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.
