Contemporary Arab-American Literature
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Contemporary Arab-American Literature

Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging

Carol Fadda-Conrey

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Contemporary Arab-American Literature

Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging

Carol Fadda-Conrey

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About This Book

The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the US as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, Carol Fadda-Conrey takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a US framework while maintaining connections to their homelands, Arab-Americans contest the blanket representations of themselves as dictated by the US nation-state. Deploying a multidisciplinary framework at the intersection of Middle-Eastern studies, US ethnic studies, and diaspora studies, Fadda-Conrey argues for a transnational discourse that overturns the often rigid affiliations embedded in ethnic labels. Tracing the shifts in transnational perspectives, from the founders of Arab-American literature, like Gibran Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, to modern writers such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Geha, Randa Jarrar, and Suheir Hammad, Fadda-Conrey finds that contemporary Arab-American writers depict strong yet complex attachments to the US landscape. She explores how the idea of home is negotiated between immigrant parents and subsequent generations, alongside analyses of texts that work toward fostering more nuanced understandings of Arab and Muslim identities in the wake of post-9/11 anti-Arab sentiments.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2014
ISBN
9781479826674
1. Reimagining the Ancestral Arab Homeland
Palestinian-American writer and literary critic Lisa Suhair Majaj claims her belonging and attachment to the city of Jerusalem, which she repeatedly visited as a child and as an adult, and describes this city in her essay “Journeys to Jerusalem” as living deep inside her “like the stone of a fruit” (101).1 Such a weighty and incipient core (which can extend beyond Jerusalem to stand for various Arab locations) holds what Majaj calls the “traces [that] register at the deepest layers of consciousness” (88). Assorted renditions of such a visceral representation of an original Arab homeland, in slightly varied guises, accents, and flavors, lie at the core of contemporary Arab-American literature, in which the theme of inherited memories of ancestral homelands is prominent. Tracing such representations in several contemporary Arab-American literary texts, I highlight in this chapter the ways in which second- and third-generation Arab-American identities are shaped by specific articulations of transnational belongings that complicate the link between, in poet Lawrence Joseph’s words, “what is furthest from us / and what deepest in us” (“Inclined to Speak” 164, lines 22–23).2
Focusing on literary representations of second- and third-generation Arab-Americans who were born or raised in the US from the mid-twentieth century onward,3 this chapter shows how these generations, most of whom have never been to the Arab world, revise inherited understandings of and connections to that “furthest” and “deepest” point of origin, or the “old country.” Instead of replicating the older immigrant generations’ nostalgic memories of Arab homelands, however, these younger generations of Arab-Americans destabilize such nostalgia by moving depictions of original homelands beyond a celebratory focus on ethnic and cultural traditions to incorporate accounts of the harsh realities of war, dispossession, gender politics, and exile.4 Through such portrayals, Arab-American writers whose work is featured in this chapter (as well as other writers throughout the book) carry out the important task of “de-mythologizing the homeland” (Shakir, “Imaginary Homelands” 23).5 This generational shift in perspective becomes noticeable in the works of writers who either were born or came of age in the 1950s and 1960s onward, a watershed period for the development of a critical and interrogative outlook among Arab-Americans generally, primarily due to major political and military upheavals as well as social change occurring in the US and in the Arab world.6
In producing antinostalgic literary mappings of original homelands, these writers draw on transnational frameworks of knowledge production to imagine, exemplify, and enact in their work a revisionary approach to Arab-American citizenship and belonging. This approach ultimately alters dominant understandings of US national membership by inserting the complex political, religious, and national landscapes of Arab homelands into discursive constructions of US space. Such insertions challenge binary constructions of national belonging, which pit the US against the Arab world and posit any simultaneous claim to both locales as a contradiction in terms. Instead of espousing a “split vision,” or a sense of having to constantly oscillate between two (or more) cultures, Arab and American, which are often regarded as being at odds with each other (Majaj, “New Directions” 123; Salaita, “Split Vision”),7 many of the texts explored in this chapter express a critical transnational vision that is simultaneously linked to, and informed by, the inescapable pull of an Arab homeland as well as a US locale. It is this particular vision that distinguishes the majority of immigrants’ children coming of age during the second half of the twentieth century onward from their older counterparts.8
The transnational vision that I trace in this chapter lays claim to the spatial, material, and temporal positionalities of Arab-American identities within the US as mediated by an older immigrant generation. In this way, the US becomes the central locus from which the Arab homeland is explored, identified with, and reimagined, but not forgotten. But instead of it becoming an ostracizing factor in constructions of Arab-American belonging in the US, it is asserted and reconceived as an elemental part of transnational formulations of Arab-American identities that challenge the binaries of exclusion and inclusion inherent in dominant understandings of US citizenship and belonging. It is exactly this type of transnational vision that enables Arab-American writers to challenge any docile and unquestioning forms of ethnic identity (despite lingering assimilative tendencies within Arab-American communities that might indicate otherwise). This type of revisionary perspective, however, even though it ultimately destabilizes a secure and unchanging notion of home and homeland, does not necessarily lead to an inevitable sense of homelessness.9 Instead, it opens up new vistas of belonging in the US, which create new understandings and maps of home by simultaneously laying claim to and transforming both the Arab and the American sides of Arab-American identities.
Rather than pursue a chronological analysis of literary narratives shaping and giving voice to the ongoing development of Arab-American transnational belonging, and in order to delineate the continuance of certain concerns and the revision of others, this chapter and the book as a whole trace specific thematic threads that place side by side texts by an older generation of writers (who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s) alongside others by a younger generation (who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s). This approach shows that the revision of nostalgic representations of original homelands in Arab-American literary texts published from around the 1990s onward has been highly diverse, representing a whole range of national, religious, political, and regional, as well as generational, concerns. Irrespective of such diversity, however, these texts share a clear investment in retaining the Arab homeland as a central trope in the production of revised forms of spatial, material, and temporal Arab-American positionalities.
To analyze such discursive revisions and the new mappings of home they create, I start by tracing second- and third-generational representations of immigrant memories as manifested within the confines of domestic Arab-American spaces. In the absence of the US-born-and-raised generation’s direct experience of an Arab homeland, the immigrant parents’ and grandparents’ reproduction of it from memory within the space of the immigrant home becomes the primary site through which this generation first comes in contact with it.10 The reproduction of this Arab homeland occurs primarily through material fragments, including food, Arabic text, photos, music, plants, and religious icons and scripture. The persistence of such fragments is exemplified in the first section of this chapter through poetry and nonfiction by Lawrence Joseph, Therese Saliba, Suheir Hammad, and Naomi Shihab Nye. An analysis of these writers’ revised engagements with the domestic fragments embodying immigrant memories leads to an exploration in the second section of this chapter of the gendered aspects of these memories and the role that parents/grandparents play in perpetuating patriarchal mores in the diaspora. Drawing on texts by Joe Kadi, David Williams, D. H. Melhem, and Diana Abu-Jaber, I focus specifically on the grandmother and father figures to analyze the ways in which their cultural knowledge is received and renegotiated by their children and grandchildren. After exploring some of the ways in which these writers strategically delineate and question nostalgic and gendered memories within the insular confines of the Arab-American immigrant household, I turn in the third and final section of the chapter to analyze how they depict the movement of the second and third generations from the insular immigrant mold into a more public US domain. Such movement is analyzed in the context of works by Lawrence Joseph, Hayan Charara, Elmaz Abinader, Mohja Kahf, and Susan Muaddi Darraj. The transformative aspects embedded in such reconfigurations of homes and homelands are essential for the placement of transnational Arab-American belonging in the US outside neo-Orientalist and imperialist frameworks.
The Presence of Absence:11 Fragments of Arab Homes Re-membered
The revision of nostalgic and fragmented deployments of an absent Arab homeland within the present of a domestic immigrant space is captured most effectively in Lawrence Joseph’s poem “Sand Nigger” (1988).12 Considered to be a landmark piece in Arab-American literature, this poem delineates the ways in which the physical artifacts of an Arab homeland, in this case Lebanon, within the confines of the narrator’s “house in Detroit” inform his developing consciousness as a young child as well as his negotiations of Arab-American heritage and identity as an adult. Within the space of his childhood home, the narrator recollects fragments of food, language, history, and religion that embody the inherited memory of a Lebanon left behind but not forgotten:
Lebanon is everywhere
in the house: in the kitchen
of steaming pots, leg of lamb
in the oven, plates of kousa,
hushwee rolled in cabbage,
dishes of olives, tomatoes, onions,
roasted chicken, and sweets;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lebanon of mountains and sea,
of pine and almond trees,
of cedars in the service
of Solomon, Lebanon
of Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs, Turks
and Byzantines, of the one-eyed
monk, Saint Maron,
in whose rite I am baptized. (lines 15–21, 26–33)
Despite the poem’s piecing together of such culinary, historical, and religious fragments that capture nostalgic, if not mythical, remembrances of Lebanon, its larger depiction of an original homeland falls far from being elegiac or ideal. The nostalgic remembrances of the narrator’s grandparents (whose presence in the narrator’s childhood home informs the wistful tone captured in the lines just quoted) exist in harsh juxtaposition with another fragmented version of Lebanon permeating the poem, one that is neither palatable nor sumptuous. This darker version, which the speaker’s parents try to suppress, is dominated by war, conflict, and death and stands in stark contrast to the nostalgic backdrop of his grandparents’ lyrical representation of “Lebanon of mountains and sea”:
Lebanon of my mother
warning my father not to let
the children hear,
of my brother who hears
and from whose silence
I know there is something
I will never know. (lines 34–40)
This concealed knowledge of a war-torn Lebanon is followed by a cousin’s graphic description over dinner of his “niece’s head / severed with bullets, in Beirut, / in civil war” (lines 56–58). In emphasizing the multiple Lebanons that exist within this childhood home (ranging from the ideal to the horrific), Joseph evokes a complexity of Arab history and Arab-American heritage that flies in the face of nostalgic essentialism, pointing to the generational shifts in perspective vis-à-vis the homeland within the same household. This perspective is inevitably shaped and revised by evolving events in the Arab world, specifically here the Lebanese war (1975–90). In this way, despite the predominance of an idyllic “Lebanon of mountains and sea” in the speaker’s household, other contradictory versions of this homeland emerge to contest such idyllic representations and to underscore that nostalgic immigrant remembrances of original homelands often omit or conceal harsh realities that extend to violence and death.13
Notwithstanding these fragments’ power to evoke a sense of an original homeland, albeit one pieced together from contradictory versions, Lebanon remains not only inaccessible but for the most part incomprehensible to the speaker. For the legacy of the Lebanon(s) to which he is exposed within the domestic space holds disorienting elements, including a language (Arabic) that he finds hard to read “word by word from right to left” (line 5), a political history that he is not privy to, as well as a budding doubt toward an inherited religion, leading him to question his grandmother’s belief “that if I pray / to the holy card of Our Lady Of Lebanon / I will share the miracle” (lines 12–14). In this way, the various fragments of Lebanon evoked in this home do not create a link to an original homeland but instead highlight the speaker’s disconnection and alienation from it. Such disconnections and gaps, however, become the key factors instigating the children and grandchildren of immigrants to develop alternate, demythologized, and individualized forms of attachment to Arab homelands that extend beyond the nostalgic and the celebratory.14 In doing so, they mobilize new critical understandings of these ancestral homelands that in turn enable them to engage more directly and critically with the larger social and racial US structures, as I discuss in this chapter’s second section. In other words, the impossibility of connecting to mythological immigrant renditions of an Arab homeland that we see in Joseph’s poem gives rise to a multilayered understanding that transcends singular constructions of home, with all the exclusionary and conditional forms of belonging such constructions entail.15 In “Sand Nigger,” the speaker’s awareness of the multiple narratives within his home about Lebanon is the first step toward reenvisioning his national belongings and allegiances, thus producing more informed and critical versions in the process. This awareness accompanies him in his efforts to self-identify along the black/white racial binaries outside the confines of the domestic space, a self-identification that I discuss in more detail in the thematic context of this chapter’s second section.
Therese Saliba’s nonfictional essay “Sittee (or Phantom Appearances of a Lebanese Grandmother)” (1994), published in Joe Kadi’s anthology Food for Our Grandmothers, similarly depicts the development of a critical and multilayered vision from the perspective of a child also reacting to her grandmother’s nostalgic remembrances of a lost Arab homeland.16 In this piece, Saliba pays homage to her deceased grandmother Victoria, who immigrated to the US at the age of twenty-four never to return permanently to her native Lebanon. In an evocative statement, Saliba acknowledges her ...

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