One day, on the shores of the Dead Sea in Israel, a strange “salt disease”, carried by wind and sand, began to strike indiscriminately. An illness that affects workers and prisoners, refugees and undocumented immigrants, but also tourists and staff at seaside resorts.
But it was only when Israeli settlers themselves began to suffer from the disease that the state reacted. For the media, “the incident became a human tragedy on an international scale.” The valley was quarantined, roads were blocked and the wall, “which reminded the vanquished of all they had lost,” could really play its role.
Then civilization collapsed.
Then a colony of pink flamingos appeared in the valley, feeding in what remained of the brackish waters of the Dead Sea. “By watching them live, we learned to live like flamingos,” says Alef, the narrator of the fourth novel by Montreal writer of Palestinian origin Yara El-Ghadban, The dance of the flamingosA fable of anticipation mixed with fantasy and utopia – political, romantic, cosmic – where, as one can easily guess, the ever-burning echoes of Palestinian news resonate.
Twenty years after the events, Alef tells and tells his story. A certain number of people, cured of the disease, have started to live again in this valley, forgetting, in turn, the world that seemed to have forgotten them.
Son of a Palestinian gardener and healer and an Israeli rabbi, Alef, 20, the very first child of this community of survivors who call themselves the “people of salt”, is in love with Anath, a young woman of 19.
“We have learned to live with the fragility of the earth and the untimely moods of the water. We have learned to watch over the living as they watch over us.” And if their existence has become almost primitive again, they live with each other in almost perfect harmony. Some of their evenings turn into celebrations during which “they dance the flamingo dance.” A kind of sensual ballet, an “offering of joy to the valley and to the living.”
They are the salt of the earth, so to speak. A magma of characters from which a few strong female figures emerge.
The ecumenical intentions of the author of The shadow of the olive tree and of I am Ariel Sharon (Mémoire d’encrier, 2011 and 2018) do not stop there. Because for the salt people, all animals have now become “living”. Each miraculous newborn is paired with a flamingo and the children are even “breastfed” at the beginning of their existence by the waders. Better: the animals talk to humans.
Utopia nourished by both anger and good feelings, The dance of the flamingos progresses according to a first-person narration curiously peppered with numerous dialogues, peppered with poetic and incantatory flights.
And if the past can resurface “at the slightest turbulence”, the weak narrative tension poorly prepares us for the upheavals that loom towards the end of the novel. Idealistic and atmospheric.