Native by Sayed Kashua

Author:Sayed Kashua [Kashua, Sayed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802190185
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

MEET THE AUTHOR

June 11, 2010

I’m sorry. You’ll have to forgive me. I’m under a lot of pressure. Though I have never been considered a particularly calm person, during these past few days my anxiety level has reached new heights. Yes, it’s all because of the book, the book. I’ve never felt as much of a merchant as I have this past week. I am prepared to do anything, even join the next voyage to Gaza, if a public relations person will promise me this means selling another few dozen copies. However, not all the marketing tricks have worked out well. For example, the television interview—to be broadcast soon—for which the interviewers insisted on meeting my parents, culminated in a mass disaster. At least two thousand potential sales were thrown into the trash as a result.

“Have you read the book?” the interviewer asked my father, who only nodded in a dissatisfied way.

“And what did you think of it?” continued the interviewer, and my father turned to look at me. Only because I was present and he did not want to hurt my delicate feelings, he made the effort of saying it was “an okay book,” with the least believable “okay” one can imagine.

“Just okay?” wondered the interviewer.

And here my mother intervened in the conversation and said: “We told him a million times he should go study law but he insists on making problems.”

“As a matter of fact, when he was little he wasn’t problematic at all,” said my father, annoyed. “He was a good boy, he never cursed, he never thought about girls. It’s only because we made a mistake and sent him to study with Jews that he has a filthy mouth and cusses out everyone right and left.”

“I don’t know,” said my mother. “I say, why should a person go looking for trouble as though there weren’t enough.”

It’s not going well, I’m telling you. It is driving me out of my mind. One critic, about whom I couldn’t tell whether he liked the book, wrote that I insist on writing about Arabs even though the characters could equally have been Jews from Sderot—that is, not really Jews, but poor, almost Arabs.

That same critic noted that writing about these characters could label me as an Arab writer. I was horrified. Me? An Arab? After all I have done. After I invested everything I have, heart and soul, they come along and write that I am an Arab, and for what? Only because of the characters? It is not good to be labeled an Arab, not good, not good at all. An Arab isn’t recognized, an Arab is good for a clearance sale, not for a special deal at Steimatzky.

I decided to gird my loins and combat my reputation as an Arab, so when a nice researcher called from Army Radio and said the station was devoting one of its special Book Week programs to Arab writers, I immediately objected and told her I would not participate.

“I’m very sorry,” I said to her, “but I don’t want to be an Arab writer.

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