The Palace on the Higher Hill (excerpt)

The following is an excerpt from The Palace on the Higher Hill, a novel by Karim Kattan. Initially written in French, the novel was translated into English by Jeffey Zuckerman and published by Foundry Editions on the 2nd of April, 2025. It can be ordered online.

Introduction by Sabiha Allouche and Ghiwa Sayegh

We first read Karim Kattan’s novel, The Palace on the Higher Hill, in French in 2021, and again in English in 2025. Back in 2021, we thought of the novel as our very own Beloved (Toni Morrison) – one that speaks of hauntings and crossings, one that reclaims places long-gone, but in our own region of West Asia. Today, with the intensification of the genocide on Gaza since October 2023, the novel is no short of prophetic. Written before its time, it predicted the course of a devastating and seemingly unstoppable colonial futurity, against the often naive promise of queer futures. Through his narrator, Kattan painfully embodies queer (non)futures, almost writing himself into disappearance.

And yet, The Palace on the Higher Hill’s organized chaos is an insistence on Palestine. Early in the novel, Kattan’s narrator leaves the quietude of his European life for his native village of Jabaleyn, an imagined place in Palestine. There, he stays in his ancestral home, today a crumbling palace but once a magnificent site of bourgeois excess. He converses with ancestral ghosts, each representing a Palestine that could have been, and is especially haunted by his aunt, Nawal. Ghosts, however, rarely linger, and one by one, with the intensification of colonial expansion, they fade into the abyss of our narrator’s familial estate and of history. With every vanishing, a growing sense of incertitude about the fates of our narrator, and Palestine, engulfs us readers.

Our narrator’s ghostly encounters mirror the historical anomaly that Israel is: an anachronistic colonial project turned white supremacist settler colonial genocidal entity. Like the ghosts in the novel, the settler colony’s crimes are clear as day. Unlike them, however, it is allowed to persevere, and its impunity grows larger by the day.

Kattan’s many attempts at grasping Palestine repeatedly fails throughout the novel and echoes, in many ways, anti-zionist activism. For us anti-zionist activists, we have become well accustomed to the unwillingness of hegemonic powers to hold Israel accountable. Yet, we persevere in our anti-zionist work, some of us at great personal risk. Though we repeatedly yearn for it, Palestine is yet to be within our reach.

But if we are to read what is within our reach against the grain, then perhaps Kattan’s ghosts haven’t vanished. Perhaps they have simply withdrawn for the duration of the novel. The fact that Kattan can see his ancestors’ ghosts and converse with them is not indicative of his resignation to a fragmented reality as a forcibly displaced Palestinian whose land has been stolen and home confiscated. Instead, his ghosts are thousands of similarly dispossessed Palestinians in previous lives, who choose to linger to remind us that Palestine always has been and always will be. These ghosts, unsurprisingly, can only be seen by those whom the land recognizes and embraces.

The following excerpt particularly speaks to us, and to this issue, in how it exposes the ugliness of settler colonialism and its project for the future. It is this ugliness that prompts resistance, rather than to give in to the deceitfully queer “haven” of the genocidal entity. Being goaded into resistance by the ghosts of your ancestors is no short of a queer, anticolonial endeavour, which also invokes the imagery and symbols of our region’s “otherworldly” (the wahsh, the Bedouin moon).

Finally, the excerpt illustrates conflicting futurities: on the one hand, the “(re)productive” queer futures that envision queer families and child-rearing, embodied by the narrator’s partner George, and the direct contrast with an anticolonial futurity – one that necessarily begins with the narrator’s fate: witnessing the extinction of his own people. It is not a desertion of queer futurities as much as it “just happens,” like disappearance under perpetual genocide does. Perhaps then, Kattan’s intervention into queer (non)futures is about staying with this discomfort, navigating the contradictions of the dead and the living with the vulnerability that is characteristic of the narrator, without ever losing the liberation of Palestine from sight.

The Palace on the Higher Hill (excerpt)

I didn’t know the driver. He didn’t talk to me, didn’t ask questions. I was alone in the back seat. Not even my aunt Jeannette was coming with me to the airport. They were glad to be rid of me. Even though I hadn’t done anything. I turned and looked back at the valley in ashes and the two hills as they grew less distinct, along with the village, and Old Jihad’s restaurant, it hurt, and the houses, our house and what was left of Joséphine’s, and what was left of her flowers, it hurt, the village was empty, like it’d been abandoned or left to die, even though nothing had happened, nothing, the place looked like it’d been empty forever, had they all fled, the car rounded a corner, and everything was gone, even though nothing had happened, nothing, and I hadn’t done a thing, what things I’d done I’d just imagined, and nothing had happened, just two gold-hued eyes in the night and soldiers climbing our hill in the drizzle, and now the village and the two hills and our house up there and Joséphine’s further down, all now at the mercy of the wind, I turned to look straight ahead again because it hurt and suddenly there was the sea, suddenly blue, then, for the first time in my life, an airport, a plane.

Off to boarding school for me. Although I hadn’t done a thing. Two weeks later a letter informed me my aunt Jeannette had died. Served her right.

There’s something I have to confess to you. I hope you’ll hear me out, after everything that’s happened. I won’t go so far as to ask you to accept what I’ve done, much less support it – all I ask is that you hear me out. I have to confess to you.

I killed a man. A settler. A man but a settler. A settler but a man. It sounds kind of bad, doesn’t it, when I say it like that – but nothing could be further from the truth. You have to understand: he materialised before me, under the almond trees. He was already dead, like a ghost, so that didn’t change a thing at all. Immaculate daylight dappled the almond trees’ shadows. He didn’t see Nawal, but she was the one guiding my hand. I had a gun. I’d come out of the house and sat down in the clearing. I’d found the revolver in Nawal and Ibrahim’s bedroom. I’d come outside with a glass of lemonade in my hand and the gun in my pocket and these plans to put an end to my life in a bucolic, unremarkable place. How nice the weather can be when death blossoms, I was thinking. But the settler appeared out of nowhere. I shot him – well, more precisely, Nawal took my hand and shot him. She was tired, too. She was like a time-worn statue of a goddess. How pointless. I mean, a gun! If I hadn’t fired the shot, he probably would have. That’s what I think. But that doesn’t change a thing. That’s not an admission. Yes, I’ve come out and said that I killed a man yesterday, just like that, boom. Nothing more to it.

What I have to confess to you is different. The man, that settler (I haven’t moved him, he’s still there, under the almond trees, that doesn’t change a thing, do you think his body’s already beginning to rot?), was ugly. I know, I know, but he really was. Maybe I wouldn’t have killed him if he’d been handsome enough. I probably wouldn’t have. I might have let him kill me, and quivered with pleasure. If he’d been handsome enough to take away even Nawal’s breath, if he’d been handsome enough to charm a demon, who knows, things might have gone differently. I might have straight-up asked him to kill me not with a gun but with those beautiful hands of his around my neck and I would have died with an orgasmic moan, with drool running down my chin.

Before he turned up, before I found the gun, before I decided to come outside to die under the almond trees, Nawal was whispering nasty things in my ears: “Go on, get out, go and face them, if just one of them falls when you shoot then that’s a bird in the hand, go, don’t be scared, I’ll go first, they won’t dare shoot me, I’ll pump them full of fear, let’s go now, I’m going first.”

I was tired and I didn’t want to expend even more energy; I wanted to die. The settler appeared before me and ended up saving me. So I’ve decided to talk to you, to confess everything to you. I don’t have anyone left to talk to and I know, in spite of it all, in spite of the shudder I feel at the thought of writing to you, that you’ll hear me out. That at first you’ll feel the urge to delete this message. And I also know, because I do remember this much about you even at this point, I also know that you won’t. You’ll let out a weary sigh, and then you’ll read on.

All this time that I’ve been locked up with Nawal, a whole equinox, three seasons, two months, I’ve needed to talk to someone because that way I can clear up any misunderstandings. 

Well, lend me your ears, if you will.

It’s the story of a beginning, I’d say. Or the story of an end. I was born under a Bedouin moon. No idea what that means. Tante Jeannette always told me that, her tone implying a condition I had contracted and might well pass on to her. She said that the day I was born, she came out of the house and got lost in the woods. She happened upon a beast with its guts ripped out. “An animal,” she said, “a wahsh, a wild creature, all alone.” I always asked, “What kind of creature?” “A creature, just some creature.” And that creature – imagine whatever you like, a deer, a ghoul, a jackal, a mutant – already beginning to rot, started talking to my aunt, Tante Jeannette. What it said I couldn’t possibly guess. Actually, whenever she told me the story, she would squint at me accusingly. Except she looked exactly like one of those raccoons in my comic books, so I’d always burst out laughing and she would turn and remark, “There you have it.” Here I am talking to you as if I didn’t know you! “I was born” this and “my aunt Jeannette” that and so on and on. Nawal’s done me in. The smoke’s covered the horizon in the distance. The stone villages dotting the hills disappear at times behind the scrim of smoke like in a game of hideand-seek. I can kind of tell that most of the buildings are just rubble now.

“The Bedouin moon.” That was another one of Joséphine’s expressions. Sometimes she talked about it when I was at her house, she’d look at the sky and cry out, “Well, that’s a beautiful Bedouin moon if I ever saw one!” So, ever since I was little, all moons have been Bedouin. Which stirs up images in my mind, one way or another, of caravan moons, indomitable moons, racing across the desert toward oases of stars. A moon foreign to itself, not unlike this self in me that isn’t me. Here we are, myself and this other self in me, in the garden behind this house overlooking Joséphine’s garden and, in the moonlight, these two gardens haven’t lost any of their shine.

Lately, scraps of us, you and me living together, have been resurfacing. I’m getting better at recalling who I was for those ten years with you. Much of it is still hazy and if that life has been wiped from my mind, just know it wasn’t for lack of trying to hang on to it. Just this morning, I remembered that you wanted children. Memories came back of you leaving out brochures of children with huge smiles, catalogues to pick them from: handsome and well groomed, impish but well mannered, silly yet well behaved. There was even a range of colours to choose from: more sickly olive like me or glowing sprite like you? You wanted kids, and I wouldn’t listen. As if, the second you brought up the topic, a dull din rose up around me and pulled me away. I remembered that this morning, as they were starting to encircle the village.

I never could have explained to you my awareness that I was born to witness the extinction of my people. But you – in all your attentiveness, all your sweetness – you were keen on children and prepared to wait until the end of eternity for me to agree. Believe me, George, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to disappear from your life like this. I didn’t mean to, I swear it, I didn’t mean to wake up that day in a daze as the sun struggled to rise, I didn’t mean to grope around on the nightstand for my phone, to tap at it and pick an airline, a departure time, an extra checked bag, without any real thought, of course I’d need two suitcases for a big trip, I didn’t mean to not tell you, to slip away in the early-morning haze. Fortyeight hours later, I didn’t really mean to reach the house, to struggle to push this door open, to stagger into this drawing room. I didn’t mean to, you might not believe me, that’s on you, I didn’t mean to not write to you all this time. Not a single text, not a call, not an email, not even an oldfashioned letter. I didn’t mean to vanish into thin air, there was no grand scheme; it just happened.