Sat, Oct 25, 2025
The Woman from Tantoura
A testament to Palestinian memory, exile, and women’s quiet resistance
Her name is al-Tanturiya. Her name is Palestine.
Radwa Ashour’s novel Al-Tanturiya (The Woman from Tantoura) centers on the Palestinian woman Ruqayya, whose testimony offers an intimate account of her family’s suffering after the Nakba. Urged by her son to write, Ruqayya speaks in a first-person voice so vivid it reads like memoir rather than fiction, echoing the lived reality of many Palestinians. In 1948, the massacre in her village, Tantoura, forced her family into exile. Now as an older woman, she looks back on her life that stretched across Palestine, Lebanon, the Gulf, and Alexandria, marked by children and grandchildren, friendships that cross borders and decades, and a lifelong, unfulfilled longing to return. Ashour’s beautiful writing often stands in striking contrast to the harshness of the events she conveys.
This is a story of hardship and suffering, but also resilience; of the losses that made her loved ones martyrs; of displacement, dispossession, and injustice; and, still, of hope: the joy of newborns, the song of weddings, and the stubborn preservation of a culture under pressure to disappear.
Ruqayya remembers discovering that her mother wore the key to their home in Tantoura on a cord around her neck, which she later passed to Ruqayya. What startled her most was learning that many women in the refugee camps, without meetings or plans, started the same shared ritual.
The ending is both painful and hopeful. On the occasion of Lebanon’s liberation, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon travel south to the border to glimpse Palestine and meet loved ones across the barbed wire. There, Ruqayya unexpectedly finds her son Hasan. He lifts his infant daughter, also named Ruqayya, toward her at the fence, and the grandmother gifts the child a pendant inscribed “Al-Tantouriya,” along with the house key she has guarded for decades. The gesture turns memory into inheritance, a clear testament of Palestinian resilience. And that little baby, lifted into the air above the damned barbed wire that has separated what was once one, and shattered thousands of lives, stands as a stubborn symbol of hope.