Level One: Infinities Unit, Class 4

Articles
Borders drawn by colonizers have contributed a lot to the diaspora from countries in the Levant and beyond. In this week's piece, Roxane touches on the difficulty with transliterating Arabic script into English letters (which is why so many Arabic words have so many different English spellings) and on carrying cultural traditions in the diaspora. One member of the group, who uses a stage name to keep her performing private from her family, said:

“You cannot bulldoze a dance. It’s something that can be carried with you. It’s intangible culture, right? You cannot take it away. When my family came (to the US) they couldn’t carry anything. What could they carry? They could remember the dances, they could remember the songs, even when language in their tongue was ripped out from being able to speak, what could they do? They knew the songs, We knew the dance..... And I feel like reclaiming that, and making these moves, even in the face of making your family angry or eliciting potential shame or messing up and shaming your name or whatever, is to make it a radical act of reclamation of joy." ~Hye Jinx

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Regional Highlights This unit, we're focusing on the Arabian Peninsula and Levant. These regional highlights are meant to give a general orientation, and really only scratch the surface of the diversity of people and arts in the MENAHT/SWANA area (Middle East, North Africa, Helene, & Turkey/SouthWest Asia & North Africa). This week is a hard one to talk about.

Many dancers and dance patrons in the US have come from Palestinian families displaced by the Nakba and ongoing apartheid. It is important to separate the desire and right of people on each side of those walls to live safely and freely, from guilt born by governments. To state the, hopefully, obvious, nothing justifies genocide, even being the descendants of genocide survivors. Simultaneously, equating opposition to Israel's policies with opposition to Jewish people is just as antisemitic and wrong as directing opposition to such policies at someone who just happens to be Jewish, just as it would be wrong to assume all Catholics agree with or shoulder responsibility for Italian military policy.
For more information on the history here, check out this video. For all the problems of Ottoman rule of the region, that history does at least prove that people of any religion can live side-by-side and get along in the land. It's also important to remember that there is a massive power difference between Israel and Palestine, as well as massive amounts of trauma all around. 

On the dance side, many Palestinians express pride in their heritage through the local styles of dabke, and bellydance is popular on both sides of the walls.

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A group of young Americans performing Palestinian Dabke.

Nagwa Fouad's father was Egyptian, her mother from Jaffa. As a result of the Nakba her family came back to Egypt, so Nagwa spent some time in a refugee camp near the Suez Canal, before returning to Egypt. She had lots of amazing music composed for her shows.

Finger cymbals are the ultimate way to cary your music with you!