McCann visited Palestine and Israel in 2015 where he heard the stories of two fathers, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who had lost their daughters to the conflict. The proposition that an outsider could understand, rather than experience, this colonial reality appeared to me to be as redundant as the notion of an ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ account of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I had always been of the view that the colonial experience had been so deeply engraved on Palestinians that any attempt by an outsider to depict this ‘lived experience’ would be artificial, contrived and even futile. I must confess that I did not come to this novel with high expectations. “Apeirogon: A Novel”, which was written by an Irish author, Colum McCann, and which engages with the experience of bereaved parents on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, could possibly be viewed as a further chapter and extension of this controversy. Cultural appropriation has recently become a hot topic in the publishing industry, and it has dovetailed with wider controversies about race relations and the right of any one individual or group to speak on behalf of another.
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