Anton Shammas' Arabesques
An Arab-Israeli novelist writes a book in Hebrew...
The outstanding adjective that appears over and over again in the discussions of Arabesques, the only novel by the prolific Anton Shammas, a Christian Arab and translator between Hebrew and Arabic, is intricate.
“The path of its plot, like the layers and loops named by its punning title, winds through a maze of characters, times, motives and meanings, as Anton Shammas hunts for Anton Shammas in one of the more confused and confusing regions of the world.” These lines come to us from the great William H. Gass, reviewing the book in 1988 for the NYT Book Review.
The second paragraph is too articulate a primer for the text, and rich on its own merits, to not share. Gass usually has substance as well as the “mock-baroque” style: he captures the sanguinary dimension of “tribal” identity through the ambiguous use of “vein,” for example.
“Who am I?” is a question that has many answers, depending on what self is sought. Is it the legal self who hopes for an inheritance? Is it the tribal self whose finger will follow every vein that carries the family colors? Is it the psychological self, hoping for a harmony among its conflicting skills and feelings? Is it the cultural self, the native of a language, the exiled self who simply needs a passport and a port of entry? Or is it the self who is searching for a fresh essence, the ambitious self, the self of a better future, who shall eventually be described by his accomplishments the way Sir Walter Scott is now said to be the author of “Waverley”?
Arabesques seems to narrate a quest by the author to find that identity or self-definition beyond being the author of Arabesques.
It was recently reissued on the NYRB Classics line. The print is a facsimile of the original Harper & Row edition and it’s rather thick and squatty type. But the cover, a photo of the author’s mother with friends in the 1930s, is not only meta but very germane to this memoir-novel.
Documents like family photos, as well as supernatural pictures like reading olive oil on a plate of water, are mediations for time — and the novel’s structure hops around through time and people, in search of inscrutable ties across history. As Gass says, “Thus the present looks back at the past to see the past peering forward toward the future.”
Arabesques is divided into The Tale and (secondarily in volume) The Teller.
“The Tale” contains anecdotes of parochial life in the Galilee, the region of northern Palestine and southern Lebanon, for multiple generations of the author’s family, through the years of the British Mandate up to the first decade of the Israeli state’s existence. It has a non-linear drift, carrying you along mostly by mood and potent images.
However, these chapters are braided with a second part called “The Teller,” about the narrator’s adult life as a petty-bourgeois intellectual in Paris and then in the US on a visit to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. There’s a bit of a love-triangle between the author and an Israeli novelist and Amira, an Egyptian-Jewish woman. These sections are drier, and hasn’t aged so well, like a lot of esoteric postmodern fiction from the 80s.
There’s another Palestinian Arab in the contingent who works for the PLO, raising the worry of a political dilemma for the author once he travels back to Israel. But Shammas deflates the political situation in a comic moment when the Jewish novelist Bar-On blows up at the PLO spokesman for littering — the true red line!
All my opinions about this novel are basic: folks seem to agree that the best part in the novel is a scene from “The Tale,” from the days of the Nakba in 1948, where we see the process of a village surrendering.
One sentence leapt out because of the way the noun changes, at the end of its assembly: “And when they got to Al-Mahafer my uncle took his white kufiya off his head and stuck the cloth onto the tip of the ox goad, and handed the flag of surrender to the priest.”
The villagers take the makeshift flag to the entrance, and greet the invading Israeli militia with a ceremonial dance.
They broke into the “Dabkeh Shamaliyeh,” a wild Galilean dabkeh, which had in it something of the joy of those who had been passed over by a fatal decree, and something of the pleasure of submission by the weak, and something of fawning before the stranger, and something of the canniness of the villager who draws the most unexpected weapon at the most unexpected moment. It also had in it just plain capriciousness and frivolity. One way or the other, by the time the feet tired of the dance and those present at the ceremony were covered with a thin white layer of dust, and as is the way of all dust, it did not distinguish between the conquering soldier and the conquered villager.
1948 is one critical event in this narrative. Another is the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, deep in the author’s family past. And finally there is 1982, the year of the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut, when a right-wing Christian militia slaughtered Palestinian women and children, mutilating their bodies and etching “the sign of the Cross” on their breasts. (The IDF had the camps surrounded, and merely sent up flares to provide light for the Phalangists’ deeds.)
A photograph from this horrific event triggers a mystery for the narrator: could the man in the photo be a cousin, even a kind of doppelganger, thought to be long lost?
The darkest moment in the novel for me came from these words by the narrator’s cousin Ameen:
“The problem is that it’s the Lebanese Christians who have been slaughtered far more often. For a hundred years, since the 1860s, they’ve been suffering at the hands of the Muslims and the Druse. And if this Michael Abyad, whose face looks so pitying, identifies with the Muslim corpses lying by the sidewalk, well, it’s better for both him and for us that we not be related.”
Resonating more than the book’s content may be the implications of how it was made. “The first major work by an Arab writer in Hebrew,” is the incessant logline. Shammas’s relationship to that language is a fundamental question within the book’s general theme of self-definition.
Arabesques was a critical and commercial hit in Israel, but of course the choice was not without controversy. One the one hand, Shammas is either hopelessly confused about nationality; on the other hand he may be a traitor to the Arab or Palestinian national cause.
If failure is built into the novel’s search for origins as well as its broken-back structure, then that failure may be seen as a success, in the sense that it reflects the failure of the binational position taken up by Shammas in the years leading up to the First Intifada in 1987. This was a single-state solution, one that preserved the state of Israel but does away with its constituted Jewish identity in favor of one distinct from the Jewish diaspora and the surrounding Arab world.
The foundations for such a project that Shammas’s novel — and the deliberate choices made in its production — symbolized were scarcely existent in the 80s. The decisive duality between Jewish and Arab identities in the first couple decades of Israel’s history led to conditions hostile to a revolutionary or liberatory program based on national culture.
This excellent review piece by Ratik Asokan for the Yale Review shares a sense of the pessimism Shammas had arrived at in his commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the early 90s, by the time of the Oslo Accords. He’s quoted: “For all those Palestinians who, in the last 45 years, kept hoping that their displacement and exile were a grave injustice that somehow would be acknowledged and rectified, it’s time now to master the art of forgetting.”
A sad note. But the situation has transformed many times over in the 30 years since, to say nothing of the Arab Spring. One wonders if Shammas might see now the outlines for a free Palestine and more.
This post kicks off a low-key miniseries of letters that may be called Reflections of the Israel-Palestine Conflict in Literature.
Coming up, we’ll look at multiple books by another Christian Palestinian — the fiction and criticism of Ghassan Kanafani.