Images of the Christ in Fencing with the King by Diana Abu-Jaber

Images of the Christ in Fencing with the King by Diana Abu-Jaber
W.W. Norton & Company, 2022; 320 pp., $17.95

In 2006, our town selected Abu-Jaber’s novel Crescent for a city-wide bookfest. The lyricism of Abu-Jaber’s prose and its echoes of Middle Eastern myth and mysticism enchanted me. Subsequent works likewise engaged my interest, particularly her memoir The Language of Baklava. Upon hearing early in 2022 that Abu-Jaber was releasing a new novel—her first in eleven years—I made haste to procure a copy.

Fencing with the King was inspired by the rich cultural heritage of Abu-Jaber’s own family. Amani, the protagonist, is a poet-professor one year short of tenure at a university known for dangling full professorship just out of reach. She is recently divorced. And on occasion she drinks too much.

It’s a Match

The opening scenes find Amani in Jordan with her father, Gabe, celebrating the king’s fiftieth birthday. Amani has recently learned that Gabe used to fence with the king when the two were young; thus the invitation to participate in a ceremonial match during the month-long celebration. With Amani’s mother, Francesca, inextricably wrapped up in the responsibilities of her school principal job, Amani agrees to accompany her father.

But when Amani discovers fragments of writing penned by Gabe’s Palestinian mother, the four-week sojourn turns into a quest. Gabe and his brothers remember their late mother, Natalia, as a frayed and troubled soul. Forced as a child to flee her hometown, near Nazareth, she arrived on foot in a Bedouin village in Jordan. There she grew up and married the man who became Amani’s paternal grandfather.

Alienated from and misunderstood by her husband and his community, Natalia sought refuge in books and writing. We learn at length that her greatest grief was forced estrangement from her eldest son, Musa. Much later we learn that, when the brothers were young men, second son Hafez tidily bundled Musa off to the desert to get him and his inheritance rights out of the way.

Echoes of Antiquity

Amani discovers that Musa was and is simple in multiple senses. As a child he fell behind the social-intellectual development of his peers. When she eventually tracks down the middle-aged man, Amani finds him living a minimalist existence in a desert cave, watched over by the nuns of a nearby convent.

Given that the novel is set in territory held sacred by all three Abrahamic religions and that most of the characters are either Christian or Muslim, scriptural parallels fit comfortably into its makeup. Musa is the Arab form of Moses. The biblical Moses, despite being raised in Pharaoh’s court, spent most of his life in the wilderness. As an adult he first killed an Egyptian guard, then separated two Hebrews engaged in an altercation, and finally fled to the desert. Forty years later, by God’s command, he returned to lead the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt. When his unruly charges displeased the Almighty, Moses spent another forty years shepherding them about the desert.

In the novel, Amani retrieves Musa from his desert retreat and shows up with him at the titular fencing match. In the aftermath, Hafez attacks Gabe, and it is Musa who breaks up the fight between his two younger brothers.

Hafez subsequently carts Musa off to the desert for the second time in both of their lives. Amani follows. But in the course of her pursuit, she becomes separated from her Bedouin guide and loses her way. In hopes of leaving a trail, she sheds, one by one, her school ID, library card, insurance card, and finally her purse and money.

By the time darkness falls, Amani is alone in the desert, bereft of identity and worldly goods. She recalls her one of her mother’s favorite maxims—stop struggling. Sinking into the sand beside a rock, Amani offers up a mental apology for her folly: I’m sorry. Please forgive me. She attempts to inscribe words in the sand, but the wind sweeps away even these proofs of her existence.

At daybreak Amani attempts to carry on but is overcome, first by the heat and then by a sandstorm. As she despairs of life, the realization dawns that she has held herself too tightly. Self-protection has prevented her from giving of herself, from loving, and from living a full life. The crisis constitutes a sand-scoured death and rebirth.

The scene is elegantly crafted, but at my first reading I objected to what I considered a weakness in characterization. Up to this point Amani hadn’t markedly projected the sort of self-protection she repents of. She is a loving daughter, devoted to her grandmother’s memory, chummy with her cousin.

But on reflection I concluded the understated nature of Amani’s shortcomings renders them all the more relatable. It is not merely the obvious villains—the greedy, the ambitious, the cranks—but all of us who need to learn self-relinquishment. Ultimately, the duplicitous uncle Hafez carries on unreformed, while it is the largely unobjectionable Amani who asks forgiveness.

Giving of One’s Self

Gabe and Hafez come from a traditionally Christian family. Gabe has converted to Islam. Hafez is a quintessential hypocrite. He curries favor with the archbishop while cheating on his wife and grasping at position, power, influence, renown, land, and inheritance. In a rare moment of self-knowledge, he reflects: “It seems as if you work and work, always ‘eyes on the prize.’ . . . And when you finally get it—it is so very wonderful. . . . And you think: After this, my life is now different. I am changed. Forever. It’ll never go back. . . . But then a little time goes by and after a while no one but you remembers being a star” (p. 129).

Amani’s mother, who appears only briefly at the beginning and end of the novel, is the voice of wisdom—the Sophia sought by both carpenter Gabe and poet Hafez in their youth. But it was Gabe, the worker in wood, rather than Hafez, the crafter of lyrics, who proved to be the true seeker after wisdom and thus obtained it.

In the denouement, we are told Francesca regularly donates her hair to organizations that make wigs for cancer victims. All the boxes for organ donation on her—and Gabe’s—driver’s licenses are checked. She is reported to say that the point of being alive is to give yourself away.

It is a material generosity. But moments such as Amani’s desert epiphany suggest that the ideal extends to one’s immaterial elements as well. Francesca’s words recall Jesus’s enigmatic statement that “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

Christians understand this to mean that those who surrender themselves wholly to God can look forward to a life that extends beyond earthly existence. Fencing with the King does not necessarily conjure the hope of eternity. Indeed, toward the end of the book, Amani’s love interest asserts that it is the impermanence of life that makes it precious. But for Francesca and Amani, the fleeting nature of existence calls for a disposition not of tenacity but of open-handedness.

Servant King

Other passages in Fencing conjure echoes of Christ as well. Natalia’s place of origin is initially reported as Nazareth, Jesus’s hometown. And when Amani awakes in the desert after her epiphany, it is to the scent of blooming herbs and the sight of a child on a donkey. The eighteenth chapter of Matthew records Jesus’s approbation of childlikeness. And both Matthew and John record Jesus’s riding into Jerusalem on a humble donkey one week before his death and Resurrection.

In the concluding scenes of Fencing, Musa, restored to his desert home, makes the surprising claim (accurately, as it turns out) that the King of Jordan is building him a house. The statement echoes Jesus’s promise to his followers, in the course of predicting his death, that he leaves to prepare a place for them: “My father’s house has many rooms” (John 14:2).

Spoiler alert: In the end, Amani’s generosity of vision segues into a nearly ideal life for a writer. She takes a cafe job in Jordan that enables her to work on a novel inspired by her grandmother’s writings. She observes she has “deliberately trad[ed] a professorship for a job waiting tables” (p. 295). But she has gained contentment, demonstrated by the fact that she no longer needs to resort to the bottle.

Not to be overlooked is the promising romantic relationship facilitated by Amani’s remaining in Jordan. But Abu-Jaber takes care that her protagonist should release professional security before being assured of relational bliss.

Fencing with the King rewards on multiple levels—personal, political, spiritual, and historico-cultural. From the raw material of family history, Abu-Jaber has crafted a meditation on personhood, family, and meaning that ranks high among her previous literary works.