Ali Al-Kurdi’s novel The Shamaya Palace depicts the transformation and expansion of a refugee shelter in Syria since the 1950s and its changes over decades. Unlike much of the Palestinian writing about camps, which concerns actual tents eventually replaced by buildings, the novel, as the title suggests, houses refugees in a deserted palace “at the heart of the complex fabric of Damascus’ Old City.” While Palestinian refugee camps are typically isolated at outskirts of cities and society, Shamaya’s location creates tension between marginalised refugees and various other ethnic, religious, and cultural groups in Syrian society.

As a political opposition group in Syria, Palestinians have faced an endless spiral of marginalisation: they are stateless refugees, exposed to class disadvantage, opposing a particularly repressive regime. They also embody the unresolved question of Palestine and pose a threat to Israel. The narrative depicts different scenes of discrimination by the police apparatus as well as the policing and restrictions enforced by the UN and the UNRWA in addition to the dire living conditions. Al-Kurdi himself was a political prisoner: he was arrested in 1982 and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment, first in the Syrian General Security Directorate, then in the notorious Tadmur and Saidnaya prisons.

Published in Arabic in 2010, before Al-Kurdi’s arrival in Germany, the novel portrays life and intricate relationships inside Shamaya Palace. The palace was built in 1865 in the Jewish Quarter and was once the home of the wealthy Shamaya Efendi. After the owners left in the beginning of the 20th century, the property was appropriated by the Syrian state, which opened it in the 1950s to Palestinian refugees arriving in Syria in the aftermath of the Nakba. The novel recounts the historical logistics of housing the refugees, with the palace divided into tiny units to accommodate fifty Palestinian families, assigning one room to each. An oblique, omnipresent narrator occasionally replaces the different first-person narrators, adding to the sense of surveillance and confinement.

The novel, its form and arrangement reflect the evolution of Shamaya’s many small dwellings. It consists of a collection of connected, fast-paced short stories, similar to synopses, as if they were the small rooms originally allocated to the characters. Over the years, these housing units had to be expanded to accommodate growing families, as the Palestinians’ supposedly temporary condition as refugees remained unresolved and their sojourn in Syria dragged on and on.

The Map

The book opens with the explosive potential at the heart of camps:

“‘The map’ was our favorite childhood game in the Jewish Quarter of Damascus. We used to split up into two teams: The first group hides, while the second starts drawing with chalk a grid of the neighborhood’s corridors on the ground, to mark the area we would move within. The second team then seeks to hide in the places drawn on the map, while the first returns to study the drawing and go after the hidden team as one of the goals of the game is to catch the members of the second team before they return and erase the traces of the map.”