Arab Voices in Diaspora ross Readings in the Post / Colonial C ultures Literatures in English 115 Series Editors Gordon Collier †Hena Maes–Jelinek Geoffrey Davis (Giessen) (Liège) (Aachen) Arab Voices in Diaspora Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature Edited by Layla Al Maleh Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Cover painting: Leila Kubba, Distance (2007; acrylic and collage on canvas, 100 x 100 cm). Courtesy of the artist. Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2718-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2719-0 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands Table of Contents Acknowledgements vii Preface ix Anglophone Arab Literature: An Overview L AYLA A L M ALEH 1 Gibran and Orientalism W AÏL S. H ASSAN 65 Strategic Genius, Disidentification, and the Burden of The Prophet in Arab-American Poetry R ICHARD E. H ISHMEH 93 The Dialectic of the Nature/Man/God Trilogy of Acceptance and Tolerance in the Works of Amine F. Rihani B OULOS S ARRU 121 The Last Migration: The First Contemporary Example of Lebanese Diasporic Literature S YRINE H OUT 143 Transnational Diaspora and the Search for Home in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters C AROL F ADDA–CONREY 163 The Dynamics of Intercultural Dislocation: Hybridity in Rabih Alameddine’s I, The Divine C RISTINA G ARRIGÓS 187 The Semiosis of Food in Diana Abu Jaber’s Crescent B RINDA J. M EHTA 203 vi ARAB VOICES IN DIASPORA ^ How to Be a Successful Double Agent: (Dis)placement as Strategy in Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt D IYA M. A BDO 237 Women in Exile : The ‘Unhomely’ in Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt F ADIA S UYOUFIE & L AMIA H AMMAD 271 Bodies Across: Ahdaf Soueif, Fadia Faqir, Diana Abu Jaber M ARTA C ARIELLO 313 Searching for Room to Move: Producing and Negotiating Space in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret M ARTA C ARIELLO 339 From Harem to Harvard: Cross-Cultural Memoir in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage G EOFFREY P. N ASH 351 (Trans)Planting Cedars: Seeking Identity, Nationality, and Culture in the Lebanese Diaspora V ICTORIA M. A BBOUD 371 Tomorrow They Write their Story: Chaldeans in America and the Transforming Narrative of Identities Y ASMEEN H ANOOSH 395 From Romantic Mystics to Hyphenated Ethnics: Arab-American Writers Negotiating/Shifting Identity L AYLA A L M ALEH 423 Making It Survive Here and “Dreams of Return”: Community and Identity in the Poetry of Mohja Kahf S AMAA A BDURRAQIB 449 Meditations on Memory and Belonging: Nada Awar Jarrar’s Somewhere, Home D AWN M IRAPURI 463 Notes on Contributors 487 Acknowledgements There are many I would like to thank for making this project possible. My thanks go to Kuwait University for granting me a sabbatical leave which procured me time and peace of mind to put this work together. My thanks also go to the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Devel- opment (Kuwait) for honouring me with its Distinguished Scholar Award and funding my research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For generous assistance during my stay at UNC, special thanks go to Professor Edward Donald Kennedy of the English Department, who ran the Comparative Literature Program at the time and who made my stay a most rewarding and fruitful one. Thanks go to RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers) for giving me the opportunity to attend their conferences, present papers at their podia, and meet with creative writers and artists who constitute the subject of this volume. Thanks to all the contributors to this volume for their patience with and faith in this project. Special thanks go to Dr Gordon Collier, the Cross/Cultures Technical Editor at Rodopi, for his generous assistance, unflinching perseverance, and superb efficiency in getting this book into production. To him I remain grateful. For permission to include Brinda Mehta’s article on the “Semiosis of Food in Diana Abu Jaber’s Crescent,” which had earlier appeared in Mehta’s Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing (2007), I would like to extend special thanks to Mary Selden Evans, Exe- cutive Editor of Syracuse University Press. Thanks also to Leila Kabba, for kindly permitting the use of her painting “Distance” on the cover of this book. viii ARAB VOICES IN DIASPORA ^ A life-long debt goes to Professor Sadiq al-‘Azm for putting me on the right track. As always, it is to my brother Professor Ghassan Al Maleh that I owe my greatest debt of gratitude. He has been my constant mentor and un- failing guide. To my sister, Afaf, no words of gratefulness are enough. Her love, care, and constant giving have been my lighthouse and haven. But above all, it is to my husband, Professor Hazem Sabouni, that I owe my profound gratitude for being there for me, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, a life-time supporter and a living example of giving and self-denial. To Maya, Mazen, and Diana Sabouni I owe the deepest gratitude and heaps of love for making my life richer, more meaningful, more beautiful. L AYLA A L M ALEH J UNE 2009 Preface RAB V OICES IN D IASPORA: Critical Perspectives on Anglo- phone Arab Literature sheds light on an increasingly important A body of creative writing in English by Arab authors, or by authors of Arab descent. It deals with a previously neglected corpus of literary work that is now receiving increasing attention not only from university departments with Middle Eastern concerns but also from intel- lectuals everywhere who are interested in postcolonial studies, the New Literatures, and indeed the larger domain of World Literature in English. Although scores of books have looked at anglophone literature around the globe, they tend to make scant reference to the contribution of Arab writers. The literature of the Caribbean, the West Africans, the Indians, for example, has been introduced to the world, investigated, and analyzed. Names such as those of Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bharati Mukherjee, and Anita Desai, among others, now form what we might call a ‘parallel canon’ indispensable to academic depart- ments everywhere. However, anthologies and critical scholarship ap- proaching anglophone Arab writing remained scanty, except for a doctoral dissertation here and an M.A. thesis there. Edward Said, the Arab- American godfather of postcolonial theory, wrote a brief article on Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun, but even Said overlooked Arab literature of English expression. The fact of the matter is that Arabs have been using English as a medium of literary expression since the beginning of the past century. A significant anglophone Arab literary revival has taken place in the last few decades. Now, quite logically, it is awaiting full recognition. Hyphenated Arab-American, Arab-British, and Arab-Australian authors have been making their voices heard with originality and confidence. They aim to carve a niche for themselves within other emerging literatures which use x ARAB VOICES IN DIASPORA ^ the lingua franca of English. While their voices could easily be accommo- dated under labels such as ‘emigrant’, ‘ethnic’, and ‘postcolonial’, the term ‘anglophone’, coined after the model of ‘francophone’, has been found to be convenient enough to lodge them within the larger multicul- tural family. The description implied by this adjective ‘anglophone’ does not simply provide a linguistic ‘shelter’ for the Arab writer in English. What the label also achieves is a much wider umbrella under which certain themes and concerns can be shared. Born away from the homeland, Anglo-Arab literature is haunted by the same ‘hybrid’, ‘exilic’, and ‘diasporic’ ques- tions that have dogged fellow postcolonialists. The tension between the centre and the periphery, the ‘homeland’ and the ‘host land’ raises, time and again, familiar issues of belonging, alle- giance, and affinity. Concerns pertinent to cultural and relational identi- fication lie at the heart of these works, and the tension between assimi- lation and preservation is equally persistent. Some commentators find migration and hybridity enriching and invigorating agents. Others seek to conceptualize a ‘third space’, as Homi Bhabha called it, or an in-between- ness, which challenges ideas of essentialism and root-oriented identity politics. In this vein, some essays in the present volume propose an ex- ploration of the Anglo-Arab writer’s sense of hybridity and liminality. Other essays move theoretically from a notion of exilic nationalism to the idea of diasporic transnationalism . Apart from literary values, cultural affinities, and thematic concerns, anglophone Arab literature has recently captured the attention of readers worldwide as a medium through which they can gain a better knowledge of the intellectual and spiritual make-up of Arabs. Literary works acces- sible in a familiar language can offer plausible interpretation and human- ization of Arabs much better than journalism, historical reports or political memoirs. Written in English, works by Fadia Faqir, Ahdaf Soueif, Leila Aboulela, Hisham Matar, Rabih Alameddine, Suheir Hamad, or Mohja Kahf, to name a few examples, serve as cultural mediators. These authors project the Arab by way of themes and types that negotiate between diffe- rent cultures. They present not the exotic or alien but the comprehensible and acceptable. Moving beyond an internal audience, anglophone Arab writers have the capacity to play a crucial role in disseminating through the wider world their images of hyphenated Arabs and of the Arab people as a whole, thereby fostering acceptance through understanding.