My native impartial bookstore has a nook dedicated to what it calls “Palestinian Tales.” The small show of books, which went up in October 2023, is a grim assortment of largely nonfiction titles, reminiscent of Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ Struggle on Palestine: A Historical past of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 and Ben Ehrenreich’s The Approach to the Spring: Life and Demise in Palestine. The smattering of novels are largely by Palestinian American writers, amongst them Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Hala Alyan’s Salt Homes, each bleak multigenerational epics of exile and grief.
You possibly can really feel the load that these books have to hold, every bearing the “strain” to inform “the human story that can educate and enlighten others,” because the British Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad lately wrote in her ebook Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. As a result of Palestinians are a individuals steadily lowered to an issue, the impulse to testify on their behalf is pure. However artwork that begins with such a mission shouldn’t be artwork that’s prone to shock or entertain. Didacticism usually leads to fiction largely inhabited by heroes and fantastically tragic figures: the Palestinian grandmother who tightly grips the important thing to the ancestral residence that she misplaced; the younger Palestinian American girl who returns to the occupied lands and feels, for the primary time, her individuals’s wrestle; the deracinated physician in Beirut or Kuwait or Paris, unmoored and overwhelmed by longing.
Particularly on this previous 12 months of mass loss of life in Gaza, writers wish to humanize Palestinians. They want to humanize Palestinians. And perhaps hoping, as a reader, to additionally encounter events to chortle is obscene. However a brand new debut novel by a celebrated Palestinian American playwright responds in a startling method to the burden that Hammad described—by shrugging it off. In Too Quickly, Betty Shamieh isn’t attempting to teach or enlighten. I used to be greatly surprised when, as we talked, she described herself as primarily writing “fan fiction.”
What Shamieh meant is that she creates tales to entertain herself, as a type of want achievement. Her performs—she has written 16—have one thing of this high quality too. In Malvolio, produced by the Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2023, she took the tragic idiot of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night time—who’s tricked into pondering that the noble woman he serves, Olivia, is in love with him—and gave him a sequel that ends in marriage and overcome his tormentors. Shamieh has rejiggered Palestinian characters in an analogous spirit in different performs, making them irreverent and flawed as a substitute of avatars of victimhood, carnal the place they are typically portrayed as saintly. In fan-fiction mode, she performs with style, which supplies her a construction to complicate. With Too Quickly, she informed me, “Greater than something, I wished to create a Palestinian American Intercourse and the Metropolis.”
The novel, which opens in 2012, has all of the beats (and a few of the cliché and cringe) of a romantic comedy—one which unfolds partly within the West Financial institution. In Shamieh’s basic marriage plot, an indecisive girl is approaching her 40s and attempting to choose between two males, every of whom represents a definite path for her. But the protagonist, a theater director named Arabella who shares a lot of her biography with Shamieh, is an antihero. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants to America, Arabella is each confused and demanding. She needs to pursue Aziz, a person descended from her clan who’s volunteering as a medic in Gaza and who gives her the prospect of being the great Palestinian, making infants for her individuals—a life determination that may even be politically sound. However she discovers that she has emotions for Yoav, an Israeli American theater pal she has identified for almost 20 years, who represents the impartial life she has made for herself in New York Metropolis; he doesn’t need children in any respect. Arabella shouldn’t be an emblem of something—she could be self-righteous, self-deprecating, petty, lustful. And he or she’s humorous. I’m undecided how she would really feel about being tucked among the many different “Palestinian Tales.”
“Don’t everyone knows that we’re type of horrible?” Shamieh requested me, as a Palestinian American Carrie Bradshaw may. “I’m simply in contact with the truth that I’m that means.” However she puzzled aloud whether or not different individuals know this about themselves too. “Typically I really feel like I’m taking part in reality or dare, and no one’s actually truly telling the reality.”
I met Shamieh in the future in early November at a French brasserie referred to as Marseille in New York’s theater district, a favourite spot of hers the place she had many post-performance glasses of wine throughout the twenty years she spent working Off and Off-Off-Broadway after graduating from the Yale College of Drama in 2000. I anticipated her to be as brash in individual as Arabella is on the web page. “In case you have been serious about hating me already, don’t fear. You’re in nice firm,” Arabella assures the reader within the very first paragraph. “Additionally, attempt as you may, you may’t hate me as a lot as I hate myself.” However Shamieh, a curtain of lengthy black hair sweeping down one aspect of her face, conveyed calm and even slightly shyness, explaining, “I’m older, and I’m a mom.” In her 40s, she has a 10-year-old son and now lives in San Francisco.
From the novel’s begin, Arabella resists her Palestinian identification. She’s not one to signal petitions. She’d quite be acknowledged for her distinctive productions of Shakespeare: “I staged comedies as in the event that they have been tragedies and vice versa” (an excellent abstract of Shamieh’s work as a playwright as effectively). When she is featured on the quilt of American Theatre journal and later learns that this was purely as a result of the editor was on the lookout for a method to honor Edward Mentioned, the Palestinian American mental, Arabella is livid: “I used to be chosen not for the artwork I made however for the artwork I made whereas being Palestinian. I had executed every little thing in my life to by no means really feel I obtained a leg up as a result of magnanimous liberal white individuals felt sorry for me.”
Requested to direct a manufacturing of Hamlet within the West Financial institution metropolis of Ramallah, Arabella hesitates at first. “I’ve zero want to return to Palestine,” she tells Aziz the primary time they communicate, after their grandmothers have set them up. She lastly takes the job as a result of she hopes to impress the British theater firm sponsoring the challenge. And since she needs to check the chemistry with Aziz.
Arabella’s identification disaster is one which Shamieh understands. She was the primary Palestinian American playwright to have a manufacturing premiere Off Broadway, and the duty of representing the Palestinian or Arab perspective on the New York stage felt daunting, she informed me, particularly as she labored all through the Struggle on Terror years. She definitely was not curious about producing “agitprop,” she stated; as a substitute she studied Neil Simon’s comedies so she might emulate them. Simply earlier than she began writing Too Quickly, she had decided to attempt writing for tv, like a lot of her playwright mates. She was able to go for the cash—till, that’s, she discovered herself caught up within the story of Arabella, a single girl in her mid-30s who needs to cool down however can’t determine who she is.
“The one means I might cope with my worry of being pigeonholed and restricted and diminished by my ethnicity was to jot down about my worry of it,” Shamieh informed me. “That’s the one means I can course of it and chortle at it.”
The ribald humor, the over-the-top-ness that she brings to describing this wrestle, jogged my memory—surprisingly—of mid-century Jewish American writers, particularly Philip Roth, navigating between the poles of Jewishness and Americanness with a lecherous grin. I assumed again to a hotel-room encounter on the finish of Portnoy’s Grievance. Alexander Portnoy is in Israel, wrestling on the ground with a hearty younger girl from a kibbutz. He’s drawn to her energy and repelled by it, wanting to overcome her but in addition to be her—and, to make issues much more Freudian, he realizes with a jolt that she reminds him of his mom. The scene, in all its violence and absurdity, reveals the subterranean tensions between Diaspora Jews and Israelis. In Too Quickly, Arabella spends days in resort rooms in Jerusalem and Ramallah with Aziz, having intercourse and consuming takeout hummus and skewers of shrimp. At one level, mid-fellatio, she discovers scars from bullet wounds on each of his legs—the work, it seems, of Israeli snipers. She needs to speak about what occurred; he doesn’t need her to cease.
The novel is filled with such moments, when Arabella’s personal urges collide with a way of obligation to one thing higher. She is drawn to the concept of Aziz, as he’s to the concept of her—propagating and making their grandmothers blissful. Shamieh informed me how acquainted this facet of tribalism felt. Her household is descended from Christian Palestinian clans that lived for hundreds of years in a village that finally grew to become Ramallah. In the course of the decade main as much as the Six-Day Struggle, in 1967, a lot of the members of her household scattered to some completely different cities in the US, together with San Francisco, the place Shamieh was born and grew up. However the descendants remained in a type of “time warp,” Shamieh stated, gathering yearly at an infinite conference, partly for the needs of pairing up younger descendants. “I’d say perhaps 95 % of my cousins married individuals who can’t communicate Arabic and have names like Betty and are fully American, however are from our clans,” Shamieh stated. She went too as a result of “it appeared simpler than courting.”
However she felt an interior battle, which makes its means into the novel. “I lived within the house—that stasis—between being pushed and being pulled,” Arabella explains. It leaves a gap for self-aware scrutiny of the narratives that prop up an individual’s sense of identification and group. One Manhattan scene, during which Arabella secretly seeks out the mom of Yoav, her Israeli American love curiosity, lands in an surprising place. The mom, Indji, is an Egyptian Jew who was exiled from Egypt within the Nineteen Fifties and located refuge in Israel earlier than coming to the US. To realize her confidence, Arabella pretends to be Jewish (a hokey contrivance that Shakespeare would have accepted of), and Indji shares the story of her banishment. The story tilts Arabella’s perspective. “I fretted over the plight of Palestinians solely as a result of I used to be one,” she displays. “Had I been born Jewish, I’d have been a Zionist, maybe a militant one. I’d have insisted we had a homeland. I’d have wished it safe. By any means needed.”
It’s a vertiginous second for Arabella—and for the reader, too, in a put up–October 7 world during which each Palestinians and Israelis have rewound the tape on their very own tales all the way in which again to their most elemental and least accommodating variations: the Nakba versus the Holocaust. “Inviting a competing historical past into your worldview is disorienting,” Arabella says. “It flips a change in your mind and your imaginative and prescient out of the blue turns into kaleidoscopic. The shards of your individuals’s historical past are true and clear, however they don’t coalesce right into a neat image of saints and sinners.”
In his ebook Orientalism, Edward Mentioned famously revealed the ways in which Western literature had depicted Arabs as unique, backward, irrational, and in want of steerage—portrayals that served, consciously or not, to justify a colonial mindset towards them. However Mentioned’s evaluation additionally posed an implicit query that it didn’t reply: If these writers robbed Arabs of their full humanity, how can literature restore it—with out, that’s, merely creating characters who’re the noble inverse of those Western writers invented?
Shamieh’s novel could be snug on romance-fiction cabinets, however the longer trajectory of her dramatic work factors to her deep concern with this query. She got here of age within the Nineties, throughout the optimistic interval of the Oslo Accords—a time, she informed me, when Mentioned and the conductor Daniel Barenboim might create an Israeli-Arab youth orchestra, for instance. In 2003, Shamieh herself helped discovered a Jewish and Arab American theater collective referred to as the Semitic Root. The defeatism that has come to outline the way in which that many younger individuals at the moment understand the battle between Palestinians and Israelis shouldn’t be actually a part of her vocabulary. And as we sat and talked, I sensed an unwillingness to delve too deeply into the mess that’s the area’s politics; that’s not what has motivated her.
What propels her as a substitute is the concept of making characters and tales that confound expectations—together with, often, her personal. Early in her work on Too Quickly, Shamieh realized that her marriage plot wanted to be multigenerational, pulling her again towards what she had resisted as a fusty Palestinian style. Interspersed between Arabella’s sections are the first-person narratives of her energetic grandmother Zoya (who on the boat to America manages to steal a second of transgression with a person named Aziz, truly the grandfather of the Aziz whom Arabella will meet—once more, Shakespeare would approve) after which of her mom, Naya (who bridles at an organized marriage, immerses herself in African American tradition, and grows an afro). “I assumed I used to be writing Intercourse and the Metropolis,” Shamieh informed me, after which “it was as if Carrie Bradshaw’s grandmother exhibits up, and she or he’s like, ‘I survived the potato famine and I didn’t have a good time on the boat to Ellis Island being a single girl, and that’s why you want sneakers and are obsessive about males.’ ”
These girls are all antiheroes of a form, particularly when set in opposition to figures in different Palestinian works. Shamieh talked about one largely ignored 1974 novel by the Palestinian Israeli author Emile Habiby, which she regarded to as a uncommon precedent for its profanity and satire. The Secret Lifetime of Saeed: The Pessoptimist is a picaresque story of a Palestinian man stumbling via the wreckage of the 1948 battle out of which Israel emerged. He finds himself in surreal conditions (together with an encounter with an alien from outer house), at all times attempting to make the perfect of them—and in some way at all times falling deeper right into a gap. “He’s attempting so laborious and doing every little thing and nonetheless failing,” Shamieh stated.
This uphill-battle swashbuckling is what animates Shamieh in her dramatic work too, which fairly constantly options norm-breaking girls who trigger havoc. One in every of her most profitable performs, Roar, appeared Off Broadway in 2004, starring Annabella Sciorra as a Palestinian girl named Hala. Like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Want, she incites quarrels and betrayals amongst relations who’re pushed, and infrequently defeated, by unabashed sexual want and a starvation to assimilate in daring methods (the teenage protagonist of the play, Hala’s niece, is a blues singer). “Roar has these girls who’re in your face,” Samer Al-Saber, a theater professor at Williams Faculty who’s compiling a choice of Shamieh’s performs right into a ebook set to be printed subsequent 12 months, informed me. “They’re humorous. They’re always discussing what probably might be thought of soiled laundry. They’re preventing with one another, in opposition to one another, and for one another. And in that means, it isn’t the everyday minority story.” By bucking conventions, Al‑Saber added, Shamieh can also be resisting the calls for of the market.
Shamieh informed me that in writing such characters—her “loopy girls,” as she put it—she additionally managed to keep away from the traps set for her by the broader tradition’s notion of Arab People. She might have executed the anticipated, she stated, and written performs about, for instance, honor killings, a persistent drawback in sure Arab communities. However she frightened that she could be reinforcing stereotypes; by not creating submissive and oppressed girls, she might upend them. On the identical time, she was writing characters whom she not solely knew—girls like these in her circle of relatives—however was extra snug sharing with a non-Arab viewers.
Arabella additionally chooses a 3rd means on the finish of Too Quickly, and (spoiler alert) her rejection of Aziz was significantly putting to learn, as a result of her rationale appeared like one thing Shamieh herself would say. “In contrast to Aziz, I wasn’t trying to find some extent to life,” Arabella says. “I used to be trying to really feel enthralled by it.” Shamieh truly did say one thing like this to me, although it was extra grounded within the problem and alternative of being Palestinian. “I really feel like my bent as a human being is in the direction of pleasure, in the direction of connection, in the direction of optimism,” she informed me. “However I occur to have been born to individuals who don’t have a lot at this level to be optimistic about.”
This text seems within the February 2025 print version with the headline “A Palestinian American Intercourse and the Metropolis.”
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