Mornings in Jenin
Mornings in Jenin
Humanity ought to speak louder than war.
Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin traces the fate of three generations of a Palestinian family caught in a history of displacement, violence, and unending conflict from the beginning of the twentieth century onward. Through an intimate family narrative, the novel gives voice to lives marked by the loss of home, refugee camps, and the disintegration of everyday existence, while at the same time bearing witness to endurance, love, and the preservation of dignity under impossible conditions. At the centre of the story lies the disappearance of a young boy and his later fate on the opposite side of the conflict, in a world where systems reduce human beings to numbers and real places to anonymous points on the map of occupied land.
The novel illuminates the political reality of occupation, dispossession, and human loss through the everyday experience of those for whom war is not an abstract concept but a continuous condition of survival. At the same time, it explores questions of memory, the burden of the past, and the persistence of humaneness in the face of devastation. The stage adaptation by Žiga Divjak and Gregor Zorc draws on the Palestinian storytelling tradition and is set within a temporary refuge, where a family narrative intertwines with documentary traces of life, with photographs, and with objects from a lost world. Divjak’s first production for the Maribor Drama will continue the line of his socially engaged theatre, foregrounding questions of community, inequality, and responsibility, while confronting audiences with the distance between here and elsewhere.
Fran Žižek Hall
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