Mai Serhan, I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter's Memoir (The American University in Cairo, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Mai Serhan (MS): I wrote this book because I knew it made a good story. I was drawn to its literary merit—its dramatic arc, high stakes, complex characters, and strong sense of place. But I also recognized that it carries meaning beyond my own experience, with the potential to resonate widely. There are seven million Palestinians in the diaspora, and while this narrative is deeply personal, it follows a collective blueprint: the 1948 Nakba.
My aim was to connect with other Palestinians, to humanize our experience, and to assert our presence in the face of political frameworks that have long sought to erase us. I was also an act of collective healing, an attempt to reclaim our narrative through the power of storytelling.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MS: The memoir explores the experience of being a second-generation Palestinian in diaspora, and how that identity shapes family dynamics; themes of exile and displacement, memory and erasure, sickness and healing are all central. It is also a text that examines Palestine in the literary imaginary, making it, in a sense, a künstlerroman (an artist's novel) that treats political imagination as transformative and narration as a form of restoration.
As for the literatures, the book belongs to Palestinian and Arab diaspora literature, memoir, postcolonial literature, feminist narratives, and fragmented, hybrid literary forms.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MS: My previous book, CAIRO: the undelivered letters (2022) is essentially a collection of letter-poems addressed to an absent editor-in-chief. Epistolarity runs through both works and so does fragmentation, though the focus differs. I Can Imagine It for Us is a memoir that unfolds as a braided narrative; one of its plotlines is a letter to my father, in which I imagine and reconstruct my village, al-Kabri in Acre, as a means of posthumous healing. Both works are written from a space of absence but, more importantly, in defiance of it. Toward the end, the scope of CAIRO: the undelivered letters expands to encompass what is happening just beyond the Egyptian border—in Gaza. As this expansion unfolds, the work begins to echo some of the central themes in my memoir: global inequality, moral decay, urban alienation, violence, and toxic masculinity.
As for how it departs, well, it leaves the motherland, Egypt, in search of the fatherland, which is Palestine, and in the process traces the transnational nature of life in the diaspora. The memoir moves between Cairo, Dubai, Beirut, Palestine, and China, where the main plot unravels.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MS: I wrote this memoir first and foremost for other Palestinians in the diaspora, who currently number around seven million, though the statistics are difficult to verify. I also hoped to reach readers in the so-called First World, particularly readers who may be emotionally distant from, or unfamiliar with, Palestine’s history, lived realities, and the ongoing struggle. Many of these readers have been shaped by Western media and education systems in which Palestine is often erased or distorted.
When I completed the book in 2022, before October 7, I could not have anticipated the global shift in attention toward Palestine. Today, I believe it speaks to an even broader audience: activists, organizers, and scholars engaged in decolonial movements; non-Palestinian Arabs reckoning with their region’s complicity, silence, or helplessness around Palestine; readers drawn to ethical reflection in times of global crisis; artists working through silence; those grieving a parent; children of exile or displacement beyond Palestine; and readers interested in hybrid, formally experimental narrative forms.
Ultimately, I want this book to register our presence in a world that has long denied it. The dominant vision of a two-state solution erases those of us in the diaspora, who are denied the right of return.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MS: Poetry is a constant in my life; it offers a welcome respite from deadline-driven projects. I’m currently translating an adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs into a graphic novel. Alongside that, I'm working on an essay about the enduring legacy of Mahmoud Darwish. I’m also developing an idea for a new novel; a phantasmagoric love story between a refugee from Gaza and a ’48 Palestinian.
J: The memoir occasionally takes dark and violent turns. Why did you choose to expose so much of the darker side of your story?
MS: Because it is all true, and, as a writer, I am always striving for the truest sentence I know. Memoir, especially, is truth-telling dressed in dramatic techniques and narrative form, so once you commit, there is no room for half-truths. I needed the story to be not just factually accurate, but emotionally precise. I did not want to simply share my experience with the reader; I wanted to fully embody it, specifically, vividly, and unapologetically. I aimed to strike that raw nerve of truth so that I hold your attention. Letting it all out was not only a narrative choice, it was necessary for healing.
Excerpt from the book
[Page 45]
Cairo, 1984
Little me is a silence, and silence is a violence severing me from my surroundings. In and out of the frame, my world wars before me, and around. Sometimes, I will say something. I will throw a word out into a car or a house and hide, watch its flames lick everything.
It’s okay to self-soothe when I’m small, but growing up isn’t easy, so I continue to suck my thumb. I suck it in cupboards, under tables, behind closed doors, but my mother still knows. I am three years old, I am five then six, and still suck my thumb. My mother tries everything to kick my habit. She gives me a teddy bear to hug, drowns my thumb in nasty-tasting oil, but my world won’t stop warring, so why should I stop sucking my thumb?
My parents send me to school so they fight in private, and I’m nervous in class. I sit in the back row hoping to hide, but attendance sheets call me out. All the other kids are rowdy, they’re all over the place, but must stay in their seats. The religion teacher, Mr. Saeed is in a silk shirt with silver threading and a mustache, glossed and trimmed. He walks slowly up and down the aisles, arms crossed behind him:
Today is Quran recital day. You will recite verses 1–50 from Surat an-Nisa’. I hope you learnt it by heart, because if you didn’t—
He stops, turns his beady eyes on us and calls the first name, then the second and third in no particular order. It’s a game of Russian Roulette and I see all the heads dunk a little. The girl with a long brown ponytail gets up and recites something about fear, women, two or three or four wives. I raise my hand. Mr. Saeed, I need the toilet, I say, and inside that toilet booth I take a minute or three or four to suck my thumb.
I’m seven years old, I’m eight and still have not kicked the habit. The kids in school catch me sucking. That boy, Hussein, I’ll never forget his name, crawls under the table and finds me there. He finds it funny.
[Page 59]
Acre, pre-1948
You never liked school, Baba. Maybe because the house in al-Kabri was home, you preferred to stay there. Your mother would go around chitchatting with all the household’s working women, the ones filling barrels with rainwater and the ones boiling bay leaf. The ones tending the cinchona trees and grating the oranges.
Your brothers all went to school without a fuss. Your sister, Nadia, did so well in her studies that your father sent her to Jerusalem to attend the exclusive Schmidt’s Girls College, where she learned German and English. But you, every day at 7:30 a.m., the same scene. You would lie on the floor like dead weight. Your father would try to lift you up, and he would fail.
You will go to school, he would say.
I won’t.
He would pull you by the arm, by the ear.
Why not?
I don’t want to.
Why not!
It gives me a headache.
Your father, an effendi, son of an effendi, son of an effendi could not wrap his head around the idea of an uneducated son. What was even more troubling was that you, a little boy, could get your own way with him.
I put your photo next to his, Baba, and I know why you could get away with it: because you looked exactly like him. The only differences were his moustache and tarbouche. With him you got your way because you were his shadow, long and dark ahead of him. Beyond that land, those years, were the unknown streets where you would roam towards a point of no return. He saw it in you, and it frightened him.
[Page 23]
Beirut, 1994
I am seventeen years old when I leave my mother in Cairo to reunite with the Serhan family in Beirut. The Lebanese Civil War has just ended, and my Palestinian clan descends on the city from all over the world: from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Jordan, and from Cyprus, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Bullets on building facades expose abandoned war sites. Beirut windows are gaping holes that look into rooms ripped into two. Rubble, rust, and peeling paint line the streets, where big black dogs still prowl. However, Beirut has turned its ravaged buildings into nightclubs where everyone dances on tables and forget the scars of war.
I tag along to a taverna where the family orders everything on the menu and copious amounts of araq, a Levantine spirit made of anise. Araq clouds cups and minds fast, as I am about to learn. I am intimidated by this international set called my family. My male cousins are handsome and worldly. They’ve been sent to private boarding schools in the UK and Ivy League universities in the United States. The girls are brazen and beautiful. They color their hair with Sun-In and have boyfriends called George and Jean-Michel who, behind our family’s back, pick them up on motorcycles in the middle of the night. My uncles have an easy elegance about them. They sit back and smile while their glamorous wives cackle. The party is boisterous as they make toast after toast.
To Beirut!
Long live Lebanon!
To Palestine, one day!
I watch quietly and squirm as I sip the bitter-sweet drink. I’ve never tasted alcohol before. My father never allowed it, but he seems happy surrounded by family, exceptionally so. A few cups down and a sound finally comes out of me. I stand up and ask everybody to be quiet, shhhh, I have something to say. I am awkward and scrawny and no one’s used to me initiating conversation. They stop to listen. I get up on the table, raise my cup, and knock the chandelier. My cup cracks. Baba is amused. He brings me another cup and pours me another drink. I take a sip and proceed to tell a joke in my Egyptian accent. The adults love my Egyptian accent. It conjures up the golden age of Egyptian cinema with its legends such as Abdel Halim Hafez and Faten Hamama, and the glorious years of Pan-Arabism and Gamal Abdel Nasser. I am more than the sum of my parts to them right now.
Ssshh, listen. I’ll tell you a joke: A mummy covered in chocolate has been discovered in Egypt. Archeologists believe it may be Pharaoh Rocher.
I watch them laugh so hard they nearly fall off their chairs.
Nizar, your daughter is drunk!
On the way back to my aunt’s apartment in Tallet al-Khayyat, Baba warns me not to tell my mother he let me drink, but I’m neither listening nor walking straight. He carries my limp body on his shoulder five floors up to my aunt’s apartment while I sing and sway my upside-down head of hair. Israeli missiles have slammed into the hills of Beirut recently, destroying two power stations and plunging the city into darkness, but Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal says he will pay the full cost of rebuilding them. Until then, Baba has to walk up with me on his shoulder.
The next morning over a breakfast feast, Baba’s heart is full from last night’s communion. He summons all my cousins, my sister, and me to line up in front of him.
When I call on you, he says, I want you to step forward and tell me your full names and where you’re from.
When it’s my turn, I step forward toward him and feel confused. I cannot tell whether the words rolling off my tongue are new or old, whether I’m lost or found.
Mai Nizar Fares Nayef Mohamed Ali Kheir Serhan, I say, Palestinian from al-Kabri.
[Page 193]
Limassol, 1989
Teta wears her scarf “babushka” style to head to the farmer’s market. It’s a large triangle of silk that she ties in a neat knot under her chin.
Teta’s mannerisms change once she puts on the scarf to head out. She develops strange ticks. Something about her breaks. She shrinks and her back bends. The matriarch recoils around a sudden, inward fear.
But then again, maybe it is not the scarf. Maybe it is the fact that she is leaving her place, getting into a car, with someone else at the wheel, steering the course. Perhaps it’s about the road and the fear that it might be one-way, out.
There are other signs, like when she sits next to me in the back seat of a car, how she mumbles versus from the Quran and slips the tips of her fingers under my thigh. I always try to move my leg away, but her fingers follow me. Eventually, I relent, uncomfortably, and the warmth of my body, anchoring her hand down, reassuring her of my presence, carries her safely through the journey.