Arab-American Women’s Writing and Performance: Orientalism, Race and the Idea of “The Arabian Nights” by Somaya Sami Sabry (review)

Adopting a cultural studies approach, Somaya Sami Sabry’s Arab-American Women’s Writing and Performance is situated at the intersection of ethnicity and gender. The book addresses Arab American women artists’ resistance to the increasing racialization of Arabs in the United States following 9/11 and the war in Iraq, in addition to the gendered legacy of Orientalism. Focusing on the cultural production of four Arab American women—writers Diana Abu-Jaber and Mohja Kahf and performers Laila Farah and Maysoon Zayid—the book argues that these women resort to “Sheherazadian narrative” and “Sheherazadian orality” (p. 3). Empowered by Sheherazade as a “proto-feminist storytelling mother figure,” they “undermine the hegemonic Orientalist discursive practices about Arab women” and “stereotypical and exotic representations through reformation of the frame tale of The Thousand and One Nights or the invocation of its orality” (pp. 171, 15, 3).

Sabry solicits multiple theoretical perspectives from postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, film studies, and feminist theory drawn from Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Sara Suleri, Stuart Hall, and Jack Shaheen, among others. While the book’s avowed aim of critically foregrounding Arab American women’s resistance to racism and patriarchy is to be lauded, Arab-American Women’s Writing and Performance suffers from a degree of repetition and hasty analysis. These problems are palpable in the handling of what is potentially an original contribution, namely the Arabic term dihliz, which Sabry reappropriates from “the medieval Arab scholar Abu Hamid al-Ghazali” (p. 5). She posits that as “a ‘non-totalitarian’ threshold space, the concept of dihliz allows for an understanding of diaspora as an experience … the Arab-American diasporic experience is a dihlizian space” (p. 6). Al-Ghazali, however, is nowhere quoted, the term having been borrowed, as we find out in an endnote, through a secondary source, Ebrahim Moosa’s Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination (pp. 180-81, n. 8).

Translation is a pivot of the argument: both the misprisions of Orientalist translators of The Arabian Nights, such as Richard Burton and Edward Lane, and the output of the Arab American writers “assum[ing] the role of cultural translators … and the responsibility of telling their own tale” (p. 12). Indeed, Abu-Jaber’s 2003 novel Crescent—the discussion of which is arguably the most persuasive of the texts studied—has a character who “becomes Richard Burton’s slave and instead of being ruled by him, rules him” so that he is “interpellated within a modern version of his tales” (pp. 75, 76). A more full-fledged analysis of Burton’s translation—as well as Lane’s—was due.

The discussion of Kahf demonstrates how her 2003 poetry collection E-mails from Scheherazad “resurrects Sheherazade as a writer, a lover, and a revolutionary odalisque,” attending in particular to the signifier of the veil in terms of a “resista[nt] shaping [of] global fashion” (pp. 88, 125). Sabry occasionally cites Kahf’s 1999 genealogical study of the West’s troping of women of the region, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque, and suggests its continuity with her poetry (pp. 46, 98-99). However, there is a dearth of overarching engagement with Kahf’s other work. Granted, her Western Representations of the Muslim Woman takes us from the European medieval period only up to Romanticism, but the book does, in the introductory and concluding pages, touch on contemporary deployments of that stereotype. Kahf also has contributed other scholarly texts about the workings of Orientalist stereotypes—as “victim,” “escapee,” and “pawn”—in the United States, as seen in the reception of Arab women’s texts in translation.¹ Kahf seems to have a two-pronged scholarly poetic engagement specifically with Orientalist stereotypes of the Muslim woman. Towards the end of the introduction to Western Representations of the Muslim Woman, she asks: “Is...