I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir

A young woman’s search for connection with her estranged father, her family’s past, and the Palestinian homeland she can never visit

＂Mai Serhan’s writing is unique, sincere, dark, funny, and cuttingly tragic.＂-Selma Dabbagh

Mai Serhan lives in Cairo and has never been to Palestine, the country from which her family was expelled in 1948. She is twenty-four years old when one morning she receives a phone call from her estranged father. His health is failing and he might not have long to live, so he asks her to join him in China where he runs a business empire about which Mai knows nothing. Mai agrees to go in the hopes that they will become close, but this strange new country is as unknowable to her as her father. There, the ghosts of the Nakba come to haunt them both. With this grief comes violence, and a tragic death brings a whole new meaning to the word erasure.

In a narrative made rich by its layers of fragmentation, as befitting the splintered and disordered existence of exile over generations, this courageous memoir spans Egypt, Lebanon, Dubai, China and, of course, Palestine. It is filled with bitter tragedy and loss and woven through with an understated humor and much grace.

Mai Serhan is a Palestinian-Egyptian writer based in Cairo. She is the recipient of the F.H. Pasby Prize from the University of Oxford where she earned her masters degree in creative writing. Winner of the 2022 Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Award and a finalist for the 2022 Narratively Memoir Prize, her writing has appeared in The London Magazine, Oxford Magazine, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and Jadaliyya. She is a contributing editor to the literary journal Rusted Radishes, in Beirut, and the literary journal Fikra, in Ramallah. I Can Imagine It for Us is her first book.