From Nostalgia to Critique: An Overview of Arab American LiteratureAuthor(s): Tanyss LudescherSource: MELUS, Vol. 31, No. 4, Arab American Literature (Winter, 2006), pp. 93-114Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029684 .Accessed: 23/05/2011 06:13

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From Nostalgia to Critique: An Overview of Arab American Literature

Tanyss Ludescher University of Connecticut

One major purpose of this special issue of MELUS is to intro- duce scholars, critics, teachers, and students of ethnic literary works to an understudied and undervalued area of ethnic literature. This essay provides an overview of the history of Arab American literature, with particular attention to the history of Arab immigra- tion. In addition to introducing readers to the major figures and major themes in the literature, it also points to the future by considering unresolved questions and unexplored subjects.

Arab American literature mirrors the patterns of Arab American history, which scholars have traditionally divided into three phases, based on the three distinct waves of Arab immigrants who came to the US.' The first wave (1880-1924) of immigrants was made up of Greek Orthodox, Maronite, and Melchite Christians from Mount Lebanon and the surrounding Syrian and Palestinian provinces. For the first several years, immigration documents identified these Christians as Turks because they were subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The immigrants, however, despised their repressive Ottoman overseers and preferred to identify themselves as Syrians. Unskilled and often illiterate, many of these early Christian Arabs found work as itinerant peddlers, fanning across the country, and often spending months on the road. It was a lifestyle which accel- erated assimilation because it provided ample opportunities to learn English and mix with the local populace. Later, the Syrians settled in widely dispersed communities across the country, where many opened retail shops. Generally hardworking and law abiding, the immigrants enthusiastically embraced American values.

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Immigration from Greater Syria came to a halt during World War I, when famine and war ravaged the homeland. Although immigration resumed after the war, it came to a virtual standstill when harsh quotas were imposed on Syrians and other unwelcome ethnic groups in 1924. With immigration slowed to a trickle of approximately one hundred people a year, the population of the once vibrant, scattered community was not replenished. Despite the publication in the United States of numerous Arabic-language newspapers, the Syrians were increasingly cut off from events in their country of origin. As Alixa Naff notes, many Syrian Ameri- cans were largely unconscious of the nationalist aspirations in their homeland that led to the formation of the new Lebanese state in 1947 (16).

The second wave of immigration began in the decade following World War II. Unlike the first wave, which was predominantly Christian, the new wave contained a significant number of Mus- lims. This second wave of immigrants consisted of educated, skilled professionals, who were more likely to be familiar with the nationalist ideologies that permeated the Arab world. Unlike the Syrian Christians, they staunchly identified themselves as Arabs. Included in this group were a number of Palestinian refugees who had been rendered stateless as a result of the catastrophic 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

The third major wave of immigration, which began in 1967 and continues to this day, accelerated the trends of the post-World War II immigration period. In 1965, new liberalized immigration laws abolished the long-standing quota system. As a result, large numbers of West Bank Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims from Southern Lebanon fled to America after the 1967 war with Israel and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. The Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s produced a further flood of refugees. Imbued with anti-colonial sentiment and Arab nationalist ideas, this new group was highly politicized. For the first time, Arab American organizations were formed to defend the Arab point of view and to combat negative stereotypes of Arabs in the popular press. Newly sensitized to their ethnic identity by worldwide political events, the descendants of first- and second-wave immi- grants joined their newly arrived countrymen in support of Arab concerns. The Palestinian cause became the central rallying cry of

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many Arab Americans, regardless of background. The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Gulf War, and the 1987 Palestinian uprising against Israel (the First Intifada) further politicized the Arab American community.

The Mahjar Group

The Mahjar (Arabic for "place of immigration") movement in literature refers to the body of work produced by diasporic writers in North and South America during the early part of the twentieth century. The South American branch of the Mahjar group was centered in Brazil. On the whole, the group was more conservative than its northern counterpart and produced few innovations that would challenge the prevailing neo-classical tradition of poetry in the Arab world (Badawi, Critical Introduction 196). The North American branch of the Mahjar group was centered in New York and revolved around the forceful personality of Kahlil Gibran. Unlike the southern branch, it showed no reverence for traditional Arab culture (Jayyusi 70). Freed from the conservative constraints of the Arab world and bred on the American ideals of liberty and progress, the northern Mahjar writers challenged Arab cultural norms in ways that were heretofore unimaginable. Under the influence of western Romanticism and American transcendental- ism, this group inaugurated a new age of Romantic literature in the Arab world (Badawi, Critical Introduction 203).

The unique blending of American and Arabic culture culmi- nated in the formation of "the first genuine literary school in modem Arabic" (Ostle 96). Banded together around al-Funun (The Arts), an ambitious literary journal edited by Naseeb Arida from 1913-1918 and the twice-weekly newspaper al-Sa 'ih (The Trav- eler), which was established in 1912 by Abd al-Maseeh Haddad, the group developed a remarkably cohesive philosophy of litera- ture and life. In 1920, the movement culminated in the formation of Ar-Rabitah al-Qalamiyyah, or "The Pen League," a revolution- ary society self-consciously dedicated to literary reform. Accord- ing to poet and novelist Mikhail Naimy, the main theoretician of the group, the purpose of the society was "to lift Arabic literature from the quagmire of stagnation and imitation, and to infuse a new life into its veins so as to make of it an active force in the building

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up of the Arab nations" (Kahlil Gibran 154). With these clearly nationalistic goals in mind, the group encouraged the translation of European masterpieces and sought the publication of its own works as well as the works of other worthy Arab writers. In his famous book on literary criticism, al-Ghirbal, Naimy articulates the Romantic principles that guided the group (see N. Naimy 125- 40). The writer, he argued, is a prophet and a philosopher who is endowed with a special capacity for discovering the truth. Litera- ture must be focused on content, not form, for the proper province of literature is life itself. He satirizes those writers who view Arabic as a sacred heritage and insists that creative experimenta- tion with the language must replace the empty exercises in imita- tion prevalent among the Arab writers of the day.

Among the numerous qualities that united the group were a focus on the subjective experience of the poet and a belief in the transcendent power of nature. They were also famous for their use of biblical forms and imagery (Badawi, Short History 46). Indeed, their use of simple meters and stanzaic forms left the group, many of whom were self-taught, or the products of sporadic and incom- plete education (see M. Naimy, Sab'un 2:170-82), open to the charge that they were not qualified for the rigorous grammatical challenges required of classical Arabic. But perhaps the quality that most distinguished the northern Mahjar writers was their interest in Eastern religion and mysticism. The great majority of writers and intellectuals in the Arab world were secular (Cachia 140). So the focus on Eastern religion by the members of the Mahjar group was highly unusual.

Most northern Mahjar literature was written in Arabic; how- ever, three prominent members of the group, Ameen Rihani, Kahlil Gibran, and Mikhail Naimy, also produced a significant number of works in English. In addition to his Arabic works, Ameen Rihani produced an English translation of The Quatrains of Abu'l-Ala, (1903); a book of poetry called Myrtle and Myrrh (1905); a novel, The Book of Khalid (1911); a book of political essays, The Descent of Bolshevism (1920); a collection of contemplative essays, The Path of Vision (1921); a collection of mystical poetry in the Sufi tradition titled A Chant of Mystics (1921); and three travelogues. Gibran published seven spiritual works in English: The Madman (1918); The Forerunner: His Parables and Poems (1920); The

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Prophet (1923); Sand and Foam (1926); Jesus the Son of Man (1928); The Earth Gods (1931); and The Wanderer (1932). Mik- hail Naimy, along with Gibran, the most spiritual member of the group, wrote one work in English, the religious parable The Book of Mirdad (1948). In addition, he translated three of his Arabic works into English: Kahlil Gibran: A Biography (1950); Memoirs of a Vagrant Soul (1952); and a collection of his Russian-inspired short stories, Till We Meet (1957). Although these writers had a profound effect on modem Arabic literature, they never attained the same stature in American literature. Among the three writers, only Gibran is well known, though his work is widely ignored by American critics. This is unfortunate, for these writers produced work of real quality that deserves a place in American literature.

All three of these writers came from poor peasant families in Mount Lebanon. Kahlil Gibran was bom to Maronite parents in 1883 in Besharri, a mountain village in northern Lebanon, and Mikhail Naimy was born to Greek Orthodox parents in Baskinta, a small village in central Lebanon, in 1889. Like other Christians in the isolated Christian enclave of Mount Lebanon, they had little or no contact with the Muslims who lived outside their community; however, they grew up at a time when the close-minded Christian sects of Mount Lebanon were just beginning to emerge from centuries of isolation. Like Lebanese versions of the proverbial European Orientalist, they longed to discover the mysteries that lay hidden in the Arab world. For many, their first insight into the rich civilization of the Arab world would come in the United States.2

Certain themes, therefore, appear again and again in the lives of Rihani, Gibran, Naimy, and the other Mahjar writers. Among these themes are the desperate need to escape the mundane materialism of the peddler lifestyle; the importance of missionary school education in Lebanon; the effect of French, British, and/or Russian culture on the individual immigrant; the desire to transcend sectar- ian religious conflict; admiration for American vitality and hatred of American materialism; a desire for reform in the Arab world; acute concern about international politics and the political survival of the homeland; an obsessive interest in East/West relations; and a desire to play the role of cultural intermediary. The Mahjar writers viewed themselves as cultural middlemen straddling the great divide between East and West. As they saw it, their mission was

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twofold: to promote cultural, social, and political reform in the East, based on the Western model, and to encourage a spiritual awakening in the West, based on the Eastern model.

The Second Phase of Arab American Immigration

According to Michael Suleiman, World War I was a turning point in the history of the Arab American community. Before this date, most Arab American immigrants viewed themselves as temporary workers, "people who were in, but not part of American society" ("Introduction" 4). They planned to accumulate capital and return to their homeland. To this end, they saved their money, lived in squalid, overcrowded hovels, and gathered in residential colonies, where they encouraged intermarriage, associated with relatives and people from the same town and religious sect, and kept their distance from Americans.

All of this changed with the advent of World War I. During this period, communication with the homeland was ruptured and the community had to fall back on its own resources. The introduction of strict immigration quotas in the 1920s increased the commu- nity's sense of isolation and encouraged a feeling of communal unity and solidarity, which had begun during the war. Only after World War I, notes Suleiman, did "the Arabs in the United States become truly an Arab-American community" ("Arab-Americans" 43). As it dawned on Arab Americans that it was unlikely that they would ever return to their country, they were forced to address crucial questions about their identity as Arab Americans and their relationship to America. The realization greatly speeded up the process of assimilation and led to decreased sectarian conflict, increased calls for unity, and more participation in the American political process. During World War I, many fought alongside American forces or joined the war effort by buying liberty bonds. The experience augmented the community's sense of patriotism and made them feel that they were now part of the American community.

Most of the popular accounts of immigrant life written during the first and second phases of Arab American literature reflect this process of assimilation. George Haddad's Mt. Lebanon to Vermont (1916) is an immigrant success story, which recounts the author's

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love for his adopted country. Ashad Hawie's jingoistic autobiogra- phy, The Rainbow Ends (1942), describes his experience as a member of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. The goal of the book is to promote the Syrian community in the US by making the public aware of the brave efforts of this ethnic group in the war effort. Syrian Yankee (1943), by Salom Rizk, is a classic of the immigrant biography genre. Born an orphan in a poor Syrian village, Rizk discovers at the age of twelve that his mother is an American and that he is thus entitled to American citizenship. The discovery is a turning point in his life. In the following years, Rizk manages to reach America. Once there, he struggles through the Depression and World War II, all the while attempting to prove himself worthy of his destiny to become an American citizen. Eventually, Rizk becomes a lecturer. Sponsored by the Reader's Digest, he travels around the country, touting the American immigrant ideal. Finally, George Hamid's Circus (1950) is a rousing but conventional rags to riches tale that recounts Hamid's experience as an acrobat and renowned circus owner. Recruited at an early age by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Hamid was only one of many Lebanese young men who traveled to the US to become acrobats, a profession that was dominated by the Leba- nese.

Despite their enthusiasm about becoming Americans, Arab Americans soon found that there would be impediments on the road to assimilation in the form of charges that they were racially inferior and thus not worthy of becoming American citizens. In 1914, Lebanese immigrant George Dow was denied American citizenship on the basis that he was Asian and did not belong to the white race. According to the Naturalization Act of 1790, citizen- ship could only be extended to "free white persons." The shocked Syrian community managed to resolve the problem by demonstrat- ing that they were Arabs and therefore members of the Caucasian race (see Suleiman, "Introduction" 6-7). Although George Dow was eventually admitted to citizenship, the problem did not go away. The community would endure a series of court cases chal- lenging their racial status between 1909 and 1915 and again during the 1940s. During the process, notes Lisa Suheir Majaj in her essay "Arab-Americans and the Meaning of Race," a clear connection was made between "western European, Christian identity and

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'whiteness'" (323) and "non-European, non-Christian and non- white identity" (323).

The apprehension and concern that the attacks on the racial status of the Arab American community caused are evident in the early works of Arab American writers. As Majaj points out, the authors of these texts tended to stress the aspects of their culture that were acceptable to Americans and to downplay those aspects of their culture that were alien to Americans. "In particular," notes Majaj, "they stressed their Christian identity [and] their geographi- cal origin in the 'Holy Land'" ("Meaning of Race" 328).

Prime examples of this tactic can be found in two works by the Lebanese American Protestant minister Abraham Rihbany.3 One of the best of the early Arab immigrant autobiographies, Rihbany's book A Far Journey (1914) is filled with biblical allusions that place his life firmly within the biblical context. The Syrian Christ (1916),4 a remarkable work, which explains Christ's life from the vantage point of a Middle Easterner, makes the following startling claim: "I was born not far from where the Master was born, and brought up under almost the identical conditions under which he lived, I have an 'inside view' of the Bible which, by the nature of things, a Westerner cannot have. And I know," he continues, "that the conditions of life in Syria to-day are essentially as they were in the time of Christ. . . . [W]henever I open my Bible it reads like a letter from home" (5). Rihbany sanctifies the everyday customs, language, and beliefs of the Middle East by associating them with the life of Jesus.

The Second Generation of Arab American Literature

By World War II, the Arab American community was virtually indistinguishable from the larger American community, a process that was facilitated by their shared Christian faith and the fact that they did not exhibit easily discernable racial or ethnic features that distinguished them from the general population. By the time the second generation of Arab Americans came of age, most did not speak Arabic and many had only a superficial understanding of their Arab heritage.

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As Evelyn Shakir, an Arab American academic who has emerged as the main critic of the second generation of Arab American writers, notes:

The first generation of Arab-American writers (as might be expected of immigrants of an age of rampant xenophobia) dressed carefully for their encounter with the American public, putting on the guise of prophet, preacher, or man of letters. They could not hide their for- eignness, but they could make it respectable. Their American born children-those who came of age in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s- costumed themselves as "regular Americans" and hoped to pass, which may be why they produced so little literature. ("Arab- American Literature" 6)

The three major Arab American writers of this period, Vance Bourjaily, William Peter Blatty, and Eugene Paul Nassar, saw themselves as mainstream writers and did not identify as Arab Americans. On the few occasions when they did address the issue of their ethnic identity, they were hard pressed to know how to deal with it because they were bereft of ethnic literary models to draw upon. In "Arab-American Literature," Shakir discusses the different strategies adopted by these authors to deal with the issue of Arab American identity.

Vance Bourjaily, the son of a Lebanese father and an American mother, exhibits little or no feeling of ethnicity in his two novels, which deal with the Middle East, The End of My Life (1947) and Confessions of a Spent Youth (1960). If anything, Bourjaily tells us, his views were "vaguely Zionist" (Confessions 247). Quince, the protagonist of Bourjaily's autobiographical novel Confessions of a Spent Youth, explains that his paternal heritage "was not particularly a secret, rather something which my father dismissed" (238). In this book, Bourjaily does briefly explore the issue of ethnic identity when he returns to Kabb Elias, his father's ancestral village in Lebanon. Welcomed with open arms by his great-aunt Naife and her extended family, he experiences a feeling of kinship and belonging that has eluded him in American society. But the feeling of belonging is only temporary and cannot provide perma- nent relief for the modem American condition. In the final analy- sis, Bourjaily's exploration of his ethnic heritage is only one of many devices he uses to explore the quintessentially modem

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American themes of alienation, rootlessness, inauthenticity, lack of identity, and the tenuous and temporal nature of human commu- nity.

If Vance Bourjaily was largely indifferent to his Arab American background, William Peter Blatty, the author of The Exorcist, was embarrassed and overwhelmed by his ethnic identity (personified by his brash, loud, and domineering mother) and tried hard to escape it (see Shakir, "Arab-American Literature" 7-8 and "Arab Mothers" 8-11). During his childhood, which he describes in his hilarious autobiography Which Way to Mecca, Jack? (1960), he is forced to endure the cruel jokes of neighborhood children, who will not let him forget that he is alien and strange. The experience produces a lifelong "fixation" with being Arab. Later, he tried to become an actor in Hollywood but was rejected because he was too "Biblical." Although he finally learns to appreciate his Leba- nese background during a tour of duty in Lebanon working for the US Information Agency, he does not forget the insults he received in Hollywood. In an uproarious send-up, he disguises himself as an Arabian prince and returns to Hollywood, where he uses every romantic stereotype in the oriental lexicon to impress and ulti- mately mock the gullible Hollywood bigwigs. Which Way to Mecca, Jack? is a farce, a self-mocking parody of ethnic life, which uses humor to dispel the angst of being different and for- eign. By making himself ridiculous, Blatty can appear less fright- ening and alien to his all-American audience.

In a companion book, I'll Tell Them I Remember You (1973), Blatty comes to terms with the death of his strong-willed mother and tenderly acknowledges the lasting role she has played in his life. But he does not abandon his comic routine. To a modem reader, this routine bears an uncanny resemblance to the ethnic shtick used by Borscht Belt comics. This is not surprising given the time period and the author's connection to Hollywood; Jewish humor was the main model of ethnic humor during this period.

Eugene Paul Nassar's memoir of growing up in a Lebanese American neighborhood in Utica, New York, Wind of the Land (1979), is an unabashedly sentimental portrait of an ethnic com- munity (see Shakir, "Arab-American Literature" 8). Nassar, an academic and literary critic, makes no attempt to create a multi- dimensional portrait, which depicts the good as well as the bad side

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of communal life. Nor is there any attempt to deal with anti-Arab stereotyping or political issues, like the Arab-Israeli conflict, that affected the community. Instead, he celebrates the people and the enduring values of the community. The elegiac tone of the work achieves a kind of urgency because he is describing a world that is fading into extinction.

Phase Three: Embracing Arab American Ethnicity

The experience of poet and critic Lisa Suhair Majaj in the 1980s mirrors the experience of many Arab American authors searching for a community of writers. In her essay "Two Worlds Emerging: Arab-American Writing at the Crossroads," she discusses the difficulties she faced as the child of an American mother and a Palestinian father growing up in Jordan, and later attending gradu- ate school in the United States. The experience left her feeling marginalized and alienated in both societies. A turning point came, as it did for many Arab American writers, when she read the work of Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston, Native American poet Joy Harjo, and other ethnic writers.5 Heartened by the experience, she began to look for Arab American writers who would help her meld the disparate aspects of her own identity. It was difficult to find the authors because she had to look for them under diverse ethnic categories such as Lebanese, Syrian, or even Turkish, or under obscure religious categories such as Melchite or Maronite. She was also struck by the lack of scholarly criticism on the subject: "'Arab-American literature' as a category was almost completely absent from listings of immigrant and ethnic-American literature" (69), she notes.

For Majaj and other Arab American writers, the defining moment in the history of Arab American literature came with the publication of two anthologies of Arab American literature, a twenty-page collection called Wrapping the Grape Leaves: A Sheaf of Contemporary Arab-American Poets (1982), edited by Gregory Orfalea, and the larger and more comprehensive anthology, Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry (1988), edited by Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa. The publication of the latter work, notes Majaj, "was a major event. . . . [I]ts presence in bookstores and on library shelves made it possible for general readers to

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discover Arab American writers without first acquiring specialized knowledge. Moreover its publication established 'Arab-American Literature' as a category on computer data-bases and in card catalogues" ("Two Worlds" 71-72). In addition to poets from an earlier age, Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry introduced readers to a large number of Arab American poets who are still writing.

During the early 1990s, the modem community of Arab Ameri- can writers also saw the publication of one of its first works of fiction. In 1990, Joseph Geha published a collection of short stories called Through and Through: Toledo Stories, which explores the intergenerational conflicts in the Lebanese American community. Although Elmaz Abinader's poetry appeared in Grape Leaves, she is most famous for her autobiographical novel Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey (1991), which is based on family diaries and letters. Her realistic account of tyranny, famine, war, painful family divisions, and the perils involved in the emigration experience is a refreshing antidote to the idealized accounts that are often found in Arab American memoirs. Moreover, Abinader is not afraid to explore the oppression of women and the different perspectives that men and women bring to experience (see Majaj, "Two Worlds" 75-76).

One of the most gifted novelist in the Arab American commu- nity is the Jordanian American writer Diana Abu-Jaber. Her semi- autobiographical 1993 novel Arabian Jazz produced a flurry of controversy because it broke an unwritten rule in the Arab Ameri- can community that members should not criticize Arabs and Arab Americans in public. In her imaginative and comic novel, Abu- Jaber lampoons American society, attacking, in particular, anti- Arab bigots, as well as Arab society. Despite her final acceptance of both communities and her thoughtful meditation on the vagaries of living with a hyphenated identity, some readers were offended by her grotesque stereotypes of Arabs.6 This reaction demonstrates a perennial problem in ethnic literature, that writers who openly criticize the community run the risk of being ostracized and censored by the group.

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The Newest Generation of Arab American Writers

Arab American literature really began to flower in the mid- 1990s as established writers like Lebanese American poet David Williams and Sephardic Jewish American poet Jack Marshall continued to publish new works, and new writers appeared on the scene. Among the new poets are Lebanese American Haas Mroue, Detroit-born Hayan Charara, Palestinian American Nathalie Handal, and Libyan American Khaled Mattawa. Two female poets in this group consider themselves Islamic feminists. Syrian Ameri- can Mohja Kahf wears a head scarf, but is also known for writing explicitly erotic poems. Suheir Hammad, a young hip-hop poet, was born in a refugee camp in Jordan and grew up in an African American and Hispanic neighborhood in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She is most famous for her role as writer and cast member in the 2003 Tony Award-winning show "Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway" (see Smith). Among the crop of new fiction writers are Lebanese American Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Palestin- ian American Kathryn Abdul-Baki, Jordanian American Laila Halaby, Lebanese American Frances Khirallah Noble, Syrian American Mona Simpson, and Egyptian American Samia Serageldin.

In the last decade, in particular, the works of Arab American writers were taught in the college curriculum, and conferences were held that were specifically devoted to Arab American litera- ture. Several anthologies devoted to this literature appeared, notably Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists (1994), edited by Joanna Kadi; Post-Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing (1999), edited by Munir Akash and Khaled Mattawa; Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction (2004), edited by Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa; and Sche- herazade's Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing (2004), edited by Susan Muaddi Darraj. In 1996, journalist and broadcaster Barbara Nimri Aziz formally established the Radius of Arab-American Writers, Incorporated, or RAWI (the word means "storyteller" in Arabic), an organization of Arab American writers dedicated to promoting and encouraging the work of Arab Ameri-

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can authors. RAWI holds an annual writing workshop and pub- lishes a newsletter three times a year.

Two factors spurred the growth of Arab American literature. The first was the search for voices outside the traditional canon of Anglo-American male literature, a search which led to the bur- geoning interest in ethnic American writers. The second factor, like so many things in the Arab American community, was politi- cal. Recent events in the Arab world combined to raise the political consciousness and solidarity of the Arab American community. In order to combat the proliferation of anti-Arab stereotypes, writers dedicated themselves to putting a human face on the Arab Ameri- can immigrant population. Paradoxically, the events of 9/11 increased the public's interest in this heretofore ignored commu- nity.

Issues Facing Arab American Writers Today

One of the most important issues facing the Arab American community today has to do with the question of what constitutes Arab American literature. Arab Americans are part of an extremely diverse group, which includes third- and fourth-generation Ameri- cans, recent immigrants, people from different countries and religious backgrounds, and Arabic and non-Arabic speakers. Should Arab Jews and non-Arabic speakers be included in this group? What about writers like Sam Hazo, who do not identify as Arab Americans, or writers like Mona Simpson, who choose not to write about their ethnicity, or writers like Naomi Shihab Nye, who write about it only some of the time? Should they be considered Arab American writers?7 Furthermore, should Arab American writers focus on the Arab side of experience, emphasizing the traditions and values of the Arab world, or should they focus on the American side of experience, emphasizing American immi- grant experience in the context of multiculturalism?8

Arab American women writers face their own particular set of problems. When Arab American women criticize the patriarchal nature of their society, they are often accused of abandoning their own culture and adopting Western modes of thought (Majaj, "New Directions" 75). This is exacerbated by the fact that feminism is associated with Western imperialism and is therefore viewed as

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anti-religious and anti-nationalist (Darraj 193). Feminism is an emotionally fraught issue in the Arab world. Because the treatment of women is often used as a weapon to attack Arabs, any criticism of patriarchy is viewed as a reinforcement of negative anti-Arab stereotypes and an attack on the community. Finally, Arab and ethnic women writers who confirm the popular prejudices about the treatment of Arab women run the risk of pandering to the commercial interests of the Western marketplace. As Amal Amireh points out, works by Arab women are often "marketed" and "manipulated" by publishers "to meet the expectations and as- sumptions of Western Readers."9

One of the most painful issues that confronts Arab American writers is how to react to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a thoughtful article published shortly after 9/11, editor Elie Chalala expressed the shock and horror that many Arab American writers and intel- lectuals felt. In one fell swoop, he notes, the terrorists destroyed the very thing that he and many others had spent years trying to correct: anti-Arab stereotyping in American society.10 Although some Arab American intellectuals have argued that they do not need to explain themselves to the American public because they do not share the views of the terrorists, Chalala feels that explanations are required to prevent a racist backlash. He also feels that the Arab American community should reexamine its blind allegiance to the political discourse of the Arab world and stop automatically defending "any position taken by the Arab states" ("Rethinking Ideas" 14). Similarly thoughtful responses to the terrorist attacks have been expressed in literature by writers Elmaz Abinader, Suheir Hammad, Lawrence Joseph, and D. H. Melhem.11

A final issue is the need for experimentation in new literary genres. Indeed, it was the paucity of fiction, drama, screenplays, and other genres that led the editors of Post-Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing to specifically ask for "cross-genre experiments" (Akash and Mattawa xiii) from their contributors. Up until very recently, most Arab American writers confined their literary output to autobiography and poetry. The autobiographies tended to fall into one of two patterns: rags to riches American success stories or nostalgic, sanitized accounts of family and communal life. Most "serious" writers eschewed this simplistic approach and tended to concentrate on poetry. Yet as Lisa Suhair

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Mujaj notes in "New Directions: Arab American Writing at Century's End," poetry has its own limitations. The lyric works best "for nostalgic celebrations of family and community, and for anguished depictions of war and suffering" (70), she argues, but it does not provide the kind of in-depth analysis that is needed to understand the complexity of the Arab American experience. Now that Arab American writers have a stronger sense of community and identity, it is time to "move beyond cultural preservation toward transformation" (71), writes Majaj. This transformation will require, among other things, the adoption of new literary genres, a new sophisticated form of literary analysis, and the courage to engage in communal self-criticism.

Conclusion

In a 2002 on-line interview published in The Iranian, Elie Chalala, the editor of Al Jadid, summarized the current state of Arab American literature as follows: "There are a great number of Arab women writing outside of the Arab countries. This literature tends to be very secular and critical of patriarchal norms. The early phase of these writings tended to be nostalgic. But I would say that most Arab-American writers have transcended the nostalgic phase. There are a variety of genres present in their writings; their work is sophisticated and multi-layered."

Although Chalala's optimism and enthusiasm are justified, much work remains to be done. There is still a paucity of criticism on the first two phases of Arab American literature. Although scholars have studied the crucial role that the Mahjar writers played in modernizing Arabic literature, very little work has been done on the role that they played in Arab American literature. This means that key texts like Mikhail Naimy's three-volume autobiog- raphy Sab 'un, which contains a wealth of information on the early Mahjar writers, will need to be translated into English. There is a similar lack of criticism on the second phase of Arab American literature. More attention must be paid to the subtle and less overt ways in which ethnicity is treated in these works. One fruitful area of research might involve the study of ethnic humor. Although the third phase of this writing has received more attention, most of the critical work has focused on fiction at the expense of poetry.

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Finally, there is an urgent need for more high-quality literary criticism that matches the standards set by critics such as Evelyn Shakir, Amal Amireh, and Lisa Suhair Majaj.

Notes

1. See Suleiman's "Introduction" for an excellent overview of the three waves of Arab immigration to America. 2. Like Rihani, Gibran's first introduction to the Arab world took place in the United States. He first became aware of the romance associated with the Middle East through his contact with the artistic community in Boston. Jean and Kahlil Gibran argue that this contact caused the young poet to reevaluate his place in American life: "If American poets sang about the land where he was born, did not his closeness to and reverence for that place confer on him some heretofore unimagined stature?" (58). 3. This tactic was also used by Gibran. See Shakir, "Arab-American Literature" 4-5. 4. See Shakir, "Arab-American Literature" 5 and "Mother's Milk" 41-45. 5. See Shalal-Esa. 6. Abu-Jaber discusses this and other issues in her interview with Shalal-Esa. 7. There are no easy answers to these questions. Steven Salaita argues in "Vision" that it is "counterproductive" (14) to include writers who do not claim any identification with their Arab background, while Majaj argues in "The Hyphenated Author" that "Arab-American authors that on the surface have nothing to do with 'Arab' or 'ethnic' themes may, upon closer examination, reflect the impress of ethnicity" (3). 8. According to Majaj in "The Hyphenated Author," there are two main points of view on this issue, depending upon whether writers see themselves as primarily Arab or primarily American. The main concern of the former group is to preserve its political and cultural attachments to the Arab world. As such, it views any dilution of this cultural attachment as a "betrayal of Arab heritage and hence of Arab-American identity" (3). The latter group views its Arab American identity within "the American framework of assimilation and multiculturalism" (3). As such, its members are primarily interested in exploring the Arab American immigrant experience. 9. For a discussion of feminism in Arab American literature, see Amireh "Publishing," Darraj "Third World," and Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage, chpts. 10 and 12. Also see the anthologies Food for Our Grandmothers, edited by Kadi; Scheherazade's Legacy, edited by Darraj; and Going Global, edited by Amireh and Majaj. 10. Nye expresses similar views in her eloquent open letter "To Any Would-Be Terrorist," which was circulated electronically via the internet after the Septem- ber 1 1th attacks.

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11. See, for example, Elmaz Abinader's "Profile of an Arab Daughter," Suheir Hammad's "first writing since," Lawrence Joseph's Before Our Eyes, and D. H. Melhem's "September 11, 2001, World Trade Center, Aftermath."

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