Articulations of Resistance

Transformative Practices in Contemporary Arab-American Poetry

Sirène H. Harb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000710946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

Using a theoretical framework located at the intersection of US ethnic studies, transnational studies, and postcolonial studies, Articulations of Resistance: Transformative Practices in Contemporary Arab-American Poetry maps an interdisciplinary model of critical inquiry to demonstrate the intimate link and multilayered connections between poetry and resistance. In this study of contemporary Arab-American poetry, Sirène Harb analyzes how resistance, defined as the force challenging the dominant, intervenes in ways of rethinking the local and the global vis-à-vis traditional paradigms of time, space, language and value.

1 Haunted Spaces

Ghostliness, Loss, and Violence

This chapter explores literary depictions of haunting and ghostliness in Arab-American poetry to show how they convey forms of resistance to social violence and colonial oppression. These forms of violence permeate the experience of Arab Americans; they are not only related to the subaltern status of this group as the ethnic and often terrorist other in American society, but they also mark the history of Arab Americans and that of their forefathers. For many of these hyphenated Americans, their country of origin located in the Arab world has been scarred by wars, internal conflicts, and sectarian strife. The story of their (or their parents’) coming to America is also far from being a smooth realization of a utopian dream; in addition to the difficulties resulting from differing cultural contexts and experiences, these immigrants have always been marked as others and figured as “curiosities” and “ultimate foreigners” in the cultural imagination and legal frameworks informing discourses about eligibility for immigration/adaptation in the United States. Talking about these groups, the Associated Charities of the City of Boston maintained at the end of the nineteenth century, “Next to the Chinese, who can never be in any real sense Americans, the Syrians [i.e., Lebanese and Syrians] are the most foreign of all our foreigners. . . . and out of the nationalities would be distinguished for nothing whatever excepting as curiosities” (Woods 46, qtd. in Shakir, “Arab-American” 5).

For these “ultimate foreigners” to the United States, the burden of loss informs not only personal histories but also collective identities. Reactions to forms of loss are different and varied, but arguably, subjects scarred by loss are always on a quest, trying to find coping mechanisms and often repressing “unspeakable” events. Sometimes the victory of these scarred subjects consists in recovering a semblance of everydayness that provides feelings of normalcy which is interrupted every now and then by the emergence of certain traces, phantom manifestations of the repressed. Among such experiences that have left their marks on the psyche of Lebanese Americans, for instance, one may cite the horrors of the Lebanese civil war,¹ the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the Israeli occupation and its aftermath, and various forms of religious, ethnic, and sectarian conflicts. Whether penned in French or English, texts by Lebanese-American writers such as Haas Mroue and Etel Adnan have represented these conflicts and probed their impact on shaping narratives of belonging, exile, and alienation. At another level, writers of Palestinian ancestry such as Nathalie Handal, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lisa Suhair Majaj, and Suheir Hammad have projected other forms of violence that marked their personal and collective histories.² They namely represented, some in explicit and others in more subtle ways, the exilic experiences of Palestinians following the Nakba, the trauma caused by ethnic cleansing and racist and colonial practices, as well as the resulting forms of dispossession, rootlessness, and persecution. The consequences of war and dispossession in the aftermath of the First Gulf War and the Second Persian Gulf War³ have been equally explored by a number of writers, including Iraqi-American Sinan Antoon and Dunya Mikhail, Palestinian-American Sharif Elmusa and Suheir Hammad, and Lebanese-American D.H. Melhem.

Narrating wars, colonization, exile, occupation, and their aftermath, Arab-American literature chronicles different instances of social and psychological violence. These forms of violence are sometimes spoken and articulated in a direct, graphic, and detailed way; in other contexts, they make their presence felt in subtle and almost imperceptible ways. These forms of violence often produce a sense of haunting conveyed through multiple references to wandering souls, actions performed by shadows, and gifts offered by the deceased. Such hauntings record, to use Avery Gordon’s words, “the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present” (xvi). Associated with displacements and loss, forms of haunting portrayed in poems and poetry collections such as “A Letter” by Antoon, Beirut Seizures by Mroue, The Lives of Rain by Handal, 19 Varieties of Gazelle and You and Yours by Shihab Nye, and Geographies of Light by Majaj point to silenced aspects of the experiences of Arabs and Arab Americans. In its examination of apparitions of the dead and eruptions of shadows in the above-mentioned poem and poetry collections, this chapter probes the personal and political dimensions of haunting and the sociological as well as psychological implications of its portrayal in relation to violence and unfinished losses.

Such examination shows the ways in which haunting as a literary tool articulates multilayered forms of resistance since it works against notions of closure. Haunting also challenges the ideological basis of linear and progressive imperial time and its role in the construction of national and colonial narratives. As such, the past, present, and future are depicted as happening at the same time through the figure of the ghost/specter, which challenges linear time and deconstructs the opposition pitting past against present and the material/corporeal against the spiritual/ephemeral (Derrida, Specters 48). In the same vein, the ghost undoes what Walter Benjamin calls “homogeneous, empty time” (395) and heralds a critique of the ideal of progress underlying Western teleology and systems of knowledge. Against such ideal, ghosts present alternative and experimental tools for negotiating unfinished narratives and unarticulated losses, as the poems under discussion make evident. Haunting thus evokes uncertainty through the states of suspension it signifies; it alters the experience of self and home by introducing a note of strangeness and modifying ways of being in the present and being with others, ultimately resulting in defamiliarization. A critical stress on these aspects of haunting arguably shows how this mode of representation conveys the break in meaning that is integral to the experience of repressed violence. Focusing on states of suspension, the challenge of temporal dichotomies, and forms of discontinuity, my analysis probes different types of haunting in relation to resistance, namely pertaining to the affective and mnemonic spheres.

The choice of the above-mentioned texts is informed by the fact that they reflect different contexts and forms of haunting resulting in the presence of the past in the present. Such forms of haunting are namely associated with the Lebanese civil war; ethnic cleansing in Gaza and Auschwitz; the Nakba and Israeli colonial oppression; and the American wars on Iraq. I identify poetic instances of haunting pertaining to these events to shed light on the use of this strategy to depict the consequences of social violence; to negotiate resulting forms of oscillation between absence and presence; and to project historical revision based on experiential intersections dramatizing the perception of time.⁴ Since the selected texts depict the phenomenon of haunting in relation to different historical events and traumatic instances or moments, they attest to the pervasiveness of haunting as a literary and aesthetic device serving to probe the complex dimensions of violence and dispossession.

The first section of this chapter develops a theory of haunting in relation to repressed violence, colonial oppression, and suspension of historical time. The second, third, fourth, and fifth sections probe representations of haunting in the work of Majaj, Mroue, Antoon, Shihab Nye, and Handal to analyze the sociohistorical implications of such representations as they relate to time, space, value, violence, and loss. The final section highlights ways in which haunting contributes to the formulation of a poetics of resistance associated not only with literary representation but also with acts of reading and interpretation. This section also examines how such formulations of haunting and resistance complicate the mapping of Arab Americanness and intervene in debates around ethnic crossing and diasporic location.

Theorizing Haunting, Ghosts, and Shadows

Ghosts and shadows symbolize personal and collective experiences that refuse to leave and to be relegated to the past; they insist on being part of the present, bringing to it a feeling of strangeness and unfamiliarity. Shadows and ghosts are located in a complex space of articulation, associated with questions of violence, temporal disjuncture, and unfulfilled justice (Derrida, Specters xviii). On the poetic level, the state of suspension these ghosts and shadows signify indexes alternative forms of impossibility associated with textual “space[s] for the dramatization of the psychopoetics of unresolved mourning — unresolved because the object whose loss demands mourning (be it Palestine, Iraq, or Arabness tout court) is neither completely lost nor fully abandoned” (Gana 40). As such, ghosts and shadows point to an in-betweenness associated with a present in which the past intervenes to prevent closure and a sense of resolution. Such notion of haunting can be properly understood in the context of two interrelated theoretical framings of the ghostly: Jacques Derrida’s stress on the ghost as a victim in search of an impossible justice and Achille Mbembe’s focus on the connection between the ghostly and forms of “liv[ing] in death” (“Out of the World” 201; emphasis in original). First, it is worth remembering that if for Derrida, the ghost embodies forms of possibility, it is also a signifier of an unfulfilled promise relating to social justice (Specters xviii). As such, the ghost is located in a hard place of articulation, as it points to the promise of justice specifically because of the impossibility of its fulfillment.

Second, for Mbembe, the ghost and the ghostly reflect the state of subjects who “delegate … [their] death while simultaneously and already experiencing death at the very heart of … [their] existence” (“Out of the World” 201). Not unlike other targets of necropower, these subjects live in “death-worlds” resulting from “topographies of cruelty” associated with colonial and oppressive systems (“Necropolitics” 40). Focusing on both theoretical directions, this chapter argues for reading the figure of the ghost as a signifier of colonial violence, historical erasure, and marginalization. The resulting processes of signification trouble notions of belonging and community as they call for reconsidering the role of the ghostly in shaping what Carol Fadda-Conrey terms “discursive negotiation[s] of transnational connections” (3) in Arab-American literary production.

This reading of haunting, ghosts, and shadows challenges the rigidity and hegemony of specific social structures. In this context, the ghost is defined as an agent of communication or mediation between the world of the dead and the world of the living; this agent corresponds to people who formerly belonged to the realm of the living. Shadows correspond to figurative ghosts or marginalized beings, whose condition is associated with exile, warfare, displacement, and loss; they are living subjects who exist in the realm of the present. Both ghosts and shadows, nonetheless, are associated with subjects who have been wronged and are still grappling with the consequences of injustices committed against them. In this respect, the sense of the ghostly, conveyed through ghosts and shadows (who could have agency and could be capable of action), is to be understood in relation to the transgression of the normal realm and ordinary frames of reference to register a different way of responding to social phenomena.

Both ghosts and shadows manifest their presence through forms of haunting different from those associated with traumatic memories or experiences buried in the unconscious. What these spectral manifestations (i.e., ghosts and shadows) share with such experiences, however, is the notion of unfinished pain. Traumatic memories are the source of recurring, unfinished pain, and the ghostly is the “embodied” representation of such pain. Haunting associated with the presence of ghosts and shadows is intimately interwoven with forms of suspension and lack of resolution, which also characterizes, as Cathy Caruth makes clear, traumatic memories. Such lack of resolution in the case of trauma originates from what Caruth terms “belatedness.” As she notes,

Traumatic experience … suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it, that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness. The repetitions of the traumatic event unavailable to consciousness … thus suggest a larger relation to the event that extends beyond what can simply be seen or what can be known, and that is inextricably tied up with the belatedness … at the heart of this repetitive seeing. (“Traumatic” 89)

Although haunting equally “extends beyond what can simply be seen or what can be known,” it is not always associated with the unavailability to consciousness of painful events. Rather, as we shall see in the various examples discussed, sources of unfinished pain resulting in haunting are clearly identified.⁵

Unsettling Ghosts and the Violence of Memory

This section juxtaposes two forms of ghostliness; the first is associated with ghosts of subjects who were victims of ethnic cleansing, racism, and colonial violence. These victims come back to haunt the poets-speakers in Majaj’s and Mroue’s poetry, asking for their plight to be heard. The second form of ghostliness focuses on a living ghost, a colonized subject who is ghosted by the Israeli occupiers and who, in turn, reclaims agency by ghosting herself and thus becoming a shadow. Hence, she regains, albeit in a limited fashion, her place in the history of her occupied country. The juxtaposition of these instances serves to highlight how ghostliness serves not only as a figure associated with situations of oppression; rather, it could also be used at certain times by the oppressed to rewrite their story and thus resist, in their limited way, forms of silencing and marginalization. This gesture reproduces on a smaller scale the act of writing these victims into historical accounts that the authors mediate.

Since ghosts are thresholds to other worlds, they point to alternative realities and forms of perception. In the various poems that will be discussed, readers learn that hearing and seeing them depend on the shifting of points of reference associated with consciousness and the ways in which it filters reality. More specifically, answering the call of ghostliness and hearing its alarming reality depend on forms of transitioning between traditional perceptions of time and space and ways in which they are experienced by the victimized, as Majaj’s poem “Reunion” cogently shows. In this poem which stages a physical encounter with the dead and their longings and traumas, victims are engaged in a search for an impossible justice. Understanding their plight, the poet implies, heavily depends on the development of historical and social consciousness. But these ghosts are also about contested terrains and zones, unstable and precarious. They link author, characters, and readers to other places, histories, and feelings.

Before examining these places and histories, it is worth noting that haunting in “Reunion” functions on two levels: on one level, Majaj’s dead mother, father, uncle, and aunt haunt her morning and almost force her to listen to them and account for their presence and tragedies. On another level, the dead themselves grapple with the consequences of loss and the tragic disappearance of their loved ones. In its different stanzas, the poem conveys forms of tension between speech and silence, memory and forgetting, as it probes the responsibility of the poet-survivor and her struggle with personal and historical legacies. As such, haunting results in forms of distancing from the present to catalyze a (forced) journey into the past which is marked by colonization, murders, and occupation. Visitations and apparitions compete with the present and with the pressing needs of work and family. Since the dead offer Majaj their gifts of memory, they resurrect significant events of her personal history, invade her present, and disturb the delicate balance she had established with her past. These returning ghosts reclaim sites of memory that they give the poet the responsibility to transmit; in Gordon’s words, such ghosts “import[] a charged strangeness into the place or sphere … [they are] haunting, thus unsettling the propriety and property lines that delimit a zone of activity or knowledge” (63).

Because of their urgent need to communicate their stories, the ghosts haunting Majaj’s morning do not even respect the minimal protocols of visitations, as she notes in her poem:

You’d think the dead would come at night:

shadows on a midnight wind,

shudders from the heart of mystery.

Instead they crowd in over my morning coffee,

hover insistently in the steam,

jostling their competing memories.

I tell them to come back later.

All those years of longing

and they think they can show up like creditors? (3)

These ghosts of the dead throw a note of strangeness into an otherwise usual scene of a woman drinking her morning coffee. Their insistent hover in the steam unsettles propriety lines and disturbs Majaj’s plans to accomplish her daily tasks. Majaj describes their “gifts” as forced upon her; her refusal to carry the burden of memory does not deter her mother from giving her a “cracked white porcelain angel/ that stood on her dresser for years” (3); her father from filling her t-shirt “with clods of dry brown earth,/mumbling something about loss,/remembrance, Palestinian inheritance” (3); her uncle from passing down his memories of his sister, mother, and “his wife, safe and whole before the bomb/that shook the East Jerusalem cobblestones” (4). Obviously, the memories pas...