On a plastic chair in a parking lot in Ramallah sits a young man writing a novel, reflecting on his life: working in a dance club on the Israeli side of the border, scratching his father's amputated leg, dreaming nightly of a haunting scorpion, witnessing the powerful aura of his mountain-lodging aunt.
His work in progress is a meditation on absence, loss and emptiness. He poses deep questions: What does it mean to exist? How can you confirm the existence of a place, a person, a limb? How do we engage with what is no longer there?
Absurd at times, raw at others, The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion explores Palestinian identity through Akram Musallam's extended metaphors in the hope of transcending the loss of territory and erasure of history.
Über die Autorin / über den Autor:Akram Musallam was born in Talfit near Nablus in the West Bank in 1972. He graduated from the Department of Letters and holds an MA in International Studies from the University of Birzeit. He writes for the daily al-Ayyam and is editor of the political quarterly al-Siyasa. The original Arabic edition of The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion won the A.M. Qattan Award in 2008 and has been translated into French and Italian.
Sawad Hussain is an Arabic translator and litterateur with an MA in Modern Arabic Literature from SOAS. In 2019 she won the Arablit Short Stroy prize and an English PEN grant to translate one of Najwa Bin Shatwan's short-story collections. Her recent translations include Mama Hissa's Mice by Saud Alsanousi and Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh, the latter als published by Seagull Books.
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