Her first, Ishmael’s Oranges, published in 2014, drew directly on the bifurcated upbringing that she shared with her younger brother and sister, and was both a critical and commercial success. The recently published second, The Water Thief, set in Africa in the 1980s, has its origins in her professional sphere.
She recalls “a hot night four years ago in the middle of Ramadan. The war between Israel and Hamas was flaring in Gaza. There were bombs in Iraq and Syria. I was in northern Nigeria close to the border with Niger, on an immunisation campaign.
“The polio virus had resurfaced and was spreading inside and outside the country, paralysing children. Vaccination had been banned by a local governor, who claimed it was a Western plot to sterilise African Muslims.
“As I was trying to get to sleep in a boiling hot, tiny room, thinking through all the things confronting us, the fears and complexities, and being completely unsure whether I was doing the right thing — that’s when the book was born.”
The Water Thief is the compellingly written story of an idealistic young Englishman — Nick, an architect — who volunteers to spend a year helping with the construction of a hospital extension in an unspecified area near the Sahara desert in a region bereft of water. He is the son of a Catholic mother and an anti-religious, Jewish father who, as the book begins, has died from a heart attack.
It is clearly a significant moment in Nick’s life and he arrives at his destination troubled by his past failures to live up to his father’s expectations, his present doubts about his motivation for volunteering, and his future marriage to his seemingly perfect fiancée, Kate.
All of this burned itself into Hajaj’s mind on that hot, sleepless night “in a remote village in the middle of nowhere,” she says, “very Islamic with Sharia law.
“But a Palestinian surname is a get-out-of-jail-free card in Islamic communities. I was asked to talk to the imams to explain why it was so important that the children get vaccinated.
“It was a Friday. People were coming out of the mosque. One man came storming towards me furiously — he saw me as a foreigner — and started screaming at me, pointing his finger in my face. The interpreter who was with me told me that the man was saying they had just been told by the imam about the bombings. The man shouted: ‘You are killing our brothers in Iraq. You are killing our brothers in Gaza. You expect us to believe you are giving us free vaccines. You must think we’re stupid.’
“The place had no telephones, no electricity, no means of communication, and yet what was happening on the other side of the world was so fundamental to their sense of identity that it had led to them shutting out a vaccine delivered by those ‘murderous’ powers.
“Later that day, I went into one of the mud huts the families lived in — with a stream full of sewage running through it — and there was a little girl on the floor of the hut in her school uniform doing her homework. I thought: ‘You are like a flower growing in the desert. It’s so hard for you to do what you’re doing. I bet nobody said to you, ‘do your homework’. For you, this is a gift.
“I was almost shamed by my simple attitude towards going into a place full of hostile people. They don’t like us but they are doing their best to live their own lives under circumstances too difficult for me to imagine, and I can see why that man was screaming at me about our bombers over Iraq and Gaza.
“These people may have views of the world that seem crazy to us but when you actually go and live among them, and understand how their lives are shaping, you realise they’re not crazy at all. And they can be magnificently courageous in how they try to better their circumstances.”
The Water Thief carries elements of a range of people Hajaj has come across in her working life. “We have this idea that when we go in and engage in foreign aid that it is always we foreigners delivering it,” she says.
“But most of the people in any given country are from that country. I’ve met many local doctors, engineers, nurses, health workers…”
Hajaj began working for the UN in 2002, since when her peacekeeping role has extended far beyond the domestic.
Her husband, whom she met in Iraq, also works for the UN and they have an eight-year-old daughter. Although Hajaj’s own parents had three children, their romantic dream was sadly doomed.
Her mother held strongly to her support for the Jewish state while her father was an equally strong advocate of the view that the foundation of that modern state of Israel had been a great crime. They divorced after 25 years and Hajaj’s father broke off contact.
And so her education was a British one. She read classics and English at Oxford and then worked in the music business having failed to get into her preferred career. “When I came out of university, I wrote 20 letters to different branches of the UN and didn’t get a single reply,” she says.
“I wanted to go into conflict resolution in the international sphere because I never grew up feeling I belonged to a specific country. And conflict had defined my childhood. I had spent the first 10 years of my life in Kuwait experiencing the tension of the Iran-Iraq war and the intense fear of being outed as a Jew.”
It is ironic that, after decades of trying to negotiate between Jewish and Muslim obstinacies, perhaps the most appropriate sentiment for Claire Hajaj’s life experience is from a key Christian text: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” And in the case of this particular peacemaker, blessed, too, with a big literary talent.
‘The Water Thief’ is published by Oneworld
