Alligator & Other Stories is the last book I had to read to wrap up my James Tait Black project. It is a collection of nine stories by Syrian-American writer Dima Alzayat, all with a theme of dislocation.
I was nearly brought to tears by the first one, “Ghusl,” about a woman preparing the body of her younger brother for burial, against tradition. The woman’s name is Zaynab, and I believe she is the same woman we read about in later stories.
“Daughters of Manät” (does it mean “destiny”? all I could find was a definition of the word without the diacritical mark) also brings in Zaynab as the aunt of the narrator, but it begins with a woman stepping out of a window, presumably committing suicide. This act indicates a shift of point of view between telling the story of Zaynab and whatever else is going on, but that’s just it. The rest is beautifully written, but I found it a bit opaque.
“Disappearance” is the only story that doesn’t seem to contain characters of Middle East origin unless one is Etan, a boy who has disappeared. The story is written from the point of view of a young boy who is not allowed to leave his New York apartment building during the summer that Etan disappeared.
In “On Those Who Struggle Succeed,” a young college graduate makes compromises, including hiding her Lebanese ethnicity, to try to succeed at a company.
In “The Land of Kan’an” an Egyptian man living in Los Angeles tries to overcome his predilection for men as sexual partners.
“Alligator” is a long story that shows America’s history of racism through newspaper clippings, interviews, and testimony, reverting many times to the killing of a Syrian grocer and his wife in Florida by the police in 1929. Although it employs the technique, becoming more common, of using documents to tell its story, I think it is overly long and a bit redundant. I hadn’t realized until reading it, though, that there was a large emigration of Syrians in the early 20th century and that they were treated like my Irish ancestors were in the late 19th century.
“Summer of the Shark” is from the point of view of a young man of Jordanian descent working in a call center on 9/11.
In “Once We Were Syrians,” Zaynab makes another appearance as a grandmother tries to explain to her granddaughter what her Syrian heritage means.
In “A Girl in Three Acts,” a teenage girl in foster care reconnects with the Christian Syrian family that ostracized her branch of the family when her grandfather converted to marry a Muslim girl.
I found the first and last stories most affecting. The stories are beautifully written, but since short stories are not really my thing, I’d like to see a novel by Alzayat.
What? Me Read? 
These sound beautiful. I think the short stories into another culture are really rich at providing a cultural set of snapshots, sort of like a slide show. I found the same with Heart Lamp, which won the International Booker Prize this year.
I’ll look at that.
Sounds good, even though it might have felt opaque at times – a thing I often find with both middle-eastern and South American writing. I guess the cultural differences are quite big, and I often think notes would be helpful, even though I get the ‘why should we have to put notes in’ aspect. I checked with AI and it says: “Manāt is the name of a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess associated with fate and death.”, so it looks like you were right!
I think I only felt like I didn’t know what exactly was going on in one story. I’m just not a story person. But yes, there are times when a note might help.