A bildüngsroman suffused with humor and irony, Dancing Arabs
centers on a young boy from a poor Arab village, his haphazard
receipt of a scholarship to a Jewish boarding school, and the
dislocation and alienation that ensues when he finds himself
faced with the impossible: the imperative to straddle two
famously incompatible worlds.
As a child, our nameless narrator/antihero lives with his family
in his grandmother's house. His grandmother and her constantly
impress upon him the significance of their land: when so many
people fled or sold theirs away, they held strong. "Better to die
fighting for your land than to give it away."
Every night after his brothers fall a, he climbs into bed
with his grandmother, his main source of comfort and protection.
One night she tells him where the key to her secret cupboard are,
and if she should die, he must find all the death equipment in
the blue bag. Paranoid from then on, he races home every day at
recess to see if she's died. One day he gets there and she is not
there, so he unlocks the cupboard and pulls out the box. All he
finds are towels and some soaps from Mecca, but then he notices
his her's photo in the old newspaper lining the suitcase, and
some postcards in his her's handwriting. At his urging, his
grandmother tells him about the newspaper clippings: his her
was always "the handsomest and the smartest" in Tira, until he
was thrown in jail for his political activity (eg: bombing a
school cafeteria). The grandmother visited her son every week,
wrote letters to the mayor, anyone who might be able to help her
son. When he was released years later, he remained politically
active, revering the Egyptian president Nasser, and for a time,
joined the communist party.
The young narrator is nothing like his her, who "doesn't
understand how my brothers and I came out the way we did. We
can't even draw a . He says kids smaller than us walk through
the streets singing 'P-L-O----Israel NO!' and he shouts at us for
not even knowing what PLO stands for." Not at all politically
motivated, the boy knows nothing of national identity; he simply
wants to get through the school day without getting smacked by
his teacher.
He excels at school and his family dreams that by the time he
graduates, they will have their own state and he will become a
pilot, or a judge. One day the principal tells him the Jews are
opening a school for gifted students and they will be admitting a
few Arab kids too. He is accepted and his her whoops with
joy-this will mean a better life for his son and his whole
family.
His transition at school is very rough. The other students make
fun of how he speaks and eats. On a bus home to Tira during his
first school break, he is singled out and pulled off the bus by
some soldiers. Humiliated, he proceeds on his journey home, but
gets off of two more buses fearing that he will be questioned
again. He winds up at Ben Gurion airport where his her has to
come get him. He cries the whole way home and says he is never
going back. His her mocks his tears and his weakness and tells
him he has no choice-this is his only chance to escape the
limitations of life in Tira. (The tug of war between her and
son continues throughout the novel, the her putting his hopes
and aspirations onto his son, as well as his defeats and
disappointments.)
He goes back to school, but only after deciding that he will
never be identified as an Arab again. He becomes an expert at
assuming false identities: he shaves off his moustache, learns
how to pronounce Hebrew like the Jews, buys new clothes, starts
listening to only Hebrew music. Soon he falls in love with Naomi,
one of his Jewish classmates. On Memorial Day for the Fallen
Soldiers, the narrator does not stand up during the moment of
silence, and Naomi, whose her had died in action, refuses to
speak to him. Eventually, Naomi admits that she loves him too,
and for a while, they are together in spite of their differences.
She initiates him into a new world of movie theatres and
restaurants, and for the first time he learns that Zionism is an
ideology, not a swear word; that his aunt is called a refugee;
that Arabs in Israel are called a minority; he learns the meaning
of both national homeland, and anti-semitism.
As the end of his final term draws near, he is constantly tired
and dizzy, cannot or eat. He knows that he and Naomi will
have to break up when school ends. He takes a bottle of pills the
night before a big exam, and winds up in the hospital. His her
comes and blames it on "that Jewish whore." After a short
convalescence, he finds himself at Hebrew University. He trails
Naomi at school, but she avoids him. He stops going to class-he
uses his unlimited bus pass to travel the streets of Jerusalem
for hours listening to his walkman. This is how he meets Samia,
an Arab student who asks him the way to Hadassah hospital one
day; he takes her there himself and they areeeeee a couple from
then on. Four years later he decides it is time for them to
marry. He and his wife are both Israeli citizens and know Hebrew
well, but the narrator, a lost son, has no place to go back to
after having been exposed to the tempting Israeli experience from
which he is barred. He and his wife move to Beit Tsefafa, an Arab
neighborhood where they don't know anyone. Soon the second
intifada begins to rage-the narrator refers to it as "the war."
He begins drinking heavily. He blames his her for his
optimism, his faith that it will all turn out well for them, that
his going to the boarding school would make a difference.
His lessness and self-loathing deepen and spiral: he grows
apart from his wife, he drinks, fantasizes about taking a lover,
and is preoccupied with all his failures. Through his
self-destructive haze, he decides he will make everything
right-he and his wife will together peacefully, like
spoons, he'll give up drinking, he'll start praying, he'll become
politically active, a member of the Knesset. He even makes a
pilgrimage to Mecca with his one Arab friend from boarding
school. But the biggest revelation he has there is that there is
no in all of Saudi Arabia.
One night the narrator is at a bar watching Arabs take over the
dance floor. He is disgusted by their ugliness, their lack of
grace and self-consciousness. He affirms that Arabs should not be
allowed dance, not only because they look ridiculous, but because
they make him, the narrator look ridiculous. On Land Day in
March, his wife goes with her family to their old village, which
is now a Jewish neighborhood. They dress up and bring a picnic as
they do on every Land Day and Independence Day. His her
criticizes her family, these "refugees"-if they really loved
their land, why did they leave it in the first place?
After a trip to Egypt, his her gives up on his dreams of
liberation and statehood. He was stopped at a border crossing for
hours and something in him broke. Now he doesn't want to fight
any more. He hates Arabs: "It is better to be the slave of your
enemy than to be the slave of a leader from within your own
people."
In the final scene, the narrator and his wife and baby are
ing on a mattress in his grandmother's room and his
grandmother gets up in the middle of the night and vomits. He
gets up to take care of her and she tells him it's like this
every night, but that it's not death that makes her cry, it's
that she used to think she'd be buried in her own land and now
she knows that will never happen. The narrator and his
grandmother sit and they both cry together. Filled with humorous
observations, this is ultimately a serious book in which huge
human truths are delivered in the most deadpan tone, and in which
the individual self is lost to the strangling demands of family,
history, and political realities.
