Anwer Sabbar Zamil Al-Yasir

Exploring Identity in the American Multicultural Society: The Arab American Autobiography Doctoral Thesis ~ Summary ~

On September 26, 1986, the American Space Shuttle Challenger crashed. General consternation around the world, images circulating that will mark generations, like that of a group of children who cry tears for their beloved mistress: Christa McAuliff. This smiling young woman represents the typical American, or rather the ideal American, the kind-hearted teacher, the caring mother, and her tragic death shakes the whole world. Challenger’s experience was just as symbolic as it was scientific. Among the crew members, a mosaic of ethnically different people, like multicultural America: an African American, an Asian

American, a Hispanic American, a Jewish American and an Arab American: Christa

McAuliff. This story seems to us symbolic on several levels, which is why we chose it to introduce our subject. America, first of all, likes to highlight its diversity: cultural diversity,

“racial” diversity. Multiculturalism is the key word. And the Challenger shuttle was supposed to represent a colorful and hyphenated America, that is to say populated by individuals who are something American: whether they are African, Asian or Arab, or even Native. The second thing is that Christa was an Arab American, that is, an American citizen of a hyphenated identity. A detail very little known to the general public is that her maternal grandfather was of Lebanese Maronite descent, and she was great niece of Lebanese-

American historian Philip Hurri Hitti. Christa was selected from more than 11,500 candidates to participate in the NASA Teacher in Space Project, and found her untimely end in her first

(and last) extraterrestrial experience. So many paradoxes already: Christa was the typical

American, but she was also an Arab American ... So are the typical Arab Americans to be hyphenated? The Arabs are supposed to be easily recognizable, thanks to a specific

1 phenotype and behavior particularly incompatible with Western values, but Christa was a charming teacher who was chosen by a NASA jury, following her remarkable course on “the

American woman”. Her “Arabness” can only surprise her: neither her name nor her first name was Arabic, she bore no sign of belonging to the Muslim religion, and she was a perfect

American teacher! This brings us to a paradox: even if apparently invisible, and impossible to identify for most Americans, the Arabs have been a real presence in the cultural landscape of the US for almost two centuries of American history. Among the landmarks of the early Arab

(and Muslim) presence, we should mention since the 1831 publication of The Life of Omar

Ibn Said (an autobiographical work, originally written in Arabic by Omar Ibn Said, a West

African educated slave) the Commemorative Plaque commissioned by Sultan Abdülmecid I for the Washington Monument, in Washington D.C. (1853), the representation of Islam in the

“Evolution of Civilization” mural of the Library of Congress (Washington D.C.). Let us not forget Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Qur’an, published in 1764.

Since Omar Ibn Said’s autobiographical memoir, many other Arab Americans decided to write down their experience of displacement and relocation, of adaptation and assimilation in a new and not always friendly environment, among them Assaad Y. Kayat, Abraham Mitrie

Rihbany, F. M. Al Akl, George Haddad, Edward Atiyah, Salom Rizk, Isaac Diqs, Mikhail

Naimy, Fawaz Turki, Edward Said, Ihab Hassan, Laila Abou-Saif, and Fatima Mernissi. On the other hand, most of the novels written by the Arab American writers contain autobiographical elements, as is the case with Arabian Jazz (Diana Abu-Jaber, 1993), West of the Jordan (Laila Halaby, 2003), The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (Mohja Kahf, 2006), or

Sweet Dates in Basra (Jessica Jiji, 2010).

*****

2

In its essence, autobiography is the story an author makes of his own existence, recalling the facts he considered most significant for the development of his personality. The author becomes aware of himself through memories and is the protagonist of the narrated events. An autobiographical text contains many personal reflections and the language used is usually quite sustained. The story of one’s life (or, better, of some of its traits to which particular meaning is attributed, the so-called biographems) can be in verse, in the form of an essay, a theatrical work, a cinematographic film or a comic strip; generally, however, it is a prose story. The autobiography, as a codified literary genre, acquires importance and knows an exceptional diffusion especially during the XVIII century, but it is in the Latin and Christian literary tradition that the autobiography has its roots: they are in fact the Confessions of Saint

Augustine, the first great model of autobiographical narrative, made so by the inner research and the new psychological elements brought by Christianity. Autobiographical writing represents an important means for the enhancement of oneself, for the development of cognitive abilities and different forms of thought, for the creation of a sensitivity aimed at listening and assimilating the testimonies of others. Autobiography is a rather interesting genre also to better understand certain historical or political contexts. It can be motivating to know the personality life that we find important for us or in which we mirror ourselves. But why, at a certain point in one’s life, does one decide to write about oneself? Contrary to what one might think, one does not necessarily do it to talk about oneself, to give vent to one’s narcissism or expression to one’s creative excess. Sometimes autobiographical writing is instead intended to outline, albeit for hints and indirectly, the historical and social context in which it was formed and which, in turn, has contributed to change.

Unlike other literary genres, such as the tragedy, the novel, the epic and even the lyric poetry, which is probably a younger sister (less in volume, certainly not for fame), the autobiography has always aroused mistrust and fear, and indeed the custodians of literary and civil morality

3 have often tried to prevent her from entering the republic of letters. What defines it is the nature of its referent in the world, the life of a person, but if this were really its specific difference it would not be possible to distinguish it from biography, which instead, at least for moderns, belongs to the historical disciplines, and requires meticulous research in private and public archives. But on the other hand, one of its most frequent distinctive features (even if it knows exceptions) is the use of the personal pronoun “I”, which brings it closer to the lyrical genre which, of all genres, is the least mimetic, the most expressive, and which perhaps, precisely because this (or rather, because this is how it was perceived by the romantics), contributed to making the definition of literature as a mimesis, as a representation of a shared and objective reality. Autobiography is subject in other words to two opposing contradictory norms: (1) that of strictly and exclusively sticking to the truth, like the most empirical of human sciences, that is, history; (2) that of being subjective and expressive as the most subjective of literary genres, the lyrical genre, so subjective that only the modern age, from the eighteenth century onwards, has fully recognized its existence.

As a result, autobiography is the only literary genre that has to combine a high degree of objectivity (like those novels that profess “realism”) and even more of historical truth (such as the historical novel, and even more the biography) with the maximum of subjectivity, and therefore, to the limit, of literariness. Philippe Lejeune gave this paradox a legal and logical form when he defined autobiography as a genre in which author, narrator and protagonist coincide, and when he added that in autobiography the author is linked to the reader by an

“autobiographical pact” which commits him not only to truthfully tell the truth, but also to try to communicate the meaning of his own existence, to express his own personal, individual, intimate truth.

4

The modern Arab autobiography revises its cultural baggage with the suggestion of the novel and with a renewed sense of becoming and history. The society changes and inevitably the function of the adab, which expresses new demands and addresses itself to a broad public: not only to the elite, but to those who, with the strength of will, and the study, can improve their own conditions and those of the nation. The concept of identity, of self-awareness, reflects the vision of society that sees the emergence of a new class, the effendiyya, which, thanks to the education received, succeed and enter the reformed mechanisms of politics alongside the a'yān. And although the definition of “bourgeoisie” is not perfectly fitting, a sort of middle class actually takes shape, which partly recalls the one referred to by Gusdorf

(1956), when attributing the birth of the autobiographical genre to the emergence of the modern concept of the individual.

The Arab American writers, by accepting exile, accomplished a dramatic cultural shift. Most of them belong to one Christian denomination or another, having acquired from a very early age a religious education different from that of the great majority of the population in their countries of origin: another language, another frame of thought, different traditions, and even other devotional texts, originating in a different cultural space. All these prepared them for the self-imposed exile. It is as if they had already left Greater Syria, or Egypt, or the Maghreb long before their physical displacement; the only element that can fill in the geographical and spiritual gap is the adopted language—English—with its cultural, ideological, and spiritual load.

*****

It has been our intention to deal with the Arab American autobiography as a form of life- writing, and establish the social and cultural context that prompted the authors to share their personal experiences which, more than often, are stories of exile. We start from the assumption that autobiography is confession: it has as its starting point the absolute sincerity

5 of the author, whose ambition is to clear the disparate fragments of the past, to discover the logical and causal thread of events, to make order in memories, and to express an identity, a self-consciousness or an existential model, and render a unitary meaning to a life perhaps chaotically lived.

The hypotheses situated at the basis of the current dissertation have been formulated in accordance with the following research directions: (1) The extent to which the Arab migrants of the first wave integrated into the new social and cultural landscape of their new adoptive country; (2) A view of the Arab American community as a result of the socio-political and cultural background; (3) The importance of the literary production of a migrant community within the larger context of the mainstream culture; (4) Autobiography as a genre and the imperious need of the Arab American writers to be self-referential in their works, and way it eventually responds to the spiritual needs leading to the spiritual enhancement of the Arab

American community; (5) The worldliness of exile, the exile’s condition of being “out of place” and the burden of a bicultural identity as elements of an understanding of Arab

American autobiography; (6) The evolution of the Arab American autobiography from the slave narrative of Omar Ibn Said to Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, Mikhail Naimy, or

Edward Said. (7) The contribution of the autobiographical elements in the Arab American novels to the general portrait of this community, seriously affected by the 9/11 events.

The field of life-writing, of which autobiography forms the main topic of our critical discourse, is a complex one, with its stylistic and literary boundaries outlined by prestigious theoreticians of the field, such as Philippe Lejeune, James Olney, John Paul Eakin, Georges

Gusdorf or, more recently, Waïl S. Hassan. We are fully aware that we cannot cover the whole body of theoretical works devoted to this sub-genre: what is to be included and what is to be left out of it is still a matter of debate. The current dissertation, thus, tries to bring light

6 on a particular episode concerning the evolution of autobiography – the emergence of the

Arab American autobiography, and its crystallization as an independent concept.

As a method for our critical discourse we have resorted to hermeneutics, following a number of tenets of the discipline, and starting with a description of the text to be analyzed and the context in which it was written. In the first instance, the description of the text and the context in which it arises must be made. In the case of a text, a literary object, its analysis necessarily starts from the linguistic level. The text is a linguistic fact that is composed of sentences, words and the formal set of discourse. Whenever necessary we have resorted to the writer’s texts, intertwining the textual elements with reflection. After all, Hermeneutics is a synchronous and diachronic discipline at the same time, trying to capture the essences of the phenomena, but also their evolution.

Regarding the other approaches, we mention the contextual approach which allowed for a reading of some of the Arab American autobiographies in the context of the American literature, and the comparative approach, a perspective that exceeds the established geographical borders and provides the instruments that allow for the consideration of other non-Western languages and literatures.

Our thesis, entitled Exploring Identity in the American Multicultural Society: The Arab

American Autobiography, hopefully answers the research questions above, and is structured in Introduction, eight chapters, and Conclusions. The Illustrations are to be found in a dedicated section. The Works Cited list includes both the primary texts, and the references.

The sources for the illustrations are listed at the end. All illustrations belong to the public domain.

The Introduction: How Multiculturalism Makes it All Possible establishes the frame of reference: the reality of the American cultural diversity, the debate on America’s

7 multiculturalism and multiculturalist thought, ethnicity and race, and the hyphenated identity of the Arab Americans. In understanding multiculturalism we started from Normand Glazer’s statement that “Multiculturalism is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups” (Glazer 1997: 147), to reach the conclusion that multiculturalist discourse is a multicultural narrative of reality that is integral to the study of multiculturalism. If ethnicity, as a concept, refers to the defining cultural traits of a given social group, then “race” seems to be a more controversial concept, as one can see from the figures provided by the US Census, and the reluctance to place the Arab immigrants in a relevant category – neither white, nor black – hence the need of hyphenation which may help the immigrant acknowledge his identity (Renshon 2011).

Chapter One: The Autobiography as a Self-Referential Writing is a theoretical account of autobiography as a literary genre. It covers the historical review of autobiography as retrospective narrative and its current status, and it answers the question whether autobiographies are works of literature or not. It also discusses autobiography as literature of confession, and as a means of justifying oneself. We follow the evolution of autobiography since the Confessions of Saint Augustine, to The Book of My Life of Girolamo Cardano, The

Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Frederick Douglass’s A Narrative of the Life of

Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, or more recently, the development of the most recent literature in the direction of mixing personal events and reflection on the narration of the same (Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Milan Kundera or JM Coetzee) and at the same time the open access to the narrative of the self offered by the uncontrolled growth of the blog phenomenon. We have reviewed the opinions of theoreticians of the genre, among them the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, the critics and researchers Jerome Bruner, James

Olney, John Paul Eakin, Daniel Madelénat, and Philippe Lejeune. We demonstrate that the

8 evolution and the affirmation of autobiography as a literary genre liked to the affirmation of a new type of curiosity for individual life, in which events, facts and situations of a rapidly changing world seem to be reflected. It is a literary genre, always formative and a harbinger of a known feedback on the writing subject. The different definitions of autobiography lead to several conclusions: its primordial function is the cognitive one; its nature is initiatory; it is the invocation of an ego in search of his own identity. Finally, the autobiography is a document, revealing an identity assumed between the ego of the narrator and that of the author, the first expression of which is his own name written on the title page, etc.

Chapter Two: The Arab Americans – The Less Visible Community covers a number of background topics, such as the dimensions of Arab American ethnicity, the origins of the

American Arabs, the process of dislocation and settlement in the new adoptive country, the reasons that made them move away from their traditional cultural insularity towards a position that emphasizes connections with others, the debate on the ethnical categorization of the Arabs, the Arab Americans’ doubleness, and the development of the discipline of Arab

American Studies. The discussion is placed within paradigms of cultural assimilation or pluralism that reflect the pressures for a conformist adaptation exerted on immigrants in the

United States during the initial periods. We refer to relevant studies which discuss Arab-

Americans in relation to white immigrant groups of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Ernest McCarus, 1994), the relationship between racism and violence against

Arabs in the contemporary American context (Nabeel Abraham, 1994), and the definition of the group within ethnic frontiers (Frederik Barth, 1969).

We develop on the idea that migration means displacement, which leads to the self-exiled writer’s need of coming to terms with a new literal and metaphorical perspective on one’s

“home”, which acquires a new depth of meaning, a new dimension, becoming individual and personal: the writer’s not-so-distant past and the immediate present interact, while memory

9 connects one’s experiences of the old home with the new cultural, religious, ideological and political loyalties. Generally, “Arab American” refers to the Arab immigrants from the

Middle East and North Africa and their descendants and statistic usually refer to first-, second-, and third-generation Arab Americans. We trace the evolution of this hyphenated community who constantly claim a classification adequate to their experience without minimizing the complexities inherited through each side of their identity. We acknowledge the position of Lisa Suhair Majaj who explains the hyphen as “a manifestation of this complexity, by which American identity is intrinsically transformed to encompass a multitude that is no longer marginal, but coexists with and ultimately changes the center”

(Fadda-Conrey 2006: 14). Regarding the experience of Arabs in America, rooted in the racial history of the country, Steven Salaita maintains that the contemporary experiences of Arab communities in the US is governed by what he calls the “imperative patriotism”, originating from settler colonialism.

Chapter Three: Do the Arab Americans Really Exist? is an incursion into the development of the Arab American community since the first documented presence of the Arab/Muslim on the American continent in the 16th century to the publication of “Kawkab America”, the first newspaper of the Arab diaspora in America, in 1892. These Arab settlers contributed “their traditions, values, philosophies and behaviors” bringing their contribution to building of the largest multi-ethnic, multicultural nation in the world. The topographical evidence is impressive with a total of 484 Arabic place names in the US, among them Lebanon (in

Pennsylvania); Damascus (in Oregon); Alexandria (in Virginia); Jordan (in Minnesota);

Palestine (in Texas); Morocco (in Indiana); Tyre (New York); Cairo (in Georgia); Mecca (in

Indiana). Once the community began to coalesce and gain strength, the first newspapers were published, such as Kawkab America (“The Star of America”), al-Hoda (“The Guide”) and

Mir'at-ul-Gharb (“The Mirror of the West”), and al-Ayam (“The Days”). We underline the

10 diversity existing within the Arab American community, the relationship between the

Christian Arabs and the Muslim Arabs, and their status: until WWI, North-American Arabs were considered as temporary residents with characteristics of an intermediary minority.

They were labeled as clannish, alien, and unassimilable, and of uncertain racial status – neither black, nor white – while they had to decide on the identity that would better represent themselves, and go through the painful process of becoming American, as seen in the editorials of the Kawkab America newspaper, and the prestigious activity of the Arbeely family.

Chapter Four: The Autobiography of a Muslim Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said opens the analytical component of our thesis and is devoted to The Life of Omar Ibn Said, the first autobiographical narrative of an educated African slave literate in both his native Pulaar language, as well as in Arabic, which remaps the slave narratives and performs different rhetorical gestures and autobiographical symbolic actions that highlight his African education and his language alienation. Although he converted to Christianity, deep in his heart he remained a Muslim, writing in Arabic, and exchanging letters in Arabic with other Arabic- speaking slaves in America. While “Arab American” was a convenient label attached to the

African slave whose knowledge of Arabic allowed him such an achievement, Omar’s autobiography complicates the path that American slave narratives trace between a slave’s literacy and his identity. We mentioned the scholarly responses to Omar’s Life from some of the authors who treated slavery in its international context, and investigated its multiple facets, such as Allan Austin, Sylviane A. Diouf, Robert J. Allison, Michael Gomez, Ghada Osman’s and Camille Forbes. They stress Omar’s possible interactions with other Muslim slaves

(Allan 2011), that that French and British slave purchases were constrained, sometimes controlled, by the Muslim leaders’ policies (Diouf 2011). Allison (2011) examines both literary and historical sources, and contends that Americans confronted uncomfortable

11 parallels between Barbary Coast slavery and their own. They discuss the extent to which

Muslims in early America were able to practice their faith and to pass their Muslim traditions to their progeny (Gomez 2011), and provide a literary analysis of Omar’s narrative, paying special attention to his use of the Qur’an, and his mastery of Arabic, focusing on the matter of

Omar’s conversion and the ways in which some Africans identified themselves in the new

American context (Osman and Forbes, 2011).

Chapter Five: A Migrant’s Dream Come True draws a complex portrait of the Arab migrant writer who, having chosen exile or having been forced to, assumed the risk of writing his memories / autobiography in a foreign language, in a foreign country, and a cultural background different from his own, and refers to several nineteenth and twentieth century authors who, in search of the American Dream, attempted to bring East and West together, striving to adapt to the new conditions without forgetting their native land. These autobiographies were written by less-known authors—Assaad Y. Kayat, Gregory M.

Wortabet (in the 19th century), Abraham Mitrie Rihbany, George Haddad (in the first decades of the 20th century), F.M. Al Akl, Edward Atiyah, Salom Rizk, William Peter Blatty, Isaak

Diqs, Said K. Aburish, Fawaz Turki (in the second half of the 20th century)—or by well- known scholars and writers (Laila Abou-Saif, Fatima Mernissi, Ihab Hassan, Edward Said).

Most of these authors came from the Greater Syria (Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine), and also from Egypt and Morocco, thus covering a huge geographical expanse and various religious denominations: Greek Orthodox, Protestant, Coptic, and Muslim.

The texts chosen for our analysis share a dominant idea: all these writers from the Arab world chose geographic or linguistic exile, or were forced to do so. Whether it is exile or migration, it implies a passage, often denoting a certain degree of disorientation, or loss of meaning, with a subtle hope of return lingering in the background. Most of the authors were in search

12 of the American Dream, with its load of hope, peace, contentment, liberty, brotherhood, and plenty, sometimes conveying a dimension of universality to their personal stories which they decide to tell to the Western readers. They carry with them their own burden of memories reflecting their experiences, and they are facing the unusual situation of re-living their Arabic language past in an English language present. They are torn between a past that escapes them—by the double temporal and linguistic distance—and a future where they do not know yet whether they will be entitled to quote after the rite of passage to which they give themselves on the narrow and unstable board of the present: the present of writing. The choice of the new language turns the autobiography into “a study in loyalties”.

We mention the religious dimension of these texts, as religion was an identifying factor, considering the religious diversity of the Middle East, and the dividing lines between different denominations—Christian, Protestant or Greek Orthodox, on the one hand, and

Islamic, on the other—and the role played by the missionary schools which more than often embraced them all, Christians and Muslims alike. The social-economic dimension is also considered, with a stress on the various employment opportunities the authors had before they crossed the Atlantic to a better life, and their close encounters with the American labor market. The material success is accentuated by the juxtaposition, for those who stayed in the country, of two states of the same individual who from nothing becomes someone. It is a new change of perspective for this individual who seems to have (re)found a subject status. To those who managed to go there and stay, America is a dream come true, even if they finally realize that, to quote Kipling, “East is East, and West is West”.

Chapter Six: “East is East and West is West” takes over the Kipling reference at the end of the previous chapter and follows five directions relevant for our demonstration, as follows: (1)

The West as a promise: Edward Said and Orientalism; (2) The gap between the real and the

13 imaginary; (3) The colonisable colonized; (4) Adopting the colonizer’s language; (5) The disoriented Orient.

In this chapter we start with a connection between Kipling’s imperialism and Said’s

Orientalism, seen as the dynamic exchange between individual authors and the vast political enterprises belonging to the three existing empires (American, British, French) on the intellectual and imaginary territory. But the Bombay-born British writer Rudyard Kipling, and then the Jerusalem-born Arab American critic Edward Said were not singular in noticing that the West was only a promise of prosperity, and that there is a gap between the real and the imaginary.

In their autobiographical writings, Arab American authors did not hesitate to take a critical position. Thus, Dr. Fouad M. Al Akl denounces the betrayal of the Western dream, Salom

Rizk wrote about the gap between the real and the imaginary, Gregory M. Wortabet repeatedly asked the Western powers to provide a solution to all their problems, Edward

Atiyah thinks that the dream of fusion, of assimilation, is replaced by the confrontation with the alien Other, while Abraham Mitrie Rihbany denounces materialism as Western evil that all authors are confronted with and accept most with difficulty.

The critical spirit of the Oriental is blunted by the fascination exerted by the Occidental but also by the ideology that the latter inculcates in his teaching. Ameen Rihani denounced the excessive materialism of Westerners, while condemning the excess of Eastern spirituality.

Last but not least, adopting the colonizer’s language is a decisive step, a position taken by a subject in search of a better place. Edward Atiyah and Ihab Hassan choose the language of the

Other to escape a reality that does not satisfy them, but for Atiyah, and F.M. al Akl the mastery of English, far from breaking down the colonial barriers, reinforces them and the subject discovers himself the untimely host of this adopted language.

14

Chapter Seven: A Memoir of Displacement – Edward Said’s Out of Place touches upon certain keywords of the postcolonial theory – “displacement”, migration, exile, wandering,

“deterritorialization” – which are at the very core of Said autobiographical accounts, not only

Out of Place (1999), but also Reflections on Exile (2001).

Our aim was to show a less-known portrait of the author of Orientalism – an Arab American writer of the exile – taking into account the ambiguous, even multidisciplinary nature of the term: an external exile of the writers and their characters, following similar paths; an inner exile, manifested by the writing through its space of creation which is, among others, the language, the mythical place of a quest for identity, which crystallizes all the linguistic tensions with the origin in the learning of the colonizer’s language (English, in our case) by the colonized; or, it could simply mean exile as deterritorialization.

We see exile as both a historical and a metaphorical condition, as a gesture of emancipation and transgression and a liberating alternative, and Said does not hesitate to declare, “This book is an exile’s book” in his prefaces of Culture and Imperialism (1993) and After the Last

Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986). In the case of Out of Place (1999), exile can be transformed into an instrument of resistance, a gesture of emancipation and transgression, and autobiography turns into a kind of point of arrival that allows the author to dig rationally in its past, in the effort of clarification and understanding of family roots. The book describes the writer’s dislocation, his position of externality, inadequacy and impropriety. The autobiography becomes an act of reinventing one’s identity, and Said reinterprets, and re-tells

“a story of loss” in which the idea of returning home is impossible.

Out of Place is a book about the burden of a bicultural identity, the relationship between collective history and individual history. It is written in English, at the same time the language of the writer’s American identity, and the expatriate’s idiom. According to Bill Ashcroft, exile is

15 often associated, in Said’s work, with the “worldliness”, defined as the acute awareness of the existence and interdependence of other times and other places, because no story, however singular, is isolated from global history. Said’s progress demonstrates a matured mind shaped by the experience of exile, rejecting any submission to fixed ideas or geographically determined worlds.

Chapter Eight: When the Biographer Turns Self-Referential underlines the differences and similarities between biography/autobiography, and biographer/autobiographer, leading to a definition of the “novelistic” or fictional biography, with an insistence on the portrait of the author as a self-referential biographer. The theoretical support of our reading of Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani as prophetic writers, and of Mikhail Naimy as the self-referential biographer is given by the studies of Lytton Strachey, Leon Edel, Virginia Woolf, Dorrit

Cohn, and Harold Nicolson among others, who point out to: (1) the demystifying purpose served by the biographer’s intuition and imagination (Strachey); (2) the necessity of an analytical approach to biography with the purpose of seeing “through the rationalizations, the postures, the self-delusions and self-deceptions of the subjects” (Edel); (3) the idea of the iconoclastic vocation of the modern biographical genre, in support of the hybrid genre of imaginary biography (Woolf); (4) the absolute narratological distinction between biography and fiction (Cohn); or (5) the idea that the hybridization between a novel and a biography would transcend the artistic and epistemic limits (Nicolson).

A significant portion of the chapter is devoted to the works of Kahlil Gibran and Ameen

Rihani, the two Lebanese-American writers whose destinies intertwined, and whose seminal works – Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) and Rihani’s The Book of Khalid (1911) – continue to arouse the interest of critics and the wider reading public, after having inspired generations of readers and writers for more than a century since their publication. Though it can not be

16 classified as a novel, The Prophet proclaims the unity of being, based on the reconciliation of opposites: good and evil are inseparable, joy and pain are two sides of the same coin, life and death depend on each other, and there is no past or future but only an eternal present. The writer himself is the symbol of this unity: in him East and West, religious and pagan, ancient and modern, past and present – all merge in a complex personality. Along an almost identical line of thought, The Book of Khalid supports the unity of the universe and the unity of religions; advocating the unity of the Arab world, the union between East and West, and the fusion of national literatures, between tradition and innovation, classicism and modernity, national and international culture.

Both books contain overt references to events and circumstances in the authors’ personal lives, which justify their inclusion in a discussion of Arab-American autobiography. Our choice of Mikhail Naimy’s Kahlil Gibran: A Biography is motivated by the life-long friendship and personal relationship between Naimy and Gibran, which turns the Biography into a “novelistic” – or fictionalized – biography, with strong autobiographical elements which give it a remarkable self-referential value.

Conclusions: The Autobiography Revisited summarizes the discussion and shows that, as an axis of analysis, we have followed Philippe Lejeune’s rationale on the autobiographical pact: autobiography establishes a contract between author and reader and, as a result, the narrative must be taken as truth, because this was the author’s intention in narrating his own life. The

Arab American authors considered simulate the pact, play with their possibilities, but break with it: despite their presumed appearance in these texts, there is always a kind of indetermination that breaks the contract.

Regarding the condition of the self-exiled writer and the process of assimilation, we have dealt with the Arab migrant’s ceaseless search for the American Dream (with its load of hope,

17 peace, contentment, liberty, brotherhood, and plenty), the different aspects (linguistic, religious, and socio-economic) of the new identity, the gap between the pre-exile imaginary and the reality in the field, the unexpected burden of the split, or hyphenised, or bicultural identity.

We have analyzed the Arab American autobiography within the framework of the discussion of multiculturalism and the manifestation of Arabness in the predominantly white America.

The red thread of our thesis which has hopefully answered the research questions is that of exile–autobiography–self-referentiality–novelistic biography, and we approached the Arab

American writers, most of them forgotten, in an attempt to understand the subtle complexities of the life of a migrant community, the efforts of the Arab American writers towards their recognition by the mainstream culture, the desire to overcome the unfavorable post-9/11 reception of any manifestation of Arab culture, enhanced by the recent political developments.

Whatever the results, our approach could only be self-referential.

18