Strategic Genius, Disidentification, and the Burden of the Prophet in Arab-American Poetry

Strategic Genius, Disidentification, and the Burden of The Prophet in Arab-American Poetry

RICHARD E. HISHMEH

HE NOTED COLUMNIST Nicolas Von Hoffman writes that, since the 1970s, Arabs have dubiously been “the last ethnic T group safe to hate in America.”1 Maha El Said argues that this has been particularly true since the events of 9/11, and that “the attack that brought down the World Trade Center labored to increase the height of the wall that separates ‘Self’ from ‘Other’” for Arab-Americans. She claims that this division “was enforced by the simplistic view expressed by the U.S. foreign policy, where the world is divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘with us’ or ‘against us’,” concluding: “in the midst of this new schism, Arab-Americans [...] become trapped in an attempt to redefine their identity, and reconstruct a hybridity that seems impossible in a world that is divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’.”2 While the work of the Arab- American poets represented here was written before the events of 9/11, Said and others attest to how 9/11 intensified pre-existing cultural attitudes and prejudices towards Arab-Americans. As a result, there now exists a particular urgency for a critical reassessment of Arab-American poetics and of Arab-American identity. For many Arab-American poets, contested identity has meant a re- negotiation of their relationship to the world of Western letters; it has

1 Gregory Orfalea, Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans (Austin: U of Texas P, 1988): 5. 2 Maha El Said, “The Face of the Enemy: Arab-American Writing Post 9/11,” Studies in the Humanities 30.1–2 (2003): 201. 94 RICHARD E. HISHMEH ^ required these poets to re-tune their voices to a key in harmony with Western poetics. In American poetry, one such voice has been that of Romantic genius. While Romanticism encompasses a wide range of poets and thinkers, particularly relevant to Arab-American poetry is a prophetic strain that has informed American poetry and culture from Walt Whitman to Bob Dylan. Exemplified in the works of European forbears such as William Blake and the early Wordsworth, this visionary Romanticism (here, interchangeably referred to as Romantic genius) often embeds a politically significant revolutionary stance within narratives of personal experience and intense spiritualism. Often detached from its original political potency, this trope has remained viable in American poetry and culture well into the era of postmodernism, particularly as a highly effective identity used by publishers, poets, and writers to sell their works. If some of this visionary Romanticism seems at odds with the tenets of postmodernism – purged of its spiritual insights and relegated to a marketable cultural construct – Arab-American poetry is one place where depic- tions of Romantic genius seem compatible with postmodern claims re- garding the wholly discursive aspect of language that takes over from the realities of authorial existence and intent. By evoking the trope of visionary Romantic genius in a way that is neither a nostalgic return to Romanticism nor an exclusively marketable gesture, many Arab-Ameri- can poets have found fresh ways of engaging Romanticism that reinvigo- rate its political implications and can be productively discussed within the discourses of postmodern theory. George Lipsitz’s concept of “strategic anti-essentialism” and José Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” help clarify how Arab-American poetry’s engagement with visionary Romanticism achieves these ends. As these theories attest, marginalized groups often survive, or resist, through calculated and complex intersections with dominant, mass culture. In this context, the trope of Romantic genius found in much Arab-American poetry becomes something more than an attempt to simply mimic West- ern authors, or a marketing ploy to sell books. As Lipsitz observes,

When people confront obstacles to direct expression of their aspirations and interests, they sometimes take a detour through fictive identities. These may seem escapist. They may involve the appropriation, colonization, or eroti- cization of difference. But appearances of escape and appropriation can also provide protective cover for explorations of individual and collective iden-