CHICAGO: A young writer in Ramallah contemplates the trajectory of his life in the profound, abstract novel “Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion” by Akram Musallam. Translated into English by Sawad Hussain, Musallam’s narrator explores the things and places that appear and disappear in life and how consequences can eat up a past to leave a future bare. His identity is as removed as it is connected to the identity of Palestine, his life moving in a parallel manner to the politics that govern his home.
While working on a story, Musallam’s narrator sits on a plastic chair next to the Al-Manara lion monument in downtown Ramallah. After paying for a spot in a parking lot, he explains to the manager that he must write in this space as his work depends on it. The manager, an ex-liberation fighter who spent 18 years in an Israeli prison and was released in 1995, is a voracious reader and allows the young writer to discuss his work with him. Musallam’s narrator divulges details about his life, his parents and a past that brings with it power and personas whose histories the occupation has been attempting to erase.
Beginning with a blue scorpion that haunts his dreams, the narrator reflects on his life as an only child, on his father who lost a leg to a vengeful nail and on his mother, whose womb became too sad to reproduce after her husband’s tragedy. However, he will not use these circumstances as symbols for the “political powerlessness of his generation.” His father lost his leg in 1967, the same year that their land was stolen. And yet his father insists that his son scratch an itch he continues to feel on a leg that isn’t there. Living on the highest mountain in the middle of Palestine, the narrator works through the past as he pushes ahead with his future.
Musallam’s power lies in the weight of his word and the airy sentences that carry with them insight. He references Palestine’s past: the songs and shepherds, the influential writers like Hussein Al-Barghouti, the Oslo Accords that brought Ramallah onto the world stage and then the invasion that crushed its streets, cars and dreams. Musallam details every corner of loss and absence as the background constantly changes with the construction of the new and demolition of the old. Despite having a narrator so steeped in loss, his goal is to write a story that does not romanticize the margins but puts to the fore the inhumanity that creates them.
