Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

Introduction

Introduction AN UNDERCURRENT OF disquiet runs through the memoirs that follow. Much of the disquiet emanates from the struggle to reconcile, negotiate , and otherwise transcend the margin/mainstream distinction that casts a shadow over the lives of Arab Detroit. In everyday discourse this struggle is manifest in a nagging discomfort with self-referential categories. To wit, "Am I an Arab or an American, or something in between?" "Does a hyphen separate me, and Us, from Them?" Or, "if I can be Arab and American at the same time, why does the hyphen still exist?" These loaded categories, and the definitions of self and Other embedded within them, are foisted upon the (unsuspecting) inhabitants of Arab Detroit in overlapping areas of life: family, religion , work, school, and neighborhood. These worlds, categories, and definitions intersect in unpredictable ways, often with unforeseen results. Most vexing are the categories handed down within the secure confines of the family, which are taken to heart then carried out into the world. Their problematic quality is always contextual. What does it mean to be a Yemeni Muslim, a Lebanese Shia Muslim, a Palestinian Christian, or an American-Irish-German-Lebanese in late-twentieth-century America? The memoirs offered here resurrect the personal dimensions of familiar social categories (Yemeni, Muslim, Arab woman, Lebanese, Palestinian American, Ramallah Palestinian, American of Lebanese background), pumping life into them, attaching names and faces to them. On one level, these memoirs serve as evocative portraits of the individuals whose life experiences they recount. The memoirs cannot substitute for abstractions and social categories, but they can illuminate them in ways statistical data never will, while simultaneously revealing the limitations and imprecisions of such data. The six essays collected here move along a continuum from margin to mainstream. At one end is Shams Alwujude, a first377 Life Journeys generation Yemeni Muslim woman; at the other, Marilynn Rashid, a third-generation American of Lebanese, Irish-Protestant, GermanCatholic ancestry. Marilynn is not so sure about who she is and what her name represents; Shams is so certain of her identity that she has prudently decided to use a pseudonym. In between lie the essays of four individuals who are at various points along the margin /mainstream continuum. Lara Hamza and Hayan Charara share a similar age and Lebanese Muslim background but reveal divergent life experiences due partly to differences in gender. Lara, the only foreign-born among the four, resents her Lebanese identity and favors her American side until she reaches college, where she begins to embrace her Arab heritage. Hayan straddles the line between margin and mainstream the way a young boy might straddle a neighbor's fence, using the advantage of height to see his world from a new perspective. Nabeel Abraham and Jeffrey Ghannam trace their roots to two nearby towns on the West Bank in Palestine, but they wrestle with their Palestinian identity in radically different ways. They are a generation older than Hayan, Lara, and Shams, which adds another dimension to their perspectives. Jeff approaches his ethnic side from a position squarely in the mainstream. Like Marilynn Rashid, he must reach back to find his ethnic past, but unlike Marilynn, his roots in Ramallah are semiaccessible, however distant and remote the town of Ramallah might seem to him now. Consciously or unconsciously, Jeff accepts his place in the American mainstream. Not so Nabeel, who at an early age rejects the mainstream in which he finds himself immersed. In college, Nabeel consciously embraces his ethnic identity and struggles to reconcile it with his mainstream existence. He must undergo the "sweat lodge" of experience to discover his place in the world. The subversive aspect of these memoirs should not be overlooked . Their power (and that of similar essays scattered throughout this volume) lies in their ability to undermine established Arab-asOther categories. By highlighting the particular and the individual at the expense of standard representations of Arab Otherness, the memoirs transcend Otherness altogether, reaffirming Ralph Waldo Emerson's observation that what is most personal is most universal. The power of these memoirs also lies in their ability to dislodge and subvert self-referential categories: Lebanese, Yemeni, Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, Arab man, Arab woman, and even the all-purpose "Arab American" label. These categories and others like them are found across the entire spectrum of Arab Detroit. Like the Arab-as378 INTRODUCTION Other categories, theyare equally freighted with meaning, stereotype, prejudice, and imprecision...