“It’s not a pretty story. It will shock and upset some readers, and make others extremely uncomfortable. And that’s part of what makes it so good.”
The opening passage of Dima Alzayat’s 2020 novella “Alligator” (included in Alzayat’s 2020 collection Alligator and Other Stories) might give some readers flashbacks of grinding through William Faulkner in high school: “my mother’s skirt hair on my father’s arms black shoes leather sandals slippered feet across a hardwood floor strawberries pyramid-stacked on trays…” and, well, thus begins the tale of a tormented family haunted across generations by a violent lynching that took place in the 1920s in Lake City, Florida. “Adele (1990)” is the narrator and the year where “Alligator” begins, but Alzayat does Faulkner one better – not only does she move forward and back in time, across multiple locations, with her settings, but her many narrators are joined by a chorus of other voices: emails, social media posts, ancient news clippings, courtroom transcripts, and reality-show screenplays.
Alzayat veers into John Dos Passos territory, stylistically, as these passages evoke the modernist experiments of his U.S.A. trilogy. And she wastes no time impressing on the reader the shocking, tragic violence of the killings of 1929 – immediately after Adele’s brief stream-of-consciousness opening chapter, there’s a newspaper item describing the shooting of Nancy Romey, and the gruesome, bullet-ridden body of her husband George, found in a ditch a day later. It’s not a pretty story. It will shock and upset some readers, and make others extremely uncomfortable. And that’s part of what makes it so good.
“Alligator” brings an especially harsh light to bear on the injustices inflicted upon Florida’s minorities during the “Roaring 20s” (and earlier, and later). These wretched and tragic histories have been well-documented already, of course; Alzayat has described her own process of “discovery” and research in interviews such as this one with London Magazine. The Romey family are Syrian-Americans, though, and the letters, testimonials, advertisements, headlines, and editorials included in the story tell an unsettlingly familiar parallel story of racial discrimination and hatred in the Deep South, up to the present day. Much detail is given throughout the story to the racial category (and status) that Syrian immigrants occupied in the Jim Crow era in the South; a lot of it is raw and will make readers uneasy. Parallel narratives of late 20th and early-21st century discrimination and violence frequently recur, in similar mixed-media fashion. And the history of the Seminole Wars in Florida is conveyed in fleeting, disturbing newspaper items from the 1830s and in a grade-schooler’s history report from 1999.
“Alligator” alone is worth the price of admission (or purchase) for this collection. But the entire book is filled with compelling and gripping stories. “Summer of the Shark,” for instance, is another Florida-set tale that takes place on a dark day in recent American history. Oh, and the title? Lake City was named “Alligator” until 1859. The more things change, right? I suspect that was Alzayat’s point.
