Akram Musallam: اسيرة العقرب الذي يتصبب عرقا (The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion)

The latest addition to my website is Akram Musallam‘s اسيرة العقرب الذي يتصبب عرقا (The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion). Our unnamed narrator, clearly based on the author, had a epiphanic moment as a teen, when a French woman showed him her blue scorpion tattoo and let him outline the shape of her hips, while naked, on a mirror. He has never seen or heard from her since. We follow him as he now tries to write a novel about himself and the scorpion, but also about his parents (father lost part of his leg, another pivotal moment), his aunt and her stories and the car park where he writes his novel as it used to have an apartment where the famous Palestinian poet Hussein Barghouthi lived. Muted, in the background is the Israeli occupation and the intifada. Above all, our author feels emptiness, nothingness and loss – loss of Palestinian culture, of the dance hall where he first saw the scorpion and meaning in his life.

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