Arabian Jazz

By Diana Abu-Jaber. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993, 374 pp. List: $21.95; AET: $17.95.

Reviewed by Jean Grant

In Arabian Jazz, her engaging first novel, Diana Abu-Jaber gives us an Arab-American family living in upstate New York: Matussem Ramoud and his two daughters, Jemorah, 29, and Melvina, 22. Twenty years earlier their American mother, Nora, died of typhus during a visit to Jordan—"on purpose to make Arabs look bad, " claims Aunt Fatima. A loving, loyal busybody, Fatima aims to marry off her nieces. Dressy and bossy, with a beehive hairdo and nails of Dragon Lady red, she sings happily in Arabic about the woman who washes her husband's feet.

For such a funny book, Arabian Jazz covers a lot of serious ground. The girls are haunted by their mother's death. As if fulfilling a dictate of fate, the iron-willed Melvina becomes a nurse. She wears her nurse's cap "like a tiara." Jemorah drifts. She's 29, "marriage-emergency" time according to Aunt Fatima. But the home Jemorah wants is not with a man, but the one she lost when her mother died.

As for the girls' father, he turns to his drums much as Arabs still do throughout much of the Arab world. "You needed drums, Matussem knew, like bodies needed hearts, the muscle to keep things going." But he slaps the drums to a new beat, the jazz beat of America.

Some of the novel's best moments show the older generation's prickly sensitivity and easy pride. "Americans had the money, but Arabs, ah! They had the food, the culture, the etiquette, the ways of being and seeing and understanding how life was meant to be lived," says Aunt Fatima.

The Ramouds' neighbors—"poor, white" stick figures who weaken her novel by distracting from the plot—seem all the more dysfunctional when set against the tight-knit Ramoud family.

At the heart of this book is a celebration of Arab-American idealism and determination to succeed while maintaining their family ties and traditions of hospitality and generosity. It's a blend of pathos and humor, and it's easy to laugh at the rich relatives who flit in from the "old country" to use the States for their amusement and find themselves outwitted.

Much of the dialogue of the older characters is to standard English as scatting is to melody. At first this is irritating. Yet by the time Matussem returns after the absence of a few chapters (he's been in Jordan), you welcome his "Don't try to bamboozle me, Melvie, you heart picker."

With his jazz standards, slang and lawn ornaments, Matussem tries hard to be American. But their Arab heritage makes his daughters vulnerable.

As a child, Jemorah is taunted on the school bus for her "strange name and darker skin." She cringes as the bus approaches the mailbox on which Matussem has painted their name RAMOUD "four inches high in bright red. " Later, she says, "It's not enough to be born here, or to live here, or speak the language. You've got to seem right."

Yet there are advantages to being hybrid. "You get two looks at a world," says the cousin Jemorah may eventually marry. "You may never have a perfect fit, but you see far more than most ever do."

Arabian Jazz clearly presents the anti-Arab bias in the United States. More importantly, Abu-Jaber shows this bias is unmerited, for her very likeable Arab-American characters are far more worthy of respect than their unhyphenated American neighbors. Abu-Jaber's novel will probably do more to convince readers to abandon what media analyst Jack Shaheen calls America's "abhorrence of the Arab" than any number of speeches or publicity gambits.

Jean Grant is a free-lance writer specializing in Arab affairs. A former English teacher at the American University of Beirut and reporter for Saudi Arabia's Arab News, she now lives in Oak Ridge, TN.