Arab-African Migrant Literature a Dissertation
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Clandestine Mediterranean: Arab-African Migrant Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Nahrain Al-Mousawi 2012 © Copyright by Nahrain Al-Mousawi 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Clandestine Mediterranean: Arab-African Migrant Literature by Nahrain Al-Mousawi Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Saree Makdisi, Chair Professor Gil Hochberg, Chair Clandestine migration from North Africa across the Mediterranean has been explored widely as a topic in the fields of social science in the past decade, but representations of undocumented migration in literature have not been subject to significant attention and analysis. Moreover, in comparison to French, Italian, or Spanish literature, Arabic clandestine migrant literature has barely been subject to recognition or discussion. Even though this dissertation includes some Anglophone literature, by and large, its main attention to Arabic literature addresses the dearth in scholarship on contemporary Arabic literary representations of clandestine migration from Egypt and Morocco, as well as trans-migration from sub-Saharan Africa. My analysis of literature charting journeys from the Mediterranean’s southern shores and rendering clandestine existence in the global North attempts to contribute to not only the discourse on migration literature but on conceptualizations of the Mediterranean as both a dividing border and unifying contact zone, ii especially vital to the contemporary recurrence of the study of seas and particularly the Mediterranean. My discussion encompasses Arabic literature by Moroccan author Rachid Nini and Egyptian author Khaled Al-Khameesy, as well as Anglophone literature by Moroccan- American author Laila Lalami and Nigerian-American author Sefi Atta. Themes of invisibility, nostalgia, transience, paralysis, mobility and immobility in secret Mediterranean border crossings are analyzed alongside themes traditionally capturing a mythic Mediterranean space, like cosmopolitanism, cultural interaction, and adventure. I explore and demarcate the dual imaginaries of the Mediterranean space and attempt to retrieve migrant narrative along these meeting points and dividing lines. Because the dissertation attempts to address an imbalance in the research literature by focusing literary analysis on Arabic and Anglophone African narratives and poetry that chart migration from the homeland, across the Mediterranean frontier, to the European shore, it focuses on journey narratives, which often show migrant characters representing an interdependent relationship of uneven development that connects the northern and southern shore. Thus, this dissertation reflects the authors’ investment in how distinct nations map the journey across the Mediterranean, casting the literature as both national and diasporic, emergent from and part of the African Mediterranean rather than about it. iii The Dissertation of Nahrain Al-Mousawi is approved. Negar Mottahedeh Gil Hochberg, Committee Co-Chair Saree Makdisi, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv To my mother, Seham Al-Mousawi, and in memory of my father, Abdul-Hussein Al-Mousawi v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii COMMITTEE PAGE iv DEDICATION v TABLE OF CONTENTS vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii VITA viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: Clandestine Mediterranean—A Useful Fiction 1 CHAPTER 2 UTOPIA UNDONE: Morocco’s Clandestine Migrant Literature 40 CHAPTER 3 MEDITERRANEAN CIRCUIT, MEDITERRANEAN FRONTIER: Clandestine Migrants in Egyptian Literature’s Double Imaginary 74 CHAPTER 4 ACROSS THE SAHARA, TOWARD THE MEDITERRANEAN—TRANSITS: Impossible Arrival in Sefi Atta’s “Twilight Trek” 105 CONCLUSION: Burning Borders, Re-creating the Mediterranean 137 BIBLIOGRAPHY 146 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the generosity and encouragement of my committee chairs, Gil Hochberg and Saree Makdisi, who offered much guidance and feedback during the completion of this project. I would also like to thank my other wonderful committee member Negar Mottahedeh, who has offered invaluable support and advice. My year of archival research in Morocco would not have been possible without the generous funding of the UCLA International Studies Institute, as well as the encouragement of Gil Hochberg to support this fellowship, which has been extremely significant to this project. Moreover, without the advice and encouragement of Gil Hochberg and Saree Makdisi, it would not have been possible to get the support and funding to further my Arabic studies, which have been essential to a project on Arabic literature. I thank all my wonderful committee members for making this a productive and insightful process. I thank my amazingly patient and kind partner and husband for his consistent love and support and for always keeping me motivated. I thank my best friend Karla Stine for always being generous, supportive, and inspiringly graceful in the best and in the most difficult circumstances. I would like to offer my gratitude to my family, especially my mother who returned to Iraq nearly 10 years ago and continues to thrive there despite enormous obstacles. She remains an inspiration, and she, along with my amazing father who passed away my first year of PhD studies, are to whom I dedicate this project and this life-long undertaking. vii VITA 2005, MA, University of Texas, Austin, Middle Eastern Studies, Arabic Studies 1996, BA, University of California, Berkeley, English Literature Awards 2010-2011, Collegium of University Teaching Fellowship 2009-2010, International Fieldwork Fellowship, Morocco, International Institute, UCLA 2008-2009, Graduate Research Mentorship (Academic-Year), UCLA 2008, Fred & Edith Herman Memorial Prize, American Academy of Poets, UCLA 2008, Foreign Language & Area Studies Summer Fellowship & Travel Grant, Arabic, UCLA, 2007, Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, UCLA, 2007-2008, Foreign Language & Area Studies Academic-Year Fellowship, Arabic, UCLA, 2006, Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, UCLA 2005-2009, Cota-Robles Fellowship, UCLA 2005, Center for Arabic Studies Abroad Fellowship (Declined) 2004, Foreign Language & Area Studies Summer Fellowship, Arabic, UT Austin Publications [forthcoming, 7/12] The Diamond Pipeline: Africa & the Arab World, Postcolonial Text 6, no. 4 [forthcoming] Bahrain & Saudi Arabia, Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations (Cleveland: Lincoln Library Press, 2012) (Spring 09) Jamal Juma: Iraqi Memory in Three Poems, Portals: A Journal in Comparative Literature 7 (Winter 10) Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, Asia, & South Africa, Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies 5, no. 3 (Fall 09) La Petite Jérusalem: The Subject of Universal Humanism “In Pieces, As It Is”, Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal 6, no. 1 (Spring 06) Silmandé: Nation Building & the Lebanese Encounter, Ufahamu: Journal of the African Activist Association 32, nos. 1-2 (Spring 06) Algerian White: Djebar’s Meditations on Death, Ethnic 3rd World Review of Books 6 Official & Nationalistic Art in Africa, World History Encyclopedia, 1900-1945, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO Inc., 2011 viii Chapter 1 Introduction: Clandestine Mediterranean—A Useful Fiction In recent years, the study of seas has come to be seen as a methodological and discursive tactic displacing nation-centered frames of cultural and historical studies, extending focus to global circulations of people and goods capable of surpassing the limited prism of the nation-state. In light of this shift, scholars have been attracted to the idea of a presumably borderless world of oceans and seas. From the unprecedented flourish of scholarship dedicated to the Atlantic, we would then witness a renewed outburst dedicated to Mediterranean studies. Inspiring a scholarly chain of transmissions in Mediterranean studies, French historian Fernand Braudel’s history of a unified Mediterranean in the sixteenth century (1976) centralizes the timeless “constants” of a geography that produced civilizations that linked its shores.1 While Braudel-inspired histories in Mediterranean studies critique his totalizing view of history as a deterministic “landscape of time”2 that effaces human agency, they still hinge on apprehending the Mediterranean in light of a preconceived unity. For example, Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (2000) recent revised history displaces Braudel’s geographical determinism, diachronic particularities, and metropolitan centers (in favor of neglected rural margins). Individual will is no longer subsumed within a Braudelian framework of particular geographic conditions and temporal limits, but foregrounded as the basis for “communications” on which Mediterranean unity is dependent.3 1 By “constants,” I am referring to Braudel’s focus on ahistorical geographical and environmental continuity and determinism through the longue durée perspective of historical time, wherein he privileges the unity of the Mediterranean: coherence of [this] history, the extent to which the movements of boats, pack animals, vehicles and 2 Miriam Cooke, “Mediterranean Thinking: From Netizen to Medizen,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 292. 3 Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 25. 1 Although The Corrupting Sea’s relational “analysis of the whole by way of its components”4