BETTY SHAMIEH’s literary debut novel Too Soon explores exile, ambition, and hope across three generations of Palestinian American women.
Read on for an extract …
ABOUT THE BOOK
Arabella gets an unexpected chance at love when she’s thrust into a conflict and history she’s tried to avoid all her life.
Zoya is playing matchmaker for her last unmarried granddaughter and stirring up buried memories.
Naya is keeping a secret from her children that will change all their lives.
Thirty-five-year-old Arabella, a New York theatre director whose dating and career prospects are drying up, is offered an opportunity to direct a risqué cross-dressing interpretation of a Shakespeare classic – that might garner international attention – in the West Bank. Her mother, Naya, and grandmother, Zoya, hatch a plot to match her with Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Arabella agrees to meet Aziz, since her growing feelings for Yoav, a celebrated Israeli American theatre designer, seem destined for disaster…
With biting hilarity, Too Soon introduces us to a trio of bold and unforgettable voices. This dramatic saga follows one family’s epic journey fleeing war-torn Jaffa in 1948, chasing the American Dream in Detroit and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, hustling in the New York theatre scene post-9/11, and daring to stage a show in Palestine in 2012. Upon learning one of them is living on borrowed time, the three women fight to live, make art, and love on their own terms.
A funny, sexy, and heart-wrenching literary debut, Too Soon illuminates our shared history and asks, how can we set ourselves free?
**********
1
ARABELLA
New York City
2012
It was not that September 11 felt like just another day in New York to me. It’s that I had to pretend it wasn’t. I was only traumatised by how little I was traumatised. If you were thinking about hating me already, don’t worry. You’re in great company. Also, try as you might, you can’t hate me as much as I hate myself.
I had more skin in the game on that day than most New Yorkers who wound up with intact skin. In short, I had almost been killed. I was tunnelling my way under the Cortland Street subway station minutes before it imploded under the weight of the Towers, fuel, and human hatred.
So, I had been closer to death than my artsy New York intellectual and theatre friends, who stared out at the world with eyes bleary with horror, at the first public gathering I attended on September 17. It was at New Dramatists. I was a month into my yearlong gig as a director- in-residence there. In a circle, we sat in that unconsecrated church in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen to ‘come together’ as a community. They all looked fearful, anguished, dazed. Childlike and innocent, but in that Lord of the Flies kind of way. If anyone was gonna be Piggy, and wind up with their head smashed in, it was clearly yours truly.
I was waiting for someone to slip up and exclaim, ‘What kind of animals could do such a thing?!’ and then watch all the eyes in the room turn to me.
And, if that happened, I knew I would snap and spew vitriol of a rather intense nature. Say some regrettable things. In other words, tell the truth.
‘Not feeling particularly safe? Surprise, surprise! The world’s a fucking terrible place! Innocent people die horrible deaths every fucking minute of every fucking day. I’m always painfully aware how easily I could have been one of them. I’m a Palestinian. Yeah, yeah, I was born in America. But my parents never really left and neither can I. When the country you are from no longer exists, you can’t ever truly emigrate from it. Give my people a homeland, so I can finally ditch it! Give it the big middle finger and pledge allegiance to another f lag! Until then, I was born there, I live there, and I can’t leave there. Not a day goes by where I don’t feel haunted and hunted. Every day is like September 11 for me. Welcome to how I feel all the time.’
But thankfully, that liberal crowd was careful. Measured. They even outdid themselves in their estimations of how much Arab blood was on American hands, spouting facts and figures I was not politically astute enough to keep in my head. Or rather did not have the inclination to do so. I – of course – didn’t say a damn word. For fuck’s sake, I’m a theatre director, specialising in postmodern interpretations of Shakespeare. I could recite every major monologue in Hamlet before I could tell you one solid fact about what year which administration gave what order to bomb what Arab country. But I could probably give you a strong opinion about why.
While they debated whether it was safe to use the subways again (conclusion: it was unsafe, but we had no choice), I wondered if, had I died in the attacks, it might be assumed that I had been a part of planning them. That happened to a few 9 ⁄ 11 victims, who were Americans of Middle Eastern descent. They were investigated and posthumously cleared of all charges. That would be some shit, wouldn’t it? To never feel truly accepted as an American, but to be killed because you represented America. Then, to have it assumed you were complicit in the attack that robbed you of your life. Good times.
My British shrink at the time pronounced that I was repressing my feelings, insisting I had been impacted by the violence of the attacks on my beloved city, despite my sense of alienation. A pert blonde who bore a resemblance to a young Camilla Parker Bowles, she said I was turning my feelings of sorrow into anger. Because, of course, my sorrow might overwhelm me. So, according to her, I wasn’t actually angry.
I didn’t have the heart to argue. I had a policy of studiously avoiding extensive discussions of Middle Eastern politics, even in therapy. It would tax me too much to dwell on my family history, where we are from and why we’re not allowed to return. I couldn’t afford to let myself fall into a funk. It was hard enough for me to get out of bed in the morning. Also, rarely necessary until at least noon on most days.
My Yaba made a lot of bread. Literally. My dad bought a bread factory within a few years of leaving the Christian quarter of Jerusalem to study Engineering at San Francisco State. His Palestinian ass is now the number one manufacturer of sourdough in the world (God Bless America!). Hence, I was no starving artist. And I probably wouldn’t have lasted a year working in theatre in New York if I had been.
But that’s beside the point. I was savvy enough to get the memo that it wasn’t worth the physiological toll it took on my body to engage in such conversations, which would turn contentious more often than not. Let some other mother lover start a war of words. This ensured I was less likely to be triggered. My heart need not flutter like a butterfly with its ass on fire, the juices of my stomach could remain in their lining. No thank you! I come in peace and – in peace – I intend to motherfuckin’ stay. Just trying to direct some good productions of Shakespeare. Life is hard enough trying to stay relevant in an increasingly culturally irrelevant art form.
Since men who looked like my brothers were now crashing planes into buildings, I wondered if I needed to look for an Arab shrink. So, if she said weird shit – like I was feeling sorrow when I was damn sure I was feeling anger – I could take it for what it was worth rather than wonder if her analysis of me was coloured by her own discomfort with facing an angry Palestinian. We’re much more manageable when we are sad.
The shrink had basically said I was numb and hadn’t been able to process my reaction to September 11. You, Arabella Hajjar, are in for some fun. A meltdown is on its way. You’re going to swim in a tsunami of grief. Wait for it.
I didn’t think she was right until I entered my apartment on an unusually dark early evening in May over a decade after September 11. To be fair, that day was doomed from the start. I had been dreading it since I got the invitation to the opening night performance of the latest play at the Public Theatre five weeks earlier. ‘What does one wear to an off-Broadway opening of a play one hates at a theatre that one abhors?’ I wondered (possibly aloud) as I put my key in my door and stepped inside. To my horror, without warning, my window into the world had changed.
**********
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Betty Shamieh (she/her) is the author of 16 plays.
Shamieh’s theatre work has been the subject of features in the New York Times, Time Out, American Theatre magazine, Theater Bay Area, the Brooklyn Rail, San Francisco Chronicle, Svenska Dagbladet, Teaterstockholm, der Standard, Aramco Magazine, Kathimeiri, and the International Herald Tribune among others.
A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, Shamieh was awarded an NEA/TCG grant to be a playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre. Shamieh was selected as a Clifton Visiting Artist at Harvard and named as a Playwriting Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Shamieh has taught playwriting at Columbia/Barnard, Denison College, and Marymount Manhattan College. She is a alumni member of New Dramatists. an affiliated artist at the New Group, and a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect.
Recently, she was named the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem and a Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford. She was commissioned by Noor Theatre with support from Pop Culture Collab to develop a comic TV pilot, inspired by her play Roar.
0 Comments