BOOKPATHS

United States; Jordan

The Language of Baklava: a Memoir, by Diana Abu-Jaber (New York: Anchor Books, 2006; first published in 2005)

Diana Abu Jaber’s “culinary memoir” moves readers from her childhood to adulthood and between the cultures of her American mother and Jordanian father, with food, family, joy, and confusion pulling her, and us, sensually and insightfully along.

After growing up with Bud’s idea that Jordan is our truest, essential home, a part of me has come to believe it.  My grant proposal describes a novel that I will write about characters undergoing ambitious self-excavation, recovery, and reconciliation as they move between countries.  It is set in both America and the Middle East, and it is meant to draw together my own deep cultural ambivalences – to try to look right at the conundrum of being ‘Arab-American.’ Arab and American.  But what I think is a project proposal is really the crude outline for the process I want for myself.  Sometimes it’s too intimidating to look at things directly, to think, Now for the first time I will go to live in Jordan, I will choose it freely, and I will see if this place has anything at all to do with me.  The airplane door ‘thunks’ shut for the last leg of the trip.  As the plane taxis down the runway, the fear that perhaps I don’t belong in Jordan at all begins to fill me, overtaking my knees, my hands, my breath.  It tightens like a net.  I try to breathe deeply.  There’s the sound of rustling paper.  A woman across the aisle unwraps an elaborate portable meal of lamb, onions, squash.  I inhale the scent of rice with fried nuts and cinnamon and feel calmer. – from The Language of Baklava: a Memoir, by Diana Abu-Jaber

Related Websites

Diana Abu-Jaber Website

Publisher’s Website

Palestine; Jordan

Poet Ibrahim Nasrallah, “a second-generation Palestinian living in Jordan,” talks with Richard Lea "about how it feels to have his work banned.”

“’A Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip, for example has experienced different political and social conditions to those experienced by another living on the West Bank,’ he explains. ‘The same goes for Palestinians living in the diaspora, or in Jordan, Lebanon or Syria. In fact, I would say there are Palestinian peoples, and not a single Palestinian people. Nevertheless, there is one thing common among them: one dream, one destiny and one homeland.’" – from “Writing of Jordan, Dreaming of Palestine,” by Richard Lea, The Guardian

Jordan

"Ein Fadr...yes, it is ancient, and without wish to join the modern world. In fact, the past holds a strange vitality." -- from Staircase of a Thousand Steps, by Masha Hamilton

Staircase of a Thousand Steps : a Novel, by Masha Hamilton (New York : Bluehen Books, Hardcover 2001; Paperback 2002)

"Then the slope of the village comes into sight. Ein Fadr, where houses cling to one another and tenacious shrubs find life between the stones of walls. Where farmers as complicated as the earth itself flow into the fields each day as they have through generations." -- from Staircase of a Thousand Steps, by Masha Hamilton

Masha Hamilton's Staircase of a Thousand Steps is set in Jordan "before the 1967 war with Israel." Ein Fadr, a fictional village unchanged by time, "is based upon an actual village" Hamilton "stumbled upon in the West Bank" during her years as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. Readers enter the village, where intolerance is embedded in tradition. Intolerance is at the root of the secret eleven-year-old Jammana seeks to uncover during the course of the novel, a secret involving her grandfather, Harif, grandmother, Hannan, mother, Rafa, and the village midwife, Faridah. While some villagers do rise against injustice at the novel's climax, others cling to tradition.

Each character comes to life in Staircase of a Thousand Steps, as does the landscape of village and desert. Readers can imagine the dwellings of the village, "some so ancient that they lean against their neighbors like old men with canes; the aroma of baking bread, lemons, lavender, and the herbs Faridah collects; the grapes and olive trees on the hillsides; a "warming breeze," and desert sand whirled by wind.

While Staircase of a Thousand Steps questions the intolerance bred from an unwillingness to consider change, it also understands the importance of history, of remembering. At the novel's beginning and end, readers find Jammana living in the United States remembering the land of her childhood and the words of her family, especially her grandfather's urging her to "'recall it all, Jammana. Death and birth, dung and jasmine. But recall it gently.'"

"Then I learned again that a life lived only in forward motion is not a life at all." -- from Staircase of a Thousand Steps, by Masha Hamilton

Visit these websites

Masha Hamilton's Website
http://www.mashahamilton.com/index2.html

Reader's Guide
http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/staircase_of_a_thousand.html

"Often in the Middle East, place is seen as a problem. Bloody conflicts arise from competing claims on the land. But beneath the violence and politics lie magic, history, passion. This is the land where Adam is said to be buried, where Abraham walked with the sons of his old age, and where a woman, if she looks over her shoulder at the wrong moment, can be turned to stone. The characters in Staircase, I felt, had to live in a place as timeless as water, and play out their stories largely apart from the obscuring fog of politics." -- Masha Hamilton (Reader's Guide Interview)

"Suddenly, within the dirt, he recognizes the scent not only of Faridah, but of Alula and Bahir and even the old mukhtar who hated him so. The earth is tied more loosely than man to the rules of time, and its memory is broader. Finally, each story loses its singular importance and combines as one. Each victory crumbles and merges with loss." -- from Staircase of a Thousand Steps, by Masha Hamilton

"Past and future are no more separate than the tree trunk from its branches." -- from Staircase of a Thousand Steps, by Masha Hamilton