“I am twenty-four years old when they amputate Baba’s foot.” So begins Mai Serhan’s I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir. She sits by her father’s bedside in a cramped bedroom in Beirut, trying to care for him, but she cannot mend what is broken: he is a man severed from both land and body, his missing foot a brutal, haunting echo of a lost country. 

Then the story takes flight. We follow father and daughter to China, at the cusp of its global economic rise, where he is said to have built an export empire; to Abu Dhabi in 1981, in an expat compound “flanked by Palestinian aunts and cousins left and right;” to salons of turn-of-the-century Cairo; to Beirut’s war-scarred streets, cemeteries, and underground clubs; to Dubai’s dizzying towers and international ad agencies. Yet everywhere, they remain unanchored—except to the one place Serhan has never been, the place her father can never return: Acre, Palestine, before 1948. “Everywhere I go, I go looking for my village in Acre,” Serhan writes, “and when I don’t find it, I close my eyes, I imagine it for us.” 

Bringing this razed village to life is at once an act of radical imagination and meticulous research—the recreation of an origin story. Writing from post-memory, Serhan carries the traces of a home she has never inhabited, while engaging with oral histories and archival accounts. As a poet, she revives this place in language, layering epistolary notes, essayistic vignettes, and lyrical reflection, writing in fragments that echo how generations of Palestinian families are alienated by the rupture of exile. She weaves her family’s historical narrative seamlessly into the story, evoking a cyclical rhythm so that no matter where she travels, the story always returns to Palestine. 

— Olivia Katrandjian for Guernica 

Olivia Katrandjian: This is a deeply personal memoir, but it also speaks to the collective story of Palestine and its diaspora. What motivated you to take on such a task?

Mai Serhan: No one had written a story about two Palestinians in China, which is where my main plot unfolds. It pushed the theme of alienation, that cutting off, to its extreme. I didn’t see myself reflected in much of Palestinian literature either; the olive tree, the key of return, the freedom fighter—these were not metaphors that spoke to my lived experience. I belong to a generation twice removed from the origin home. We navigate different metaphors now; airplanes, transit spaces, international calling codes. We carry Palestine intellectually and emotionally, even as we remain physically cut off from it.

I began writing in 2021, before October 7, at a time when the Palestinian cause was practically forgotten. Palestinians spoke out about their suffering under Israeli occupation, but the world largely ignored it. The siege, apartheid, and settlements were met with silence. One of my goals was to reach the Western reader who had never encountered “Palestine” in their education or media, or who had only seen it through a distorted lens. 

On a personal level, I was still grieving the loss of my father and the way exile had shaped his life. He never found his footing after his expulsion in 1948. He passed away in transit, in a hotel room in Bangkok, far from any place or people he knew. These in-between spaces are not meant to hold memory, and in them, his life seemed to dissolve. His death, in that hotel room, exemplified a vanishing; a person passing through the world without leaving a trace, without acknowledgement. Disappearance, for me, is endemic to the Palestinian experience, not only in the loss of land, but the erosion of continuity, recognition, and trace. I wanted his life, and his death, to be accounted for.

In his poem “Identity Card,” Mahmoud Darwish writes, Put it on record / I am an Arab; I felt the need to put my own account on record as well, to acknowledge, to honor, to remember, and to preserve. 

More than anything, this project was a way to connect with the roughly seven million Palestinians living in the diaspora. My story is specific to me, but it gestures toward a broader Palestinian condition. I hoped it would resonate, make someone across the ocean feel less alone. 

Olivia Katrandjian: At the end of your memoir, you do exactly that—you “put it on record,” as Darwish writes,  with the words, “I am from Acre.” The memoir then breaks into a poem, formatted as a column in the middle of the page to suggest a road, or a roadblock. The sudden switch to poetry coincides with your proclamation of your identity, in a moment of ownership and reclamation. Was this your intention?

Mai Serhan: Yes, that moment marks the point at which I finally take control of a narrative that had, until then, been overwhelmingly chaotic and stripped of agency. It is also the only place in the book where I speak directly about Gaza. The shift to poetry felt necessary because poetry demands a different kind of attention. This change in mode announces a rupture with what came before and signals a step into my own authorial voice. Because the memoir up to that point is full of digressions, placing the poem at the center of the page was a deliberate way of grounding the reader, both visually and formally.

Olivia Katrandjian: Tell me about the creative process behind writing this book. 

Mai Serhan: I had been carrying this story for over twenty years, long enough to reflect and gain perspective. By the time I was ready to write it, it felt like a full-term baby, ready to be born. From the moment I began thinking about its shape, certain things were instinctive. I knew the personal and the political would be inextricably linked; that the main plot would unfold in China, which naturally presented itself as a metaphor for displacement; that the narrative would be fragmented, mirroring the fractured Palestinian experience in the diaspora; that it would resist a linear path in order to remain faithful to the journey; and that it would be a hybrid work—both because the Palestinian experience exists outside the conventions of genre, and because, as a writer, I prefer to draw freely across forms and modes to achieve the most powerful effect.

I worked largely from family narratives that were handed down to me, literature I had read, and whatever research I found about my village, and when the story required me to fill in gaps, I drew on post-memory, dramatic techniques, language, and imagination. To me, post-memory is the space between knowing and imagining. I have never been to my village in Akka and I did not experience Palestine first-hand, but through proximity, careful observation and interaction with family, I inherited a cultural reservoir of images, behaviours, tonalities, and ways of living. Most of all, I inherited an incurable longing, and that emotional weight has shaped my inner landscape and sense of self. That is why you’ll find the story moving through an affective terrain, where the intimate and the geopolitical are completely intertwined. To imagine, then, was a process of bridging the gap, between what I know and feel, and what could be and what is possible. 

Once I realized there were three plotlines, the question became how to create the narrative braid. The braiding itself, however, was largely intuitive, connecting the fragments through associative thought. I was able to jump, temporally and spatially, between pre-1948 Akka, China in 2000, and Cairo in the 1980s, sometimes through an image, at other times through a feeling, an idea, or a word. The structure first came to me as a dramatic arc, with all three plotlines complicating, rising, and resolving in tandem, echoing one another throughout. The traditional dramatic arc was essential because it held the larger narrative together in ways that its inner workings—largely poetic in sensibility—didn’t.

I paid attention to the music of language and how it reflects mood and atmosphere, creating immersion. I worked with vivid, specific, and sensory detail to turn what I imagined of my family history into something concrete, something the mind’s eye can clearly see and feel.

Olivia Katrandjian: You began writing this memoir in 2021 and completed it before October 7, 2023. How did the political situation impact your publication process?

Mai Serhan: I secured representation with one of London’s most esteemed literary agencies in 2023. By October of that year, the manuscript was ready to be pitched. The Frankfurt Book Fair would have been the perfect opportunity to pitch it, but the organizers  chose to spotlight Israeli voices while canceling four Palestinian events, including one for Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. At the London Book Fair the following March, my agent told me publishers were looking for work that sells— self-help, cookbooks, and influencer content—while Palestine remained a “sensitive” topic. By mid 2024, half a year into the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the publishing industry abroad, namely in Europe and America, was still catching up to the urgency of the moment, and I did not want to wait. So I pivoted toward the regional market, seeking publication in the Arab world.

When I pitched the manuscript to the American University in Cairo Press, it received an instant and unanimous yes, and the publication date was set just nine months later, which is exceptional in the publishing world. It felt like the book had found its home. There was a discussion about how to classify the work and whether labeling it a memoir might make it harder to sell, but I wanted ownership of the story, and my publisher agreed it was compelling enough to stand on its own, even though I was not a public figure.

Olivia Katrandjian: Palestinians are expected to be perfect victims: they must endure the injustice of occupation without resisting in order to gain sympathy from the international community, an approach which leaves out the everyday complexities and contradictions that make Palestinian lives fully human. In stories, the best characters are often the most complicated ones. How did you navigate this tension while writing your memoir?

Mai Serhan: I agree. The literature that has stayed with me most is always filled with conflicted characters who carry both light and shadow. They come alive when we explore their fears, vulnerabilities, motives, and contradictions. My relationship with my father was deeply conflicted as well; it was tender and anguished at once. He was a victim of a great historical injustice, yes, but he never allowed it to define him. Even after his foot was amputated, he didn’t give in. He went back to China and worked just as hard. This resilience is what makes him so compelling to me, both as a daughter and as a writer. He loved us, without question, but his capacity to love was constrained by his own trauma. That kind of love will end up hurting the people closest to you. 

My father didn’t just lose a home, he lost his sense of orientation, both geographically and emotionally. He came from a long lineage of landowners, so his connection to Akka ran profoundly deep, and haunted him wherever he went. The Serhan family were prominent leaders; oral histories, literature, and family accounts all attest to this. For this name to be rendered weightless and without currency meant that every attempt at reinvention, wherever he went, ultimately failed—including his effort to build a home for his own family. This is why the origin home in Akka is at the heart of the story. It makes sense of the scars. This is also why the narrative weave is so important, to juxtapose these events and in doing so, allow you to draw your own conclusions. 

To write this story from within was, for me, to free it, to affirm that we are allowed to define ourselves on our own terms, not through an external gaze or in reaction to a dominant narrative. Agency and authorship reside there.

But beyond the political considerations, the decision to write is always prompted by a question. Mine was, how do I reconcile? I wanted to offer grace, to humanize my father by looking at who he was through what he’s endured, and the coping mechanisms he built to survive. His violent dislocation in 1948 shaped him, and in turn, shaped me.

Olivia Katrandjian: As you try to reconcile with not only the different sides of your father, but with your shared history, the memoir moves restlessly across time and place, evoking a sense of running. Decades after being exiled from his Palestinian village, your father was still trying to outrun his ghosts, and you seem to inherit these ghosts from him, this need to run. At one point, you write, “Baba, I know you don’t want to look back at tapered leaves or torched homes, but it is all in you, there is nowhere to hide. Time is about to stop, so stop running, hear me out.” Did writing this memoir allow you to confront your past in a way that your father was unable to do? 

Mai Serhan: Yes, absolutely. My father showed me what I did not want to be. He was a chronic escapist who paid a terribly high price for always running, for never confronting the past and its enduring effect. I ran in the opposite direction, backwards, toward that wound, to process what he could not. Writing the memoir became a way of facing what he had always suppressed, of telling the story to heal him, even after his death.

Reading Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun was a turning point. The idea that one can stay alive through storytelling and recounting the lives of Palestinians one tale at a time, struck me deeply. Writing became my way of restoring what history and exile had scattered, assembling fragments of memory, giving voice to the silence that haunted my family, and carving out a place where we can exist fully, even if on the page. 

Olivia Katrandjian: You carve out a place for your family to exist, together, on the page, and in doing so, you paint a picture of Acre in evocative detail: you describe a spring as “steaming hot in winter, like bubbling honeycomb,” and how “the mountains would fade at sunset and blend in with the colors of the sky, orange and lavender.” What was your research process like?

Mai Serhan: Well, I have never been to Palestine, so I had little material to work with. My father spoke of horse stables and a wine cellar, but rarely elaborated. My aunt, now the only surviving member of my family’s Nakba generation, lives in Beirut. She has dementia and no longer remembers who I am; I have to remind her every few minutes. Yet she remembers Palestine vividly, recounting her life there and her exodus again and again. I never saw her fading memory as a limitation. On the contrary, I came to understand it as a living testament to the systematic erasure of our history. I wanted to embed memory loss into the narrative and explore a path forward for our generation through post-memory. It created an urgent need to gather the fragments before they disappeared.

In 2021, I went to Beirut to interview a few key people. I visited Abu Fadi, my father’s only confidante in south Beirut. I met him near the Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp, where ninety-five percent of the refugees come from my village, al-Kabri. He gave me a book written by Badr Eldin al-Jishi, another refugee from al-Kabri, titled al-Kabri: A Heavenly Grove. The cover depicted a lush, hidden garden overflowing with fruit, which to my mind was a vision of paradise. Inside, it documented everything: the village’s families, maps, songs, food, weddings, funerals, and daily life. Through it, I learned that my grandfather had been a widely influential political leader, something I hadn’t fully grasped from family stories. One detail captivated me: al-Kabri had four natural springs that together formed the largest water source in Palestine. It reminded me of the four rivers flowing beneath Man’s feet in the Bible, allowing me to imagine the village as something almost mythical, a paradise lost. Abu Fadi also introduced me to his aunt, Hajjeh Fatmeh, who was 94 at the time. She had worked as a household helper in my grandparents’ home in Acre. She described the house to me, its rooms, rhythm, the day-to-day life within it. She remembered everything about that fateful day in 1948: the panic, the hurried decisions, the moment they climbed onto a truck headed to Saida in Lebanon, the exodus itself.

Olivia Katrandjian: In your memoir, you merge political and historical narratives with your personal story, writing in vignettes that are at times prose and at times poetry. In this way, your inner fragmentation is mirrored on the page. How did you use stylistic choices to convey greater meaning? 

Mai Serhan: From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to write a traditional memoir. I used the lyrical precision of poetry to reimagine al-Kabri, the epistolary form to address my father intimately, and the essay form to create moments of pause, breathing spaces for reflection when the story needed it.

Genre, for me, is both a guide and a constraint. It offers structure but also limits what can be said. As a Palestinian, my experience lives outside those boundaries, in the margins. I wanted my structural and linguistic choices to reflect that, to inhabit uncertainty, to bring the rupture I feel in life onto the page.

The memoir’s structure mirrors lapses in memory and the digressive paths of family history, destabilizing space and time at every turn, but there is also a solid dramatic arc that holds it all together.  

Language, too, became a site of alienation. My father spoke in the Palestinian dialect while I spoke Egyptian, creating an internal dissonance that plays out in the text. There are Qur’anic references grounding the story in Arab-Islamic identity, while my time in China added another linguistic layer—our translator in China spoke only classical Arabic and Cantonese, unable to grasp my Egyptian vernacular. I weave in classical Arabic and Chinese dialogue intentionally, to make the reader feel a measure of the same linguistic estrangement I lived.

Olivia Katrandjian: Your prose is incredibly lyrical. How did being a poet influence your prose writing, and are there other writers who blend poetry and prose who have inspired you?

Mai Serhan: Poetry taught me how to listen to the heartbeat of words, to pacing, to feel a temperature and see textures; it taught me how to breathe through words. It demands precision and whim at once so that what you deliver is the truest possible experience for the reader.

My memoir is also an act of imagination; lyricism gave me the freedom to envision a village that once was, to capture its abundance, beauty and joy. Infusing the work with sensory detail allowed me to inch closer, to intimate what I’ve never experienced for myself.

Writers who have inspired me in this respect include Etel Adnan, Clarice Lispector, Maggie Nelson, Ariana Harwicz, Anne Carson and Hala Alyan.

Olivia Katrandjian: As the descendent of Armenian Genocide survivors, I feel a deep responsibility to tell the stories of my people. The majority of Armenians live in diaspora, severed from their homeland. As Armenian American author Nancy Kricorian wrote, “Our stories are a homeland.” You, too, are a member of a people scattered by violence and exile—what does that mean to you as a writer, and how have you navigated that responsibility? 

Mai Serhan: Since you’ve drawn the connection between the Armenian genocide and the Palestinian genocide, I want to begin by saying that one of the few lights in these bleak times has been working in solidarity with Armenian writers like Nancy Kricorian, Nancy Agabian, Sophia Armen, Raffi Wartanian, and Gina Srmabekian. I also want to thank you, especially, for the brilliant work you do through the International Armenian Literary Alliance to bring our voices together.

Darwish’s poem “Who Remembers the Armenians?” tells us: I remember them / and I ride the nightmare bus with them / every night. That line has always stayed with me. Solidarity matters because it amplifies struggles that might otherwise go unheard. It brings new eyes, new ears, and new allies, and it challenges the isolation that comes from being scattered, building networks of recognition so that the Palestinian story is not forgotten. It also brings practical support, helping protect activists locally, and inspires me creatively through the exchange of ideas and perspectives.

As a Palestinian writer, I feel an ethical responsibility to write. Writing is how I carry my Palestinian-ness, how I say no, how I bear witness. Literature isn’t a frill or ornament; it’s here to stir, to unsettle, to connect. To remain coherent amid chaos and erasure is, in itself, an act of resistance. Solidarity reminds me that this work isn’t only mine, it’s part of a larger, shared humanity, a recognition that oppression and displacement anywhere matter to all of us. And it validates the emotional and moral weight of the stories I carry, the ones I feel compelled to put on the page.

Olivia Katrandjian: ​In her book, Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage: News Narratives about Artsakh and Gaza​, Mischa Geracoulis​ writes of ​the violence inflicted on ​Armenians and Palestinians in ​Artsakh and the Gaza Strip, ​respectively, and the attempts to not only erase a people, but to destroy cultural heritage. She writes, “The removal of a targeted group’s cultural heritage removes proof of that group’s existence, ultimately distorting reality.​” In writing and publishing your memoir, you are working against this ​erasure, correcting the historical record. What were some of the misrepresentations you chose to confront in your story?

Mai Serhan: Oh, there are many. The intentional structuring of a steady, false flow of information, meant to deny, rename, smear, and endlessly rewrite the script, has been in the works for over a century. The phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land,” popularized by Christian restorationists in the 19th century and later adopted by Zionism, is one example. The memoir challenges this claim by transforming the physical homeland into an emotional and psychic terrain, proving, in other words, an intimate knowledge of place.

Another example is the statement attributed to Ben-Gurion: “The old will die and the young will forget.” As a second-generation Palestinian in the diaspora, who works from post-memory, I see this memoir as a testament to our generation’s resolve—to remember and to create, across generations, through a growing, deliberate, and sustained effort. Israel has long cemented itself as the archetypal victim, but this memoir refuses to victimize its people. Instead, it excavates the depths of injustice and, as you said, presents imperfect victims. There is no need to perform victimhood, only to be human.

There is also the myth that we were uncivilized, a notion used to justify occupation. Yet the memoir describes a beautiful alternative to the “modern project”: an idyllic village abundant with fruit, where people took root. It had mosques and churches, schools and factories, a currency and a passport, political leaders and families with deep ancestry.

Finally, there is the false claim that we sold our land and left voluntarily. The memoir offers a factual account, naming those involved in the selling of our land: how, in 1935, a company was founded in Beirut specifically to sell land in southern Lebanon and Palestine. Its founders were then Prime Minister Khayr al-Din al-Ahdab, Wasfi al-Din Qadura, Joseph Khadij, Michel Sarji, Mourad Danna, and Elias al-Haj. The company purchased land from wealthy Arabs who vacationed in Palestine, offering extortionate sums, then transferred the titles to the British and, in turn, to the Jewish National Fund. No Palestinian left by choice. We were terrorized and driven out. As Warsan Shire writes in her poem “Home,” no one leaves home unless home chases you / fire under feet. It baffles me how this simple truth is still so difficult to understand.

Olivia Katrandjian: This memoir is addressed to your father. Who is your ideal reader, and what do you hope they take away from your story?

Mai Serhan: I don’t think there’s just one ideal reader. This memoir is an open invitation to anyone willing to read and be moved; to step in and come away changed, even slightly. At its core, the book speaks to Palestinians, especially those in the diaspora who carry a sense of home they’ve never fully known. But it’s also for anyone who has lived between places, who understands displacement in any form.

It’s also for readers who are drawn to experiments in form, voice, and language; those who appreciate lyricism and hybridity.

I see the memoir as a kind of storm, one that unsettles everything so that you might see the world more clearly afterward. My ideal reader is anyone willing to enter that storm, to let it move through them, and to emerge seeing the world, and perhaps themselves, a little differently.