The Inheritance | on What Women Inherit

[Young Feminists, the Book by My Bedside] Sahar Khalifeh’s novel The Inheritance

Yousra Feriel

When I began searching for a book written by a feminist Arab author, I didn’t expect the hardest part would be finding one translated into Korean. After some research, I discovered The Inheritance by Sahar Khalifeh, one of Palestine’s most celebrated feminist writers and the first woman to write about Palestinian women’s lives not just as victims of occupation, but as complex individuals caught between love, politics, and patriarchy. Her works often explore how patriarchy, colonialism, and class intertwine in daily life, especially for women living under occupation.

A colour photograph, taken in the 1970s, shows Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh. Photo: Palestinian Museum Digital Archive (Jerusalem Times Archive), Item 139308. URL: palarchive.org

 

What drew me to The Inheritance was how Khalifeh wove together the public and the private. Although she opposed the occupation, she wasn’t afraid to criticize patriarchal traditions within her own society. She wasn’t afraid to be both, a nationalist seeking liberation and a feminist fighting for women’s dignity.

As someone from Algeria, a country with its own colonial and nationalist history, it was easy to relate to this book. I could put myself in the author’s shoes and feel her rage, anger, disappointment, regret, and sadness. Both our societies share similar gender expectations.

Through Zayna, the protagonist, I could also recognize the deeper kind of displacement that comes from moving between worlds. After years abroad, she returns to her father’s village and finds herself caught between belonging and distance, close enough to understand, but too changed to truly fit in. Her gaze becomes that of an outsider looking in.

Once you develop a certain level of self-awareness, you can’t help but become an observer of everything around you. Zayna lives that way throughout the novel. Observation can become a way to cope. To me, her constant observation felt like a quiet attempt to understand those around her, and maybe, in some unspoken way, to be understood. But that kind of awareness is a lonely place to live in.

It’s also what makes her identity so complicated. In America, she is the Palestinian woman marked by difference. In Palestine, she is seen as too Western, too independent. She doesn’t fully belong to either world. And how could she? America, built on colonization, stands in direct contrast to her Palestinian identity, one shaped by resistance and dispossession. For her, feminism and national liberation are not separate struggles; both come from the same fight to exist with dignity in a world built to erase you.

The cover image of al-Mirath (1997), a novel by Sahar Khalifeh—one of the leading voices in Palestinian literature and a prominent feminist writer—and the cover image of its Korean translation, The Inheritance (translated by Song Kyung-sook, Asia Publishers, 2009

The Women’s Stories

Khalifeh sets her story in the West Bank after the Oslo Accords, a time when many Palestinians were returning home with dreams of rebuilding. But what they find and what Zayna encounters is a society still broken by inequality and control.

Through Zayna’s visit to her father’s village, the reader meets women whose lives reveal the invisible costs of that brokenness.

There’s Nahleh, who spent years in Kuwait working to fund her brothers’ education. When she returns home after the Gulf War, she finds herself unwanted, too old to marry, too independent to fit in. Her bitterness fills her small room as she says, “They squeezed me like a lemon and then left me behind.”

Then there’s Futna, Zayna’s father’s seventh wife, who becomes pregnant through artificial insemination in an Israeli hospital, hoping to secure her place by bearing a male heir. When she goes into labor amid military restrictions and blocked roads, no help can reach her. She dies giving birth, and the child conceived through the occupier’s system and born into chaos becomes a symbol of how the personal and political are inseparable, how even birth, the most intimate act, unfolds under the weight of occupation.

There’s also Samira, an educated woman living in Ramallah who tries to live freely but finds that modern life offers only a different kind of confinement; one shaped by gossip, surveillance, and moral policing. And Ruqayya, a Christian woman who falls in love with a Muslim man, discovers that love itself can become forbidden territory. Their story ends not because of occupation, but because of their own society’s fear of crossing boundaries.

Together, these women form a chorus, different voices echoing the same exhaustion, strength, and quiet endurance that define life under both patriarchy and occupation.

The scene that stayed with me the most is when Sitt Amira hands the baby to the Israeli soldiers and says, “Thank you very much, this is your share.” It’s both a desperate cry and a cynical act at the same time; anger, grief, and resignation intertwined. That moment captures everything the women in this story endure. Their pain feels familiar to me, echoing the stories I’ve heard and witnessed in Algeria. And I believe Korean readers, too, will find parts of their own reality reflected in these women’s experiences.

Activists from the Palestine Peace Solidarity Network holding a banner that reads, ‘No Palestinian liberation without women’s liberation, and no women’s liberation without Palestinian liberation!’ at the National Workers’ Rally for International Women’s Day in March 2024. (Provided by the author)

What We Inherit as Women

Reading The Inheritance made me think about some of what I’ve inherited as a woman from Algeria. This book didn’t change my view of feminism but it added nuance to it,  especially from a modern, post-colonial perspective.

I don’t think this book is meant to offer solutions. Some books do; this one teaches. It forces readers to look closely, to feel, and to recognize the weight women carry.

As a woman, I am familiar with that inheritance too. We are born into rage, fear, and shame but also into resistance. A woman’s very existence is radical, and being a woman is a rebellious act.

Some readers might see Khalifeh’s criticism of her own society as misplaced, but I think it’s honest. Her inner critic makes the story more truthful. Khalifeh shows how patriarchy within Palestinian society becomes a weakness the colonizer can exploit, how internal oppression serves external control. Liberation without equality isn’t liberation at all.

I would recommend The Inheritance to young Korean feminists because it shows that women’s experiences, even across distance and language, are deeply connected. The details change, but the struggle, the endurance, and the will to live on our own terms remain the same.

Original Article : https://ildaro.com/10334