Check out the below video to watch the Cambridge Common Writers-hosted book launch for Nada Samih-Rotondo’s (Fiction, June 2012) debut memoir, All Water Has Perfect Memory.
Life changed forever for six-year-old Nada following Iraq’s invasion of her birth country, Kuwait, and subsequent immigration to the United States with her maternal family. Just as she finally settles into her strange new life apart from her father in Rhode Island, learns English, and grasps the fact that she is not merely visiting but is here to stay, life throws other surprises her way to forever change her world.
A debut work from a Palestinian American author, All Water Has a Perfect Memory is a memoir that takes readers from the author’s ancestral origins- the coast of Yaffa, Palestine, to her birthplace of Kuwait, eventually landing on the shores of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. The narrative confronts generations of silence and, ultimately, revelation with an imaginative blend of folklore and history that explores the relationship between our bodies, ancestors, and the Earth. The work explores the way the author is intertwined with her maternal line while reuniting with her father after a 30-year separation.
Voices once hidden in the waters of our bodies are amplified and released to forever alter the landscape, breaking cycles and seeding an audacious hope interconnected to lands past and present.
Nada Samih-Rotondo is a writer, teacher, and mother who is inspired by the relationship between personhood and place. She is interested in the slippery concept of home, local histories, and creature folklore. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, she immigrated to the United States at the age of six to Rhode Island. She lives in the enchanted post industrial land of Providence with her husband and three kids. Her work has been published in The Masters Review, Squat Birth Journal, Topography Literary Magazine, Frequency Anthology, and Gulf Stream Magazine.
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