Mai Serhan's memoir 'I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir' was published in October 2025 by the American University in Cairo Press, taking the form of letters to her late father, a Palestinian from Acre expelled during the 1948 Nakba. The book explores exile and family memory through imagination and recollection. Serhan, raised in Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and Beirut with a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother, seeks to reconstruct her lost heritage.
The memoir opens with: “I have never been to the place where I am from, but I can imagine it for us, Baba, for you and me.” It moves fluidly between locations and eras, from Cairo to Shenzhen in 2000, Beirut in 1994, Abu Dhabi in 1981, and back to Acre in 1897. Serhan portrays her father, who bore the weight of displacement after the 1948 Nakba, as silent about Palestine due to profound pain, rendering him caustic and withdrawn, eventually leading him to China where he worked himself to death.
At its core, the book grapples with a question both personal and historical: what does one do with an inherited past that disrupts future possibilities? Serhan responds through writing aimed at endurance, remembrance, and repair, acknowledging her family's fragmented history of forced departure. She writes: “Our bloodline is like a tree in a storm, its branches break, they disband in the wind with nothing to obstruct their movement.”
Rejecting linear chronology, the epistolary style mirrors the scattered geographies of exile. She reflects: “Exile led you to believe everywhere was a threat and everyone was in your way,” adding ruefully: “I wish you’d understood it was no way to live, it could’ve saved us, it might’ve even saved you.”
She describes Acre lyrically: “It might seem to you that life is an inferno you cannot escape, but there were once four seasons … In Spring, a multi-colored terrain of citrus yellow and henna red, and a green flying carpet to the east and northwest.”
In an interview with The London Magazine, Serhan described the work as a Künstlerroman, a coming-of-age story of an artist finding her voice and identity. It transforms absence into narrative, filling historical gaps with stories, offering a fragile promise of continuity rooted in knowledge.
