In the opening pages of her recently published literary memoir Dhalat Gharibeh (She Remains a Stranger), Palestinian author, storyteller and journalist Rasha Hilwi offers a lexicographical meditation on the word ghurba.
"Ever since I crossed those seas, I’ve tried to translate the word ghurba into other languages. I came to the same conclusion as others before me: some things cannot be translated.
Ghurba derives from the root gharaba.
Ghurba (noun). The verbal noun of gharuba.
“His ghurba lasted long”: his separation from his homeland and family lasted a long time.
Ghurba is nawā or being far away.
“He lived for a long time in ghurba”: he lived for a long time in lands of displacement.
“I found him in a state of ghurba”: he was found in loneliness and desolation.
“The loss of loved ones is itself a ghurba”: whoever loses someone dear becomes like a stranger among people, even if they have never left their homeland."
Published in July 2026 by the Berlin-based Arabic bookshop and publisher Khan Al Janub, She Remains a Stranger is an intimate autobiographical narrative about motherhood, Palestine, and what it means to inhabit several forms of ghurba all at once.
For Hilwi, the impulse to write this book was an old one. But it was motherhood, and the estrangement born of it, that ultimately gave form to the story.
"Before motherhood, writing about culture was a major part of my life. Then motherhood came and severed me from that world. This is characteristic of how motherhood functions more generally: It imposes a particular kind of isolation, separating you not only from your former self, but also from the outside world," Hilwi tells The New Arab.
"But more than that, motherhood put me face to face with so much I had left unresolved: my relationship with myself, with places, with my family’s heritage, and that of my ancestors. It forced me to deal with feelings of pain, loss and, above all, ghurba," she adds.
Together with the realisation that she was battling postpartum depression, this confrontation set Hilwi on a journey of healing.
So, in 2022, she returned to her most familiar form of expression: writing.
She began chronicling her life as a new mother of twins in Amsterdam, far from her first home, Palestine, and the coastal city of Akka, where she grew up.
Writing became a way of making sense of it all.
"It shielded me from a heaviness I hadn’t yet realised I was carrying," she asserts.
Hilwi writes of the weight she was carrying, which was never hers alone. It comprised the histories of the women who had moulded her, particularly her mother and grandmother, and all they had passed down to her.
It was an inheritance imbued with both pain and love.
She also writes of the weight of becoming a mother abroad: of her attempts to root her children in a heritage that is geographically remote yet intimately present.
Sometimes, this means something as ordinary as encouraging them to enjoy her familiar spreads of labneh, za’atar and olive oil on their Amsterdam dining table.
At other times, it means insisting they pronounce helwe properly with the Arabic ‘ḥ’ rather than the ‘h’ of a foreign accent.
As Hilwi navigates everyday life, the book's bigger question begins to take shape. What can a mother give her children of a home they have not known as she has?
But just as writing offered Hilwi a way through this question, the devastation unfolding in Gaza rendered the very act of writing meaningless.
For Hilwi, motherhood made the distance between Amsterdam and Gaza unbearable.
She found herself comparing her children’s safety against the reality of Palestinian mothers struggling to keep theirs alive, or "how one child could be playing on an actual slide while another slides down the wall of a destroyed house in Gaza."
Yet, with time, Hilwi realised she could not abandon writing. However modest, it was a contribution she could make, "a small piece in a much larger mosaic through which Palestinians continue to affirm their continued existence, whether in academia, theatre, cinema, literature, or elsewhere."
Making a home from fragments
Hilwi’s She Remains a Stranger contributes to that mosaic, her act of remembering offering some relief from a deepening sense of ghurba.
As she takes the readers with her through the daily rhythms of motherhood in Amsterdam, Hilwi journeys back through memory, revisiting the life she once shared with her family in Palestine, from Haifa, where her grandparents rebuilt their lives after being forcibly displaced from their village of Iqrit in the Upper Galilee in 1948, to Akka, her hometown, where she was born and raised.
As a third-generation Nakba woman, she imagines the life that might have been. She writes of a ghurba that did not begin with her departure from Palestine to Berlin, or her subsequent move to Amsterdam.
It is a ghurba that was already part of her inheritance.
"There is a ghurba that I know: that of Palestinians in their own country, in their own cities, especially those who stayed. I am one of them. I did not witness the Nakba, but I have lived with its direct impact on my grandparents, who became strangers on their own land, constantly reminded by an entire system that they were strangers and refugees in their own country."
But if ghurba can be inherited without ever leaving home, what happens when one does leave? This question also runs through Hilwi’s account of her journey from Akka to Berlin, a city she sought out in search of a life she had been denied.
"I did not go to Berlin for Berlin. I went for Arab Berlin, a city that had taken in so many of our people because of our catastrophes."
There, she found glimpses of the life she might have known in Akka had the Nakba never happened. Surrounded by friends from Beirut and Cairo, she could eat Syrian food, attend an Egyptian show, or listen to Lebanese music.
In Berlin, she found a home assembled from fragments of other homes, brought together by people whose different journeys had directed them to the same city.
"There was still alienation, of course, much of it arising simply from being in a new city, with a new language and a new way of life. Despite all that, Berlin gave me a sense of home. I needed it because I had been denied that in my own hometown. Israel had taken that right from me."
But finding something of home elsewhere did not mean that Hilwi’s ghurba disappeared. When she eventually moved from Berlin to Amsterdam, to be with her husband and raise her family, it followed her, taking on new meanings.
"It was in Amsterdam that motherhood truly put me face to face with all these forms of estrangement: from Palestine, from the experience of creating a life in two new cities; and from the heritage I was carrying."
With time, however, Hilwi came to see that her ghurba was not necessarily something to overcome, but something to understand.
"I don’t think there will ever be a moment when I stop feeling estranged. Ghurba will always accompany me, and perhaps that is important because it gives rise to questions as well as a constant search for meaning."
As it acknowledges the persistence of ghurba, Hilwi’s text is equally concerned with the life that remains possible after rupture, whether after motherhood, displacement or the devastation of genocide.
For Hilwi, this possibility materialised in motherhood, which offered "a sense of home" and, as she writes in the book, became "the vital force that stirs the muscle of imagination."
For her, motherhood was not only another site of estrangement, but a way of imagining life beyond it. And storytelling, in turn, became Hilwi’s way of insisting on that life’s continuation.
"The fact that we are still able to tell the story, that the story continues to be told, is itself an answer to genocide."
A Dutch Translation of She Remains a Stranger, titled Ze blijft een vreemde and translated by Djuke Poppinga, is scheduled for publication in November 2026 by Uitgeverij Jurgen Maas in Amsterdam.
The book excerpt featured at the beginning of this article was translated from Arabic by Nourhan Tewfik.
Nourhan is a London-based arts journalist specialising in the Middle East. She is also an Arabic TV/film consultant and researcher
Follow her on Instagram: @nourhantewfik