3Gs

From “the Chuck D of Palestinian hip-hop” (Los Angeles Times), a memoir of three generations of one family of Palestinians up against loss, oppression, and a shape-shifting past, present, and future, in a work of stunning originality and kinetic energy 3Gs tells the stories of a father, his son, and his son’s future daughter—Fawzi, Tamer, and Shaden Nafar—three generations of fracture and dissonance, stubborn insistence, love, hope, and the will to create. It’s also the story of a town—Lyd to the Palestinians who fled there in ’48, Lod to Jewish Israelis—built of people from elsewhere, swamped by crime and poverty, and, in the not-too-distant future, off-limits to those who call it Lyd. Fawzi, Tamer’s father, keeps his head down as the 1948 expulsion lives in his bones. He gets by, passing as a postman though he can’t read, installing boilers, and playing in a wedding band, until an accident puts him in a wheelchair. Tamer keeps his head up and his voice loud, spitting punchlines and cries of fury, not leaving Lyd even as the violence comes for his own. He will come to a point of understanding and gentle respect for the father who, he always thought, hadn’t fought back. Shaden is the future—Lyd is in her past, but she risks returning to save its artifacts and memories to live in Palestine-in-the-Cloud, a place beyond conquest and capture. Part oral history, part fable, part self-analysis, 3Gs defies the expectations of memoir with the emotional vastness of a multi-generational novel and the rhythmic force of rap. It is a wildly innovative work of power and pathos that introduces a master storyteller.