In Search of Identity: The Israeli Arab Artist in Anton Shammas's Arabesques

The autobiographical novel Arabesques presents a complex double self-portrayal of an Israeli Arab as an artist. The narrator's gravitation toward the cultural center conflicts with his loyalty to his ethnic periphery. His search for identity as a minority writer intertwines with his search for identity as an individual. The tension of the unresolved identity split emerges in the work's fragmented structure and inconsistent story line. I argue that the centrality of Hebrew in Arabesques communicates the possibility of overcoming the split. Such reconciliation requires that instability and pluralism be accepted as forces that shape the lives of individuals and of nations. The use of Hebrew explodes both the cultural stagnation of the minority and the intransigence of the majority. The hybridization of language and lore destabilizes the definition of nationalism, bringing, for both the dominating and the dominated, the hope of cultural revitalization and of ideological rapprochement.