No One Knows Their Blood Type
Unlike most Palestinian fiction, No One Knows Their Blood Type (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2024) does not prioritise the Palestinian anti-colonial resistance or portray its protagonists as central to the Palestinian struggle. The reader is introduced to relatable characters with relatable traits, and the promise of enough intrigue to keep reading about this dysfunctional family dynamic that is told through the viewpoint of several narrators but mostly by Jumana, the protagonist in the novel.
This is not to say that the Palestinian context is irrelevant – indeed some situations are shaped by absence caused by political obligations. The book is also steeped in the colonial violence and limitations imposed by Israel upon the Palestinian people. However, the author introduces the reader to the more mundane albeit dramatic situations that are largely overlooked in literature that amplifies the Palestinian resistance. In Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s novel, the characters are relating to their immediate narratives, their immediate surroundings and complications. There are no references of magnitude of Palestinian resistance; instead, daily life and personal narratives bring forth and shape Jumana’s story, who discovers that is she is likely not the daughter of the man she was brought up to think was her father.
The book opens with hospital scenes as Jumana’s father dies and his death certificate reveals an O positive bloody type, while Jumana is AB positive. Her soon to be husband Suheil points out the discrepancy but is not concerned. Jumana, on the other hand, is faced with the possibility of a scientific confirmation possibly upending what she believed to be true of her family life, even though through her narrations, we see several ambiguities emerging.Based upon recollections, descriptions and anecdotes, the book does not follow a chronological order. Jumana and her sister Yara were born in Beirut. Their early childhood is swathed in rumours and at a very young age, they are sent off to live with their aunt in Amman. Jumana and Yara’s father is a PLO officer whose presence is very sporadic as he lives in Spain, leaving his sister to provide for his daughters. It is mostly through the aunt’s indignation at caring for the two girls that the PLO occasionally features in context, due to several visits to the office in Amman asking for financial help in the girls’ upbringing.
The mother, Amahl, is further displaced from the family narrative as the children had been taken from her by their father, while the aunt refuses to engage on an emotional level with the girls’ questions about their mother. It is only through Amahl’s chapter in which she narrates her story, that the reader is acquainted with the turbulence of a loveless marriage brought about by allegiance.
Eventually, the children are sent to Tunisia to live with their father, ushering in a new saga of frustration, at times violent. On one hand, Abu al-Saeed is portrayed as a single father taking care of two daughters; Yara being similar to him in temperament while Jumana makes herself unreadable through a quiet innocence. Despite their differences, the siblings are united in protecting themselves from their father’s anger, much of it brought on by the political situation within the PLO as well as not knowing how to relate to his two daughters.
The book also exposes the fact that Abu al-Saeed questions his paternity when it comes to Jumana; an issue which all three grapple with in different ways. For Abu al-Saeed, it manifested in questioning Yara about a particular timeline. For Yara, the paternity issue raised more questions that illustrate her preoccupation with unresolved trauma and what should be done with it. Jumana, on the other hand, considers taking action by approaching a Jewish clinic for a DNA test.
What makes these narratives so compelling is the open-ended way in which rather than resolution, the characters continue living their lives, or situations, in ways that make complete truth discovery elusive. At the same time, the characters show engagement with their immediate preoccupations. All carry their own shard of trauma and learnt behaviours that become coping skills depending which view one takes. All are struggling to survive in their relational circumstances. And while Palestine is very much embedded within the book, the engagement one finds from the protagonists with Palestine is not the one that is usually lauded and illustrated, but the quiet being of people who have enough preoccupations in their life and also happen to be Palestinian.
Jumana’s reflections are mostly rooted in emotion and quiet observation, she is the one looking for answers to a certain extent, while the other protagonists either maintain facades or levels of dissociation. Jumana is conscious of restrictions of freedom of movement, and how using the train because she has a Jerusalem residency permit through marriage might brand her a “normaliser”.
Yara, on the other hand, has a harder time associating with a past that is not of her remembrance. When her father decides they should return to Palestine, she ponders, “What’s strange is that the word ‘return’ doesn’t exactly apply to me and Jumana. How do you return somewhere you’ve never been. I don’t understand why we have to feel how everyone wants us to feel.” This dissociation is reflected in most of Yara’s interactions; almost a reluctance to disturb what is the immediate.
Given the absence of immediate political ramifications in the novel, although the politics is still present, return is almost like a chore for Yara. However, it is also Yara who is resistant to returning to discovery, for example, and is reluctant and scared to see Jumana on a possible quest to discover the truth about her parents. But Palestine is also made up of multitudes of narratives, many of them silent because the colonial context in all its violence takes precedence. This book is a reminder of the silent stories that are obscured, of the humanity that is hidden at a political cost.
