Modern Arabic Literature Between the Nation and the World: the Bilingual Singularity of Kahlil Gibran

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Queen Mary Research Online 1 Modern Arabic Literature between the Nation and the World: The Bilingual Singularity of Kahlil Gibran Ghazouane Arslane Queen Mary University of London Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 2 I, Ghazouane Arslane, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Ghazouane Arslane Date: 23/12/2019 3 Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................ 4 Note on Translation, Transliteration and Citation ...................................................... 5 Acknowledgement ........................................................................................................... 6 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter One: Reinventing the Religious in and against Modernity: The Poet as a Post-religious Prophet ................................................................................................... 55 1. Re-imagining God, the Self and the World 59 2. The Poet as a Post-religious Prophet in the Modern Times 70 3. The Greater Self, or the Prophetic as the Impossible 84 Chapter Two: The Bilingual Chasm ......................................................................... 103 1. Gibran’s Ruʾyā Ḥadāthiyya (Modernist Vision) in Arabic: Writing as a “Coincidence of Opposites” 106 2. Ṣawt al-Shāʿir [The Voice of the Poet]: An Arabic Voice of a Universal Vision 115 3. The Decision to Write in English: The Bilingual Anxiety 123 4. Bilingualism between Hospitality and Hostility 132 5. Arabic, Bilingualism and the Orient as Identitarian Veil 138 Chapter Three: Gibran as a Nationalist and (Post)-Nahḍawī ................................. 152 1. ‘Mother Syria’ and the Emergent ‘Syrian Idea’ 157 2. The End of the War: Nationalism and the Unfulfilled Quest for Nationhood 168 3. Syria within the East: Civilizational Anxiety and Gibran’s Vision of the Nahḍa 186 Chapter Four: Multiple Horizons of Expectations, Multiple Gibrans: Or, Gibran as World Literature .................................................................................................... 198 1. Initial Reception of Gibran’s English Works in the U.S. 203 2. The Problem of The Prophet in the American Cultural and Literary Field 224 3. The Translational Movement of Gibran’s English Work into Arabic, or its “Arabization” 235 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 251 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 258 4 Abstract This thesis argues that the bilingual literary oeuvre of Kahlil Gibran (Jubrān Khalil Jubrān), the Arab Mahjari (immigrant) writer (1883-1931), is marked by a singularity that is irreducible to biographical and culturalist approaches. This singularity, drawing on Derek Attridge, signifies the inexhaustible alterity and creative difference of his bilingual texts that my reading attempts to analyse and do justice to by focusing on their universal and national dimensions, complementary albeit not without tensions. This interpretation begins from the premise that Gibran’s anglophone works should be read as Arab world literature. This ethics of reading, and this methodological perspective, is adopted because the Gibranian text is marked and fissured by a bilingual movement that enabled the creative possibility of writing in English and obscured its textual visibility in (Euro)-America. My argument develops in four distinct but inter- laced directions. First, I read Gibran’s poetic enterprise in both languages as a universal endeavour to reinvent the religious in and against modernity – and the Arab Nahḍa/Awakening. Second, I focus on the discursive chasm that his bilingual movement produces, which nevertheless binds the particular and the universal. Third, I highlight Gibran’s critical writings vis-à-vis the question of Syrian nationhood and the Arab Nahḍa, a crucial facet of his work as intellectual. And finally, I turn to the problematic reception of his anglophone works in the U.S. (especially) and in the Arab world, to underscore the conditions of this reception and interrogate what is rendered (in)visible by it. As an attempt to read Gibran’s bilingual texts hospitably and critically, this thesis performs – and proposes – an ethics of reading that attends to the distinctness of modern Arabic literature, with Gibran as illustrative example, in its creative and problematic movement between the nation and the world. 5 Note on Translation, Transliteration and Citation All translations from the Arabic in this thesis are mine unless otherwise noted. Transliterations of titles, words or passages in Arabic follow the IJMES (International Journal for Middle Eastern Studies) Transliteration Guide. For the purpose of convenience and accessibility, names of authors in Arabic have been transliterated without following the IJMES guide. I use the abbreviated forms of the primary sources below consistently throughout the thesis: CWs: Kahlil Gibran, The Collected Works (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2007). CWs in Arabic: Jubrān Khalil Jubrān, al-Majmūʿa al-Kāmila li Muʾallafāt Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān bil-ʿArabiyya [The Collected Works in Arabic] (Lebanon: Kitābuna li al-Nashr, 2014). CWs in Arabic O: Jubrān Khalil Jubrān, al-Majmūʿa al-Kāmila li Muʾallafāt Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān: Nuṣūs Khārij Majmūʿa [The Collected Works of Jubrān Khalil Jubrān: Texts Outside the Main Collection], ed. Antoine al-Qawwal (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1994). 6 Acknowledgement This work would not be possible without the generous scholarship I received from The Algerian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, for which I am grateful, to pursue my PhD in the United Kingdom. I am grateful and indebted to my first supervisor, Professor Galin Tihanov, for his kind, patient and constant support and for his constructive, critical feedback over the four years of my PhD. His belief in me and my research project has been a continuous source of strength and inspiration. I am also grateful to my second supervisor, Dr Nadia Atia, for her crucial feedback and helpful suggestions and for her warm and positive encouragement. Special thanks are due to Katie Da Cunha for reading and editing some of my work and for all the valuable and enjoyable discussions I had with her in the British Library. I have also benefited from the wonderful discussions I had with, and the useful suggestions of, Andrew Hines, Ellen Jones, John Dunn, Ruby Tuke, Emma Luce Scali, Faisal Hamadah, Abdelbaqi Ghorab, Ouissal Harize, Huyem Cheurfa, Dr Shital Pravinchandra and Dr Selma Mokrani Barkaoui, among others. My warm thanks are also due to Charlotte Terrel for proofreading one of my chapters. Over the years, I have received an enormous and warm support from my father, my stepmother, my younger brother and especially my sister, a family I am fortunate and happy to have. I also thank my extended family and good friends in Algeria, and especially Taki Eddine Gasmi, for their wonderful encouragement throughout the four years of my PhD. 7 Introduction In Ghurbat al-Kātib al-ʿArabī [The Exile of the Arab Writer] (2013), Halim Barakat, the eminent Syrio-Lebanese novelist and scholar, laments the fact that Kahlil Gibran, one of the most prominent Arab Mahjari (immigrant) writers of the early twentieth century, lives in utter isolation in an unknown, solitary place in Washington, D.C., “an isolation which is not the one he loved and, inspired by it, he wrote, but a poor and stifling isolation that he has not chosen for himself but was, indeed, forced upon him.”1 Barakat is talking about a memorial of Gibran, located in an empty, non- descript place between the centre of D.C. and its suburbs, which was made in 1989. “When one ventures to visit the memorial,” he writes, “one has to look in vain for a parking slot until one is driven away from the area and reluctantly decides not to pursue the venture.”2 Barakat admits that this situation has induced in him a feeling of “guilt mixed with sadness and anger,” because Gibran, the revolutionary writer who inspired and instigated Barakat’s literary energy and yearning for writing, has turned into a dead cultural monument established by a committee that barely knows a thing about the Arab Mahjari writer, except, perhaps, for his well-known book The

Load more