American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary

5. Arab Masquerade: Mahjar Identity Politics and Transnationalism

179 5 Arab Masquerade Mahjar Identity Politics and Transnationalism The first four chapters of this book address an American discourse on Arabness that the first generation of Arab immigrants to America inherited. The ways in which this discourse prefigured Arab American identity and the ways in which a group of Syrian migrant intellectuals challenged that discourse are the focus of this final chapter . Until quite recently, historians have tended to read the story of the pioneer Arab migration to America through a narrative of the Arab that existed in American literature prior to the actual presence of Arabs: the story of the street Arab. This story uses the figure of the peddler to tell a tale of transition—­ from savage to civilized, from darkness to whiteness, from foreigner to citizen. As with Barbary captivity narratives and Near Eastern travel narratives, Arabness is a temporary state in the street Arab tale, and once one becomes American, one is no longer Arab. A coterie of first-­ generation Syrian migrants to America, by inserting themselves into the American discourse controlling the definition of Arabness, however, enunciated their own forms of literary representation and myth, inventing a system for inventorying and controlling the meaning of the term Arab. Focusing on these mahjar intellectuals situates the Arab experience in America in a global context and shifts the narrative emphasis from the teleology of “becoming American” to a more complex accounting of the multiplicity of identities migrants inhabit. The chapter begins with a historiography of Arab migration to America that emphasizes the role literature plays in erasing the Arab identity of Syrian immigrants. I then provide a counternarrative on the Arab presence in America that stresses migration rather than immigration and transnational affiliation rather than national affiliation. This counternarrative emerges out of the mahjar sensibility cultivated by writers such as Ameen Rihani, the first Arab American novelist and a lifelong advocate 180 Arab Masquerade of pan-­ Arabism. Concentrating on the forms of Arab masquerade that Rihani explores in his novel The Book of Khalid, the chapter moves into an analysis of the relationship between American Orientalism and Arab American self-­ representation. The literary strategies of self-­ representation that Rihani employs ultimately translate into the political strategies informing pan-­ Arabism. The chapter ends with a reconsideration of the legacy of Arab American literature that revivifies the importance of mahjar writers and their transnational paradigms of identity. Syrian Immigration Arab, to go huckstering. 1948, Baltimore, MD. —­H. L. Mencken, The American Language1 The first “Syrians” who came to and through America in the late nineteenth century were mostly Christian men from rural villages hived into the Lebanon mountain range.2 Many of them earned their money in a trade they inherited from German Jews in America: pack-­ peddling. Pack-­ peddlers carried a large suitcase filled with “notions,” often on their backs and often from places such as New York City to places such as Vicksburg, Mississippi, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota. These suitcases were called kashshies (a corruption of caixa, the Portuguese word for box). The narrative of the Syrian pack-­ peddler is so central to the way in which the pioneer generation has been historicized that no scholarly account of the years between 1880 and 1924 exists in which the figure does not appear prominently. A pioneer-­ generation anecdote relates that the first words a Syrian in the New World learned were “Buy sumthin’, Ma’am?”3 With rare exceptions, earlier historians of Arab immigration in America have argued that the pioneer-­ generation migrants were remarkably successful in their effort to integrate into an unhyphenated American culture.4 Elaine Hagopian and Ann Paden begin the preface to their 1969 study on Arab American assimilation by remarking on early Arab immigrants ’ “tendency to acculturate rapidly and assimilate to the American environment.”5 Sameer Abraham and Nabeel Abraham, in their introduction to a 1985 study of Arab American communities, note that Arab Americans’ lack of visibility in American society can be attributed partly to “the fact that they were generally well integrated, acculturated, and even assimilated into mainstream society.”6 Alixa Naff comments on the Arab Masquerade 181 “rapid assimilation of Arabic-­ speaking immigrants before World War I” into American society, in the introduction to her 1985 book on the role pack-­ peddling played in the early Arab immigrant experience.7 “If political and economic events had not reactivated Arab immigration” in the post-­ 1967 years, Naff...