One of the great tragedies of Palestine is how little most outsiders know of everyday Palestinians. Journalist Di Cintio narrows this gap by recounting his nearly 20 years of visits to the West Bank and Gaza, weaving conversations around the writings of Palestine’s many literary figures ... A timely and exquisite book.
In Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Life in Contemporary Palestine, the Canadian Di Cintio travels to Palestine to see how al-Nakba — or 'the catastrophe,' the displacement of Palestinians after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War — has shaped Palestinians’ everyday lives ... Pay No Heed to the Rockets ends where it began, with a dedication to the people of Gaza. Despite poverty and war, Gaza is the only place where Palestinians live as Palestinians among Palestinians ... (Cintio) offers vivid portraits of Palestine that transcend the fragmentary glimpses of poverty and violence that the region is often reduced to in Western media.
... marks the successful culmination of a personal journey in which Di Cintio strove 'to see Palestinians as a people unto themselves, not merely as one half of a warring binary. Not in opposition but in situ' ... Pushing back against such overreach, as the writers in Pay No Heed to the Rockets are doing, enables Palestinian society to retain a measure of psychological health ... Nothing could be more important, as the sad truth is that the occupation shows no sign of coming to an end.
Canadian writer Marcello Di Cintio notes in his stunning, important new book Pay No Heed to the Rockets something the vast majority of his readers might never have seriously questioned in their own thinking: the Palestine of the weekly news headlines completely obscures the Palestine of living daily reality.
Di Cintio first traveled to Israel in 1999. When he returned again in 2015, it was to seek out Palestinian writers to learn how they, rather than activists and politicians, saw the Arab-Israeli conflict. In this literary travelogue, the author records his encounters with Arab writers from the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip ... Interweaving history and politics, the book introduces Western readers to the modern Palestinian literary scene while celebrating the rich diversity of voices that comprise it ... Illuminating reading from a highly engaged author.
Di Cintio offers a powerful and perceptive reflection on Palestinian culture in a memoir that mixes travelogue and literary appreciation. He is surprised to travel through Israel and the occupied territories and discover so many 'brokers of beauty': poets, playwrights, and novelists producing stories of growing up, falling in love, disapproving parents, having conflicts over religion, and breaking rigid gender roles ... This is a refreshing and hopeful reminder that on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are countless people who wish to live their lives free of the hatred borne of geopolitical conflict.
