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Negotiating the Third Space in the Arab American Fiction of Diana Abu-Jaber and Laila Halaby

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Negotiating the Third Space in the Arab American Fiction of Diana Abu-Jaber and Laila Halaby UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA Y LETRAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA TESIS DOCTORAL NEGOTIATING THE THIRD SPACE IN THE ARAB AMERICAN FICTION OF DIANA ABU-JABER AND LAILA HALABY INÉS KAROUI GHOUAIEL DIRIGIDA POR: DRA. DÑA. EULALIA PIÑERO GIL MADRID, 2015 UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA Y LETRAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA NEGOTIATING THE THIRD SPACE IN THE ARAB AMERICAN FICTION OF DIANA ABU-JABER AND LAILA HALABY TESIS DOCTORAL PRESENTADA POR INÉS KAROUI GHOUAIEL PARA LA OBTENCIÓN DEL GRADO DE DOCTOR DIRIGIDA POR LA DRA. DÑA. EULALIA PIÑERO GIL PROFESORA TITULAR DE UNIVERSIDAD MADRID, 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to many people who generously encouraged me through the years to develop my research in fruitful ways and to accomplish this doctoral dissertation. I am indebted to my advisor Dr. Eulalia Piñero Gil for her insightful comments and continuous encouragement through every stage of the dissertation. The time and energy she provided and her detailed comments were instrumental in helping me develop and revise each chapter constructively. Special thanks to Ibis Gómez-Vega, Northern Illinois University, for her generosity and all the references on Arab American literature she provided me with. I would like also to thank Steve Redwood for his patience and attention to detail in his reading. He greatly contributed to the shaping of this dissertation thanks to his thorough revision. I am also deeply thankful for my family in Tunisia, without whom this dissertation would never have been accomplished. The importance that my parents Abderrazak Karoui and Faouzia Ghouaiel place on education, and their unflagging love and encouragement sustained me through the difficult times. They have always believed in the importance of providing their four daughters the opportunity to receive a good education and allow them to take their own decisions. I am grateful to my sister Amel for her help and support during the last phase of this doctoral thesis. Special thanks to my sisters Syrine and Wissem for their encouragement and generosity. I am also thankful to my nephew Adham for being a source of peace and happiness. The accomplishment of this dissertation could not have been possible without the care and attention of Aldo Rebolledo whose encouraging and positive attitude constantly inspired me. Thank you for your unflagging emotional support, patience and confidence through the years. Finally, a special thank to my friend Samira Trabelsi for her beautiful friendship, constant encouragement, generosity and patience. إلى روح جدتي الغالية ،،، آسفة على التأخير، كان بودي أن تشاركينا هذه الفرحة عندما كنت بيننا إلى والديا العزيزين فوزية وعبدالرزاق ،،، ها أنا عند وعدي، شكرا على كل الحب والدعم ” أنا حرة... حرة تماما في عالمي هذا الصغير...“ نوال السعداوي، مذكرات طبيبة “Remember for yourself and for your tomorrow…Remember to make your day new and old, but be sure to think of something you never thought of before.” Laila Halaby, West of the Jordan “‘Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.’” Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Arab American Experience in the United States of America 15 1.1 Early Arab American Literature 15 1.2 Second Generation of Arab American writers 39 1.3 The Emergence of an Arab American Consciousness 45 1.4 Embracing Arab American Ethnicity 54 Chapter 2: Theorizing Contemporary Arab American Literature 61 2.1 Defining the Third Space 61 2.2 Redefining the Third Space According to Arab American Discourse 67 Chapter 3: The Narratives of Displacement in Arabian Jazz by Diana Abu-Jaber and West of the Jordan by Laila Halaby 89 3.1 Arabian Jazz 89 3.1.1 Fragile and Displaced Female Arab American Identities in the Making: The Poor White Community Entourage and the Absence of the Mother Figure 89 3.1.2 De-mythologizing the Old Country and the Burden of Representation 106 3.1.3 Matussem: an Arab Father in America 121 3.1.4 The sisters: The Nurse and the Dreamer 133 3.2 West of the Jordan 154 3.2.1 Mawal: The Memory of Palestine 156 3.2.2 Soraya: The Rebel 170 3.2.3 Khadija: The Shy one 185 3.2.4 Hala: The Bridge 198 Chapter 4: Crescent and the Creative Strategies of Resistance 219 4.1 Crescent’s Engagement with the Issue of the Image of Arabs in the United States 221 4.2 Nadia’s Café: The re-creation of home in the ethnic borderland 235 4.3 Eating Up Differences and Cooking Up Stories 245 Chapter 5: Once in a Promised Land: The Collapse of the American Dream 269 5.1 Embracing America 274 5.2 The Collapse of Jassim’s and Salwa’s American Dream 284 5.2.1 Salwa: Miss Made in America 287 5.2.2 Jassim: The Frustrated Perfectionist 299 Conclusions 319 Summary in Spanish 331 Bibliography 341 INTRODUCTION 15 16 INTRODUCTION Arab American literature is a burgeoning field struggling to carve a space of its own within the mosaic of America’s ethnic literary scene. Its tradition dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century with the arrival of early Arab émigré writers. This literary genre has been shaped by the different phases it has gone through, together with the varied circumstances and historical events which have affected its course. Arab American literature mirrors the historical, social and political development of the American communities with Arab descent in the United States. In this way, contemporary Arab American discourse is the result of more than a century of Middle Eastern presence in America. Aware of their cultural background, most contemporary Arab American writers focus on ethnicity and proclaim hybridity as the essence of a hyphenated Arab American identity. This increasing awareness leads them to explore the spaces situated on each side of the hyphen in their literary work, as they insist on situating the Arab American experience within its American multicultural context. These writers consider that they are entrusted with the mission of the self-representation of their community in order to do away with the widespread misrepresentations that dominate the perception of Arabs in the United States. Possessing a solid grounding in American identity, these writers express their attachment to the Arab homeland, while avoiding sentimentalism and nostalgia. When I first started to become interested in Arab American literary production in the late 1990’s, I was disappointed because of the absence of any appreciable body of scholarship approaching this emerging literature, in spite of its acquiring a growing mainstream audience. But this disappointment quickly turned into excitement at having 1 discovered a promising field which had hardly been studied at all in academic research in the United States and especially in Spain. Needless to say, the beginning was very hard and even painful, due to the difficulty of securing access to the limited body of criticism on Arab American fiction that did exist. I could only find a few short reviews and articles about some literary works. In spite of that, I did not hesitate to take the decision to dedicate my PhD dissertation to the exploration of the works of Diana Abu- Jaber and Laila Halaby, whom I consider two of the most important figures in the Arab American literary scene. Abu-Jaber was the first contemporary Arab American writer that I heard about when I began my search for a possible literary corpus by American writers of Arab descent. My study of her fiction is here restricted to her first two novels because the Arab American perspective is no longer central to her later work. Abu- Jaber’s novel Arabian Jazz (1993) is commonly regarded as “the first mainstream Arab American novel”,1 and was thus an obvious choice to include in my thesis. Her second novel Crescent (2003) is a richly layered work, which reflects the writer’s hybrid voice and transnational concerns. Laila Halaby was the second major writer I discovered in the Arab American literary tradition, and my decision to include in this dissertation her novels West of the Jordan (2003) and Once in a Promised Land (2007) stems from my great admiration for her. I believe that these two novels can be ranked among the best contemporary Arab American works of fiction thanks to the author’s poetic prose in the depiction of her characters and their stories. Both writers belong to families with mixed backgrounds, American and Jordanian with Palestinian origin, which further encouraged me to work on their narratives because of my interest in their literary depiction of Palestine, and the 1 Shalal-Esa, Andrea. “Clearing the Path for Mainstream Arab American Literature.” Al Jadid Magazine, Vol. 16, Nº62 (2010). < http://www.aljadid.com/content/clearing-path-mainstream-arab-american-literature> 2 question of displacement and exile. I think that Abu-Jaber and Halaby are especially prominent names in a generation of Arab American writers who have succeeded in presenting the stories of their hyphenated characters to mainstream America. Their narrative questions the widespread misrepresentations of Arabs in American popular culture, as well as the preconceived notions of what constitutes Arab American subjectivity. They present, instead, their own perception of individual and collective Arab American identities. They thus portray a diverse collection of characters and stories, which together provide a perfect stage for the negotiation of Arab American subjectivity in the United States. For this reason, I have made use of Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space as the theoretical framework for this research. I believe that this choice distinguishes my approach from other studies in the field.
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