What Is Distinctive About Arab-American Writing Today? Ten Leading Arab-American Writers Speak to the Huffington Post

posted on: Sep 30, 2010

We asked some of the brightest stars in the Arab-American literary firmament what they think most stands out about Arab-American literature today. Every new strain of literature in this country undergoes familiar periods of marginalization and ghettoization (perhaps self-reinforced), before breaking through into the mainstream. At some point, readers and critics stop thinking of the hyphenated literature from an exoticizing perspective, and instead treat the writing on its own terms. To what extent has this process already happened with Arab-American writing, or is still happening? Who are the writers making the most original contributions, in fiction, poetry, and other genres? Are there circumstances unique to them, in finding acceptance and legitimacy for their work, or is their path to recognition perhaps even aided–in a strange twist of irony–by the very attention presently focused on the Middle East? These writers, with a diverse inheritance of Arab-American culture, share their thoughts, and we hope you will too.

Sinan Antoon

A few months after 9/11 I was invited to a conference at Tufts University on “Arab-American Writing Post 9/11.” I submitted an abstract for a paper entitled “A Rabid American Writing Today.” The organizers corrected the title thinking “Rabid” was a typo! To write and try to publish (let alone work, and live) in the U.S. while Arab or Muslim after 9/11, means choosing one of two paths. The first entails self-orientalization and on it one proceeds to perform one’s circumscribed role as the entertaining, but always safe and grateful Arab in the grand political and cultural circus. There are always openings and many Arab-Americans are more than willing to play the role (you know the names). There might be an improvised moment here or there and some indignation, but the narrative is, more or less, fixed for the Uncle Toms. The other path is that of standing outside the coliseum and distracting and disturbing the citizens-spectators on their way in or out. Screaming at times, if necessary, to point to other directions. Whispering, at others, into their ears stories about barbarians both in Rome itself and abroad. It’s not easy being a barbarian in Rome. The Romans rarely listen, but the barbarian has to keep it real.

Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi-American poet, novelist, filmmaker, and translator, the author of two novels (including I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody), and two poetry collections.

Randa Jarrar

Arab-American literature today is distinctive for its diversity of voices, topics, genres, and purposes. We’ve got straight, queer, young, old, Christian, Muslim, and Atheist Arab-Americans writing about living in New York and Lebanon and everywhere in between. Want great poetry? There’s still plenty of it (See under Hayan Charara, Khaled Mattawa, Suheir Hammad). Want plays? We’ve got ’em (See under Leila Buck). Want some non-fiction? Yup, it’s here (See Moustafa Bayoumi and Alia Malek). Novels? They’re getting better and better (I’m looking at you, Rabih Alameddine). Our past achievements were sometimes marred by self-exoticization: a focus on food (“Look, grape leaves! Baklava! Don’t hate us–you love our food!”) and the Arabian Nights (“Don’t pay attention to these bearded weirdos–check out this hot chick in our past who told stories and saved 1,001 virgins! Including herself! She rocks!”). I’m hoping we’ll continue our path away from these themes; away from convincing people that we’re “universal”–last I checked, Arab-Americans are human beings and don’t need to prove this fact to anyone.

Randa Jarrar is a Palestinian-Egyptian-American writer whose novel is A Map of Home.

Fady Joudah

Distinction is in the eyes of the beholder. The predominant vision is of those who see Arab-American poetry through the scope of the ethnic or the political, the topical and thematic. And they will decide which poetry is Arabic enough or American enough, based on conscious or unconscious absorption of the cultural, and the othering of culture. Of course there is little new in this trend. In the past such questions and categorizations were asked of and imposed on women, African-Americans, etc. The presumption is that they were at a yet undifferentiated state (compared to American poetry or society at large) and now will be observed and encouraged to explore their multi-potentiality. Subcategories eventually reach a state where distinction is an academic imagination, an uninhibited mitoses of identities that consumes those who have entered it, and can only repeat itself when there’s a new kid in town. And this newcomer must address the question of what it means to belong, a hegemonic matter more often than not. Arab American poetry is and has been aesthetically as varied as any other American poetry, but that discussion still takes a backseat (in a minibus) today.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, the winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and the winner of the 2010 Pen USA Translation Award, for Mahmoud Darwish’s If I Were Another.

Hosam Aboul-Ela

There is nothing literary that characterizes the vast array of Arab-American writing appearing today, and this should not surprise anyone, since the Arab world itself is too vast and diverse to be reduced to clearly definable characteristics, and the culture of immigrants from the region is even further dispersed by the experience of migration. The only thing that really ties Arab-Americans as a community today–and also distinguishes them from other hyphenated American communities–is a widespread dissident attitude regarding American foreign policy. Whereas other hyphenated American communities may form a semblance of a community identity through a shared experience of historical oppression inside the U.S. or a shared commitment to human rights, for Americans of Arab descent, it is more often the experience of living in a “home” that has increasingly over the past 60 years, constructed the “homeland” as its global other. The literary production of Americans of Arab descent is increasingly staggeringly diverse, with everything from long poems, novels, stories, memoirs, spoken word, theater, and most recently film. But it is the marks left on our consciousness by this tension between the grand foreign policy narrative of “home” and the injustices visited upon “homeland” that connect these exciting new voices in American letters.

Hosam Aboul-Ela, an Egyptian-American critic, teaches poscolonial literature at the University of Houston, and is the translator of Voices by Soleiman Fayyad and Distant Train by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid.

Philip Metres

Though Arab-American writers have been around for over a century, the rise in readerly interest in Arab-American writing since 9/11 has dovetailed with what may be a literary renaissance. In every genre, Arab-American writers of real distinction have emerged to embody and represent the rich and complex textures of Arab-American and Arab life. With vibrant organizations like RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers), and journals devoted to Arab-American arts and letters (Mizna, Al-Jadid), we have formed quasi-familial bonds and carried on critical and creative conversations in ways that echo the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts, and other key moments in ethnic-American writing. Among the poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lawrence Joseph, Samuel Hazo, Fady Joudah, Khaled Mattawa, Hayan Charara, Deema Shehabi, and many others have inspired, instigated and cajoled my own writing. We are building bridges between Arab literary and cultural traditions and American ones (through translation and original poetry), and addressing the depradations of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Arab-American writers will continue to play a key role in braking (or least confronting) the imperial temperament, simply by constantly reminding us that the machinations of power are neither distant nor without consequence.

Philip Metres is a poet, translator, and scholar, whose books include To See the Earth, Come Together: Imagine Peace, Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941, and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein.

Hayan Charara

What most shapes my writing has a lot less to do with ethnicity than it does with language, structure, or story, or with imagining the world from another perspective. I spend more time than I care to admit figuring out rhetorical strategies, or looking at syntax, or trying out a dozen different ways to break a line or end a scene. On any given day, I think more about the placement of a period at the end of a sentence than I do my health or my marriage. Whether that’s good or bad is up for grabs. But that’s in part what it means to be a poet and writer, and every Arab poet and writer I know has these concerns. They are also each utterly unique, not only in how they write but also in what they write about and in the ways in which they make sense of the world. We aren’t all the same. Our work isn’t all the same. In fact, about the only thing we have in common is our insistence on constantly challenging any singular notion of what it means to be Arab or Arab-American. We’re doing our best to help people out of the identity trap–to stop looking at us, and to look at our words.

Hayan Charara is the author of two poetry books, The Alchemist’s Diary and The Sadness of Others, and editor of Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry.

Laila Halaby

Arab-American literature has always bridged east and west and it does so now without losing its momentum or the power of its art by explaining itself or by talking too much about tabouleh and other superficial cultural expectations. It has developed the confidence to be American–and this is important–to be American without having to apologize or explain itself; it has developed the confidence to be. Arab-American literature has stepped out of the margins and joined the ranks of the other Others that make up this country’s literary body with a wide array of voices (some accented, some not) that tell classy stories and poems (especially poems) and write plays and non-fiction and sing (amazing) songs that reflect both the diversity of the Arab world (ethnically, religiously, politically, sexual orientation-wise) and the colorful immigrant threads that are such an integral part of the story. In short, Arab-American literature has stepped up to take its place in American literature as a large, powerful, lovely part of the whole body…an organ or blood rather than an unnecessary appendage.

Laila Halaby is a fiction writer and poet, whose books include the acclaimed novels West of the Jordan and Once In a Promised Land, and the forthcoming poetry book my name on his tongue (Syracuse University Press, 2011).

Deema Shehabi

Any critical reader knows that Arab-American writing cannot be viewed through a monolithic lens. It is no secret that members of my generation categorically reject being placed into compartments. Our reasons for doing so are twofold: a desire to enter the mainstream canon in order to make our narratives part of a bigger “national” story and a desire for our work to stand alone under a discerning literary-aesthetics banner rather than on exclusionary constructs. Our themes are diverse, complex, irreducible, and wide. Our individual narratives and discourses culled from direct experience do, however, carry their particular preoccupations: a certain preoccupation with family, a serious social engagement with the politics of our time, a certain love/hate relationship with the literary canon that simultaneously compels us to reject and seek to (re-)enter it with vigor, an inheritance/remaking of the traditional lexicon of our ancestors as it has evolved through the generations, and a certain faithfulness to–and distaste for–memory and actual events. Ultimately, I believe that what is distinctive about Arab American writing is the ambition of its scope, the humanism of its subject matter, and the potential it carries for formulating through language a hybrid, unclassifiable identity.

Deema K. Shehabi is a Palestinian-American poet whose work has been widely published. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart prize three times.

The only real distinction is that these writers are originally Arab, and the United States is at war in the region. And of course, there is theme. When these writers’ works are Arab-related what sets them apart is that they are writing from within that culture. I should point out that although Arab-American literature started with Gibran, there is only a small number of recognized Arab-American writers. However, there is a growing number of writers from this community and it’s promising. I will add that of the established authors such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Khaled Mattawa, and Diana Abu-Jaber, their experiences and influences are varied and their works are vastly different aesthetically, stylistically, and thematically. Most writers don’t want to be classified and tend to agree that art transcends borders. Unfortunately, if you happen to be Arab, Middle Eastern or Muslim, people often fixate on where you’re from rather than the story or poem. The distinction lies not in the literature produced as much as in the responsibility that is often thrust on the author–one where he or she must explain or defend a region and its diverse people and cultures.

Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet and playwright, whose books include The Neverfield, The Lives of Rain, Love and Strange Horses, and The Poetry of Arab Women.

Marian Haddad

Being of Syrian descent, and having lived five minutes from the U.S. Mexico border, and being the only American-born child out of 12 conceptions, I feel, at once, Arab-American, Border-Tex-Mex-American, as well as–simply–American. I feel the majority of Arab-American poets and writers hold that multiplicity of countries within them. Naomi Shihab Nye speaks often of her Palestinian-born father, Aziz Shihab–and her Sitti Khadra, her Uncle Mohammed or a broom-maker in Palestine and how he wove the weave around the straw. Fady Joudah’s work includes translating poetry from Arabic to English, and his Arab-American-ness is prevalent in the mere work and art of his translations of Mahmoud Darweish. However, again, like many of us, there are pieces of his that do not call up one specific culture. Like Naomi Shihab Nye, Joudah’s work varies from a deep connectivity to ancestral place to poems about non-ancestral subjects. There does seem to be a great power and desire within Arab-American poets and writers to translate, when they have that ability and capability, work from poets and writers from their mother land. What I find is that Arab-American poets and writers hold multifarious voices. What is a country? How many countries can we hold in our pockets? How many languages can we read, write, think in?

Marian Haddad is a widely-anthologized Syrian-American poet, and the author of Somewhere Between Mexico and a River Called Home. Her forthcoming book of poetry is Wildflower, Stone (Pecan Grove, 2011)

Anis Shivani
Huffington Post