Travel, Relationality and Privilege in Palestinian American Poetry Hind El Hajj, Sirène Harb Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, Volume 3, Number 2, 2016, (Article) Published by Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/778432/summary [ Access provided at 26 Sep 2021 01:11 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] Mashriq & Mahjar 3, no. 2 (2016),62-87 ISSN 2169-4435 Hind El Hajj and Sirene Harb TRAVEL, RELATIONALITY AND PRIVILEGE IN PALESTINIAN AMERICAN POETRY Abstract Negotiating location, identity, and class, the poetry of Palestinian American writers Nathalie Handal and Naomi Shihab Nye projects relational models of travel to fashion forms of resistance to colonialism, imperialism, and systemic violence. As such, the poets' travel experiences mediate a revaluation of identity away from discourses of essentialism and in terms of struggle. On a first level, the depiction of travel reflects an agential literary practice in its elaboration of a poetics of relationality with colonized communities. This poetics challenges hegemoniC modes of being and compartmentalization informing mainstream politics and narratives of modernity and progress. Travel also functions on a different level: it serves as a vehicle to complicate modes of relationality and problematize their interaction with class and privilege. This representational gesture tests the limits of coalitional practices and emphasizes the importance of examining issues of privilege as they relate to cross-ethnic relations. INTRODUCTION The poems of Palestinian American Nathalie Handal and Naomi Shihab Nye negotiate problems associated with the conflation of community with space and location, identity with kinship. Their travel experiences and encounters allow a revaluation of identity, which breaks from discourses of essentialism and reframes identity in terms of struggle and resistance. This article argues that, through travel and political comparativity, the articulation of personal and collective identities becomes a never-ending journey and an act of Hind El Hajj is a lecturer at Prince Sultan University in Riyadh, KSA; email: [email protected] Sirene Harb is an Associate Professor at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon; email: [email protected] © Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies 2016 Travel, Relationality and Privilege 63 resistance against racism, colonial regimes, and imperial and interstate violence. The travel trope functions in a twofold mode in the poetic works at hand. On the first level, the depiction of travel reflects an agential literary practice in its elaboration of a poetics of relationality between colonized communities. This poetics challenges the hegemonic modes of being and compartmentalization, which inform Western mainstream politics and narratives of modernity and progress. Handal and Nye's poetry, in this respect, shares this agential contestation with the literary production of a number of Arab American poets such as Suheir Hammad and David Williams. Travel, however, functions on a second level in the works discussed; it serves as a vehicle through which readers are pushed to interrogate modes of relationality to problematize their interaction with class and privilege. This representational gesture, which adds a significant layer of complexity to the poems discussed, tests the limits of coalition building and emphasizes the importance of examining issues of privilege as they relate to cross-ethnic relations. Through this strategy, the depiction of travel in Handa!'s and Nye's poetry is uniquely positioned to examine what Doreen Massey terms the "geography of social relations;" this focus sheds light, as she explains, on ways in which "[ e J conomic, political and cultural social relations, each full of power and with internal structures of domination and subordination, [arel stretched out over the planet at every different level."! This article looks at two collections by Nye, Words Under the Words, published in 1995, and 19 Varieties of Gazelle, published in 2002, and one collection by Handal, The Lives of Rain, published in 2005. Nye's 1995 collection depicts travels in Mexico, Latin American, and Palestine, while her 2002 collection depicts travels in the Middle East only. A poet and a novelist, Nye has a Palestinian father and an American mother; she grew up between San Antonio, Texas, and Jerusalem. Arab and Palestinian content were not explicitly present in Nye's earlier poetry published in the 1980s and early 1990s, but increased after the 1993/95 Oslo accords, the Second Intifada, and the September 11, 2001 attacks. The content of Nye's earlier work centered more on the Hispanic Southwest and Latin America, yet the travels and solidarities Nye made with the people of this land are directly linked to her understanding and embracing of her Arab half; as she states: "I had to live in a mostly Mexican American city to feel what it meant to be part Arab." 2 In her later work, and more specifically in her introduction to 19 Varieties of Gazelle, Nye contextualizes this collection in the political turmoil in the Middle East 64 Hind El Hajj and Sirime Harb and the events of September 11, asserting that her poetry is a space for representation and vehicle for peace in response to both terrorism and prejudice.3 Born in Haiti, Handal is a French-American poet, playwright, and translator of Palestinian descent. Handa!'s The Lives of Rain ventures into the lives and experiences of Palestinians, exiles, and indigenous people with more urgency than her 1999, pre-Second Intifada epic poem The Neverfield. Part I of The Lives of Rain tours the war-stricken Palestinian political terrain, including Gaza, j enin, Ramallah, and jerusalem. Handal contextualizes her poems in relation to the Israeli occupation and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, claiming that the "poem-portraits" she creates are a way to represent the humanity of violated people and make their suffering "daunting" to her readers.' Part II takes the reader farther, depicting Handa!'s travels in the United States, Mexico, Latin America, Europe, Palestine, and North Africa. While these are seemingly unrelated geographies, Handal poetically makes links between shared political struggles relating to these places and with occupied Palestine. Part III is a travel epic that gives a fresh, self-reflective manifesto of travel, immigration, and exile. The discussion of the poems in this article relies on theories of travel perceived mainly through the lens of "cultural comparison" as theorized by historian and anthropologist james Clifford. 5 When applied to literature-as well as anthropology-Clifford's approach produces important interventions in both modern narrations of ethnic identity and theorizations about the question oftrave!' Using travel as a category of comparative analysis challenges the common association between travel and leisure and elitism; additionally, it challenges associations between the travel trope and individualized and romantic representations of exile. Through its emphasis on travel as a tool for cultural comparison, this discussion engages with the material, historical, and political circumstances of travel and investigates neglected spaces of travel. Probing identity, race, and marginalization in the poems through a framework of travel allows for an aberration from essentialist definitions and localized or place/nation-related formulations of identity. This makes possible the reconfiguration of identities across national borders; these changes are nuanced by various: modes of travel such as buses, planes, and roads; spaces of travel, such as hotels, streets, and ghettoes; and encounters during travel. Traditional anthropology has tended to localize its objects of study within a "field" or bounded site of study, such as a village or church; this achieves nothing more than "representational essentializing" of people.' By Travel, Relationality and Privilege 65 contrast, Clifford proposes a negotiation of identity and cultural experience through mediations between "native" experiences and traveling experiences of research subjects. 7 Replacing the term "native," as Clifford uses it, with the signifier 'Palestinian' formulates important questions for the purposes of this article: How does a 'Palestinian' perspective influence the traveling experiences of the poets and their poetic subjects? How does the amalgamation of Palestinian experience and traveling experiences help create what Benedict Anderson calls an 'imagined community' of minorities?8 How does an imagined community of minorities mediate the construction of a Palestinian American identity? Scholarship that specifically discusses travel and travel experiences in Arab American poetry is scarce. Nevertheless, travel is a very common theme in Arab American writing, including autobiographical narratives, fiction, and poetry.9 Travel experiences of Arab Americans, though, are usually conflated without differentiating between origins, which range from Lebanese American, Iraqi American, Palestinian American, and more. The Palestinian American approach to travel and community is nevertheless distinct, harboring an "extra dimension of exile" rooted in a long history of violence and oppression. lO Unlike other Arab traveling experiences, Palestinians do not have a safe home - possibly no home at all- to return to. Travel in their writing exceeds being a quest for