Content area
Full Text
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 Hebrewspeaking 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 newlyestablished 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.
Keywords: Arabesques, Arabic Tale.
Introduction
Since time immemorial and those days around the campfire, humans have been telling stories in many ways including the use of language. Stories are our most familiar means of communicating the meaning we attach to our human experience. In other words, the stories we tell and live by often transmit something culturally memorable about 'who we are' within the dimensions of space and time that make us part of a historical reality. Many forms of self-presentation place emphasis on the process of individuation; that is, the...