Arabian Jazz and the Need for Improvising Arab Identity in the US

The term “jazz” in the title of Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Arabian Jazz (1993) implies a process of improvisation and intertwining. As an essential characteristic of jazz music, improvisation manifests itself linguistically in Arabian Jazz, even as it intertwines with the novel’s major themes. Matussem Ramoud, a Jordanian immigrant to the United States and a main character in Abu-Jaber’s novel, is a jazz drummer and a devotee of John Coltrane’s music, particularly the composition “Naima.” Matussem and his daughters Jemorah and Melvina are struggling to find their place in the American setting of upstate New York after Matussem’s American-born wife, Nora, dies during a visit to Jordan. The Arab side of the family wants Matussem and his daughters to move back to Jordan permanently, or at the very least to see Jemorah and Melvina marry Arab men. The characters’ dilemma of remaining in or leaving the United States is exacerbated by the racism they face in upstate New York. Their straddling of two cultures, two families, two identities, and especially two languages causes a need to improvise and intertwine their individual and collective identities as Arab Americans. The contrapuntal lines of the characters’ negotiations are accompanied by linguistic improvisations in English and in the Arabic words that find their way into the text. In Matussem’s untranslated name and Coltrane’s “Naima,” however, the moments of linguistic, musical, and translational improvisation enter a condition of dialectic density: the blue note. Like the musical blue note, which inflects a musical (usually major) scale of play by reaching for a note from outside the scale, the linguistic blue note forces a dominant language to enter into dialogue with a word imported from another language. In combination, the untranslated Arabic name “Matussem” and the musical piece and untranslated name “Naima” create a potent dialectic of both a linguistic and musical blue note.

In order to gauge the density of the blue note, it is necessary to explore the improvisational and intertwining elements that provoke its manifestation. Early in Arabian Jazz, Melvina asks her sister Jemorah to remember a Bedouin saying: “In the book of life, every page has two sides” (6). The “two sides” are in fact multiple sets of two sides (two cultures, two families, two identities, and two languages) that culminate in the term Arab American. Melvina calls upon the Bedouin saying in response to her aunt Fatima’s pressuring Jemorah to marry an Arab man and lead a traditional life. The Bedouin saying allows Jemorah to better understand the demands of the Arab side of the family and to access her American side to counter those demands. Melvina’s recourse to a Bedouin saying might seem paradoxical (she uses it to at once participate in and subvert Arab traditions); however, the nomadic nature of the Bedouin allows for a traveling understanding or cross-translation of Arab and American in the Arab American condition.

For example, when Fatima brings over a potential mother-in-law to inspect Jemorah (including her teeth), Melvina intervenes: “‘Back off, lady!’ Melvie raised a fist. ‘I’m warning you.’ ‘Allah the merciful and munificent! A demon-ifrit’ [answered the woman]” (64). The potential mother-in-law’s two-sided word “demon-ifrit” presents the transliteration of the Arabic word alongside its possible English translation (“demon”), doubly mediated by a hyphen and italics. Ifrit is the transliteration of the Arabic word that appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as “afreet,” defined as “an evil demon or monster of Muslim mythology.” While “demon” and “ifrit” share in denotation, linked as they are by the hyphen, they are also separated in connotation by the same hyphen that connects them. In western cultural understanding, “demon” begins with the Greeks and later earns a Christian significance. “Ifrit,” on the other hand, is a giant demon in Muslim mythology and makes a marked literary appearance in A Thousand and One Nights. As Gregory Rabassa puts it, “in such things as 2 = 2, we rarely wake up to the fact that this is impossible, except as a purely...