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Dancing in Damascus

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These nine short stories explore love and loss in contemporary Damascus, as well as the possibilities of writing ethnography as fiction.Growing out of the author's anthropological fieldwork in Syri...
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  • 10 August 2000
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These nine short stories explore love and loss in contemporary Damascus, as well as the possibilities of writing ethnography as fiction.

Growing out of the author's anthropological fieldwork in Syria, these nine short stories explore love and loss in contemporary Damascus. Available here together for the first time in English, they confound popular stereotypes of Arab women and men as fundamentalists, terrorists, and victims of the Gulf War. The stories touch on such themes as tyranny, good and bad fortune in marriage, exile, the snobbery of old wealth, the ambition of new money, and much else. In a postscript, "The Pirates' Socks," Lindisfarne discusses why she chose to write about her fieldwork through the medium of fiction, and how writing these stories allowed her to tell truths an academic monograph could not contain. An Arabic edition of Dancing in Damascus was published in Syria in 1997, to considerable acclaim throughout the Arab world.

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Price: £25.00
Pages: 176
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Imprint: SUNY Press
Series: SUNY series, The Margins of Literature
Publication Date: 10 August 2000
ISBN: 9780791446362
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

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"In this book we have a new experience: an approach to creative writing that is different, that starts with research and social investigation but transforms the results into a literary text. Although the author is a foreigner—perhaps indeed because she is a foreigner—her observations of social life in Damascus are valuable, especially because she does not engage in touristic or orientalist comment. [She is able] to penetrate to the depths of Syrian life, in the same way as would the best of our local women writers." — Mamdouh Adwan, poet and playwright, in praise of the Arabic edition

"In this book we have a new experience: an approach to creative writing that is different, that starts with research and social investigation but transforms the results into a literary text. Although the author is a foreigner—perhaps indeed because she is a foreigner—her observations of social life in Damascus are valuable, especially because she does not engage in touristic or orientalist comment. [She is able] to penetrate to the depths of Syrian life, in the same way as would the best of our local women writers." — Mamdouh Adwan, poet and playwright, in praise of the Arabic edition

"Nancy Lindisfarne is a talented storyteller with an ability to create settings and characters as readable and convincing as most of the contemporary fiction in literary journals today." — Carol Spaulding, Drake University

Map

The Tortoise

True Love

Jellyfish

Fresh Apricots

Not One of Us

The Box (1959)

Lovely Tits

Hyena's Piss

Ghalia's Wedding

Postscript: The Pirates' Socks

Notes

References