Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love by Anne Thomas Soffee
Reviewed by Anala Rabari
I want to make it clear as Soffee does that this is not a history of belly dance book and it is not an instructional book. This a belly dancer's memoir. However, she does include a small resource section at the back of the book that covers well-known dancers of different styles, musicians, suggested readings, and useful websites. This section concludes with a glossary of terms used in the book that some readers may not be familiar with.
This book was published in 2002 by the Chicago Review Press. This 262 page book is a must read for any belly dancer. No matter where you are at in your belly dancing, be it a beginner or a well seasoned veteran, you will be able to enjoy this book. Soffee is a Lebanese American and the majority of this book takes place in the Richmond, Virginia area which was also charming to me since I'm from the South. For some of the characters she writes their dialogue phonically so you can really hear the Southern accents in your mind as you are reading. Her attention to details and her style of writing makes the stories vividly come to life in your mind. I found myself remembering my own belly dance story as I went along reading her story. It was so wonderful because I constantly was thinking “oh, yes, I remember being in a situation like that” or I would be thinking “Thank God I've never experienced something like that.”
The book is full of wry razor wit from chapter titles such as "Your Daddy Ought to Smack your Face: Nice Girls Don't Undulate" to the hysterically funny telling of her first performance where she was caught topless while trying to change costumes at a county fair. The book starts with her trying to recover from the heartbreak of being dumped by her longtime boyfriend and her friend jokingly suggests taking a belly dance class as a way to get over her depression. I found this interesting because it seems that so many of us find our way into belly dance because we are searching for something to make us feel better about ourselves and to heal some sort of wound that we have endured.
This memoir covers all the important milestones of a belly dancer's career, experiencing going to see your first belly dance stage show, attending that first class, the first time performing, picking a dance name, buying that first costume, getting publicity shots, joining a troupe, first solo, dealing with troupe conflicts, roadtrip with fellow dancers, first workshop, having to leave a troupe, getting indecent propositions, seedy venues, and unappreciative audiences, and on top of all that just dealing with regular life experiences such as crazy family situations and getting into dating life again. Soffee leaves no stone unturned.