Creolizing Diaspora

Dottorato di Ricerca in Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Filologici Indirizzo: Letterature Comparate e Studi Culturali Ciclo XXIII Tesi di Dottorato Creolizing Diaspora Home and Identity, Language and Hospitality in Arab Diasporic Literature Relatrice: Dott. Giovanna Covi Dottoranda: Dott. Lisa Marchi Coordinatore del Dottorato: Prof. Fulvio Ferrari anno accademico 2009-2010 © COPYRIGHT BY LISA MARCHI 2011 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude to my advisor Giovanna Covi for her guidance and support. Her comments and advice regarding this dissertation have been invaluable. I also wish to thank her for having given me the opportunity to take part to the Research Group ReSisters in Conversation and having introduced me to the world of academic research. Since the beginning, Covi has encouraged me to find my voice and I am indebted to her for this forever. I would like to thank Nouri Gana for encouraging my work and for providing me with additional assistance and insightful suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Gana and the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA for having invited me to spend three months of research in a prestigious and stimulating academic environment. Very special thanks are due to Michelle Hartman for having invited me to continue my research at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. I appreciate the time and attention she has provided me and my research. Prashant Keshavmurthy offered me the opportunity to present my work in progress during one of the Brown Bag Lecture Series organized at the Islamic Institute. The audience‘s feedback influenced my thinking in positive ways and Keshavmurthy‘s stimulating insights and suggestions helped me improve my work. My research at McGill University was undertaken with the assistance of the Government of Canada that I publicly thank. There are many people I would like to thank for their encouragement and support. I am very grateful to poet Naomi Shihab Nye for her kindness and generosity; the conversation we exchanged during the RAWI conference in Ann Arbor was very inspiring. Very special and warm thanks are due to Natasha Bonnelame, Tendai Marima and Dima Ayoub for the thought-provoking conversations and to the doctoral candidates Carlo Tirinanzi De Medici, Silvia Annavini and Erica Merz of the Doctoral School in Literary, Linguistic, and Philological Studies at the University of Trento. I wish to thank my closest friends, Danny, and my family for their support, encouragement, and love. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 1. An Overview on the Arab Diaspora 5 1.1. The Arab-American Community 5 1.2. The Arab-Canadian Community 10 1.3. The Arab-European Community 13 2. Materials and Methodology 17 I. HOME AND BELONGING 25 1. Home as an Unstable Site of Inhabitance 26 2. The Heritage of Orientalism: Home as a Distant and Exotic Place 31 3. Belonging as a Choice Between Two Incompatible Terms 35 4. The Trauma of Uprooting and the Challenge of Regrounding 38 5. Rituals as Creative Strategies of Belonging 40 6. Conclusion 48 II. THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF ARABNESS 50 1. Identities in Flux 52 2. Identity Politics: Free Choice or Coercion? 55 3. The Pervasiveness of Orientalism and its Impact on Arabness 58 4. The Reappropriation of History and the Redemption of Arabness 63 5. The Impact of Gender and Race on the Construction of Identity 67 6. The Rehabilitation of Arabness 71 7. The Construction and Representation of Others 74 8. The Transgression of Cultural and Racial Boundaries 78 9. Conclusion 80 III. MULTILINGUALISM, VOCALITY, AND STORY-TELLING 82 1. Monolingualism or Multilingualism? 83 2. Multilingualism as a Political Act 87 3. First Generation and Linguistic Alienation 90 4. Second Generation and the Estrangement from Arabic 95 5. Mastery, Aphasia, and the Interdiction to Speak 97 6. Failed Accounts of Oneself 103 7. Story-telling and the Crossing of Borders 107 8. Story-telling as a Pharmakon 111 9. Conclusion 116 IV. BORDERS, CROSSINGS, AND HOSPITALITY 120 1. Blurred Images of Home and Abroad 123 2. The Tourist vs. the Migrant 129 3. Europe as Free Market and as Fortress 133 4. Margins of Migration 138 5. The Migrant as Present Absentee 143 6. Migration as Break and Potential 147 7. Crossing as Stigma and Hospitality as Third Space 151 8. Hospitality at Issue 156 9. Hospitality as Transgression 160 10. Conclusion 168 CONCLUSIONS: CREOLIZING DIASPORA 171 Works Cited 178 INTRODUCTION This research focuses on Arab multilingual literature and investigates the extent to which diaspora can be considered a useful term of reference for the exploration and critical interrogation of the literary works written by authors of Arab origin in Europe, the United States, and Canada. My study takes the risk of examining a literature that occupies, as Zahia Smail Salhi and Ian Richard Netton note, ―a third space that is not entirely Arab nor is it entirely French or English‖ (4) — to which I would add also German and Italian. Salhi and Netton investigate the Arab diaspora from different viewpoints but take into consideration mostly Anglophone authors. This is also the case of the collection Arab Voices in Diaspora (2009) edited by Layla al-Maleh and regrouping essays that follow the development of Arab Anglophone literature from the beginning until the post-9/11 period and focus on the works written by authors of Arab origin in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia. In the winter of 2006, MELUS (the Journal of the Society of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) devoted a special issue to Arab-American literature, while in 2008, the leading literary journal PMLA collected various contributions from different literary critics working on Arab- American literature. These few examples show us that, in recent times, Arab-American writers and the larger category of Anglophone authors of Arab origin have started to gain visibility and recognition. In the American and Anglophone contexts, the body of literature written by these authors has been analyzed as a field of its own; the same cannot be said for Europe where works by Arab-Europeans have been included in the larger category of migrant literature. In Italy, the term letteratura della migrazione [migrant literature] (Gnisci 1998) designates a range of works written by migrants of different origins living in Italy and writing in Italian. In Germany, literary critics have coined and employed a variety of definitions, such as, among others, the term Gastarbeiterliteratur [host-workers‘ literature], Migrantenliteratur [migrants‘ literature], and the so-called inter- multikulturelle Literatur 1 [inter- multicultural literature]. In France, the contested definition ―Beur‖ literature1 was coined in the 1980s and was temporary replaced in the 1990s by the so-called ―banlieu‖ literature (Hargreaves, 2005) to encompass the literary works written by writers of Arab origin who either were born in France or migrated to France during their childhood. All these terms, however, denote a clear intention of separating the works written by native authors from those written by migrants. This is also the case of Canada where, as Smaro Kamboureli notes (2000), diasporic literature is still perceived as a deviation from the national literature, an anomaly and a superfluity. My research intends to intervene in this debate and develop a different theoretical model, by opening up the literary and cultural niches in which the works by authors of Arab origins have been relegated and moving beyond the rigid national and linguistic boundaries that govern both comparative literature and the so-called Weltliteratur. What I intend to do is to broaden the angle of current investigations on Arab diasporic literature, by comparing works written by Arab-American, Arab-Canadian, and Arab-European authors who write in German, English, Italian, and French. In opposition to the framework of traditional comparative literature and Weltliteratur that tend to reaffirm the primacy of national boundaries (Hargreaves, 2005) and to read works in translation, I propose to develop an alternative theoretical model that is multilingual and interdisciplinary, and that blurs rigid national demarcations by using diaspora as a key term of reference. According to Robin Cohen (1999), the term diaspora originated in the Mediterranean basin where it had a positive meaning associated with economic prosperity, territorial expansion, and new opportunities. Later on, however, diaspora came to indicate the forced removal and subsequent dispersal of Jewish people, Armenians, and Africans and therefore 1 The term beur is highly controversial: while some people appropriate it to claim their Arab cultural background, others, such as Nina Bouraoui, reject it. The origin of the term is unclear; according to Woodhull, it derives from ―verlan‖, a criptic language spoken by the youth in the French banlieux and consisting of inverting the syllables of the words. Beur then, would be the manipulated version of the word ―arabe.‖ See Woodhull 32. 2 acquired a negative connotation (Cohen, ―Rethinking 'Babylon'‖ 255). As Waltraud Kokot, Khatchig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso observe, today ― 'diaspora' remains widely contested, both as a term of reference and as a concept of research‖ (2). In this study, I employ diaspora as a theoretical notion to read and interpret the literary works written by authors of Arab origin and to rethink the negative polarities local vs. global, national vs. migrant, native vs. foreigner that inform migrant literature. Indeed, as Paul Gilroy reminds us: ―the diaspora idea invites us to move into the contested spaces between the poles that we can identify roughly as the local and the global‖ (―Diaspora‖ 297). Besides being a term of reference, diaspora is also meant to designate a concrete historical condition marked by relation, and capable of ―galvanising a new creative energy‖ (Cohen, ―Rethinking 'Babylon'‖ 252) and giving birth to original world-views, non-conventional intercultural practices, and a fruitful syncretism.

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