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Nothing to Lose But Your Life: An 18-Hour Journey with Murad suad amiry bloomsbury qatar foundation publishing, 2010. 176 pages, paper , $16.00
Sometimes, we become so invested in the way we've framed an argument that it's nearly impossible to see the subject childishly, foolishly, or anew. Palestine vs. Israel has become one such argument. Illegal immigration is another. Proponents and critics have little to say that manages to break through the trenches, barbed wire, and loudly held positions.
But writer and architect Suad Amiry has a new book that can help us re-see our arguments: foolishly, childishly, anew.
Amiry may be familiar to some American readers for her tragicomic memoir Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. Her second book, Nothing to Lose But Your Life, doesn't directly address North America. But Amiry does dedicate the book not just to Palestinians, but also to (illegal) Mexican immigrants, Africans, African Americans, and Turks.
Dedications finished, the foolishness begins: To understand the situation of undocumented Palestinian workers, Amiry is trying to flatten her breasts. That's because she's going along on a dangerous border crossing from her home in Ramallah (Palestine) to Petah Tikva (Israel). As the book opens, she's playing dress-up, imagining how she might make her middle-aged woman's chest pass for a man's: "Neither their size nor their texture really helped: they were way too big, way too wobbly and way too soft."
After a little more mirror-gazing, Amiry seems satisfied with her costume. But, despite her efforts, Amiry's gender, education, and social class are recognized immediately by her skeptical undocumented companions.
Amiry's book thus joins the tradition that Creative Nonfiction has called "stunt nonfiction." CNF notes that, while Barbara Ehrenreich's recent Nickled and Dimed may be its best-known recent example, stunt nonfiction is not a new genre: Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) describes Nellie Bly's time in a New York lunatic asylum. John Howard Griffin's...