3.3. Chronotope in Tira
Each place in Dancing Arabs represents a different chronotope, thus influcing the protagonist’s understanding of his identity. As Tannenbaum noted in Men in the Sun, Figure 2. Location of Tira, Jerusalem and Beit Safafa
“[each] space produces a specific set of norms, relationships, expectations and behaviors, and the ongoing cross-overs create the dynamic of the narrative” (107). Figure 2 is the map I draw on the website named MapQuest about the location of Tira, Jerusalem and Beit Safafa.
Tira represents the Palestinian space as it is exclusively inhabited by Palestinians and the Jews only come here occasionally to shop (Kashua 170). As the sociologist Rabinowitz noticed, Palestinian citizens in the State of Israel…show more content… In the first part, Eyad listens to Grandma’s stories about his father, grandfather and Tira. He also listens to his father’s stories about himself and Tira. However, personal history presents to the readers as if there is no truth. There are constant ironies about their stories. For example, Grandma often says that Eyad’s father is the smartest and the most handsome student in his class (15). She also tells Eyad that his grandfather is the smartest in the village. However, when Eyad looks into the suitcase and finds his father’s transcripts, the low mark of 70 casts a doubt over the reliability of Grandma’s stories. Even though his father explains that 70 is a high mark in his days (36), the unity of Grandma’s stories still renders themselves unreliable. As Paul Ricoeur wrote in History and Truth that the task of history is “imposing unity on the diversity of our field of knowledge and of resolving differences of opinions” (History and Truth 42). The stories of Grandma are so unified and unquestionable that they may not be…show more content… It is featured with disciplined homogeneity and chronotopic discontinuity. Tira is secluded not only because of the roadblocks set around it, but also because of the villagers’ recognition of Jews as the Other. For example, Abul el-Abed says that the way to distinguish an Arab from a Jew is to see whether they will stand up and shout when he shoots a gun (33). Their antagonism against Jews is the way to construct Palestinian identity (Nasser 3). The roadblocks in the State of Israel not only set borders between places, but also segregation between Palestinian citizens and Jewish citizens. The “roadblocks” surrounding Tira create a striated (grid-locked) space to separate Palestinian community from Israeli community and control the way that Palestinian citizens construct their history and homeland. The way that villagers in Tira perceive time and space reflects how the physical “roadblocks” become mental “roadblocks,” which deterrritorializes Palestinian history for those internal refugees. Even though they still live in the same land as their forefathers did before the Palestine-Israel war, their history become anti-Israel and unreliable as their homeland became striated space incorporated into the State of
