Arab American Aesthetics

Literature, Material Culture, Film, and Theatre

Therí Pickens, Therí Pickens, Therí A. Pickens, Therí A. Pickens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367593179
• eBook ISBN: 9781351596527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Arab American Aesthetics enlists a wide range of voices to explore, if not tentatively define, what could constitute Arab American aesthetics in literature, material culture, film, and theatre.

This book seeks to unsettle current conversations within Arab American Studies that neglect aesthetics as a set of choices and constraints. Rather than divorce aesthetics from politics, the book sutures the two more closely together by challenging the causal relationship so often attributed to them. The conversations include formal choices, but also extend to the broad idea of what makes a work distinctly Arab American. That is, what about its beauty, ugliness, sublimity, or humor is explicitly tied to it as part of a tradition of Arab American arts? The book opens up the ways that we discuss Arab American literary and fine arts, so that we understand how Arab American identity and experience begets Arab American artistic enterprise. Split into three sections, the first offers a set of theoretical propositions for understanding aesthetics that traverse Arab American cultural production. The second section focuses on material culture as a way to think through the creation of objects as an aesthetic enterprise. The final section looks at narratives in theatre and how the impact of such a medium has the potential to recreate in both senses of the word: play and invention.

By shifting the conversation from identity politics to the relationship between politics and aesthetics, this book provides an important contribution to Arab American studies. It will also appeal to students and scholars of ethnic studies, museum studies, and cultural studies.

Part I

Literary aesthetics

1 The poetics of torture in Philip Metres’s Sand Opera

Carol N. Fadda

This chapter analyzes how torture, violence, death, and trauma are rendered aesthetically in works by Arab American artists and writers. Fadda argues that such texts, in their depiction of the ugly and the horrific, deploy the political in compelling and self-reflexive ways as an integral component of their texts’ nuanced aesthetic makeup.

On political aesthetics

Literary and artistic works by racialized minorities in the US such as Arab Americans are often primarily read and analyzed through a lens that undermines or downplays these works’ aesthetic dimensions and highlights their political ones. With Arab Americans being overwhelmingly relegated to the realm of the “foreign,” “suspect,” “un-American,” or “terrorist” by a US mainstream, Arab American literary and cultural production often becomes the designated site for instructing an uninformed US public about Arab American experiences, as well as rectifying the harmful misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims in the US national imaginary.¹ Examining Arab American literary and cultural production primarily through important but nevertheless limited political lenses runs the danger of ignoring the rich and complex aesthetic dimensions of these texts, as well as their thematic variety. Their political role in addressing and combatting trenchant forms of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia, however, should not be downplayed. These texts then offer narratives that are multiple and varied, emanating from both political and aesthetic investments. As Hayan Charara points out in his introduction to Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry: “The idea of a single Arab American poetry (or people, or individual, or culture) is exploded through varied and complicated engagements with language, style, form, meaning, tradition, class, gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, history, ideology, and of course the self” (xvi).

This chapter challenges neat categorizations of the aesthetic and the political into separate and distinct spheres of inquiry, calling for deeper interrogations of how the aesthetic and the political inform and enfold each other. To do so, I focus on Philip Metres’s book of poems Sand Opera (2015), which depicts acts of torture and violence exacted on the bodies of Arabs and Muslims at Abu Ghraib and other secret, global US-run sites of incarceration.² Sand Opera (the title being a redacted form of the term Standing Operation Procedure, or SOP), provides poetic renditions drawn from various sources. They include testimonials of prisoners and US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, the Standard Operating Procedure manual used by the US army at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the voices of the incarcerated and disappeared in black sites operated by the US across the world. In their depiction of the horrific, the painful, and the traumatic/ traumatized, Metres’s poems interweave the aesthetic and the political in compelling and self-reflexive ways.³ They highlight how political power (as well as the lack of it) shapes the construction and deployment of narratives in times of crises, dictating whose voices are heard and folded into a national discourse of heroism, patriotism, and vulnerability, and whose perspectives are rendered literally and discursively invisible. I argue that the poems in Sand Opera, in confronting, documenting, and narrating trauma, specifically the traumas of the unnamed and the voiceless in the US-led war in Iraq and the so-called “War on Terror,” not only delineate but also complicate the imbrications of the political and the aesthetic by incorporating (through their poetic structure) the very same methods of erasure, redaction, and omission they seek to resist. In examining the forms of political aesthetics that Sand Opera deploys and their navigation of US hegemonic discourse, my analysis not only interrogates whose voices are included, but how they are included and portrayed.⁴ The larger aim of this chapter is to show how political aesthetics deployed in a project like Sand Opera is elemental for dismantling the primacy of US national narratives of exceptionalism, thus challenging and undercutting the entrenched logics justifying violence, torture, and warfare in the name of patriotism, homeland security, and US national interests.

This chapter then emphasizes how Metres, by deploying documentary poetics and drawing on a specific form of what I am calling political aesthetics, shapes a narrative of collectivity that confronts the traumas of torture and violence enacted by the Iraq war and the “War o[f] Terror.”⁵ My close readings of the poems in Sand Opera, primarily the ones included in the “abu ghraib arias” section as well as some others in later sections such as “first recitative” and “second recitative,” emphasize how these poems, despite the redemptive ways in which they give voice to the voiceless, simultaneously underscore the perpetual limitations of such documentation. They do so quite literally on the page through erasures, redactions, and omissions of the details of the torture acts at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. In this way, the narratives they offer and the voices they capture collide with and often get subsumed and erased by the powerful discourse of national security and the state of exceptionalism that has defined so much of official US rhetoric regarding its “War on Terror.”

Nevertheless, what the poems in Sand Opera assert in their deployment of documentary poetics is what Metres himself defines as “the tradition of poet as journalist, poet as documentarian, poet as historian, poet as agitator” (“From Reznikoff”). In this way, by poetically adopting the documents of violence and terror and by highlighting the linguistic fractures and inadequacies embedded in any attempt to represent such violence, the poems in Sand Opera underscore the complex ways in which language, form, and structure are strategically mobilized to interlink the aesthetic and the political. Such interlinkings make visible and legible the hierarchical structures of power and visibility in dominant US narratives of nation and empire.

The poetic architecture of Sand Opera

Divided into five sections, Sand Opera captures what at first glance seems like a cacophony of voices and perspectives, all nevertheless funneled through an evocative arrangement combining the audible and the visual in configurations structured around several musical forms. Section one, titled “abu ghraib arias,” alternates between the testimonials of some of the nameless detainees at Abu Ghraib on the one hand, and on the other hand the statements/ruminations of some of the soldiers administering the acts of torture there, as well as extracts from the field manual (Standard Operating Procedure) used by the US military in its various off-shore spaces of torture and incarceration (including Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and various undisclosed black sites).

Section two, “first recitative,” captures multiple perspectives, including an Iraqi woman’s mourning of her son killed by a drone strike, set alongside another poem depicting a widow’s grief over the loss of her husband, a US soldier deployed in Iraq. The poem “Black Site (Exhibit Q)” in this same section features a diagram of an interrogation room at a US-run detention center, printed on transparent paper and superimposed on quotes taken from the testimonials of the Yemeni prisoner Mohamad Farag Ahmad Bashmilah. Similar diagrams set against short selections from Bashmilah’s statements reappear in the book’s fourth section, titled “second recitative,” grouped together with a copy of a document featuring Saddam Hussein’s fingerprints after he was captured by the US army.

The poems in “hung lyres,” the book’s third section, alternate between poetic images capturing the fragility of a newborn and the uncertainty of early parenthood, and descriptions of the torture tactics to which prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are subjected, including repeatedly being exposed to loud music: songs like “Barney Is a Dinosaur,” groups like Rage Against the Machine, and the theme of Sesame Street (Metres, Sand Opera 102). The book’s last section, “homefront/ removes,” “dedicated to the victims of the [US’s] terror war” (Metres, Sand Opera 103), also incorporates testimonials made by Bashmilah about his rendition to multiple CIA-operated secret sites around the world, where he was tortured and held from October 2003 until May 2005. Such testimonials appear in this closing section of Sand Opera alongside a series of poems that explore a speaker’s (presumably the poet’s) subjectivity, promulgating his own (as well as others’) often fractured and “disembodied” “I” (81) in relation to discerning and seeing “eye[s]” seeking to unearth and contend with the invisible/the unfamiliar in the wake of 9/11. These poems bear witness to the spatialities of torture, or the black sites through which the US traffics its renditioned bodies.

Moreover, the emphasis on the different kinds of musical registers throughout the book (including arias, operas, the blues, etc.) adversely brings forth a tonal focus on sound, speech, and vocality that should not merely be heard, but more importantly should be listened to, deliberately attuning the ear to the different and nuanced notes making up larger movements or “symphonies” of violence and trauma. As Metres points out: “documentary poetry often invite[s] a chorale effect, with multiple voices and voicings merging into a larger (but often dissonant) symphony. These are poems that don’t simply ‘contain multitudes’ (as Whitman bragged) but seethe and breathe multitudes” (“From Raznikoff”). My close readings of the poems below attend to how aesthetic mobilizations (both linguistic and visual) occur in the book, paying close attention to the ways in which the intersection of various spatial and temporal registers with linguistic, visual, and poetic forms produce significant reformulations of dominant US national understandings of power structures, perspectives, and political positionalities.

The poetics of form in “abu ghraib arias”

The book’s first section, “abu ghraib arias,”⁶ places the narratives and testimonials of Abu Ghraib prisoners in conversation with those by their US captors. Based on the depositions made by the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, all titled “(echo/ex/),” these poems are literally juxtaposed with poems (appearing on the facing pages of the book) that integrate statements made by US soldiers involved in the scandal, as well as excerpts from a Standard Operating Procedure manual used by the US military at Guantanamo Bay. In both sets of poems, Metres uses erasure and redaction to poetically and visually recreate and thus challenge the censorship that the US government enforces to discursively conceal and sanitize its acts of military aggression and violence. Incorporating the exact descriptions of the acts of torture that the prisoners were subjected to, the “(echo/ex/)” poems defy the erasure and the censorship of these prisoners’ voices and perspectives, even when visually emulating the methods used to censor and restrict information deemed too graphic for Americans’ sensibilities. The second of the “(echo / ex/)” poems incorporates a prisoner’s description of the beatings he received from the US soldier Charles Graner:

And Graner released my hand from the door and he cuffed my hand in the back.

I did not do anything hit me hard on my cuffed me to the window of the room

(“[echo/ex/] in the beginning,” lines 4–7)

The use of erasure here to de-emphasize and literally de-highlight the violent acts exacted on the prisoners’ bodies, especially when placed alongside the redacted and covered up lines from the prisoners’ testimonials, produces a jolting visual mapping that exemplifies how evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib has been suppressed and censored by US government officials. In its replication of the ways in which information is censored and hence sanitized for a US public, then, the poetic form here linguistically foregrounds a political engagement that defies the separation of the aesthetic from the political. However, the “(echo/ex/)” poems do not seek to rectify the political illiteracy that is the ultimate result of the censorship they depict. They do not fill in the blanks of erased and missing narratives. They do not aim to make readily visible or available information (about the prisoners’ identities, their names, their specific histories, and positionalities) that is relegated to the margins of US national discourse. For positioning them as corrective or alternative texts ultimately risks reasserting the hegemony of mainstream narratives from which these voices and perspectives are perpetually erased. By poetically deploying forms and structures that underscore the state’s acts of censorship, however, these poems compel the reader to confront how information is manipulated and edited to produce and promulgate narratives of exceptionalism and legality (in a context of pervasive and illegal acts of wars and torture), specifically here in relation to the torture acts carried out at the Abu Ghraib prison.

The poems in the “abu ghraib arias” section placed on the pages facing the “(echo/ex/)” ones alternately draw on the language of a Standard Operating Procedure manual (ironically in one poem giving directions on how to handle the Koran following Muslim traditions and in another poem on how to conduct a Muslim burial), and the testimonials of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib. Starting with the words “the blues of” in their title, each of the poems based on soldiers’ testimonials explicitly names a soldier whose statements are then incorporated in the poem. In this way, these poems automatically take on a specificity of experience and perspective that is lacking in the uniform title “(echo/ex/)” used for the prisoners’ poems, with the interchangeable perspectives of pain and trauma they capture. In other words, with titles such as “The Blues of Lane McCotter,” “The Blues of Javal Davis,” “The Blues of Charles Graner,” or “The Blues of Lynddie England,” these poems provide access to a personalized version of the soldiers’ perspective that renders more obvious (and by extension problematic) the absence of the specific voices, faces, and bodies attached to the victims of Abu Ghraib. In this way, the unnamed, unidentified and hence unknown identities of the Iraqi prisoners who speak through the “(echo/ex/)” poems are overshadowed and rendered even more marginal by the specificity of subjectivity and experience that the naming of the soldiers allows.

Such specificity spills into the content of the poems as well as their poetic form, distinguishing the particular fears, desires, and outlooks of each soldier. For instance, the portrayal o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: what’s (identity) politics got to do with it?
• Part I: Literary aesthetics
• Part II: Material culture
• Part III: Film and theatre
• Index