On Kashauas Dancing Arabs

Christina Tang
FYS Place, Landscape, and Identity in the Middle East
Mar 5
th
, 2014

Ironically, it was precisely because I personally went through the turmoil of
identity crisis that I initially found it hard to sympathize with him, the unnamed
protagonist of Dancing Arabs. He embodies tragedy, if we were to define tragedy the
gap between what it could have been and what it really is. I opted the path taken by
Adel. Therefore, trying to make sense of the novel in light of my personal experience,
I wanted to raise the question on the significance of an individual: How do we weigh
the significance of individual feelings on the grand scale of history? At the end of the
day, can we choose how we feel? And do our feelings even matter? And if they did, to
what extent were our feelings justifiable when the pressures upon us were
institutionalized?
In the readings for previous class, the authors argued that Israeli nationalism
as a nation-building tool rather than a state-building tool required transforming
Jewishness from a religious identity into a cultural identity. Therefore, in Dancing
Arabs, readers saw how on multiple levels the mainstream Israeli Jews validated
their cultural collectivity with the pants they wore, the books they read, the way
they spoke, the cars they drove, and, last but not least, the thinly-veiled contempt
with which they treat the Arabs. The material, external symbols were backed by the
powerful narrative of a national homeland, a state-building narrative deeply
inculcated in the minds of any average 12
th
grader. Therefore, if Jewishness bred
Israeli nationalism, where should the Arab place themselves in this cultural map? To
me, Kashaua painted a picture of the Jews as a colonizing power that constantly
contrived to forge a narrative of co-existence between the Jews and the Arabs, while
not realizing that this very attempt would, indeed, institutionalize the cultural and
political stratification between the two groups.
Even on the individual level, the conflict of Israeli and Palestinian identity
was multi-faceted. His father, a realist who could not imagine himself without the
bars and the barbed wire and will [always] emerge from the whole thing with his
reputation intact demonstrated the tensions of identity. On one hand, ethnicity
remained the most natural allegiance. On the other hand, practicality demanded him
to be thrilled by the possibility that his son might be the first Arab nuclear scientist.
Therefore, a Jewish education was welcomed despite how, in rage, he called Naomi a
Jewish whore. In this regard, Naomis mother was the same she wouldnt mind
her daughter dating an Arab boy at school; but once graduation sent the young
couple into the real world, she was bound to crush the romance herself if she had
to. In Dancing Arabs, the attitudes of the adults/parents emulated what we read on
the old historians. The experienced the birth of a state, with all its antagonisms
entailed. They lived through the wars; everyone fought in it in his own way.
Therefore, reality for them was the nasty stillborn of yesterday, the unresolved past
pointing grimly towards a hopeless future. Israeli nationalism could demand the
faade of peaceful coexistence but could not force their affection.
The younger generation stood awkwardly with all their innocence, which
eventually incubated all sorts of troubles. Thats the story of his, Adel and Naomi.
They stood on the ruins of yesterday, aware of the blood taint but were unable to
grasp the pain; they were born scarred. The antagonism between the Jews and
Arabs was inculcated in the environment: they both thought calling people a Jew or
an Arab constituted a curse. And yet how could an individual unlearn cultural
imprint? Therefore, Dancing Arabs was more than just the confusion, frustration,
shame, and anger of an Arab attempting to escape his Arabness. The crux of the
matter was that he, along with his generation, was caught in between two worlds,
and that he had nowhere to go. Their world compartmented not between the Arabs
and the Jews but between the hostile differentiations of them and us. The tension
was manifested in the episode where his Arab classmates from the old school ran
into him and his Jewish friends. He chose to deny to ethnic allegiance facing his Arab
counterpart but was forced to admit it in front of his Jewish friends. Meanwhile, in
school Naomi advocated for the equality among different people for Kashaua, it
was as much tragedy as an irony that the younger generation seemed to be both
confused and innocent regardless of their ethnicity.
The only pointed direction was wattan, a seemingly unattainable spiritual
home. Wattan almost became his name, and again it almost became his nephews
name. It emerged as much as it was denied. His father found reconciliation in his
biological belonging. Adel, with all his worldliness and insensitivity, seemed to have
found wattan in Islam. For Adel and many others, Islam was the only secure home
that was entitled to them, in the same way in which the Israelis considered Israel
their national homeland. Islam was the one allegiance that the Israeli could not deny
the Arabs off, for certain. But at the end, was the return to Islam another form of
conformity in its own right?