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Arab Literature Magazine 'Banipal' Focuses on Arab American Authors
The latest issue of Banipal, the London-based magazine of modern Arab literature, is testimony to the vibrancy of the community of authors of Arab origin in North America.
More than 150 of the 224 pages of Banipal 38 are given over to fiction and poetry by 29 contemporary Arab-American authors.
The writers are a distinguished group; they have been festooned with literary prizes and hold numerous academic positions. Arab -American literature is gaining ever wider attention and is a subject for study in certain American universities and in a few universities in the Arab world.
And yet despite such achievements it is not always easy to be an Arab in America, especially since the terror attacks of 9/11. One of the books reviewed in the eight-page Books in Brief section of Banipal 38 Is an updated edition of the classic study “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People” by the Arab-American professor and journalist Jack Shaheen.
Some of the authors featured in Banipal 38 write explicitly of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.”As if, somehow, I were responsible” writes Philip Metres, associate professor of English at John Carroll University, Ohio, in his poem “Home/Front”.
“The photos of the hijackers looked like a bunch of my cousins, a Warhol rendering of our family photo album, portraits bleared in displaced layers of ink. Who fed you who memorized your hands who breathed you in?” The poet alludes to the ethnic profiling of Arabs with his mention of “glances and glares”. He recalls how his father would say: “My son, you are Arab, be proud of it.”
In the prologue of Gregory Orfalea’s forthcoming novel “The Fiends”, the Arab-American first-person narrator is caught up in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, where he works. He realizes that the attack poses particular issues for him as an Arab American, but most immediately he has to rush to Los Angeles where his mother has been critically injured in an automobile accident.
Poetry predominates in the 29 samples of Arab-American writing presented in Banipal 38. There is work from 19 poets including Fady Joudah, Naomi Shihab Nye, Etel Adnan, Lawrence Joseph , Iman Mersal and the late Sargon Boulos.
Memoir has been a vital element in Arab-American literature from its earliest days, and Banipal 38 has extracts from three memoirs-in-progress: Elmaz Abinader’s “The Water Cycle”, Evelyn Shakir’s “At Home and Away” and D H Melhem’s “Lights in a Doorway”.
On the fiction front there is a short story by Egyptian-born Pauline Kaldas, as well as flash fiction from Deborah Al-Najjar and excerpts from novels by Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Kadhim Al-Hallaq, Susan Muaddi Darraj and Laila Halaby.
In addition to its selections from the work of Arab-American authors, Banipal 38 has a report from the third national conference of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), held over three days in June at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. RAWI began on a modest scale in the early 1990s, and has expanded into an essential hub for Arab-American writers.
RAWI’s presidency was held from 2005 by the acclaimed Libyan-born poet and translator Khaled Mattawa, an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.
Mattawa is the recipient of several poetry prizes, and earlier this month it was announced that he has been awarded the 2010 Academy Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. At the RAWI conference the presidency passed from Mattawa to the Detroit-born poet Hayan Charara, the son of immigrants from Lebanon. Charara and Mattawa both have three poems in Banipal 38.
The Banipal 38 authors explore various facets of the Arab-American experience, including displacement, adaptation, identity, and violence in the home country.
There are striking examples of poetry and prose on themes of war. Dunya Mikhail’s extraordinary “Iraqis and Other Monsters” reflects the horror of sectarian and ethnic strife. Another powerful war poem is “A Night with a Thousand Shores – Death in all Languages” by the Iraqi American poet, novelist, translator and filmmaker Sinan Antoon.
One of the brightest stars in the Arab-American literary firmament is the Palestinian-American physician, poet and translator Fady Joudah. His translations of poems by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, collected in “The Butterfly’s Burden”, won the 2008 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. His second volume of Darwish translations, “If I Were Another”, recently won the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation. Joudah has also won prizes for his own poetry; his first collection “The Earth in the Attic” received the 2008 Yale Series for Younger Poets Award. Banipal 38 contains three of his poems – “7 February 1991”, “I was there” and “Adrift”.
In the three sections of her beautifully crafted poem “Song Posts”, set in 2009, the Palestinian-American poet Nathalie Handal, moves from the Washington inauguration of President Obama to Palestine-Israel and to Tehran. Syrian-born Mohja Kahf’s arresting poem “Brenda Unbound” is dedicated to the late Lebanese-American poet Brenda Moossy who died in January 2009.
Lisa Suhair Majaj, Palestinian-American, poet and essayist, dwells in her five poems on memories of growing up between the Arab world and America.
Pauline Kaldas’s short story “A Conversation” takes the form of the spoken dialogue and private thoughts of an Egyptian couple who have lived for 40 years in the USA. The husband tries to persuade his wife that they should retire to Egypt, promising her a beautiful apartment and servants, but she wants to stay put: “I’m old, and my steps are solid on this land where I have learned to live…”
Fiction writer, poet, essayist and artist Patricia Sarrafian Ward was born in Beirut, and her 2003 award-winning novel “The Bullet Collection” portrayed the relationship of two sisters in the Lebanese civil war and in the USA. In the compelling start to Ward’s novel-in-progress, “Dead Boys”, an American woman is shocked when her long-time Lebanese husband lets slip during an evening at home with friends that he shot someone’s brains out during the Lebanese civil war. He has concealed this secret from her throughout their marriage, and she demands that he tell her more.
Kadhim Al-Hallaq (the pen name of Kadhim Joni Mahdi) was born in Basra, Iraq. He fled to the US after twice being imprisoned by the Iraqi regime and was granted refugee status. The semi-comic extract from his novel “My One-Eyed Father and his Six Wives”, translated by Ghenwa Hayek, depicts the arrival in the US of a book-loving Iraqi refugee who is hauled away police and interrogated amidst suspicions that he is planning an attack. After he is cleared and put up in a hotel he has a physical encounter with the female federal investigator who had been dealing with his case.
There is much else to enjoy in Banipal 38, like poetry by four poets from the UAE: Nujoom Al-Ghanem, Ahmed Rashid Thani, Khulood Al-Mu’alla and Khalid Albudoor. In July Albudoor, l-Mu’alla and Al-Ghanem read their poetry at the London Literature Festival, and at the Ledbury Poetry Festival.
There is also a traveling tale from Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha, “Automative Monologues”, and a witty monologue in the voice of a West Bank Palestinian actor by UK-based Iraqi playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak entitled “Love in the Time of Barriers”.
Susannah Tarbush
The Saudi Gazette