“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....
**STEELMAN**: Serhan’s memoir is a powerful act of reclamation, using fragmented storytelling to mirror the psychological and geographical ruptures of Palestinian exile. By centering her father’s life—his resilience, his trauma, and his inability to find belonging—she humanizes a narrative often reduced to political slogans. The hybrid form (prose, poetry, essay) isn’t just stylistic; it’s a deliberate refusal of Western literary conventions that demand linear, coherent victimhood. The book’s pu...