Introduction to Focus: Arab-American Literature after 9/11

Special thanks to all the reviewers and essayists who came forward in short order to contribute to this focus on Arab-American literature. I did not solicit reviews on particular books or authors; instead, I let the writers choose what they felt was best. What they chose were among the most celebrated recent works, though many others could also have been included. This is a moment of remarkable and unprecedented literary production among Arab Americans, and this focus could not be timelier; this selection amply demonstrates the breadth and diversity of Arab-American literature—which would include not only multiple generations of Arab Americans, but also figures who have contributed voluminously to Arab literature through translation and their own poetry, such as Marilyn Hacker. Though it is standard practice to provide a précis of the reviews that comprise the focus, I have woven the names of the reviewed writers throughout this introduction rather than explicate the reviews individually since the essays (and the essayists) stand sturdily on their own.

In the very first Arab-American novel, the brilliant picaresque The Book of Khalid (1911), Ameen Rihani's eponymous character proclaims, "I am a citizen of two worlds—a citizen of the Universe; I owe allegiance to two kingdoms." It is the dash between these two utterances that most intrigues me, a marker of the extra-linguistic leap from the well-worn notion of the immigrant's dual identity (threaded and tugging between the Old Country and the New World) to the idea of the immigrant as a proto-cosmopolite, one whose travel explodes the very idea of identity tethered inextricably and ultimately to nation. Yet even here, despite his leap, the problem of allegiance returns in the next utterance. "Where and to whom do I belong?" are questions that haunt immigrant and ethnic writing, and with a particular intensity under the pressures of empire and colonialism so evident throughout the Middle East. Arab-American literature and culture are many things, and perhaps its multitudes trace back to the slow breakup of the Ottoman Empire, whose various peoples and languages and cultures and faiths echo the dazzling diversity of the new Arab-American literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

If the early heady cosmopolitanism of Ameen Rihani and Kahlil Gibran strategically employed and occasionally reinforced Orientalist ideas in American culture, the energy and vision of their Ar Rabita al-Qalamiah ("The Pen League") was not fully realized until nearly a century later with the full flowering of civil rights, national liberation, and ethnic pride movements in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. Arab Americans themselves—who legally had been considered "white" but who often faced discrimination based on immigrant status and religious/cultural difference—often chose the path of quiet assimilation. In the words of pioneering scholar Evelyn Shakir, "the first generation of Arab American writers (as might be expected of immigrants in 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 foreignness, but they could make it respectable." For nearly 50 years, the best Arab-American writers (among them William Peter Blatty, the author of The Exorcist [1971], whose mother happened to be close friends with my Lebanese grandmother) only referred to their ethnicity in joking or minimizing ways (Blatty's memoir about his early years and war experience is called Which Way to Mecca, Jack? [1960]).

SeaWiFS image caputure of the Arabian Peninula (2000)

It's emblematic, I think, that Arab-American poet D. H. Melhem focused her scholarship on Gwendolyn Brooks, whose career moved from the witty and empathic formalist portraits of Bronzeville residents to increasingly sympathetic poetic dialogues with Black Nationalism. Emboldened as well by the courageous work of Edward Said—whose landmark Orientalism (1978) was quickly followed by ground-breaking critiques of empire, Zionism, and representations of Islam—Arab-American writers such as Lawrence Joseph, Etel Adnan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sam Hazo, Elmaz Abinader, and others began...