Arabesques: An Arabic Tale in Hebrew Letters Posing a Challenge for a Dialogue and Mutual Recognition in Honor of Peace  

Oleh:

El-Hussari, Ibrahim A.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: International Journal of Arts and Sciences vol. 06 no. 02 (2013), page 423-433.
Topik: Arabesques; Arabic tale
Fulltext: 06_02_32_El-Hussari.pdf (295.65KB)

Isi artikel

This article looks at the discourses shaping the purports of the narrative structure of Anton Shammas’s Arabesques, an Arabic tale written in Hebrew letters. Addressing the Hebrew-speaking readers in the first place, Shammas designs this semi-autobiographical novel to reposition himself as both narrator of his family saga and character in his own right. As a narrator-character, he is privileged to witness the horrible demise and loss of his own Arab Palestinian identity and the emergence of quite another identity imposed on him by the newly-established Jewish settlers’ State. Seeking a way out of this ambivalent national allegiance, he gets involved in various situational conversations with a number of Jewish Israeli intellectuals, some of whom feature as characters in the tale. The reactions of those intellectuals to his compelling attitude and tone, as he pragmatically voices himself in their language, vary widely. Surprisingly, however, all of those Jewish intellectual voices echo the same Zionist zeal when their polarizing talks create the Arab other outside the discourse. By using Hebrew as the language of his narrative, Shammas tries to de-territorialize and un-Jew that language and bring it back to its semantic origins. For him, the Hebrew language which dominates the cultural space in Israel today can in no wise keep discriminating against its non-Jewish, Arab Palestinian natives who also use Hebrew as one of the two official languages of the State. Does Shammas’s narrative discourse compel his Hebrew readers to question their own version of the self-narrated history and accept to negotiate the issue of identity and citizenship? The present study uses a positioning analysis approach to interpret the narrative text and the principal conflicting voices that are likely to frame the concept of inclusion.

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