'Fencing with the King': Fiction
A story of inheritance set in 20th-century Jordan.
I met the author Diana Abu-Jaber once, many years ago, in an encounter that has always remained a pleasant memory because we bonded briefly over our shared experience of having lived in central New York state. Since then I’ve read several of her books; what I appreciate most about them is not only her lyrical writing but also her Jordanian American perspective, one I don’t see often in literature. Her latest novel, “Fencing with the King” (W.W. Norton & Co.), published in March, centers on a Jordanian American woman who impulsively joins her father on a trip to the homeland he hasn’t seen in decades.
***
Amani knows her father, Gabe, as a carpenter, a woodworker, but that is in America. In his native Jordan, he was a fencer, good enough to compete against the king himself (though the king always won). So when the king’s 60th birthday comes along, a special letter arrives at Gabe’s home: a request that he take part in a fencing exhibition during the upcoming festivities.
Gabe isn’t as enthused as one might expect about a royal invitation. His Italian American wife, Francesca, is even more indifferent; she tells him the festivities coincide with her busy season at work and she can’t spend several weeks in Jordan. The trip is a no-go. Then their thirty-something daughter, Amani, recently divorced and feeling adrift in her career as a poet, makes an executive decision: Her father should go, and she’ll accompany him.
Abu-Jaber hits all the expected notes for a story about an immigrant and his American child crossing space and time to reacquaint themselves with their family and culture of origin. But she does so subtly, sometimes in moments that ring just briefly, like this one from a hot, dusty falconry demonstration that Amani and her father attend shortly after they arrive in Jordan:
“Don’t they believe in water?” her father asked.
“They?” Hafez looked bemused. Someone edged in front of Amani and took a picture of her uncle. She shuffled backward. Her throat felt like parchment.
“All day and all night in those airplanes — it’s like crossing the Sahara,” Gabe said.
“I’m well aware.” Hafez lowered his nose to his glass.
In that quick exchange, Abu-Jaber limns the tension between the brother who stayed and the brother who left and didn’t return, forcing his kin to come to him if they wanted to see him. It’s a tension that stretches throughout “Fencing with the King” as Amani learns more about her family: not just what they’re like today, but also the inheritances and legacies that have formed them and the secrets that have divided them for decades.
***
My own parents also left their country and rarely returned — that plane trip, too, required a commitment of all day and all night. I was with my mother the first time she went back, when I was about six; the one thing I remember about that flight is watching tears slip down her face as our plane descended and she saw the evening lights of the capital city for the first time in eight years.
Like Amani, I was surprised to land in a culture where I stuck out even though I could claim it as much as anyone else.
Men in slacks and pullover sweaters stood on the corners. They flicked cigarettes cupped inside their palms, greeted Omar, and studied Amani as she went by. Across the street, four more women swathed in black looked over their shoulders at her.
“They can tell you’re not from here,” Omar said, his face smug.
“I pretty much got that.”
Strangers on the street occasionally pulled my mother aside to ask if I was from somewhere else. I finally asked her how they could tell. She told me it was the way I walked, which only confused me more. Then there was the milk, which my mother considered an essential part of an American child’s breakfast. Every morning she bought a small bottle of milk from my uncle’s store and I obediently drank it while my cousins crowded around to watch; they’d never had milk, which was considered a luxury back then. I’d never felt so American.
***
For his return to the motherland, Gabe has packed his most treasured possession, the knife his father passed down to him.
Each birthday, Gabe visited with his mementos. First, he took out Il Saif. After the knife, he looked at the photograph of his family. The enlarged black-and-white showed them all together: older brothers Hafez and Farouq, father Munif, tall and sternly upright, and mother Natalia, her wire reading spectacles propped on her head, her eyes that peered into other worlds. Gabe, a grubby, squinting kid on the ground. His hand was lifted, as if he were holding on to something, but the corner was torn away at his fingers.
The knife, Il Saif, looms large between Gabe and his brother Hafez, who thinks that as the oldest, he rightfully should have it. Amani perhaps ought to care how this friction is resolved, but she’s much more interested in a mysterious blue envelope she finds that appears to bear Natalia’s handwriting and fragments of poetry. Rather than acquiesce to her uncle’s attempts to impress her with his position close to the king, she sets off to unseal the story of the envelope, a quest that ultimately takes her into both metaphorically and literally shifting sands.
I find Abu-Jaber’s prose comforting, like a just warm enough blanket on a late summer night with a hint of chill in the air. “Fencing With the King” wraps its sharp themes in that light, loose covering, a combination that’s irresistible.