Bir Zamanlar Yafa: Enver Hâmid’in Yafa Sabah Kahvesi Hazirliyor Romaninda Filistin’de Günlük Hayat Ve Kültür
Once Upon a Time Jaffa: Daily Life and Culture of Palestine in Anwar Hamed’s Novel Jaffa Prepares Morning Coffee

Summary/Abstract: In his novel Jaffa Prepares Morning Coffee which was published in 2012 and nominated for The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in 2013, Palestinian novelist, poet and critic Anwar Hamed aims to show Palestinians’ daily life before the Nakba (the Catastrophe for Palestinians) in 1948. After living long years in Hungary where he had gone for education, he moved to London in 2014, since then, he has been living there and working for BBC Arabic service. Through a love story between two young Palestinians come from different social status in Jaffa in the 1940s, Anwar Hamed purposes to revive the past and the memories of the lost homeland. He presents culture and traditions of Palestine, away from the image that has been portrayed to the world in the literature and the media. In the novel, food culture, travels, weddings, entertainments, religious days and holidays, women, men, rich and poor people, Muslims, Christians and Jews are described vividly. But at the end of the novel, Hamed strangely connects the negative sides of the Palestinian social structure to Osman Ghazi’s dream and thus Ottomans’s rule in the Middle East. This paper will focus on Palestinian people’s daily life and traditional culture in Jaffa and Beit Dajan before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 (before Nakba) and the Ottoman perception in that area; then these data will be examined through the sociological and the historical perspective as it is displayed in the novel of Anwar Hamed, Jaffa Prepares Morning Coffee.

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