The Trinity of Fundamentals

The Trinity of Fundamentals follows the story of 22-year-old Kan’an during his nine years of hiding from the occupation between 1982 and 1991. Driven by an unshakable commitment to the Palestinian cause, Kan’an takes the reader through his compelling journey filled with sacrifice and struggle, love and pain, isolation and liberation. All the while, major political and historical transformations unfold across international, regional and local contexts, including the First Intifada. Throughout all this, Kan’an maintains a spirit of revolutionary optimism so strong that the reader is bound to be transformed. It is all the more moving to know that Kan’an’s story is inspired by the real life experience of Rafeedie as he organized and struggled against the Zionist oppression of his people.

Love, revolution, and life—these are the “Trinity of Fundamentals'' that pave Kan’an’s path of struggle. Although the novel is set in the past, it holds many lessons that resonate with our current political moment, mobilizing us into collective action.

Wisam Rafeedie is a former Palestinian political prisoner, full-time researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences at Bethlehem University – Palestine. He previously worked as a part-time lecturer in Sociology and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University. He holds two master’s degrees from Birzeit University, one in sociology for his thesis on the changes in the status of women in contemporary Palestinian literature before and after Oslo, and the other in contemporary Arab studies.

When Wisam Rafeedie was imprisoned in Askalan prison, he received a letter from the Palestinian prisoners’ movement leadership in Nafha prison that contained a curriculum for prisoners. Rafeedie was surprised to find his own novel, The Trinity of Fundamentals, listed in that curriculum. 

The Trinity of Fundamentals is a fictionalized account of his nine years of hiding from the Occupation in Palestine, which ended in his capture in 1991. He wrote it during his imprisonment at Naqab prison in 1993, a few years after he was captured by the Israeli occupation army. Throughout the process of writing his novel, Rafeedie distributed excerpts of it through the clandestine system of circulation established by the prisoners, which moved materials and information across cells; various sections were transferred via pieces of bread dough or pill capsules that were thrown across cells. Eventually, his attempts to smuggle his novel out of the prison through this method was thwarted by the interception of the prison guards who subsequently confiscated it the year it was completed.

• Title: The Trinity of Fundamentals
• Author: Wisam Rafeedie
• Translated by Palestinian Youth Movement's Popular University Committee
• Publisher: 1804 Books
• ISBN: 9798988260219
• Subjects: Fiction › General, war, Palestine, prison