the Sickle Moon fuses these macro-historical forces with Laeth’s experience of daily life: his social worlds, his pleasures and pains, his hopes and fears, the array of available choices, and the choices that the resistance makes for him.
Tensions between resistance factions—familiar groups like the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, as well as fictional newcomers on the scene—drive the novel’s plot, while Laeth’s political shame and crisis of political identity form its emotional core. Despite constant reminders of his forefathers’ courage, the sanctity of martyrdom, and the unshakable hope animating Palestinian identity and resistance, Laeth’s fighting spirit has been eroded by the constant march of death. But, with his friends spread across the political map, Laeth is not without choice: his cousin Aylul is an increasingly militant actor building the ranks of Al Mubarizun, “the final resistance,” a radical, fictional secular offshoot of Hamas; his neighbors are active Hamas members; his ex-girlfriend is the daughter of a top figure in the Palestinian Authority, who are depicted as collaborators doing backdoor deals with Israel; and Laeth’s latest acquaintance has joined “The Forgotten Ones,” generally despised by both Israelis and Palestinians. The Forgotten Ones—another fictional group—promote “peaceful coexistence,” openly collaborate with Israel, and run compounds where Palestinians and Israelis live and work side-by-side. For Laeth, each of these bodies is compromised in some intractable way. The wealthy bureaucrats of the Palestinian Authority run a slick, diplomatic bureaucracy from sparkling skyscrapers among desperate urban poverty; Hamas’ tactics and religious ideology are increasingly outdated; the high-risk militant actions of Al Mubarizun are equally high in casualties; and joining The Forgotten Ones is tantamount to betrayal of history and the nation. Yet, because his world opens onto both opulence and sordid desperation, abstinence is the most compromised position of all.
Laeth’s experience—his social relationships, his pleasures and pains, his hopes and fears, and especially his immediate sensory world—is portrayed in dense, enigmatic language, which is one of two distinct modes of the novel’s prose. When Laeth listens to Hamas members dig their tunnels, he thinks: “the acrid nostalgia of what should have been keeps their muscles from failing.” When approaching his car: “Gray sleet stardust painted on metal curvature meant to resist nature’s might, stands on twenty-inch black aluminum legs, each autonomous from the other. Shadow-tinted LEDs gaze unblinkingly at twilight, eager to witness land ravished.” In contrast, when political action erupts—protests, underground journeys, life-or-death decisions—Husien’s language sharpens and the novel jolts into urgent clarity.
Oscillating between dense poetry and blunt prose makes Beside the Sickle Moon a particularly unruly novel. The way Husein defamiliarizes language when it comes to Laeth’s perspective is dizzying—at times even confusing—but this disorientation is also part of the novel’s force. Questioning whether “aluminum legs” are an advanced technology or Laeth’s metaphor for his car’s wheels is a sign that you, the reader, are a stranger to his world. Slipping into Laeth’s shoes is not really an option. Husien’s refusal to grant us easy access to Laeth’s experience of a multigenerational Nakba—not just a dystopian Palestine in which outsiders are all implicated—should make us question whether we can claim any fluent understanding of it. The obscurity of Laeth’s psycho-somatic experience can also be read as a rendering of collective trauma so overwhelming that it resists linguistic transmission. Poetic language, however, rejects the illusion of transparency, allowing it to capture something of the inexpressible through indirect means. We might touch it, feel it, have an impression of it, but we can’t understand it. When we feel as though we can really enter a character’s mind and body, and truly grasp them, it is too easy for a reader to accept their experiences of suffering as our own—until we put down the book. And the danger is that emotional catharsis allows an abdication of political responsibility.
In its navigation between temporal scale, poetry and prose, and political contestation, Beside the Sickle Moon rises from the ruins of the present into a future from which our current configurations of power can be seen from a clarifying distance. Although we cannot clearly experience this future from the inside, and it is one where people are bruised, fragmented, and torn, and large-scale violence has reached even more sickening heights, it is also a future where direct action and committed resistance are alive and raw.
By insisting that the fight for Palestinian liberation is still alive after a century of occupation, Husien affirms that resistance is not futile. Against the magnitude of global forces dominating our contemporary historical conditions, we, the people of the world in fierce solidarity, are our only hope.
Londiwe Gamedze writes about African and Black American literature and political history. She is a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley and writing her dissertation on political attitudes in the novels of Miriam Tlali, Bessie Head, and Nadine Gordimer.
Set in a hauntingly plausible future, where Israel has marked a century of Palestinian occupation, Thaer Husien’s debut novel, Beside the Sickle Moon: A Palestinian Story, opens with a poetic, sonically disorienting line: “I hear the rhythmic pin-drop of muffled revenge from tunnels being dug 20 meters beneath my feet.” This is the world of Laeth Muhammad Awad, a convenience store owner in a town just outside Ramallah. For a fee, Laeth has allowed Hamas to connect his store’s backroom freezer to the group’s vast underground tunnel network, an artery of resistance running just beneath the surface of daily life under Israeli occupation. The store, which Laeth inherited from his father (who now lives in Michigan), symbolizes the immense network of forces shaping our protagonist’s life. It connects him to the Palestinian resistance and a world where political distance is possible. As Laeth listens, so do we. Sound stretches across the novel like a vibrating membrane sliding between scales: the personal and political, the intimate and the epic.
As a novel of the future, Beside the Sickle Moon is, unsurprisingly, preoccupied with temporality, attempting to reconcile the vastness of macro-historical events with the immediacy of everyday life. Sonic frequency plays a crucial role in this mediation. Laeth’s world is textured with sound: global news reports (“another thousand climate migrants killed at the US-Mexico border,” says one radio broadcaster) intermingle with jazz tunes, death metal hits, Arabic love ballads, rock and roll records, the Beatles, and even the YouTube mix, “LoFi Beats to Study and Relax to,” which Laeth sardonically calls a “classic.”
Husien has structured the novel like a vinyl record; its two parts, named “Side A” and “Side B,” gesture to the illusory simplicity of binary choices. When one side is heard, the other is always just beneath. Husien highlights this tension throughout Beside the Sickle Moon, exploring the interdependence between personal and historical time, and between the competing sides within the Palestinian resistance movement, while stressing the inevitability of having to choose.
If the novel’s music spans from the past into the readerly present, its technology extends across our present into the future. Beside the Sickle Moon’s tech is eerie in its believability. Water is so scarce that the wealthy wear VitaStim wrist implants, gills that pull moisture from the air. Holograms walk among the living, advertising products, reading the news, or appearing as deceased loved ones. And the infamous sport Gladium, where players interact with androids made of ballistic gelatin, is banned by the United Nations for facilitating human cruelty beyond imagination. Yet, amidst these disconcerting advancements, Palestinian life under occupation remains disturbingly unchanged: the same long lines at Israeli Occupation Force checkpoints and the soldiers’ capricious cruelty, the same scarcity of fresh produce, the same dishearteningly fractious political landscape.
In the bewildering complexity of late capitalism’s economic organization, a striking theory has emerged from Marxist literary criticism: Futuristic science fiction may be the most fitting genre for the historical novel today. (See Frederic Jameson’s “The Historical Novel Today,” in Antinomies of Realism, Thomas Laughlin’s essay on Antinomies, and Ian Duncan’s “History and the Novel After Lukacs.”) In 1937, Georg Lukács argued that the finest historical novels center on characters whose culture, psychology, and actions emerge organically from the specific historical conditions shaped by broader social, economic, and political forces. Lukács was, in part, responding to a literary shift after the 1848 wave of European revolutions, when the bourgeoisie quietly abandoned their universal liberal ideals to consolidate dominance over the working class. He criticized generations of bourgeois authors for sidestepping their own complicity in this power imbalance by reducing historical periods in their literature to mere aesthetic backdrops, rather than engaging with them as the material conditions from which human experience, cultural forms, and social drama arise. When making this argument, Lukács was grounded in a European context where power resided within the nation-state, cementing the historical novel as a genre focused on realism and a national perspective.
Since Lukács offered this thesis, the nation-state has become an increasingly insufficient category for comprehending these broad networks of power. Contemporary writers like Husein are inventing new vantage points from which we can analyze individual human experiences about a wider totality. Science-fiction, with its “view from the future,” allows a critical historicization of our contemporary moment. It lets us see the forest as well as the trees, revealing opportunities to challenge hidden oppressions, and forcing us to confront the dangers of staying the course.
Beside the Sickle Moon chronicles Laeth’s uncertain journey through complex political terrain, depicted from the perspective of the Fanonian “native intellectual.” Though he spent his youth immersed in local activism and organizing, Laeth reflects that the “lessons from Jung and Marx,” which he encountered at university, “only helped me understand my deepest flaws, not withstand them.” (Husien leaves open the question of whether this intellectualization is to blame for Laeth’s political deflation.) Unable to bear the human toll of endless struggle, Laeth wonders if survival—perhaps even through surrender—might be the last remaining hope for Palestinian resistance. His friends, aligned with various resistance factions, bitterly disapprove. In “Side B,” Laeth embarks on a controversial path, ultimately assuming an unexpected historical role.
One of the most chilling features of Husien’s novel as history is the world’s renewed abandonment of Palestine. In a future of systemic global crisis, nations have closed ranks and shut their eyes. Israeli mines run on the slave labor of Palestinian captives, and refugee camps have become invisibilized death zones, whose existence Laeth explains here:
Once the US pivoted to ground colonization in Gaza, Israel ran into a problem. Jordan, having spent a century playing along for better oil deals, couldn’t take in more refugees. So, taking a cue from the CCP’s “cleansing” of Uyghurs, Israel set up “vocational training centers.” Four in Gaza at first, but with the world’s attention pulled to the Great Climate Migrations, they could operate in the shadows. A boost to the black market for organs kept certain pockets happy, and without any expansionist agenda, no nation dared intervene. Genocide quietly carried on.
Although sober, dryly ironic passages like this appear in Husien’s novel as descriptive context, they are crucial to the text as a historical novel. Here, Husien deftly connects the dots between international power struggles, the global political economy, and the disastrous consequences of unchecked climate change. He lays bare how national sentiment is, in the last instance, determined by the economy. Beside the Sickle Moon fuses these macro-historical forces with Laeth’s experience of daily life: his social worlds, his pleasures and pains, his hopes and fears, the array of available choices, and the choices that the resistance makes for him.
Tensions between resistance factions—familiar groups like the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, as well as fictional newcomers on the scene—drive the novel’s plot, while Laeth’s political shame and crisis of political identity form its emotional core. Despite constant reminders of his forefathers’ courage, the sanctity of martyrdom, and the unshakable hope animating Palestinian identity and resistance, Laeth’s fighting spirit has been eroded by the constant march of death. But, with his friends spread across the political map, Laeth is not without choice: his cousin Aylul is an increasingly militant actor building the ranks of Al Mubarizun, “the final resistance,” a radical, fictional secular offshoot of Hamas; his neighbors are active Hamas members; his ex-girlfriend is the daughter of a top figure in the Palestinian Authority, who are depicted as collaborators doing backdoor deals with Israel; and Laeth’s latest acquaintance has joined “The Forgotten Ones,” generally despised by both Israelis and Palestinians. The Forgotten Ones—another fictional group—promote “peaceful coexistence,” openly collaborate with Israel, and run compounds where Palestinians and Israelis live and work side-by-side. For Laeth, each of these bodies is compromised in some intractable way. The wealthy bureaucrats of the Palestinian Authority run a slick, diplomatic bureaucracy from sparkling skyscrapers among desperate urban poverty; Hamas’ tactics and religious ideology are increasingly outdated; the high-risk militant actions of Al Mubarizun are equally high in casualties; and joining The Forgotten Ones is tantamount to betrayal of history and the nation. Yet, because his world opens onto both opulence and sordid desperation, abstinence is the most compromised position of all.
Laeth’s experience—his social relationships, his pleasures and pains, his hopes and fears, and especially his immediate sensory world—is portrayed in dense, enigmatic language, which is one of two distinct modes of the novel’s prose. When Laeth listens to Hamas members dig their tunnels, he thinks: “the acrid nostalgia of what should have been keeps their muscles from failing.” When approaching his car: “Gray sleet stardust painted on metal curvature meant to resist nature’s might, stands on twenty-inch black aluminum legs, each autonomous from the other. Shadow-tinted LEDs gaze unblinkingly at twilight, eager to witness land ravished.” In contrast, when political action erupts—protests, underground journeys, life-or-death decisions—Husien’s language sharpens and the novel jolts into urgent clarity.
Oscillating between dense poetry and blunt prose makes Beside the Sickle Moon a particularly unruly novel. The way Husein defamiliarizes language when it comes to Laeth’s perspective is dizzying—at times even confusing—but this disorientation is also part of the novel’s force. Questioning whether “aluminum legs” are an advanced technology or Laeth’s metaphor for his car’s wheels is a sign that you, the reader, are a stranger to his world. Slipping into Laeth’s shoes is not really an option. Husien’s refusal to grant us easy access to Laeth’s experience of a multigenerational Nakba—not just a dystopian Palestine in which outsiders are all implicated—should make us question whether we can claim any fluent understanding of it. The obscurity of Laeth’s psycho-somatic experience can also be read as a rendering of collective trauma so overwhelming that it resists linguistic transmission. Poetic language, however, rejects the illusion of transparency, allowing it to capture something of the inexpressible through indirect means. We might touch it, feel it, have an impression of it, but we can’t understand it. When we feel as though we can really enter a character’s mind and body, and truly grasp them, it is too easy for a reader to accept their experiences of suffering as our own—until we put down the book. And the danger is that emotional catharsis allows an abdication of political responsibility.
In its navigation between temporal scale, poetry and prose, and political contestation, Beside the Sickle Moon rises from the ruins of the present into a future from which our current configurations of power can be seen from a clarifying distance. Although we cannot clearly experience this future from the inside, and it is one where people are bruised, fragmented, and torn, and large-scale violence has reached even more sickening heights, it is also a future where direct action and committed resistance are alive and raw.
By insisting that the fight for Palestinian liberation is still alive after a century of occupation, Husien affirms that resistance is not futile. Against the magnitude of global forces dominating our contemporary historical conditions, we, the people of the world in fierce solidarity, are our only hope.
Londiwe Gamedze writes about African and Black American literature and political history. She is a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley and writing her dissertation on political attitudes in the novels of Miriam Tlali, Bessie Head, and Nadine Gordimer.
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