Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts (review)

Gary Nabhan covers an impressive range of topics in his latest work. Among a community of Arab American writers and scholars, Nabhan seeks to understand his ancestry by drawing on personal experiences both in nature and in informal ethnographic settings. Trained as a desert ecologist and agricultural scientist, Nabhan shares with readers his exploration of “whether desert creatures and desert cultures are inherently competitive for scarce resources in ways that inevitably lead to war” (p. 4). In nine chapters, Nabhan describes the camel importation in the nineteenth century to the United States; desert culinary similarities between Arabia and al-Andalus and Mexico and the U.S. Southwest; Arabic language influences; plantidentification in Siwa, Oman; warnings about human-modified landscapes; and his family history in the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. The final chapters trace the different tastes of the spice thyme, use hummingbirds as a case study, and take on the environmental implications of war. Each chapter poses provocative questions and challenges readers to more closely look at global linkages (what the author calls, “congruencies” [p. 4]).

Nabhan succeeds in making history more accessible to general audiences and integrates his interests in sustainability and culture by drawing on his own family’s migration story. For historians, however, the book does not always provide precise citations on source material. In Chapter 1, for example, Nabhan tells the engaging story of camel-driver “Hadji Ali (Hi Jolly)” that leaves readers wanting to know more of the historical evidence. Ultimately, Nabhan concludes that many people from desert landscapes have faced environmental injustice by dominant societies failing to recognize “every person’s and every peoples’ right to peace and connection to place” (p. 130). He therefore asks his audience to embrace the similarities of desert cultures and landscapes and to care for both by “water[ing] your garden always” (p. 133).