The A. M. Qattan Foundation hosted a book launch event for Maram Masarwi’s book “The Bereavement of Martyred Palestinian Children: Gendered, Religious and National Perspectives,” on Thursday, 16th January 2020, at the foundation’s building in Ramallah.
The book was presented by Dr. Honaida Ghanem, the director of the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR). Dr. Ala Alazzeh, Chairman of the Department of Sociology at Birzeit University discussed the book with the author. Actor and writer Maya Abu Al-Hayyat read excerpts from the book during the launch event.
Maram Masarwi is a lecturer and researcher. Her book examines the phenomenon of individual and collective bereavement in Palestinian society. It seeks to explore the boundaries of the discourse of bereavement and commemoration in that society through interactive relations between religion, nationality and gender, and the ways these influence the shaping of the mourning process for Palestinian parents who have lost their children in the Second (al-Aqsa) Intifada. Over the course of the book’s five chapters, Maram Masarwi scrutinises how these components have shaped the differences in behaviour between bereaved fathers and bereaved mothers: what characterises these differences, how they are expressed and how they have managed to shape the characteristics of the experience of Palestinian bereavement.