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Imagine your own home surrounded by roadblocks and tanks, your
water turned off and the cashpoints empty. What would you do next?
A young journalist, recently married with a new baby, is seeking a
quieter life away from the city and has bought a large new house in
his parent's hometown, an Arab village in Israel. Nothing is as
they remember: everything is smaller, the people petty and
provincial and the villagers divided between sympathy for the
Palestinians and dependence on the Israelis. Suddenly and
shockingly, the village becomes a pawn in the power struggles of
the Middle East. When Israeli tanks surround the village without
warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the outside
world. As the situation grows increasingly tense, our hero is
forced to confront what it means to be human in an inhuman
situation.
Sayed Kashua has been praised by the New York Times as a master of
subtle nuance in dealing with both Arab and Jewish society. An
Israeli-Palestinian who lived in Jerusalem for most of his life,
Kashua started writing in Hebrew with the hope of creating one
story that both Palestinians and Israelis could relate to, rather
than two that cannot coexist. He devoted his novels and his
satirical weekly column published in Haaretz to exploring the
contradictions of modern Israel while also capturing the nuances of
family life in all its tenderness and chaos. Over the last decade,
Kashua's humorous essays have been among the most widely read
columns in Israel. He writes about fatherhood and marriage, the
Jewish-Arab conflict, encounters with prejudice, his professional
ambitions, and his love of literature. With an intimate tone fueled
by deep-seated apprehension and a razor-sharp ironic wit, he has
documented his own life as well as that of society at large--from
instructing his daughter on when it's appropriate to speak Arabic
(everywhere, anytime, except at the entrance to a mall) to
navigating security at Ben Gurion airport (in a Citroen that he'd
bought especially for checkpoints: God in heaven, who ever saw an
Arab driving a Citroen?) to opening a Facebook account during the
Arab Spring (so that he wouldn't miss the next revolution). From
these events of his everyday life, Kashua brings forth a series of
brilliant, caustic, wry, and fearless reflections on social and
cultural dynamics as experienced by someone who straddles two
societies. Amusing and sincere, Native--a selection of his popular
columns--is comprised of unrestrained, profoundly thoughtful
personal dispatches.
A bildungsroman 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 father 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 asleep, 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 father's
photo in the old newspaper lining the suitcase, and some postcards
in his father's handwriting. At his urging, his grandmother tells
him about the newspaper clippings: his father 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 father, who doesn't understand
how my brothers and I came out the way we did. We can't even draw a
flag. 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 father 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 father has to come get him. He cries the whole
way home and says he is never going back. His father 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 father and son continues throughout the novel, the
father 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 father 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
sleep 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 father 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 father 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
aimlessness 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
sleep 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 beer 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 father 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 father 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 sleeping 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.
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Let It Be Morning (Paperback)
Sayed Kashua; Translated by Miriam Shlesinger
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R483
R400
Discovery Miles 4 000
Save R83 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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In his debut, Dancing Arabs, Sayed Kashua used his "wickedly
double-edged eye ... to deliver an on-the-ground sense of being an
Arab in Israel that you .. couldn't get from any news report"
(Seattle Post-Intelligencer), establishing him as one of the most
daring voices of the Middle East. In his searing new novel, a young
Arab journalist returns to his hometown--an Arab village within
Israel--where his already vexed sense of belonging is forced to
crisis when the village becomes a pawn in the never-ending power
struggle that is the Middle East. Hoping to reclaim the simplicity
of life among kin, the prodigal son returns home to find that
nothing is as he remembers: everything is smaller, the people are
petty and provincial. But when Israeli tanks surround the village
without warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the
outside world. As the situation grows increasingly dire, the
village devolves into a Drawinian jungle, where paranoia quickly
takes hold and threatens the community's fragile equilibrium. With
the enduring moral and literary power of Camus and Orwell, Let It
Be Morning offers an intimate, eye-opening portrait of the
conflicted allegiances of the Israeli Arabs, proving once again
that Sayed Kashua is a fearless, prophetic observer of a political
and human quagmire that offers no easy answers.
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