Most Westerners know little about Palestinians beyond the headlines that portray Palestinians one-dimensionally as militants, or refugees, or victims. In general, too few autobiographies by Palestinians are available in English to adequately fill the gap. In the transition already underway that will bring the Western reader more books by Palestinians about Palestinians, Sami al Jundi and Jen Marlowe's co-authored book "The Hour of Sunlight" is an outstanding milestone.
Walking through Sami's life with him as he himself remembers it provides a vivid, believable, lucid, and painfully honest window into one man's experience in a world turned upside down. It's not ultimately about politics, although politics plays a role here; it's more about hometown and families and childhood and adolescence; about friendship and the passage into adulthood and the search for one's true vocation in life. That there is also war, hunger, trauma, imprisonment, displacement, loss and exile in this tale takes nothing away from the universal appeal of one man's own very personal story. Some aspects, including Sami al Jundi's youthful experience as a kind of accidental would-be bomber, are both terribly sad and also poignantly humorous in deconstructing our notions of "terrorism" in a land under military occupation. Nothing here will be foreign to any reader with an open heart.
The prison education system set up and run by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, the school that made a Ghandian peace activist of Sami al Jundi, is an inspirational story of transcending limitations and transmuting incarceration into a kind of victory.
Both co-authors worked with Seeds of Peace; Sami al Jundi was instrumental in its founding and development, and Jen Marlowe joined the staff later on. The reader interested in the life cycle patterns of nonprofit social justice organizations will find a bonus in the last part of the book, which offers a fascinating case study of the interplay of politics, funding, security issues, local grassroots action, overseas management, and the inevitable clash of agendas.
Highly recommended!
