The Threads of the Veil: A Performance of Victimhood in "The Spiced Chicken Queen of Mickaweaquah, Iowa"

In Memoriam

Over the years, I had many discussions with my friend and mentor, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., about ethnic American literature and the state of our discipline. I recall a contentious exchange that I had with Joe about Arab American literature three years after 9/11, in which I deplored the neglect of Arab American cultural production in the US academy. I argued that despite the hypervisibility of Arabs and Muslims occasioned by the 9/11 attacks, Americans still knew very little about Arab and Arab American cultures beyond stereotypes and that hypervisibility was more a case of hyperinvisibility. Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims were visible mostly in stereotypical appearance—beards, turbans, and veils—but their cultures remained opaque. I cited Edward Said's statement in the 2003 "Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition" of his influential work, Orientalism: "I wish I could say … that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs, and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn't" (xviii).

Joe gave me one of his famous quizzical looks and said calmly: "Well, Arab Americans share the blame for this gap. I don't hear Arab Americans clamoring for Arab American literature. If you want things to change you have to clamor for them." I was taken aback, and I retorted defensively: "Joe, Arab Americans make up about two percent of the population of the US. There are Arab American voices calling for Arab American literature, but we cannot do it alone; we are a very small group even though we come from twenty-two countries in Southwest Asia and North Africa. We need the help of other marginalized communities." After an awkward silence, we moved on to another subject. Later that night, I thought again about what Joe had said. While I stood by my statement, I also realized that Joe had a point. If Arab Americans were to gain complex cultural presence and visibility in the United States, we had to make it happen. Yes, African American, Asian American, and other allies were critical, but we had to carve the path to self-representation. We owed this to ourselves. We had to continue to speak in other terms, to surprise, to intervene creatively and be heard despite the deafening cacophony of stereotypes and misrepresentations of Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims in the United States, no matter how unpopular and controversial our perspectives might seem to the dominant culture and to some of our own.

More than a decade later, as Islamophobic and neo-Orientalist discourses pervade the country, my conversation with Joe remains a constant reminder that agency is taken, not requested. As Samia Serageldin puts it, "It will be up to the Arab American literary community [either] to define itself, or to find itself defined by others" (440). I dedicate this essay to the memory of Joe. If I could tell him anything, I would say: "I am clamoring! We are clamoring!"

Introduction

"You people have such restrictive dress for women,"she said, hobbling away in three-inch heels and panty hoseto finish out another pink-collar temp pool day.

–Mohja Kahf (E-mails 42)

The poem "Hijab Scene #2" (2003), by Syrian American poet, writer, and scholar Mohja Kahf, presents a scene in which a presumably non-Muslim American woman reacts condescendingly to a Muslim woman wearing the hijab (headscarf or veil). The American woman's use of "You people" operates on two levels: a stereotypical grouping of all Muslims in which the Muslim woman in question is denied individuality and an ironic level in which the American woman fails to recognize the restrictive nature of the dress code that is imposed on the category of "pink-collar" workers to which she belongs. Interestingly, the words of the American woman, spoken with the unflinching authority of the dominant culture, are decentered and subsumed under the impression offered by the poem's speaker. In the speaker's description, the American woman hobbles away in her restrictive "three-inch heels and panty hose...