Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader's Guide

6. Promised Lands and Unfulfilled Promises: Laila Halaby

79 6 Promised Lands and Unfulfilled Promises Laila Halaby Laila Halaby has written two novels, West of the Jordan and Once in a Promised Land, that have been well received critically and have earned a steady readership. Both novels focus on a range of sociopolitical issues involving Arab American identity, civil liberties, racism and xenophobia, and the effects of September 11, 2001, on American society. It is easy to read Halaby only in the context of the political events that frame or appear in her fiction, but there is a great deal happening aesthetically in her novels, so I would like to be careful not to reduce art solely to political commentary. Halaby does comment on the state of affairs in the United States, however—a dimension of her fiction that is difficult to avoid. Here, I try to situate those comments within an analysis of her poetic structures. Halaby is an Arizona-based writer of Palestinian Jordanian and white American background. (“Palestinian Jordanian” refers to the majority population of Jordan, which is from 60 to 70 percent of Palestinian origin.) Her worldly background leads her to transnational settings, but her main geographical focus is Arizona, California, Jordan, and the West Bank of Palestine. Both of her novels examine the social and cultural positions of Palestinians in the United States. Of particular note is her identification and exploration of the spaces between American promises and the difficult realities that quietly exist alongside them. West of the Jordan West of the Jordan is a title that denotes both geography and political orientation. On the one hand, it directs readers’ attention to the West Bank and to the geopolitical West, the United States in particular. On the other hand, it identifies a 80 | 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 locus of concerns that combine an emphasis on the United States and the Middle East. Four teenage women, all first cousins, narrate the novel; each young woman represents a different cultural, historical, and economic situation. In the case of Mawal, she also represents a different locale, the West Bank town of Nawara, from which the Salaama family hails. Although each narrator’s personality is distinct , they all share the presence of Palestine as a crucial source of their identities. Khadija illuminates religious conservatism and male angst; Soraya represents the amoral waywardness of the United States and conflicts over individuality and community; Hala, arguably the novel’s main protagonist, negotiates a series of transnational questions; and Mawal is a metaphorical anchor, the culturally grounded, responsible keeper of stories. Mawal also creates the novel’s broadest metaphor, the roza, an intricately embroidered Palestinian dress, each pattern representing a different site in Palestine . At one point, Mawal says, “Stories are stitched under the skin at birth.”1 Mawal stitches rozas to honor her ancestors and to remember her community’s past. The patterns she creates come to denote the interrelation of the novel’s characters. They further denote the characters’ connection to Nawara. As the threads connect themselves to the fabric, the characters become indivisible from their place of ancestry. Mawal serves as the other three characters’ foil in that she reminds them of what they once were and what they were close to becoming. Her mantra when embroidering embodies the novel’s metaphorical values: Stitch in red for life. Stitch in green to remember. Stitch, stitch to never forget. (103) If Mawal has an opposite, it would have to be Soraya, the Los Angeles–based teenager who is sexually active, cynical, and ambiguous beneath her hyperconfident exterior. A critic might analyze Soraya in many ways, but I would like to focus on the role she plays in undermining mythologies about America and the American dream. Many of the immigrants in West of the Jordan, reflecting the attitudes of many real-life immigrants, view the United States as a stable place that holds the promise of a specific trajectory: arrival, hard work, slowly accumulated wealth, family and comfortable home, children who outdo parents’ success. Nonimmigrant Americans often adhere to a comparable but slightly different mythology, one that casts the United States as a secure but perpetually threatened Promised Lands and Unfulfilled Promises | 81 site of economic possibility and ethical exceptionalism. (The notion of American exceptionalism claims that the United States is an exceptional force of...