Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader's Guide

5. The Eternity of Immigration: Arab American Short Story Collections (Joseph Geha, Frances Khirallah Noble, Evelyn Shakir, Susan Muaddi Darraj)

60 5 The Eternity of Immigration Arab American Short Story Collections (Joseph Geha, Frances Khirallah Noble, Evelyn Shakir, Susan Muaddi Darraj) In the past twenty years, a number of short story collections by Arab American authors have been published. I take a look at four of those collections here: Joseph Geha’s Through and Through: Toledo Stories; Frances Khirallah Noble’s The Situe Stories; Evelyn Shakir’s Remember Me to Lebanon; and Susan Muaddi Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile. Each collection would be an asset to a course or reading group focused on Arab American literature. Each collection resembles a novel because its stories are not discrete; the collections use recurring settings and characters, often tying them together. In total, these collections add an important dimension to the modern Arab American literary canon. Geha, Noble, and Shakir are of Lebanese background; Muaddi Darraj is a Palestinian born in the United States. All four are Christian and write about comparable issues, though their stories and styles are far from identical. Immigration and acculturation (becoming accustomed to a different culture) are themes of note, as are negotiations of different customs and expectations, connections to the so-called Old Country, and what it means to be an “American” as opposed to an “Arab.” Joseph Geha: Through and Through Through and Through: Toledo Stories is a classic of Arab American fiction. In fact, some critics (myself among them) use Through and Through as a demarcation point of modern Arab American literature, as opposed to the earlier period when al-Muhjar (the immigrants) predominated. Originally published in 1990 and The Eternity of Immigration | 61 reissued in 2009 by Syracuse University Press, Through and Through contains eight stories, all of them about (mainly Christian) Syro-Lebanese immigrants in Detroit and Toledo. (The term Syro-Lebanese refers to the period in the first half of the twentieth century when Lebanon was still a part of Syria. The immigrants from the area that would become Lebanon, in particular the largely Christian Mount Lebanon region, carried Syrian passports.) Through and Through explores issues of acculturation, family dynamics, and class mobility in the United States. All of the stories are realistic and utilize Aristotelian linear structures. Although all the stories in Through and Through deal with the same urban setting and have characters who inhabit similar cultural terrain, they are not interconnected. The characters are not recurrent, and each story focuses on a different aspect of life in Arab Toledo, Ohio (and, in one case, Detroit). Through and Through is not autobiographical, but it is influenced by Geha’s experience of growing up in a Lebanese immigrant community in Toledo. One of the collection ’s primary motifs is the way generational changes affect immigrant communities ; in this case, Lebanese immigrants gradually give way to integrated Americans. This motif is evident in “Almost Thirty,” told from the point of view of Haleem Yakoub, whose grandfather Braheem was the first immigrant to the United States in his family. Braheem, Haleem, and Haleem’s father, Rasheed, represent generational differences as they relate to Lebanon and the United States. Haleem explains, for instance, that Rasheed “never got used to the snow and long winters of this country.”1 Here Geha exemplifies difference through weather, a phenomenon that defines place at least as crucially as language or religion. It is not only weather that makes America different, though; the Americans themselves manage to confound and amuse the immigrants. In fact, one of the interesting features of “Almost Thirty” is the way that the Lebanese characters define “American,” which appears to be coterminous with “white American” or at least with “non–Lebanese American.” These definitions become clear through the issue of marriage. The early generation of male Lebanese immigrants in “Almost Thirty,” in accordance with actual history, returned to Lebanon to marry or sent for women from Lebanon to become their wives in the United States. Their children and grandchildren, however, marry “Americans.” This distinction is noteworthy because we should keep in mind that the word American denotes nationality and not ethnicity—or 62 | M o d e r n A r a b A m e r i c a n F i c t i o n at least it is supposed to denote only nationality. In other words, no matter one’s ethnic, religious, or national background, one is “American” if one holds an American passport—that is to say...