'I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
- Venue
- Main Building, SOAS
- Room
- RG01
- Event type
- Seminar & Event highlights
About this event
A young woman’s search for connection with her estranged father, her family’s past, and the Palestinian homeland she can never visit.
Mai Serhan lives in Cairo and has never been to Palestine, the country from which her family was expelled in 1948. She is 24 years old when one morning she receives a phone call from her estranged father. His health is failing and he might not have long to live, so he asks her to join him in China where he runs a business empire about which Mai knows nothing. Mai agrees to go in the hopes that they will become close, but this strange new country is as unknowable to her as her father. There, the ghosts of the Nakba come to haunt them both. With this grief comes violence, and a tragic death brings a whole new meaning to the word erasure.
In a narrative made rich by its layers of fragmentation, as befitting the splintered and disordered existence of exile over generations, this courageous memoir spans Egypt, Lebanon, Dubai, China and, of course, Palestine. It is filled with bitter tragedy and loss and woven through with an understated humour and much grace.
Registration
This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
About the speakers
Mai Serhan: is a Palestinian-Egyptian writer, editor, translator and creative writing tutor. She holds a BA in English and Comparative Literature and MA in Arabic Literature from the American University in Cairo, and a masters in creative writing from the University of Oxford. She is the author of the poetry collection CAIRO: the undelivered letters (Diwan Publishing, 2025), which won the 2022 Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Prize, and the memoir, I Can Imagine it For Us (AUC Press, 2025), a finalist for the 2022 Narratively Memoir Prize. She is also the translator of This is What Has Come to Be, a collection of Sayyed Darwish’s 1919 song lyrics, and The Thief & The Dogs a graphic novel adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel.
Omar Robert Hamilton is a novelist and filmmaker working between Europe and the Arab world. Born in London, he moved to Cairo with the outbreak of revolution in 2011 and produced documentaries about the uprising that generated millions of views. His first novel, The City Always Wins (Faber & Faber, 2017) was based on those experiences and won numerous awards including the Prix de Littérature by the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. He is a co-founder and current Festival Director of the Palestine Festival of Literature. Most recently, he is the co-editor of You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Writings of Alaa Abd el Fattah (Fitzcarraldo, 2021).
Organisers
This event has been organised by the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS and the Palestine Festival of Literature.
Image credit: Djex93 / CC BY-SA 4.0
