Etching Our Own Image : Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement [1 ed.] 9781443809511, 9781847181954

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Etching Our Own Image

Etching Our Own Image Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement

Edited by

Anan Ameri and Holly Arida

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Etching Our Own Image: Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement, edited by Anan Ameri and Holly Arida This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Anan Ameri, Holly Arida and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-195-3; ISBN 13: 9781847181954

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword ........................................................................................................... vii Anan Ameri Etching Our Own Image: Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement......................................1 Holly Arida Chapter One Speaking Truth to Power through Poetry Poetry Is All I Know ............................................................................................8 Suheir Hammad Angels Light Words ...........................................................................................11 Nathalie Handal Chapter Two On Stage: Arab Americans in the Performing Arts Finding Our Voice: The Politics of the Personal in Arab American Theater.....18 Leila Buck Purists and Innovators: Arab Musicians in America..........................................32 Karim Nagi Arab American Hip-Hop....................................................................................42 William Youmans Chapter Three The Rise of Contemporary Arab American Literature Shall We Gather in the Mountains .....................................................................62 Gregory Orfalea Celebrating the Hyphen: Arab American Writers Today...................................70 Andrea Shalal-Esa

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The Strategic Voice of Western Poetics in Arab American Poetry....................83 Richard Hishmeh Chapter Four Palestinian Art: Bridging the Political and Aesthetic “Light, Freedom, and Mystical Presence”: The Artistic Works and Ideas of Sari I. Khoury ................................................................................................98 Christopher Khoury Moving in from the Margins: Contemporary Palestinian Art ..........................114 Jessica Robertson Wright Chapter Five Telling My Story: Personal Narrative in the Visual Arts Stories My Father Told Me: The Personal Narrative in Visual Art .................132 Helen Zughaib Layered, Erased, and Embedded Narratives ....................................................157 Doris Bittar Chapter Six Coming Together: The Collectives Arab Art Collectives and the Remaking of the Whole.....................................182 Youmna Chlala The Rise of Arab American Comedy...............................................................194 Dean Obeidallah Contributors .....................................................................................................200 Index ................................................................................................................203

FOREWORD

The Arab American National Museum (AANM) is proud to present Etching Our Own Image: Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement. This anthology features some of the work presented at DIWAN: A Forum for the Arts, which was held at the museum between March 30 and April 2 of 2006. DIWAN was dedicated to Arab American artists who work in the areas of literature and the performing, visual, and media arts. In organizing DIWAN, we hoped to generate a national dialogue about the state of Arab American arts, to bring visibility to Arab American artists and scholars, and to document their contributions in their respective fields. Close to fifty Arab American artists and scholars of the arts participated in DIWAN, many of whom had never before met. DIWAN provided the presenters, as well as our audience, with a platform to meet, present, and discuss their work and to engage in a dialogue that would stimulate and encourage new ideas and artistic expression. The work presented at DIWAN was extremely diverse; it covered a variety of topics and genres. In addition to scholarly papers, there were presentations of original works, which included visual arts, films, theater, music, comedy, poetry, and prose. Some presented their work as a part of Arab American art collectives established in the aftermath of September 11. Within each field, different genres were presented, ranging from modern visual arts to calligraphy, from hip-hop to classical Arabic music. In their work, many of the artists explored issues of relevance to the larger Arab American community, such as identity and ethnicity, war and displacement, and of course, being an Arab American artist post-9/11. Etching Our Own Image: Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement is a testimony to the resilience, courage, and innovation of Arab American artists. Through their creative work, these artists were capable of molding the hostility they found themselves facing, especially after September 11, into a positive energy; an energy that challenges as it creates and enriches our lives as it refutes the many popular assumptions about Arab Americans. Through their individual and collective work, these contributing artists affirm our identity as Arab Americans, provide us with a new form of resistance, and lift our spirit. This publication celebrates the free expression and creativity of Arab American

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artists as an indispensable part of our community’s cultural heritage, activism, and contributions. The Arab American National Museum is committed to offering programs and publications that embody the diversity and creativity of our community. DIWAN and this anthology reflect our vision of establishing the AANM as a dynamic educational and cultural institution as well as a welcoming place where artists, scholars, and community members can meet, interact, and exchange ideas—a place for the public to learn about the rich cultural heritage and the contributions of Arab Americans. Etching Our Own Image: Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement marks only the beginning of serving our mission of presenting, documenting, and preserving the contributions of Arab Americans, including those in the arts. It is a reflection of the AANM core values that the cultural heritage of all people should be preserved, celebrated, and shared. We value the arts not only as an aesthetic expression of our human experience but also as a tool that empowers people and instills community pride, especially among new immigrants and marginalized communities. We further believe in the power of the arts to address social and political issues while providing our audience with a safe space that encourages dialogue and stimulates discussions. The Arab American National Museum extends it thanks to all of the artists who participated in our first DIWAN, for supporting our work and for investing their time and energy to make the event a success. Our deepest thanks and appreciation to Rumzi Araj the main organizer of DIWAN, and to all the AANM staff whose hard work and commitment make the Museum a vibrant cultural and educational institution. My deepest appreciation goes also to the members of DIWAN’s advisory committee for volunteering their time and expertise. Lastly, we acknowledge and thank the sponsors who funded DIWAN, including the Wallace Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Artography: Arts in a Changing America, a documentation program of the Leveraging Investments in Creativity program, funded by the Ford Foundation. The generous support of these sponsors to the Arab American National Museum and DIWAN is what made this publication possible. Anan Ameri, PhD Director, Arab American National Museum

ETCHING OUR OWN IMAGE: VOICES FROM WITHIN THE ARAB AMERICAN ART MOVEMENT HOLLY ARIDA

The personal is the political. Fiction and facts are inseparable. Personal stories resist vague and generalized abstractions. They maintain the urgency, the intensity, the richness and vividness of the concrete. —Nawal El Saadawi

Impressions. Arabs in America have long struggled with negative characterizations, but 9/11 placed on them a special burden. In addition to the anguish and concern for this country’s safety that we share with all Americans, Arab Americans are constantly made to define and defend who we are. Otherwise, our image will be defined for us, either by those who commit violence in our name or by those who assert that Arabs and Muslims are somehow monolithic or deserve collective blame for 9/11. Without selfdefinition, we are misunderstood. Out of this dynamic has emerged an Arab American art movement. While this effort is not uniform, the artists within it have in common the capacity to etch their own images, to use artistic media to create their own impressions of who they are as artists and as Arab Americans. This collection of writings captures their diverse voices; our contributors include poets, musicians, playwrights, creative writers, painters, conceptual artists, comedians and scholars of the arts. The artists included here are above all artists, committed to craft, innovation, and expression; and they take on the task of etching their own image willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously. And while their art cannot be solely defined by the need to reclaim the image of Arab Americans, their work is certainly shaped by the time and place in which they create. These voices from within the Arab American art movement portray art as resistance, as an embrace of their past and their future. This is art designed to retain their origins and create something new, to collaborate and come together. Here they do all of these things. Here they find their voice as they gather in mountains, remaking the whole. Here Arab American artists tell their own story.

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Resistance. The poet and playwright Nathalie Handal tells of her inspiration to write and how she uses poetry to reconstruct her homeland. She revisits a picture of her grandfather in Palestine that has haunted her; but after so many years, it is starkly different from how she remembers it. The picture serves as a metaphor for Palestine, and her poems tell stories of occupation in small and personal glimpses. For Nathalie Handal, poetry is a form of resistance, not just to occupation, but also to the eroding memory of her homeland. Similarly, the musician Will “the Iron Sheik” Youmans outlines how hip-hop, a music genre born out of resistance, has been adopted by Arab Americans to speak out against social injustice. He quotes the Arab American rapper Excentrik, who asserts that hip-hop addresses a specifically Arab American angst: the “rampant misrepresentation” when “twenty-four seven, we’re known as terrorists.” For Handal and Youmans, the art of the spoken and written word is a powerful tool of resistance. Three of our writers analyze artists who draw on different spirits of resistance. Professor Richard Hishmeh’s analysis of Arab American poets shows Kahlil Gibran, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lawrence Joseph adopting the voices of Western poets in order to assert a non-Western agenda. Through their poetry, these poets call attention to the political turmoil in their Arab homelands, criticize imperialism, and raise awareness about Arab Americans and immigrant life. In another study, the journalist Andrea Shalal-Esa explains how the works of spoken-word poet and performer Suheir Hammad, along with those of the writers Naomi Shihab Nye and Diana Abu-Jaber, resist “any kind of totalizing narrative.” Hammad, Nye, and Abu-Jaber negotiate ethnic, racial, and especially gender boundaries, as they defy categorizations of Arab women, ”celebrating the hyphen” through their own authentic voices. Curator and organizer Jessica Robertson Wright’s study of three exhibitions examines methods for resisting the obstacles to exhibiting Palestinian art. Her focus is on Palestinian artists for whom the Palestinian experience is the subject of their work and on the means by which these artists and their curators and organizers resist marginalization. As they tell their story, Arab Americans artists empower themselves to resist occupation, marginalization, and social injustice. Past-Present-Future. Many of the authors in this collection challenge us to think about what is supposed to be the linear direction of migration. We leave our home country. We arrive. Sometimes, we go back. Suheir Hammad’s contemplation of “Women of the Arab Worlds” is also a contemplation of herself, and her poem defies definition just as the women of these Arab worlds defy definition. How does Suheir Hammad use poetry to speak truth to power? She says, “I write poetry because it’s all I know.” It is all she has to say and all

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she needs to say. The paintings of the late Sari Khoury also defy definition, according to his son Christopher Khoury. While Khoury’s paintings cannot be understood as merely “Palestinian art,” nor can they be understood apart from the restlessness evoked by his exile from Palestine. Sari Khoury’s art and his life intertwined as he embraced the themes of his homeland, and his creations transcend the boundaries of “immigrant art” and the expectations of his local audience. Like Chris Khoury’s reflections, the painter Helen Zughaib’s piece relates to her father, and the paintings she created to convey the stories he told her. Her renderings are of stories of wisdom from long ago, stories that her father carried with him when he immigrated to the United States. Yet Helen Zughaib seeks not just to preserve the past but also to reach out to people and communities outside of the Arab experience. Rather than a linear path, it is a circle that we see in the work of Hammad, Khoury, and Zughaib: migration from a place or to a place is always connected. We are attached at both ends. We are never fully here or there. Synthesis. What do we take with us and what do we leave behind? How does art transform over national boundaries? In “Purists and Innovators,” musician Karim Nagi makes a sweeping examination of Arabic music: the motivations for performers in America to maintain traditional music forms, and in Arab homelands to create something new. Asserting that Arab American musicians are constrained from innovation by pressure to remain authentic and by the nostalgia of their audience for the homeland, Nagi’s analysis speaks to the broader questions about art in the diaspora and the peculiar result of the melding of Arab and American cultures. In another form of synthesis, writer and professor Greg Orfalea draws from his heritage and his present circumstances in a creative work that is at once a lesson, a story, and an analysis of Arab American literature. He tells us, I may reveal here some themes I think are common to the literature of Arab Americans, but don’t count on it. Don’t count on me paying close attention to family, war, and love in this strange culture we find ourselves set down in as I would if I were wearing a critic’s hat, that stiff homburg. No, I am wearing no hat and going up into the mountains.

But his story of a nephew adopted during the Lebanese Civil War who gets lost in the mountains as family members stumble over each other to find him, very much revolves around family, war, and love—themes common to Arab American literature. Artists can sometimes be uncomfortable when their personal identity conflates with the identity of their work because this can be reductive. When they are

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telling a story, it may be embedded, as in the conceptual art of Doris Bittar. Bittar’s Stripes and Stars series began before 9/11, with overlays of historic maps of the East and West as symbols of harmony. As the relationship between the West and the Arab world turned more violent and complicated, the pieces in this series merged symbols of modern patriotism and militarism, evoking messages ranging from hope to despair. Bittar’s composition Lebanese Linen perhaps best symbolizes “our inability to completely know or grasp the past” as patterns in the piece combine the ancient, colonial, and modern histories of Lebanon to represent “the layered, intertwined lives of a family on the precipice of a civil war.” As in Nagi’s sweeping study of Arab music in America, and in Greg Orfalea’s blend of story, lesson, and analysis, the work of Doris Bittar embeds frames of time, layers of meaning and existence, an Arab and an American existence. Coming Together—A Diwan. An artistic movement requires that a group of artists share principles or some sort of actuating agency. While some historical art movements have embraced the same style or artistic philosophy, in the case of the Arab American art movement, the actuating agency is the reimaging of Arab America—the taking back of the power to tell our own story, on our own terms. Like the Arab American National Museum’s DIWAN conference, which gathered Arab American artists from around the nation and from all artistic mediums, smaller groups of artists have collected to collaborate, create, and support one another in the effort to define themselves, or at least move away from prescribed definitions. In this vein, the comedian and activist Dean Obeidallah describes how the post-9/11 climate in America brought Arab American comedians together. Obeidallah recalls that “many Arab Americans, including myself, became more in touch with our Arab heritage, and for the first time in our lives, we became active in Arab American organizations.” At the same time, a mixed audience emerged composed of Arab Americans who “circled the wagons” in an effort to protect themselves and to seek support from fellow Arab Americans, and non-Arabs who become interested in the question, “Who are these Arab people anyway?” Arab American comedy follows an American tradition of ethnic-American groups using comedy to confront stereotypes and racism. Obeidallah chronicles how his involvement in Arab American organizations led to the staging of the Arab American Comedy Festival in New York, and how his collaborative work speaks to the healing power of laughter and the strength found in numbers. Because Leila Buck is also a performing artist, her analysis focuses on the audience, and like Obeidallah, Buck asserts the positive and transformative experience of live interaction with an audience as well as the power of

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collaboration. Buck explains the three formats in which she has created political theater. After her solo work ISite, Buck helps find Nibras, New York’s ArabAmerican Theater Collective, whose collaborative work was in part motivated by 9/11 and the need to “illuminate the depth and breadth of what it meant to be Arab in a post-9/11 America.” Coming together again, only this time with Arab and Arab American women, Buck begins a group called Nisa’a (“women” in Arabic) who create political theater to reflect on various issues and to essentially “find their own voice.” Together, this group finds strength to negotiate the various expectations of being Arab, American, and women, and to formulate how best to represent their experiences through political theater. Another artist who traces her personal and professional growth through collaboration is writer and visual artist Youmna Chlala. She describes the evolution of the Arc Collective, an Arab art collective with which she is affiliated in the San Francisco Bay Area. She emphasizes the diversity of feelings and attitudes among members of the collective toward their identity as Arabs and as artists. Their journey is a process of a shared creative and artistic vision. The Arc Collective’s mission must acknowledge the political time and place in which they create art, but it must also “set aside” politics and keep boundaries fluid in order to get on with collecting “artistic impulses” into a collaborative project. For Obeidallah, Buck, and Chlala, the coming together with other Arab American artists has its challenges but the collaborative effort enhances personal and professional growth, elevating artistic expression to another level. This diwan, or gathering of Arab American artists, is not a total reaction to or against the political place and time, but these collective efforts are, at least in part, consequences of the political climate. The collectives are a new and powerful way for Arab American artists to tell their story. The various parts of this collection come together to make up a story. Arab American artists use their art both to resist and to embrace their past, present, and future, and to retain their origins while creating something altogether new. Ultimately, they connect with one another on the level of self-definition so that their audiences can reimagine Arab America. As the playwright Leila Buck reflects on her eight years of performing ISite around the country: “I have never had anyone attempt to refute the truth or importance of anything that I share. On the contrary, every audience thanks me effusively for my work and for the perspective it showed them; a perspective many of them never realized existed.” For Arab Americans in this time, in this place, the political is in fact the personal, and as Nawal El Saadawi suggests, great power lies in personal stories. These stories are sometimes explicit, sometimes deeply embedded under layers of meaning, but the stories told here through Arab American art are

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urgent, intense, vivid, and rich. Through these stories, voices from within the Arab American art movement redefine who we are.

CHAPTER ONE: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER THROUGH POETRY

POETRY IS ALL I KNOW SUHEIR HAMMAD

Poetry is all I know. This means I basically know nothing. Because poetry, the technology of language, the vibration of intention, the music of expression, is ever changing. As am I. How to present truth in poetry when the form is always changing? Could it be possible that the truth changes as well? Some things seem pretty consistent. Land theft, voting fraud, misogyny. So how does the poet approach painful truth? From as many angles as one can. This poem was written at the end of a month-long residency. Rather than a poem to Arab women, I wanted to make sure to include the ethnic minorities in Arab countries as well. It’s a love poem to the Arab women I’ve met who have bucked the traditional roles demanded of them. Women who have paid for their independence with more sacrifice than one would know looking at them. It’s a love poem to myself. And it’s a love poem to the young women who will so soon be here, defining for themselves what poetry means. What truth is.

“A Poem for Women of the Arab Worlds” I have heard of women like this Women of superior airs and earthy laughs Around them is music Women loud as Cairo streets Where humanity lives on top itself and voices Must carry over the silencing of a people I remember stories about women like this They always have long hair Unless they shave it off

Suheir Hammad

And they wear jewelry as part Of their person an extension Of their aspiration for the day The stories of Mecca and Medina Are alive in their memory In their robes they carry The magic of repetition The bond of imagination Their names whispered During Mama’s coffee time With her girlfriends all homesick And despairing of loneliness The women we were warned against They always smell delicious They have a humor their mothers disapprove of They inherited their humor from their mothers They know they have bodies I have heard of the dancing of women from Baghdad At once fluid and ancient A smile on the whole body The face an openness into the tender part of history The rest is so cruel These women read too much my father said And they do, Baba These women have male friends my mother said Yes Mama habibti I have been seeing them in visions As the sun begins its descent They gather around tables of abundance and Create a world that is finally about them

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And food and land and sex and husbands (very different subjects altogether) but each worthy of Passion of debate of question And all turned into a joke eventually They share a grace knowing We are all history walking Each exile each victory each power each exchange each death Is evident within the world we nurture within And outside of ourselves These women it is said Deny any of us are righteous Since we are not all free And they mean free And they mean we all Beautiful does not attempt To describe them I have written about knowing about These women so when I see them In front of me it is natural And it is joyous And I see myself in their midst And I see myself And I see myself

ANGELS LIGHT WORDS NATHALIE HANDAL

Throughout my childhood, whenever I felt lost or alone, I would go to the old photograph of my grandfather hanging on the uneven wall of my father’s library. A colored photo, it was dated 1948. Each time, I looked closely at his name, Nagib, written at the bottom right of the photo. I looked closely at his eyes, deep velvet blue, telling me to stay, to go. Looked closely at the vast sky behind him, and wondered what color it really was that day? What did it feel like to be in Palestine that day? I could not tell. His expression was unrevealing, and, worse, he seemed unwilling to give anything away. But I think it was partly that unwillingness that kept me coming back to this picture of my grandfather. I wanted to talk to him. The photograph became a place of meditation. Of prayer. Of expression. Of passion. Of love. Of theater and poetry. It was my stage, a space for my words to be actors. But I reluctantly grew to resent this photograph that helped me make sense of my world and kept me close to Palestine, because it increasingly made me aware of the strangeness of my dislocation and the absence of home. Was my homeland an illusion? Was my reality lost within that illusion? I suddenly decided to stop going to the photograph. I felt deceitful but still stayed away. Years later, many houses and countries later, I found a box tucked in the corner of the room my mother now called mine. I did not think much about the box but one evening, at midnight, the moon took my mind back to a place I knew something about but would never know everything about. I felt caught between excitement and fear. I opened the box. The photograph was the first thing I saw. At first, I did not dare to look closely at what I had so long ago abandoned, but eventually I could not resist. And then what I saw shocked me. The photo was sepia not colored. And the vast sky of Palestine actually appeared to be an ocean to me now. Had I changed to the point of not being able to see the same image I had gazed at for years, or was I now seeing the image for the first time? Had I seen what I wanted to see in the past or was this altogether a different photograph? I looked closer, and there was his name and the date on the bottom

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right. I went back to my notebooks from those years in search of angels, of light, and as I read, I understood that I could not always believe memory nor fully discover the labyrinth of truth, because the truth of one time is not necessarily the truth of another. The next day, over Arabic coffee, I asked my mother where my grandfather was in Palestine when the picture was taken. She answered casually, not knowing the importance of the question for me: That was not in Palestine. I don’t know where it was taken. But no, not in Palestine. I am not sure if I was surprised, troubled, or shaken, but at that moment, I knew that I would always be looking for Palestine everywhere, and it would always be as present as it was absent. It would always be understood and misunderstood. And the only way I knew how to open Palestine to myself, and to the universe, was through my words. Octavio Paz wrote, “Between revolution and religion, poetry is the other voice. Its voice is other because it is the voice of the passions and of visions.”1 Certainly I have experienced poetry in that way, but I also believe that art is an instrument that can create change. Some might find that naive but as Primo Levi observed, it’s a good thing, a moral thing to behave as though there’s still hope.2 Literature has the power to express deep intuitions and realities; and a poem, play, or story can bring pain and truth alive in ways that can bring revolt and immediate action. Words are sublime, and this sublimity is political in that it awakens that which is unknown and known to us, factual or metaphorical, visible or invisible; words take us to the corridors of history and transcend the obscurity of our foes. As a writer, I hunt for dusk and everything that hides behind it. As a Palestinian American, I can describe my life as an unbroken migration. This in turn makes it impossible for me to escape the grief of having lost my homeland and what that signifies for ancient Palestine and Palestinians. It also makes it impossible for that tragedy not to emerge in my work. Living in the United States during this recent bloodshed in Lebanon and Gaza reminds me yet again, of how we as Arab Americans struggle not to drown as we are pulled between two oceans—in one ocean, we see our reflection, and yet, we have become a part of the other ocean. But ultimately, I cannot disconnect from the dread or the delights of the people and world around me. I want to have an unceasing dialogue with the world though my work. I am interested in how art communicates our humanity and unites us through our fears and tears, pain and elation. I want to communicate our stories and realities: two girls running in a field of orange trees, a man bringing a single rose to his

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beloved, calling her habibti, a twelve-year-old boy walking with one leg, another blinded from an explosion. Through these poems and stories, the atrocities of occupation and war become more haunting to those listening or reading because they find themselves relating at a human level—seeing themselves perhaps as the father or mother of that child. This makes them question situations they might not have otherwise, leads them to search for information and seek knowledge about dark realities of which they are unaware, and hopefully, for Americans, help them break the silence that so deeply stains this nation. By writing, I hope to enchant, and also to resist, to bear witness—to combat forgetfulness and keep Palestine breathing….Now I can hear my grandfather, he was talking to me all of those years, only I had not realized it was through the words that filled the stages and pages of my notebooks.

Wall Against Our Breath Everyday a crueler hour— the fencing of hearts barely beating, the palpitation of leaves in our dry gardens the heat in Gaza in Jericho keeping dreams we never had the time to remember an old woman trying to revive any fantasy she can, another thinking of her husband lost no where she can imagine— men who stop answering when we scream their name too busy—trying to cross the checkpoint, the soldiers the day the night while others drink tea, talk about curfews women, the children they buried while a mother asks

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what she will tell the child inside her that she wishes it did not come We witness October in flames, and every other month following, is the same, the streets we walk through a reminder of who we are and what they will never make of us… human portraits in corners we forget to look at or forget to reach… pictures stuck on walls as if they belong nowhere a groom and bride forced to wed anywhere but where they should, and yet, we keep asking: what victory blows candles out what sea speaks of another sea Even if they raise the wall higher than we can reach we know only one home even if we take different routes each time the trees guide us the wind guides us the sun and the moon guide us and when we arrive we find the books we cannot stop reading, the embroideries the refugees made, the kitchen where our lives were lived—

Nathalie Handal

a marriage proposal a death a birth— and everyday as we brew our coffee we greet each other properly and chase the wall from our breath

Maher Salem’s Deaf Father He was sixty-eight. It was ten fifty pm Six-story house Three generations’ home Beit Lahiya, Gaza Twenty-five tanks came They said—out of the house Three minutes Everyone ran. The niece screamed My uncle’s deaf and sleeping on the sixth floor The only sound left That of dynamite It was nine twenty am When they found his hand He left a message in his fist I am not deaf but the world seems to be.

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Notes 1 2

Octavio Paz, The Other Voice (New York: Harvest/HBJ Publishers, 1990), 151. Ibid.

CHAPTER TWO: ON STAGE: ARAB AMERICANS IN THE PERFORMING ARTS

FINDING OUR VOICE: THE POLITICS OF THE PERSONAL IN ARAB AMERICAN THEATER LEILA BUCK

Why Theater? In a world dominated by film, television, and the Internet—why create theater? If one wants to represent a fictional world as though it were real, in most cases, a camera can do it better. What then is the purpose of theater? What are its strengths? The most crucial one is simple: Theater is live. Unlike film or television, no matter how interactive, documentary, or “reality-based,” theater, by definition, puts the performer and the audience in the same room at the same time, breathing together. Anyone who has seen a live performance and then watched it on TV understands this simple yet crucial distinction. In addition to its immediacy, theater goes beyond live concerts or similar events: Theater demands participation. Because it does not show its audience an actual space outside of the one they are in, it requires them to engage their imaginations, thoughts, and feelings to create the space with the performers. Even the most traditional theater requires this partnership between actors and audience in order to succeed. This is one trait that theater shares with the written word: It asks its audience or readers to form their own images, connections, and, in some cases, interpretations. When combined with the presence of actors, this exchange of energy creates a unique form of dialogue. This live interaction, this presence, is key to theater’s success as a political and educational tool. Of course, the uses of any art form are as plentiful as the imaginations of the artists creating them. Here I will discuss three examples, or levels of creation, that I have found effective in developing individual and collective Arab American political theater.

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The Political Is Personal In most situations, I find the concept of objectivity a disingenuous attempt to situate oneself outside of any feeling or personal thought on a given topic. At best, it attempts to measure the distance one has from the subject. How many of us have had our thoughts and experiences relating to a controversial topic discounted or dismissed because we are “too close to it”? If applied to less political issues, this idea would be seen as ridiculous: When seeking advice on how to raise a child would one avoid anyone who has children for fear their views would be tainted by too much experience? Why then, when it comes to political views, particularly those of Arab Americans, should artists and citizens discount our own? The Arab American filmmaker Vicky Moufawad-Paul helped clarify this feeling in a panel on her autobiographical film work, brilliantly taking the feminist rallying call and flipping it on its head: “The political” she stated firmly, “is personal.” This statement is very empowering for artists engaged in political creation. For at some level all art appeals to the personal—if not in its subject matter, then in the response it elicits from its viewer, reader, audience member, or listener. And, if this personal place is where politics are formed, then by reaching it art has the power to raise deep questions and create dialogue on how we experience the world.

Personal Storytelling Throughout my own creative life I have gravitated in my writing and collaborative work toward theater that embraces the personal connection between performer and audience. The kind of theater I love to create follows in the tradition of Anna Deavere Smith, Spalding Grey, and the vanguard of feminist solo performers rather than our conventional ideas of Broadway plays. I look directly at my audience at many points in my work, and while conventional theater often asks the actor to talk to a fictional person and the audience to witness that dialogue, my work centers on the fact that it is the audience to whom I am speaking, and with whom I want to share my story. My first play, ISite, is a one-woman show focusing on the cross-cultural experiences of my grandmother, mother, and myself, which traces the theme of living between worlds. It includes scenes based on amalgamations of characters, ones in which I play two or three people in more traditional stagings, and several in which I portray myself or my family at different points in our lives. Between each of these forms, I return to speaking directly to my audience, building to the penultimate scene of ISite entitled “Courage Under Fire,” which

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Finding Our Voice: The Politics of the Personal in Arab American Theater

presents the core of the play’s conflict between my Arab and American worlds. My direct address to the audience accounts for the scene’s prime impact as I invite them to confront this conflict with me as both listeners and witnesses. Below is an excerpt from the middle of the scene, where I describe life in Baghdad as the child of a U.S. diplomat posted there during the Iran-Iraq War.

Excerpt from ISite (©1998, Leila Buck) Despite the…uniqueness…of life in Baghdad, we were very lucky. Wartime food shortages weren’t really a problem, because we had Jassem. The miracle worker. Jassem was our sixty-year-old cook, who had worked for many a diplomat before us and could make a tasty meal out of just about anything—or nothing, which was often the case. He was the only man in his family not dead or at war and his job with us supported all his sisters, daughters and grandchildren. I can remember playing spy and peeking in on him in the kitchen. I can still see his frail body, not much bigger than mine at the time, hunched over a bowl of nothing, making the best with whatever he was given. He was very kind to me. One of the few Iraqis we knew who smiled. We used to get a scud about once a month before it got worse and I was evacuated. They all blur together after a while, but one memory has stayed with me. I was home with the babysitter, sitting on a bed reading, when I heard the double thud: (The sound of two thuds. She puts her head on her knees, hands over her neck in air-raid stance until the sounds are gone.) It makes two—one when it lands, and one when it explodes. And I knew the routine: If you heard it, you were alive. People usually die from flying glass, not from the actual impact, and we had Mylar on our windows to keep them from shattering. So I just got up and checked them for damage.

(As she says this, she stands purposefully and strides toward the “window” then stops in her tracks at what she sees.) The window I’d been sitting by had one long crack running all the way down.

(Shaking it off, moving as if to the roof) Next I went onto the roof like I’d watched my dad do to see where the cloud was coming from (returning) and went back to quiet the babysitter, who was in hysterics by the door. I remember mostly feeling calm. I must have been in shock, because it wasn’t until half an hour later when the phone lines were working and my parents called that I heard in their voices how close we had come. Death is part of life in Baghdad. Maybe that’s why no one smiles.

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(Change of pace: She moves to the suitcase, packs it up as she speaks and moves with it to sit on the bench.) The next scud I remember is from a different war. And this time the missiles are ours. And I’m watching them land from the safety of my living room in Canada at age thirteen. (She sits as if watching the TV while she speaks.) As the explosion bursts over Baghdad like…fireworks on the Fourth of July…I recognize the target. It’s the guard tower that stood less than six blocks from my house. (Rising from her seat in anger, to the television) Military target?! That’s the Mansour district, Norm. People live there! I know because I did. We passed that tower every day on the way to and from school and I’m watching my country blow it to bits on CNN?!! And all I can think about are my neighbors: The family that found our dog Pepper when she was lost, fed her oranges and spoiled her for days. And the man who took down license plates for the police at the bus stop on the corner. And the muezzin who called us five times a day from the mosque across the street. But really…all I see is Jassem. And I wonder if he’s still there—standing over a bowl of leftover promises. And I wonder…if he heard it. Like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

(After a moment, she sits back on the bench as if in a movie theater while she speaks.) A few years later I’m watching the movie Courage Under Fire: Meg Ryan, Denzel Washington…I didn’t even know it was about the Gulf War. Surprise!! (As if seeing this image again for the first time.) There it is again. My tower. Just blown away as backdrop to the tragic friendly fire deaths of what, two Americans? Three? Never mind the hundreds of Iraqis scattered across the battlefield, two Americans died, let’s make a movie! (In sweet but ill-informed woman’s voice) “Everybody knows those Eye-rackees hate us any way, I saw the demonstrations on TV.” Everybody else is crying over Meg and her beautiful blond daughter. And it’s the strangest feeling to sit in that theater surrounded by people crying just like me and realize we are mourning different people. That day my parents told me that the tower I remember so well, wasn’t a guard tower. It was a torture tower: The Fingernail Palace, in sick expatriate humor, where the government put those who refused to participate in the “spontaneous demonstrations” against the U.S. so thoroughly covered on CNN. And I think of Jassem and his family struggling somewhere between food shortages and Saddam and the hard-line solutions of American politicians…and all I can say is that we don’t know the first thing about real courage under fire.

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Finding Our Voice: The Politics of the Personal in Arab American Theater

This piece is in many ways the most directly political part of my play. The response to it over the years has deepened my conviction that theater which combines the personal and political can be a powerful tool for social and political change. I’ve been performing ISite since 1998, before and after 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, at conferences, universities, and schools across the U.S. and around the world. My audiences are schoolchildren, corporate consultants, scholars, military families, war veterans, businesspeople, Republicans, people in small towns, Israelis, those who say quite openly they have never seen an Arab except on TV or thought “they all wore the veil,” and more. I have discussions after every show and leave a book out for comments people don’t want to make in person. After numerous conversations with those who see the show and those I meet in transit, I have found that when faced with a live human being, people are actually very open to learning about the world. As the audience is my only partner on stage I am keenly aware of their reactions to my work. I have witnessed their faces, body language, and words shifting as they listen and respond to my story. In eight years of doing this piece across this country and abroad I have never had anyone attempt to refute the truth or importance of anything that I share. On the contrary, every audience thanks me effusively for my work and for the perspective it showed them; a perspective many of them never realized existed. Personal storytelling is doubly powerful because the skeptic is confronted with not just a real person, but an eyewitness—someone who can say “not only did this really happen—it happened to me.” It is far easier to argue with a list of statistics or historical facts than to reject or ignore a human being. The fact that that person is sharing their experience directly with the audience transcends most intellectual argument and allows for a connection based in the experiences and emotions that form the common thread of our lives.

Other Voices: The Politics of Juxtaposition Even the most brilliant thinkers are not always able to articulate their ideas in a way that moves their listeners. This is the gift of performers—and, I believe, a responsibility: To give voice to those who are not heard and share their voices with those who would not otherwise hear them.

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In helping to found and sustain Nibras, New York’s Arab-American Theater Collective, I have learned a lot about incorporating multiple voices. First founded before 9/11, the collective was spurred by that day to help illuminate the depth and breadth of what it meant to be Arab in a post-9/11 America. So we sought out other perspectives than our own: In creating our debut piece Sajjil (Record), we conducted and transcribed interviews with both Arabs and nonArabs, focusing on their experiences and perceptions of what it is to be Arab in America. In order to channel our subjects most dynamically we performed their words in the style pioneered by Anna Deavere Smith and expanded to group performance by the Tectonic Theater Project’s Laramie Project. This is a process of staying true not only to what our subjects said but exactly how they said it, with every um, swallow, and clearing of the throat included to respect and represent each unique voice, both literally and figuratively. Because of the power of this medium, we created distinct Sajjil scripts tailored to different subjects and audiences, using varying sections of the rich material we had found. Below is an excerpt of a dialogue I edited for a Theaters Against the War reading that Nibras participated in at Chashama, a storefront theater where we sat in the window while our words were projected to the host of strangers passing through the crush of Times Square. I chose this excerpt to demonstrate the dialogue that can be created in editing between those interviewed, who have never met and whose views may seem to be in opposition to one another. In this case they are Alan, a white Anglo-Saxon midwesterner I met on a plane, Reem, an artist in her twenties raised by Egyptian parents in the United States, and Nisreen, a U.N. employee in her thirties, all interviewed in completely different times and places. I have left the transcriptions as they were spoken in order to show the character that is conveyed in the details of speech—how the pace and rhythm of a person’s words and the pauses between them can often convey as much as the words themselves. Their voices are juxtaposed against one another in a conversation that exists only in the space of the performance and would not exist otherwise.

Excerpt from Sajjil (“Record”) (script for Theaters Against the War) ALAN: I have a…I have one question abou, I’ve THOUGHT about though an…Uh. You have a friend that wears the…(makes gesture to cover his head, indicating the hijab)… REEM: I wasn’t raised…wearing it? Um…my parents were very libral. But about…I think about, four and a half years ago, I just decided to start wearing it

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Finding Our Voice: The Politics of the Personal in Arab American Theater on my own. My mother hadn’t worn it. You know it was just a decision I made. Kind of shocked everybody (laughs). My parents and my friends you know like…they…no one thought it would stick they thought it wouldn’t last but….yeah, I was convinced. That it was the right thing to do. ALAN: O.K. Um. (pause) She does that ‘cause she wants to…you know…maintain her identity and, and so forth. Um. Inuh…the way everything is right now, has it become more of a….matter of pride, or…in yer face, or…why…. NISREEN: I see it, I see it applying to me, uhm, how…all of a sudden I’m going to assert my being a Muslim. And I’m not somebody who ever believed or, ever practiced, or ever, uhm, thought that when I would say what represents my identity I would start by saying I’m a Mooslim. But no! It’s uh, the Eid was lahst week and, I had to make it a point to say it’s the Eid and, uhm, you know we’re celebrating and, uh, of course I didn’t fahst awl through Ramadan but (chuckles) nonetheless, it was impORtant to me.

This form of presenting the personal is a form of theatrical journalism: The distance from the characters’ experiences appeals to the desire for objectivity because it is not the actors’ stories being portrayed. But regardless of the audience’s perception, this form remains a subjective one. As one of two editors of Sajjil, I learned that although we were presenting others’ words, by choosing which sections to include, and where to place them, we were creating our own story from the themes found in theirs. To do this objectively was impossible, for there is an inevitable politics to the juxtaposition of contradictory voices, or the pairing of those that echo one another to strengthen an argument or thought. Depending on who edited each draft, its themes and focus might change completely. This form of editing as writing allows one, as shown in the conversation formed between Nisreen, Reem, and Alan, to create a dialogue between people who would never have met in person, or who, if they had, would most likely not have expressed themselves with such honesty or directness. This juxtaposition creates another voice—one that is personal in a collective sense. It lives in the spaces between their words—raising questions, without settling on answers. Most importantly, it allows the audience to become the final creator, to leave still thinking, forming a crucial piece of the narrative by bringing those questions out of the theater and into their lives.

Nisaa’: Finding Our Voice From the experience of editing and performing Sajjil and working with Nibras and other companies to create various works over the years, I have come to

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appreciate the power of collaboration. It challenges us as artists to create work that explores, both in process and product, the complexity of our views from multiple perspectives. In addition, collaboration broadens the range of the personal, both in the number of voices represented in the work and the number of minds and hearts creating it. My latest project grew out of this belief in the power of multiple voices. Recently I became frustrated by the scarcity of interesting roles in theater and film for the many talented Arab American women I know. While we were all auditioning one week for the same two roles, I wished that instead of competing we could be working together to create more work that expressed the many facets of being an Arab or Arab American woman. So when Nibras was asked to perform at a conference on free speech at Princeton but no one else was available to perform, I sent out an email to over fifty Arab and Arab American women both here and in the Arab world. I invited them to discuss what free speech means to us and what we want to say about it. I called the email list Nisaa’ (“women” in Arabic), and eight women, both Arab and non-Arab, became its core, with several others emailing or calling in their thoughts when they couldn’t attend meetings. We began meeting regularly to brainstorm and discuss a variety of topics along the spectrum from personal to political. The issue that resonated most for the group was representation. Each of us had been asked in various settings to explain not only our own lives, fields, or perspectives but also those of “Arab women.” This predicament is one common to many immigrant and minority communities in this country who have been pressured to speak for their entire culture, either explicitly or simply by being the only “token” present. It is useful to look at the history of those groups and the progression of their artistic communities in addressing our own development as Arab American artists and activists. As experienced by other minority groups before us, and today more than ever by Arabs, the media spotlight on “hot-button” communities is often a double-edged sword. This attention, while providing an opportunity for recognition and understanding, is largely filtered through the lens of sensationalism. While more people are being exposed to images or stories involving the particular group than ever before, many if not most of these are highly negative and stereotypical. This places an enormous burden on artists, whose work is often asked to meet a myriad of political expectations. In the case of Arab Americans, Arab audiences are hungry for positive portrayals to balance the media; nonArabs may see negative or even questionable characteristics as confirmation of

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Finding Our Voice: The Politics of the Personal in Arab American Theater

those existing stereotypes. In this sense, both groups often place upon one story, character, or artist the burden of representing an entire people. So the questions began: Which stories do we choose to tell? What if anything is our responsibility in telling them? The women of Nisaa’ ultimately decided to create a piece about this burden of representation. Inspired by our own experiences, we improvised an exaggerated, humorous version of the many panels on which we’d been asked to be all things to all people. Central to the concept was the premise that neither the Arab nor the non-Arab side is totally “good” or “evil,” innocent or guilty. Each group has a representative who attempts to engage in real dialogue and someone trying to twist or suppress it. We also agreed to include a section that would confront the stereotypes thrust upon us by responding, once and for all, to some of the questions we’re tired of being asked, and sharing what we always wanted to answer. As we negotiated the structure of the piece, we found our process mirroring its content: In trying to show how impossible it is to encapsulate Arab American women, we were also inevitably deciding on certain aspects of those women’s experiences to put forward. Just as there were a multitude of different perspectives to present, there was a range of perspectives as to how to present them. We argued about whether the moderator should have an Arab accent or not and what each choice signified. One person felt that we were being apologists by having the Arab moderator squelching the Arab American panelist’s free speech—that setting up the moderator and panelist in this way made it out to be good Arab, bad Arab. The non-Arab woman felt uncomfortable portraying a pushy non-Arab reporter. It was disconcerting to put forth images that, by playing with stereotypes, seemed dangerously close to reinforcing them. This dialogue and its contradictions became the basis of the work. With Nisaa’ we found ourselves creating a work-in-progress based on our own experiences, rather than the words of others. Thus, it became a third form of the personal as political—sharing one another’s own stories in a partially fictionalized form. In each meeting, we were engaged in what we ultimately hoped to bring to our audience—the process of defining what makes us Arab American women and which aspects of that complex identity we choose to share with the world. Below is an excerpt, which highlights the shift from manipulated expression to the women’s own words. The Journalist and Audience Member B are nonArabs, the Moderator is an Arab American raised in the Arab world who came here as an adult, and the Panelist is an Arab American born and raised here. The tone of the piece is highly tongue-in-cheek throughout the mock panel, which is

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set up as a real one until it unravels, bringing the audience with the Panelist on a journey from what they think they have agreed to participate in to something entirely different.

Excerpt from The Panel Written by Leila Buck and Rania Khalil with Sarena Kennedy and Brook Wilensky-Lanford. Created by the Nisaa’ Arab American Women’s Collective: Sarah Abdullah, Yasmine Ahmed, Leila Buck, Maha Chehlaoui, Maysoun Freij, Sarena Kennedy, Rania Kahlil, Sahdia Marji, and Brook Wilensky-Lanford. JOURNALIST (without waiting to be called on): Yes, Hi, I’m Abby Newman from the New York Post. MODERATOR (delighted there is press in attendance): Yes—wow—welcome. JOURNALIST: Thank you. My question is, we’ve heard a lot lately about the treatment of women in Iraq—sharia law being written into the constitution, women afraid to leave their homes—how are Iraqi women coping? PANELIST: I’m Egyptian (pause). MODERATOR: Yes, em…What does this have to do with her puppets? JOURNALIST: Well, what I’m curious about is how can Arab women have any agency when they’re forced to wear the veil and (makes gesture over face) cover themselves up? PANELIST (innocently): Well, I don’t think all women who wear the veil are forced to wear the veil…Anyway, can’t they work with their veil on? (looks to moderator for help) MODERATOR: Perhaps I can answer this? First of all, are you referring to the veil (making “veil” gesture over nose/mouth), which you never see in Lebanon (unless it’s the Khaleejees…)? Or the headscarf? (journalist indicates the latter). OK, that is called the hijab, and it is an expression of modesty and direct contact with God! So it does not interfere with anyone’s (searches for the right word) “agency,” OK? JOURNALIST: So you’re not a Muslim?

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Finding Our Voice: The Politics of the Personal in Arab American Theater PANELIST: I’m a Muslim by inheritance. JOURNALIST: But you don’t cover your head? PANELIST: (makes “um, duh” gesture with her finger to her uncovered hair) MODERATOR (trying to save it): As you see, some Muslim women choose to cover, others like Salwa do not. JOURNALIST: But that’s because she lives here. If you were in your own country it would be different… PANELIST: I’m in my own country. JOURNALIST: Well, that wasn’t really clear but okay, so you are more American—I mean you do have one ultimate loyalty. PANELIST: Yes, to my art. MODERATOR:Yes, Let’s take another question about Salwa’s art—(B raises hand, journalist calls on her). AUDIENCE MEMBER B: Yes, thank you. Salwa—I actually studied puppetry myself in Bali, and I know it’s a global tradition with roots in Indonesia. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit more about the role of puppetry in Egypt today and how it intersects with….

(Panelist and Moderator are delighted at this genuine question. Panelist starts to answer although moderator is still totally bewildered regarding puppetry.) PANELIST: You know it’s interesting the way the tradition has shifted…(speaking simultaneously with the journalist, who is now cutting her off) JOURNALIST: Well, speaking of Indonesia, what about the recent resurgence of the veil in the Middle East, which is often linked to a rise in fundamentalism— Why do you think that is? PANELIST: You know, my object puppets have no veils.

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MODERATOR: Yes, I’d like to return to this question of puppetry in Eygpt…would you say…. JOURNALIST (interrupting, trying to make the point that women ARE oppressed in the Middle East): Yes, which brings me to my next question—what about female genital mutilation? Has anyone in your family experienced that?

(There’s a pause as panelist and moderator take in this question from out of left field). MODERATOR: Um. No?

The Nisaa’ project was very much about us finding our own voice. This poem from later in the piece by a woman who had never read her writing in front of anyone speaks to the heart of much of our work:

#5 You told me that you didn’t see me as Arab, that I was “culturally white,” I didn’t have a response when you said this but now I do: I’ve been called a Twinkie before for not being “Arab” enough, you know, yellow on the outside and white in the center. Honey, I’m devil’s food cake, rich and dark and sinful on the inside even though my frosting’s light and vanilla. Or maybe I’m like the tapioca in bubble tea, darker than the rest and strange if you’ve never tried it before… floating in a sea of milky white with others like me. Maybe I’m more like baklawa… appears delicate and light and syrupy but really so heavy that you can only enjoy it a little at a time. The truth is most of the time I feel like upside down pineapple cake… Everything comes down to a golden ring surrounding a cherry hidden at the bottom. Flip it upside down, right side up, There’s no ring and no cherry either. My mouth waters as I write this…

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Finding Our Voice: The Politics of the Personal in Arab American Theater

Tears stream down my cheeks when I think about what all this really means… Habibi, I rarely take a bite without being concerned about the size of my thighs, As I look at the magazine lies of the women’s bodies whom you prefer, They never show anyone like me. One unique aspect of the Panel piece, as we came to call the result of our collaboration, was that half of those working to create and present it were not performers, and most had never shared their own stories on stage. In this sense, the process actually mirrored the product as the form mirrored its content: It is a piece about Arab American women taking charge of how they are represented. Through creating and performing the piece, several of the women involved discovered a tool they had not known or shared before, and with it were able to present their identities as they experienced them, both literally and figuratively in their own voice.

And Now? Whether personal, collective, documentary or a combination, most good political theater presents more questions than answers. Some of these recur frequently in creating work about Arab Americans: *How do we go about creating work that truly effects change? *Are we truly expressing ourselves if the form or force of our art keeps our message from being heard? *Is it political to simply present an Arab woman in a hijab speaking her mind or a Palestinian character doing anything but a terrorist act? *Does our work have to address politics directly in order to be considered political or to shape the politics of our world? Each artist I know approaches these questions and their responses to them differently. The most powerful tools we have as artists are our voices—literally and figuratively—and the connections and contradictions between them. How and when we use those voices is our choice—what matters is that we raise them.

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Acknowledgments ISite was created with the editorial and directorial support of Timothy Raphael and Brook Wilensky-Lanford, as well as a team of designers at Wesleyan University. Several excerpts from the show are direct quotations from Jeanne Lababidi, my amazing grandmother—Teta. The creators of Sajjil (“Record”) were: Maha Chehlaoui (director, creator), James Asher, Omar Koury, Najla Said, Afaf Shawwa (performers, creators, interviewers), Leila Buck, Omar Metwally (performers, creators, interviewers, editors), and Rana Kazkaz (Nibras member). Creators of The Panel were: Brook Wilensky-Lanford (editor, creator, performer), Sarena Kennedy (creator, performer), Rania Khalil (editor, creator, performer), Leila Buck (artistic director, creator, performer, writer), Sarah Abdullah (creator, performer, visual artist), Yasmine Ahmed (creator, performer), Shadia Marji (creator, performer), Maysoun Freij (co-creator), and Maha Chehlaoui (director, creator-respondent).

PURISTS AND INNOVATORS: ARAB MUSICIANS IN AMERICA KARIM NAGI

For the past eleven years, I have performed various styles of Arab music and dance on a professional level, in over thirty of the fifty American states. I have met and worked with dozens of Arab and Arab American musicians and have performed for countless Arab diaspora and American communities. During this process, I have witnessed a clear trend towards a purist approach to Arab music. I have not witnessed this same trend among Arab performers who live and perform in the Arab world; the professional Arab performers remaining in their homeland have a more innovative, alternative approach to their work. This observation has prompted me to examine the very different motivations and roles of each group: the Arab American and the homeland Arab performer. Arab American musicians are understudied and mysterious. Many cultural and professional dynamics mold their approach and productivity. In order to understand their motivations and processes in comparison to musicians in the Arab world, it is necessary first to make some general observations about art in the diaspora and how the melding of American and Arab cultures may yield a distinctive result.

American Diversity and the Musician America is a country of great diversity, with many influences from a variety of ethnic groups. Innumerable political orientations and religious beliefs are represented. This multiplicity of choices creates an environment that encourages diverse styles, innovation, and uniqueness, particularly for artists. In this environment the concept of innovation takes on new meanings— one can innovate within an existing genres or subgenre (an example of this would be Eminem, a non-Afro-American rapper within the very commercial industry of hip-hop), or one can be a mainstream artist who pursues a non-commercial, esoteric genre (such as Kenny G performing catchy melodic music within the

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typically rebellious field of jazz). Either way, if an artist is not offering a new interpretation on some level, or at least original material, his or her success would be limited. For artists who come to America from a foreign country, this same dynamic persists. The most important aspect of this dynamic is in the audience. Perhaps for the first time, these ethnic/foreign artists perform for audiences containing multiple ethnicities, including groups who do not understand the language or culture of that artist. Also, within their own ethnic group, these artists find themselves performing for social groups or classes that are different from those they would perform for back in their home countries (such as a folkloric Punjabi Bhangra group performing for high-class cosmopolitan Indians from Bombay). One would expect that this “diversity factor” would inspire foreign artists to rethink their traditional art form as they perform in a new context. Foreign artists are also constantly exposed to the tastes and preferences of other ethnicities, and the general American public, as they encounter and are influenced by artists from other countries and ethnic groups. Hybrid, fusion, and collaborative endeavors between groups and styles are naturally inevitable. Certain ethnic groups may be more established in America and have more developed audiences and programs. For example, Armenian American musicians are renowned for their knowledge of Armenian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, general Mediterranean, and even American jazz repertoires. This is a function of collaboration with other ethnic artists and the need to please a diverse audience. The audience shapes the product of the ethnic artist more than any other factor. Defining questions include: Is the artist’s audience exclusively of the same ethnic group? Are the members of that audience new immigrants, or are they descendants of immigrants? Is the audience composed of mixed groups, including the artist’s own national group? And, most importantly, is the audience made up entirely of Americans who are motivated by ethnomusicological study or curiosity about the exotic? For example, there are many African music and dance groups who perform on the “education circuit” and who may remain entirely unknown by any immigrant African communities. This is generally true if the ethnic artist performs a more historical or traditional style that is interesting to erudite and purist enthusiasts but is not well known to individuals from the country of origin. Also, onstage, in front of an American audience, an artist may perform a genre that is usually partaken in, rather than observed, such as the “sama” of the Whirling Dervishes, which is historically a religious ritual rather than a stage show.

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Purists and Innovators: Arab Musicians in America

So the diversity factor along with the audience will help determine the creative environment for the ethnic artist. The purist is one who recreates and maintains a traditional archetype of style. Such artists are also referred to as traditionalist, essentialist, or even revivalist, delivering their art as their ancestors have, within a known framework and aesthetic. Variety comes from within the repertoire, new compositions and the constant introduction of new voices and talents occurring within the “essential” aesthetic and practice. An innovator, on the other hand, is an ethnic artist who re-imagines their inherited genre in a new context. Innovators may use the ethnic repertoire but find new combinations, mixtures, and deliveries. They can also innovate by applying new tools and techniques, in a fashion similar to a painter’s use of computers and software, or use repertoire and material from another tradition and apply it to their own aesthetic, (such as a Russian gypsy musician playing Russian folk music with a “Romani jangle” guitar pattern). I would not define an innovator as someone who entirely adopts a different tradition (such as the Turkish Cypriot Hussein Chalayan who designs primarily European fashion apparel). But rather, using the example of fashion, if a designer used ethnic Turkish motifs with European silhouettes, then that would be a great innovation. The ethnic culture would successfully translate itself into a new form, moving beyond its original identity and audience.

The Purists The vast majority of Arab American musicians are purists. Somehow, the diversity factor has yielded a type of traditionalist dynamic. Or perhaps the Arab American musician has resisted that factor. Either way it is fascinating. Most Arab musicians in America play either traditional or “Top 40” Arab pop music. Playing with varying degrees of talent, most of these musicians acquaint themselves with the popular songs of the last two generations. Generally, professional musicians perform the “classics” and newer pop songs, as well as traditional regional styles, like Lebanese dabke, line-dance music, or Egyptian shaabi, urban music. A smaller, elitist group studies and presents more esoteric, unknown, or underrepresented Arab music, usually modeled after the repertoire of the Syrian classicist Sabah Fakhri, born in 1933. In other words, the majority of Arab American musicians are either mainstream Arab entertainers, or revivalists, both of which belong to the purist category. Although Arab countries have less diversity than America, what is fascinating is that innovation seems to really flourish and diversify among musicians in those countries. There are fewer ethnic groups n Arab countries, many governments remain in power indefinitely, and usually a single religion is dominant. Social

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practices and customs have a huge influence on daily life and conformity in behavior is enforced. Yet, innovative Arab musicians are much more likely to be found in the Arab world. In cities like Cairo, Beirut, Ramallah, and Dubai, you will find many musicians and performers who have expanded their repertoires, re-configured ensemble instrumentation, and devised newer performance approaches. So, do we have to return to the Arab world to find innovation and travel across the ocean to America to find the purists? In the United States, there are many examples of purist and essentialist musical performers. A prominent example is the Kan Zaman ensemble of Los Angeles, California1. Led by Wael Kakish, Kan Zaman has performed classic Arab repertoire for over a decade. Using the “community orchestra” approach, Kan Zaman has been able to assemble a large group of instrumentalists and singers modeled on the national orchestras of Syria and Egypt, as well as the private orchestras of famous Arab singers. Kan Zaman has thus managed to mirror the most powerful image and sound of neoclassical Arab music, the big orchestra. Also from Los Angeles is Dr. Ali Jihad Racy, a prominent authority on traditional Arabic music. He has authored several books, the latest of which is entitled, Making Music in the Arab World.2. He has also composed many original musical pieces that utilize the classical forms used for generations by the great Arab composers. A tenured professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA, Racy has trained and advised numerous students in the study, performance, and preservation of Arabic music. He is a revivalist and preserver of traditional culture in every sense of the word. Another hero in cultural music in the United States is Syrian immigrant Yousseff Kassab. For over thirty years, Yousseff has practiced the art of tarab (enchantment). His mastery of musical delivery and vocal improvisation has served to preserve this form as a living museum piece. He has meticulously studied and documented the great musical and vocal performances of Egyptian and Aleppan masters and has authored and self-published several transcription books. Kassab mastered the oud3 (fret-less lute) and qanun (lap-harp), but after being plagued by arthritis, he focused on singing, for which he is unmatched. His vocal approach evokes that of Abdel Wahhab, the great Egyptian singer and composer whose career spanned the years from the 1930s to the 1970s. When recorded on a basic cassette, Yousseff’s voice is reminiscent of those classic recordings of the 1940s. Although he has not returned to Syria in over thirty years, his commitment to traditional Arabic music has not changed. He has performed innumerable nightclub sets, as well as concerts at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

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Purists and Innovators: Arab Musicians in America

Some younger Arab musicians are also focused on preserving a specific tradition within the Arab lexicon. Amir El Saffar started his career as a jazz trumpet player and later became infatuated with Iraqi maqam. He set out to learn the santur and vocal performance and is now the only performer in America who has a purely Baghdadi maqam repertoire. Slightly more diverse, but equally orthodox is the Sharq Arabic Music Ensemble from Boston.4 They specialize in Andalusian muwashahaat and Egyptian adwar. They use the traditional five-piece takht ensemble and even enjoy dressing up in tarabeesh5. Neither El Saffar nor the Sharq Ensemble performs as frequently as more danceand pop-oriented groups. Both would go to great lengths to avoid performing in a nightclub. When speaking of music for nightclubs, dance parties, and hafalat (the Arabic word means both “party” and “concert”), the most prolific artists are the Lammam Brothers of San Francisco. Georges (violin), Elias (accordion), and Antoine (percussion) are all veterans of the Lebanese music scene. Led by the middle brother, Georges, they pride themselves in knowing the repertoire, from intro to dynamic endings and all the details in between. They specialize in dance music and are adored by professional dance soloists for their sensitivity and accuracy. They keep up with new popular songs and deliver the classics as well. Most Arab musical groups in the United States consist of singers and back-up session instrumentalists. These groups often utilize keyboardists who emulate the different instruments, play bass, and never have to tune an actual instrument. Although the electronic keyboard, or “org,” was introduced to the music in the Arab world back in the 1970s as an innovation, it has evolved into a standard and conventional component with near ubiquity. The bands are also supported by one to three percussionists who create a thick and energetic sound that inspires dancing. These singer-based groups perform Hafalaat that attract primarily Arab expatriates, often families, and a handful of non-Arab, mostly female, dance enthusiasts. The goal of the singer is to entertain the audience by performing familiar songs for them to sing along with or dance to, much like American cover bands. The singers will often focus on specific regional music in order to indulge the nationality of the patrons, such as dabke for the Lebanese and khaliji for the Saudis. One singer/violinist who excels at this is Rachid Halihal from Boulder, Colorado, a Moroccan performer who has a set of songs geared toward each Arab nationality. He even does his best to emulate the regional dialect in his singing.

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The Innovators Traditionalism, purism, and revivalism are valiant and respectable ideals. They serve to preserve a tradition and practice. They perpetuate an ethnic culture in a foreign country, helping to bind a community, as well as educating outsiders. But purism can be balanced with innovation; artists can redefine their culture through the art they create. Despite America’s diversity and the Arab world’s conservatism and relative homogeneity, most musical innovators are found back in the homeland, rather than among Arab Americans. In the context of music, innovation can be identified in several ways, one of which is the introduction of new instruments to the Arab ensemble. Pioneers in this effort include Egyptian musicians Samir Saroor, with the saxophone, and Sami el-Babbly, with the trumpet, who brought these purely Western instruments into Arab music performance. Both had to discover and develop new techniques appropriate to the maqam6, the Arabic musical system that relies on microtonal increments and implied modulations. They also had to deliver the melodies in an “eastern way” with the typical inflection and persona. More recent contributors include Omar Khairat on the piano and Nesma Abdel-Aziz with the marimba. Unlike Saroor and el-Babbly, Khairat and Abdel-Aziz chose instruments that cannot achieve the microtonal maqam system due to the instruments’ construction. However, both adapted the repertoire and surrounded themselves with Arab instrumentalists to achieve the eastern motifs. Omar Khairat is immensely popular in Egypt as a composer, recording artist, and performer. The introduction of new repertoire and composition is among the most noticeable acts of innovation. Often this includes the hybridization of or fusion with a non-Arab musical genre such as jazz, rock, or neoclassical. Lebanon has produced the two most widely known and prolific innovators in this category, Ziad Rahbani and Marcel Khalife. Rahbani, the son of Lebanon’s most famous singer, Fayrouz, has managed to compose and perform in both traditional and progressive formats. He is considered responsible for the first blending of Arabic music and jazz on a popular scale. Khalife also uses the external formats of jazz, classical, and Western folk music. He has composed in multiple genres and often finds new structures for vocal songs and lyrical delivery. He is well known for his politically informed vocal music, as well as his cutting-edge instrumental compositions. A final area of innovation among Arab musicians in the Arab world is in the context and presentation of the music. Musicians, rather than blending genres,

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can actually present their content within a different musical format. For instance, a DJ from Lebanon, Said Mrad, has recorded many famous Arabic songs and used them in the techno and dance-electronica genres. He recreates the original melodies and delivers them using the electronic pulses, rhythms, sonic soundscapes, and structural repetition of modern dance music. Countless people have followed this example, and the vast majority of these musicians are formulaic. Nearly as prolific an area of innovation would be the Arab rap movement,7 whose musicians come primarily from areas plagued by political instability and war, such as Palestine, Lebanon, and Algeria. The Arab rappers have used this largely textual genre to deliver socially poignant and serious lyrics. Of note are the Palestinian group DAM and the Lebanese groups Aks eSayr and Ashekman. For both the techno/electronica and rap categories, the innovation comes in the crossover. In neither category have Arab musicians yet reached the creative pinnacle of the genre itself. It must be noted that there is also a small trend in the Arab world toward traditionalism and revival. There are select artists, aside from government sponsored folkloric entertainment groups, who present older styles and repertoire. The most visible may be the Al-Kindi Ensemble (led by Jallaledine Weis) in Aleppo, Syria, and Qithara (led by Alfred Gamil) in Cairo. Both groups use traditional instrument configurations and resurrections of forgotten songs. All revivalist groups in their home countries are going against the modern music and pop culture trends, appealing more to an older generation. So in a sense, they, too, are innovators since they are fighting norms and currents. An audience member would view their performance, with the instruments and older language, as unique and out-of-the ordinary. To be fair, there are certainly a handful of musical groups and performers in the United States who have gone beyond tradition. These musicians, who have commercially released recordings, nearly all started out as purists and then rebounded toward innovation. The quintessential performer of Arab jazz fusion is also the quintessential performer of traditional Arabic music: Simon Shaheen.8 A Palestinian American, Shaheen has mastered the oud and the violin. He has memorized vast amounts of traditional repertoire and has performed it on America’s most prestigious stages. Recently, he created a group called Qantara, which is composed of both Arab and American jazz musicians and performs original compositions. Their music highlights Arab instruments, as they play fast and intricate contemporary jazz melodies and passages, with much improvisation. An associate of Shaheen, Bassam Saba, has numerous jazz fusion projects and appearances to his credit. He has delved heavily into the field of international improvised music and has become quite prolific, albeit as

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an accompanist to other artists. Some other groups with traditional backgrounds have followed Shaheen’s Qantara example, including Tareq Abboushi’s Shusmo,9 and Kareem Roustom’s El-Zafeer Ensemble.10 Although these musicians are among the top of the Arab traditionalist field, they have yet to rise to the forefront of the general jazz category. There are also Arab American rappers, the pioneer being the Iron Sheik, Will Youmans, who is also a published writer and activist. He has done much to propel Arab American rap’s popularity among Arabs. Others include the “Free the P”11 consortium that features multiple artists and employs hip-hop as an activist platform. But when all is said and done, these innovative examples are a rather small percentage of Arab American musicians; most Arab American musicians are recreating traditional art as purists.

Conclusion: Toward Purism and Innovation There are various explanations as to why Arab musicians remain faithful to a stricter tradition here in America, despite the diversity factor or the audience. The foremost reason lies in the needs of their essential patrons. The Arab daspora in the United States has nostalgic longings. They wish to remember their homeland and relive the memories of their parents or themselves. They want to come together to celebrate in the way they would have done in their home country. As a result, they require that their entertainers perform classic music that resounds with their heritage. They wish to sing along, dance, and enjoy together the music that is popular, loved, and remembered. This need is essential to the Arab American audience and surpasses the need to witness original work or to promote the progressive ideas of experimental artists. In turn, the musicians respond to this need, often by choice, since it is a very natural desire for artists to please their audience.12 The other primary patron for the Arab musician or for any ethnic musician is the anthropologically-minded and culturally curious audience, often affiliated with an educational facility or multicultural organization. These patrons are interested in presenting and witnessing pure and uncorrupted representations of traditional art. They are purists and remain steadfastly focused on perpetuating the essential versions of traditional music from an exotic culture. Their greatest critique of a performer would be that she or he is “unauthentic;” thus, Arab performers for these audiences must convey absolute authenticity, which translates into being strictly traditional. Another very compelling motivation towards purism is the need for identity

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assertion. It seems likely that Arab American musicians feel pressure to preserve their culture and appear “legitimate” to their Arab counterparts. They want to prove to their family, the Arab community, and fellow Arabs back in their home countries that they have retained their Arab identity. Especially since 9/11, Arab Americans also feel the need to assert their identity to the general American public as well. Many felt that their identity and reputation were in peril, because of American fears and the backlash toward Arabs. Most Arab Americans do not want to hide or obscure their identity in order to appease this paranoia, nor do they want to be represented by extremists. Performing traditional art serves as both identity assertion, as well as a public relations effort to define their image outside of a media- based depiction. Arabs living in Arab countries do not seem to have this same dynamic. Rarely does an Arab within an Arab country, surrounded by Arabs, have to prove their authenticity. Unlike Arab Americans, Arabs in the homeland would have to make a major effort to separate themselves from the culture, since the society will always hold them accountable to the conventional norms and standards. The audience also determines the climate for innovation. What is exotic in America may be mundane in the Arab world. Because of a saturated marketplace and an overwhelming number of musical entertainers, especially in countries like Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco, artists try to differentiate themselves. A musician must find ways of getting noticed and recognized among the crowd. By innovating, whether through a new instrument combination, fusion with other genres, or a new context and presentation, the artists distinguish themselves from the multitude of traditional performers. The Arab audience is also hungry for new music, songs, and performers. The innovative performer allows both the audience and the artist to feel they belong to an evolving society. The Arab world is the heart, which pumps blood outward to the arteries that connect to the diaspora communities. The trends, whether an innovative impulse or a return to essentials, start in the Arab world and are exported to America. Someday the innovations of the Arab music world will mature into a tradition and will arrive back in America as classic material. All tradition was at one point an innovation that became mainstream. The key to artistic health can be a reciprocal relationship with all the bodily organs. While the heart pumps, it must also receive oxygen from the surrounding environment. Arab Americans have the unique opportunity to define themselves both through, and against, their tradition. Music has an inclusive appeal. It is simultaneously exotic and familiar, bearing great variety within a pervasive system. Arab

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American musicians can use the performing arts to both assert their cultural identity and connect themselves with non-Arabs. This process not only helps maintain their tradition in a foreign land but also helps to advance and develop that same tradition. This “progressive tradition” can develop exponentially within the new opportunities created by American diversity, propelled not by the need to be different, as back in the homeland, but rather the desire to belong to an evolving Arab society.

Notes 1

For more information on this group, please see http://www.kanzaman.org/home.html. A. J. Racy, Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3 For descriptions and photos of the oud and the qanun, see http://www.classicalarabicmusic.com/instruments.htm. 4 The author is a founding member of this group. 5 The tall cylinder hat of Ottoman origin worn by many men in the Arab world up until the 1940s. 6 For a complete explanation and illustration of this uniquely Arabic music system, see http://www.maqamworld.com. 7 For a cataloguing of different Arabic Rap artists, see http://www.arabrap.net. 8 See http://www.simonshaheen.com 9 See http://www.shusmo.com 10 See http:// www.layalimusic.com/index.html 11 See http://www.freethep.com 12 In the most quantifiable sense, the strategic choice of songs by a band often results in a showering of money or a generous tip from the appreciative audience member. 2

ARAB AMERICAN HIP-HOP WILL YOUMANS1

This paper looks at a nascent artistic movement: Arab American hip-hop, which puts forward a fusion of hip-hop culture and Arab or Arab American identity. Through the performers’ names, music, symbols, and political activism, they assert their status as Arab Americans and minorities. It concludes with a look at possibilities for and challenges to its growth.

Introduction to Hip-Hop Hip-hop music was born out of 1970s post-industrial, urban America and the experiences of people struggling within its pockets of destitution. The Bronx borough of New York City, where hip-hop was born, underwent rampant transformations as white flight and economic downturn brought it close to ruin. Out of socioeconomic catastrophe and official neglect, hip-hop sprung up as a major subculture. Its earliest progenitors were mostly African Americans and immigrants from the Caribbean, namely Jamaica and Puerto Rico. What is hip-hop? Hip-hop music is comprised of words over percussion-heavy music called “beats.” It is also called “rap.” Hip-hop as a cultural movement includes elements other than rap music, such as the arts of DJing, break dancing, and graffiti. Activism, beat-boxing (making music with the mouth), fashion, and slang are other aspects of the hip-hop culture, which is fluid and dynamic, yet with contested boundaries. On one hand, “every music is hip-hop” and is “ready to be absorbed” as the Roots’ album Phrenology maintains. On the other hand, purists, as they do with everything, apply a strict formula to what constitutes hip-hop and stick to convention. Hip-hop developed in urban America in a period that was rife with poverty, crime, and the effects of institutionalized racism. The edge of mainstream culture is where creative innovation spawned this new cultural growth. Although part of a recent musical tradition that includes jazz, blues, disco, and its close relative, reggae, rap music departed from these in its heavy reliance on lyricism.2

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Given the speed with which MCs rapped, the format lent itself to verbosity, even at the expense of melody. With the space to say a lot, rappers became musical pundits commenting on their lives and their communities’ issues. Rap, given its form and social context, emerged as a medium for young African Americans and Latinos to voice their political and social frustrations. Songs like Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” exposed life in the American ghetto. As the art form of the subjugated peoples in the United States—those whose stories had little visibility in the mainstream media—hip-hop took on an extra social dimension beyond its entertainment value. Hip-hop journalist Jeff Chang described it as “the voice of the unheard.” Chuck D, from the group Public Enemy, famously called rap “CNN for black people.” Rap captured the predominant frustrations of individuals often derided as violent gang members or insidious drug abusers and evolved intrinsically as protest music for the post– civil rights movement era. Despite rap moving into the mainstream, a vibrant underground scene kept hiphop’s legacy of social consciousness alive. Some mainstream artists like Tupac also expressed a feeling of disaffected rage which matched that of many people in the United States and abroad. Youth in different countries, marginalized because of globalization, also found an avenue for representing their realities and asserting their identities. Rap also gave meaning and a sense of self to many American youth, including Arab Americans. Eventually, rap’s consumers also became musical creators. The miracle of hip-hop is its staying power. Reactionary cultural crusaders opposed it and looked forward to its demise as a fad. Almost three decades later, it is thriving and increasingly complex—with numerous subgenres, styles, and languages. Hip-hop is an industry in and of itself, worth about $1.5 billion a year. With a steady flow of contributions to the Oxford English dictionary, words such as “dis” and “bling bling,” and to American culture at large, it is a predominant form of American music.

Political Complexity Both the hip-hop community and the Arab American community are extremely diverse. There is almost no uniformity in the hip-hop community; its artists range between progressive and regressive, positive and negative. Some vacillate between these poles. Artists can be progressive, as when Kanye West drew attention to the failures of President Bush during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At the same time, too many performers build their careers exploiting

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crass materialism, theatrical violence, and misogyny. (Given the commercial forces that guarantee such voices frequent airplay because of their profitability, outsiders tend to associate rap music with such values. Just because they are given the most corporate backing does not mean they are representative of the art form.) Some, especially moguls like Puff Daddy and Russell Simmons, delve into electoral politics and use hip-hop as an organizing tool for national conferences and getting out the hip-hop vote. Other artists’ political activities include grassroots organizing and solidarity work, such as the Black August political prisoner project, which took Common, Mos Def, and Tony Touch to South Africa. Arab Americans and their political organizations also run across the ideological spectrum. Although Arab Americans largely vote Republican, their political leadership leans Democratic.3 Yet, no other ethnic group gave as much proportionately to support Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in the 2000 election.4 On issues such as U.S. foreign policy, Arab Americans can be united, yet very much divided on other issues. Other similarities between the groups exist. While rappers can be community activists and even offer leadership, some promote negative values and selfdestructive vices. Similarly, while Arab Americans also build coalitions, establishing community centers and integrated religious spaces, some members of the group engage in predatory business practices, profit from the sale of chemically addictive products, and commit insurance fraud. Members of both groups tend to flaunt a level of materialism excessive even for a capitalist society such as the United States. Both rappers and Arabs are subjected to rampant stereotyping in the media, including Hollywood, and both groups are seen irrationally as violent threats against “our” way of life. Emphasizing their respective diversity, in such a context, is a political statement in and of itself. For certain audiences, such elementary assertions are novel, and even controversial. Arab American rap embodies the political diversity of both hip-hop and Arab America. That is, one can observe within the music, business, representation, and lives of this growing group of artists the nuances and complexities of both Arab America and hip-hop culture.

Arab American Hip-Hop versus Arab Americans in Hip-Hop This paper rests on an important conceptual distinction. It is useful to distinguish Arab American Hip-Hop Artists from Arab Americans in Hip-Hop based on the prominence of Arab American identity in the artists’ image and

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music. Arab American hip-hop refers to hip-hop artists who identify as Arab and incorporate that identity into their music or images. They may or may not be political. Their use of Arabic language, symbols, and music to represent who they are may be for political purposes, marketing, or for the sake of personal expression. Significantly, Arab American hip-hop artists give form to a community, a growing Arab American artistic movement, and a subgenre of hip-hop. Arab American hip-hop is a subgenre because it has certain unique traits that make it identifiable as group; however, most artists that make up this category are still underground, despite occasional media exposure. Mainstream entertainment outlets and record companies do not embrace Arab American hiphop; thus it remains independent, underground, and vibrant. On the other hand there are Arab Americans in hip-hop who are simply “flying while Arab,” or under the radar. They are involved in hip-hop but do not assert their identity in blatant ways. In fact, others often assume they are of some other ethnicity. Rather than identifying as part of a new subgenre, they identify only with the broader category of hip-hop. However, this distinction is not a rigid dichotomy. In reality, there exists a spectrum, with different artists expressing their identities to different degrees in various settings. Some MCs for instance may not promote their identity until they realize it is the only way for them to get an audience—identity as a form of currency. For some, their Arab American background only comes out when they get the inevitable question in an interview. Others project it only in their names. Some make it their overall defining raison d’être. Individual identities can fluctuate. As Amartya Sen posits, “the insistence, if only implicitly, on a choiceless singularity of human identity not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable.”5

Hip-Hop and Arab America Hip-hop resonates with young Arab Americans and is popular with younger generations in general. All the hip-hop artists profiled in this essay grew up with hip-hop and feel very much a part of it. One might explain its popularity by drawing parallels with Arabic culture or by looking to other more nebulous social-psychological explanations. For the artists themselves, there are a variety of reasons.

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Why Hip-Hop: The Question of Arab Cultural Influence Arab interest in hip-hop is sometimes explained by the numerous commonalities between hip-hop and Arab spoken-word traditions. In an advertisement for an event in New York City, the group Alwan for the Arts claimed, “Zajal is Arab rap.” Zajal is an exchange of improvised poetry between poets. As a contest of sorts, the poets try to outdo each other. The ad claimed that zajal originated in Al-Andalus (southern Spain) in the ninth century; whatever the truth of this, it is still performed in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and North Africa. Improvisation has an important place in both zajal and hip-hop culture. Free styling, recently represented in the film 8 Mile,6 takes place when MCs ad-lib rap over beats. Crowds award accolades based on an MC’s style, wit, and the number of insults the MC invokes against an opponent or the spectators. Similarly, like the African traditions that gave rise to hip-hop, Arabic music is percussion-heavy and shares a strong emphasis on rhythmic lyricism. Arabic poetry also rests on patterned rhyming. Mawwal, or mawaliya, for example, is folk poetry in the form of four rhyming lines. Saj', or rhymed prose, is another poetic convention. Arab poets compose their material in the same way rappers do, in a fluid style meant for oral recitation. Arabic is a language of rich oral traditions. It includes recitation from the Qur’an and the ahadith, or sayings of the Prophet, and the famous collection of stories known as the Arabian Nights. Two writers claim, “[t]hroughout Africa and the African Diaspora, the ‘man of words’ is regarded with special esteem.”7 Many of the most famous Arabic singers, such as Um Kulthoum and Fayrouz, sang popular poetry. The popularity of modern poetry—that of Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, and others—indicates the continued importance of the spoken word. As Phillip Hitti wrote, No people in the world manifest such enthusiastic admiration for literary expression and are so moved by the word, spoken or written, as the Arabs. Modern audiences in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo can be stirred to the highest degree by the recital of poems, only vaguely comprehended, and by the delivery of orations in the classical tongue, though it be only partially understood. The rhythm, the rhyme, the music, produce on them the effect of what they call “lawful magic” (sihr halal).8

As tempting as this analysis is, it is difficult to balance against the simple fact of hip-hop’s rising popularity across numerous ethnic, national, and racial lines. There may be no greater Arab proclivity towards hip-hop than there is a white,

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East Asian, or Latino one. The cultural similarities are interesting but far from definitive as a reason why rap is popular among young Arabs.

Why Hip-Hop: In Their Own Words Arab Americans producing hip-hop do not generally attribute their interest to unique traits within their cultural backgrounds. Many cannot explain their attraction. On a personal level, the reasons vary from simply liking the music to its low-tech accessibility. Some find hip-hop perfect for self-representation, political expression, or simply for connecting with other communities. For all the Arab American artists, hip-hop just speaks to them. As the producer, Fredwreck said: What first attracted me to it…was the music…and break dancing…when i was a kid, it was some thing fresh and new…and when i first saw someone break dancing…and when i heard the music…it hypnotized me and…it took me in…9

Other artists articulated reasons for their affiliation with hip-hop. Bay Area producer, MC, and member of Rogue State, Excentrik, said he had “always written poetry and songs.”10 Hip-hop was the most accessible music for him. He just needed a mic, beats, and a way to record himself. He first experimented with spoken-word poetry when he was young, and hip-hop was a natural transition. When he was sixteen years old, he was struck by MCs he heard freestyling. He started doing it himself. He taught himself how to play several instruments including the tabla (drum), the guitar, and the oud. Soon, he began producing music for other hip-hop groups. Narcy of the Euphrates, an Iraqi-Canadian crew, expressed his interest in political terms. He found that hip-hop “was a voice that felt oppressed speaking out.” Narcy considers himself and Arabs in general as participants in a shared history, as he reflects here: “From Slavery, to Ghettos to Colonization to Emancipation. Hip-Hop is a blueprint to create a voice and be HEARD! Word Hip-Hop is my tool to build my home that I lost somewhere in the process of immigration and displacement.”11 Narcy also has romantic reasons for being part of the art. He feels a love toward it, and “it loves me back as much as I do.” For some, it is about the benefits of self-expression and self-representation: the act of speaking for the self. Masade, also in Rogue State, felt he could “relate to it more than other music and also just liked it for its creativity and the beats and

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rhythms.” He found it the best way to “express [himself] emotionally, intellectually and spiritually.” He attributes the need to use music as a way to deliver political messages to his seeing “so many people rapping about nothing,” yet rap music is a “way to bring knowledge to Americans who are so sure we are terrorists.”12 Kalamati, a San Francisco-based MC of Palestinian descent, was exposed to hip-hop more than any other form of music. He found himself falling into the music. In school, he would always “freestyle and write rhymes to create the ‘illest’ metaphors.” In his “Middle Eastern culture club” at high school, he performed a song about Palestine. “Since then,” he wrote, “I have been fulfilling that need to represent Palestine through hip-hop.” For him, he is being like other “MCs who talk about where they are from.”13 Another MC of Palestinian heritage, ASH ONE of New Jersey, uses hip-hop for therapy and to build bridges with other peoples. As an Arab American witnessing anti-Arab racism and foreign policy, he “vented [his] frustrations by immersing [himself] in Hip Hop culture where [he] felt the unity among brothers and sisters of all races and religions.” Ash takes pride in his “social consciousness” which comes out in his music. A key experience for him was going to Palestine and, where he “spent two and a half years studying his culture and language.”14

Social and Political Angst—Weapons of Criticism In his groundbreaking work, Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said wrote: The voyage in, then, constitutes an especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work. And that it exists at all is a sign of adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures. No longer do the logos dwell exclusively, as it were, in London and Paris. No longer does history run unilaterally, as Hegel believed, from east to west or from south to north, becoming more sophisticated and developed, less primitive and backward as it goes. Instead, the weapons of criticism have become part of the historical legacy of empire, in which the separations and exclusions of “divide and rule” are erased and surprising new configurations spring up.15

The rapper Excentrik believes strongly that Arab American hip-hop is its own subgenre because its angst is unique; its “social anger is the most complex.” Arab Americans are made to feel they do not belong here, and at the same time they do not belong back home, in the Arab world. He said, “Our nationality is here, but we feel like we’re from somewhere else.” That is the product of “our rampant misrepresentation. Twenty-four seven, we’re known as terrorists.” Hip-

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hop music emerged among the “present absentees” of American society—those who are here, but relegated to invisibility in society’s margins. Given perceptions of who Arabs are and what they do, Arab American hip-hop is precisely a “surprising new configuration,” with the artists partaking in “hybrid cultural work.”16 With identity in flux, the life experience of exile and diaspora fuels Arab American hip-hop. Many Arab American MCs use hip-hop to relate to a larger community in America, to make inroads into an America to which they feel they do not fully belong. An Arab American DJ in Philadelphia named Dirty South Joe related his heritage to the problem of life in exile saying, “I’m halfPalestinian and grew up moving around a lot. I didn’t have any Palestinian friends so I never felt there was one particular ethnic group with which I could identify. It [hip-hop] makes it easier to relate to different kinds of people.”17 Louise Cainkar, a sociologist at Marquette University, found that after September 11 other communities increasingly considered Arab Americans to be “non-white.” Arabs in the suburbs of Chicago “claimed that they were socially and politically excluded, that their children were taught anti-Arab materials in the schools, that they were subject to more frequent police stops than whites, and that their organizations were hounded by federal agents.” She found that Chicago’s Arab Americans adopted a “people of color” identity and built coalitions with the Latino and African American communities.18 Arab American hip-hop artists considered themselves people of color well before September 11, 2001, even if many within their own community disagreed. In a 1997 interview, Def Jam poet Suheir Hammad, the longestserving female columnist at the hip-hop publication Stress magazine, who is considered the “older sister” of Arab American hip-hop, discussed the meaning of her poetry collection, Born Palestinian, Born Black: Audre Lorde, who was a famous African-American poet, discussed black as being a political identity as well as a cultural identity. Within the Palestinian culture, we have the concept of black being a negative force, and it is seen that way all over the world. What the book tries to do is take back the negative energy that is associated with black, reclaim it, and say that this is something that is about survival, something that is positive.19

Hammad’s challenge to existing social norms—namely the significance of blackness—foreshadowed the post-9/11 rise of politically conscious Arab American hip-hop, which, like Hammad, turns away the pressures of

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assimilation and rejects notions of whiteness as superior. However, most Arab Americans define themselves as white. For instance, 80 percent of the respondents to the U.S. census who reported Arab ancestry define themselves as “white.”20 By joining a minority-majority artistic movement, Arab American MCs are manifesting Hammad’s subversive vision of the politics of color. Arab American MCs, even those who could pass for white, are in a sense rejecting that identity. Scholar Helen Hatab Samhan argues that Arab American identity is confused between the government’s classification of them as “white,” or the indecisive “other” category, and their actual experiences as minorities. Well before September 11, 2001, she wrote, “some Arabs have become accustomed to perennial ‘other’ status, or to straddling their technical white identity with their practical affinity to ‘people of color’—i.e., every other non-European national origin group.”21 Several Arab American MCs take as their starting point political views they recognize as marginal within American society—another form of Arab American’s status as “other.” This rejection of mainstream views exemplifies their internationalism. The Philistines, ASH ONE, Euphrates (in Canada), the N.O.M.A.D.S, Iron Sheik, and Patriarch support the Palestinian desire for selfdetermination and the rights of Iraqis and criticize the War on Terror and media bias. Similarly, New Orleans-based MC Shaheed described his role as an MC: “I speak for the people of Palestine, expressing their anger, their rage, their loyalty, and most of all their hope, I am not an artist. I’m just a product of my environment doing my job as a Palestinian by speaking out.”22 Shaheed’s music reflects what Said referred to as a “weapon of criticism,” as do Arab American hip-hop songs that are explicitly political in nature. The artists in this movement are frequent guests at political rallies and often do shows in activist settings. They are resources for local activists, setting up events and looking for new ways to educate and mobilize their communities. Arab American hip-hop—as a fusion of the American minority experience and the political disposition common to the oppressed of the world—personifies the hybridity of resistance and criticism that Edward Said wrote about. The artists are often activists themselves. One of the most important Arab American hip-hop artist-led projects is the Free the P Mixtape. Ragtop, from the Philistines, along with help from Omar Offendum, from the N.O.M.A.D.S, released the mix CD featuring Arab, Muslim, and progressive artists to raise money for filmmaker Jackie Salloum’s upcoming documentary, Slingshot HipHop, about Palestinian hip-hop. Other activist efforts happen in conjunction with other groups and communities. On May 27, 2002, the New York-based

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MC, Gaza Strip, performed in a Palestinian Aid Concert to raise money for the victims of Israel’s military offensive on the Jenin refugee camp. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which held the event at Joe’s Pub in New York, also featured the prominent artists Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Imani Uzuri. A delegation from the sponsoring organization delivered the proceeds in July 2002. The more expressly political artists have faced a backlash against them that resulted in cancellation of their concerts. The Iron Sheik and Excentrik saw three shows cancelled during a tour in 2003. A campaign against them pressured the locations to cancel the shows, including one at the Ottobar in Baltimore, Maryland. Narcy, of the Euphrates, reported a similar experience. On his first album, Watermelon Chunks, he rapped a line, “truest lies calling suicide bombings, who’s alive?” The local media replaced “truest” with “Jewish,” and Narcy was banned from performing for some time. He said the controversy was “all constructed.”23 The highest profile controversy involving an Arab American MC was the episode involving the MC Arabic Assassin. Bassam Khalaf worked during the day as a baggage handler at Houston airport. His controversial lyrics glorifying terrorism led to his dismissal from his job with the Transportation Security Administration. Khalaf maintains that his “incendiary lyrics about rape, murder and mass attacks were meant only to get attention and help get his first album, Terror Alert, a distribution deal.”24 Though he predicted the controversy would increase demand for his album, a local reporter indicated on his blog that the Assassin told him his album did not fare well. Khalaf also believes he was “placed on the FBI no fly list,” which prevented him from visiting “relatives and his mother in the Middle East.”25 Just as Hammad challenges her own community’s take on blackness, some Arab American hip-hop artists also take on other internal issues with the Arab American and hip-hop communities. NaR (“fire”), a “queer Arab hip hop crew” based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is made up of two MCs with “roots in the mountains of Lebanon.” Mazen and Tru Bloo seek “social change and revolution…for all oppressed peoples.” They take on numerous sociopolitical issues, including U.S. foreign policy, the movement for Palestinian liberation, and homophobia.26

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Dual Diasporas: Arab Americans and Hip-Hop An Arab rapper in America is in exile from his place of ancestry and identity. His choice of music could also be said to be in exile from its African American origins. In other words, both exist outside of their places of origin. Both the Arab diaspora and rap music are global in reach. With the emergence of a global Arab diasporic hip-hop movement, which typifies Said’s description of “adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures,” Arab rappers are springing up all over the world and the United States to give voice to resistance and identity. Palestinian rap group DAM is becoming the Arab Public Enemy—unabashed in its politics and mobilizing in its spirit. Lebanese MC Clotaire K and the group Aksser (Rayess Bek, Ibn Foulen, Founjan Shai) also address sociopolitical issues. In commercial terms, Canada’s Arab artists are in many ways ahead of those in America. Toronto’s Arabesque has a record deal with a European company. Narcy, from the Montreal group Euphrates, is one of the most talented Arab MCs on the continent and performs politically charged lyrics to highly innovative beats. The R&B singer Massari is at the top of Canada’s music scene and is becoming an international star. Of all the places Arab rap exists, it is most prevalent and pronounced in France. There it is a significant sociocultural force. French rap grew out of the ghettos surrounding major French cities. African and Arab youth made French hip-hop the second largest market for hip-hop in the world. Like African American rappers taking on social dislocation and political marginalization in the United States, Arab French MCs are at the forefront of a youth culture challenging the French government’s policies. As in the United States, French politicians blame rappers for the consequences of the social ills they describe. Following the riots by French youth in late 2005, two hundred members of the parliament sought the arrest and deportation of rap artists for incitement.27 Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy became the French version of William Bennett by blaming the riots on the rappers rather than failed governmental social programs and discrimination.28

Unique Musicality Arab American hip-hop artists bring new sounds and instruments to the genre. Given the use of sampling—borrowing parts of other music—in hip-hop, rap artists have tapped the rich tradition of African American soul, R&B, and oldschool rap. African American rappers do not have the access to and knowledge

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of Arabic music that Arab American artists do. With only a few exceptions, including Jay Z’s use of an Abdel-Halim song for “Big Pimpin’,” rap producers have yet to “dig into the crates” 29 of Arabic music. Arab American hip-hop artists, however, create a unique musical style by incorporating Arabic music with rap percussion tracks. Excentrik’s own music not only uses samples but also relies heavily on the oud and tabla. The oud, he points out, “traditionally accompanied poetry,” which explains why it works so well with hip-hop music. His instrumentation for his spoken-word piece, “Stereotypes,” is a slow-tempo tribute to the power of the oud, giving hip-hop a new, Arab character. Other artists play Arabic chords on the keyboards. It gives their music a unique sound.

Language and Symbols Another trait of Arab American hip-hop is the development of its own language. Early hip-hop used the slang of urban America, some of which comes from an Islamic offshoot called the Nation of Gods and Earths, more commonly known as the Five Percenters. For example, referring to others as “G,” comes from the Five Percenter reference to others as “God.” Slang is an integral part of hip-hop. Arab American hip-hop is developing its own language based on the use of colloquial Arabic. In addition, Get Lit Entertainment, a family-run crew of Jordanian-American MCs, musicians, and singers, released several songs that mix Arabic and English extensively. In the song “Yalla,” Big Rob (Robert Kakish), the group’s main rapper, rhymes: so if your down than baby girl yella habibti inti ya samra when I saw you I was like smallah30

For political MCs, the unique language is the political terminology of Arab American activism. Given the prevalence of Palestinian-American MCs, much of this refers to the Palestinian narrative: al-Nakba, Intifada, al-Quds, and so on, while many of these artists wear Arab garb. For example, Oddisee, a halfSudanese producer and MC, wore a kaffiyeh (black and white checked headscarf) in a photo in a feature on him as an emerging artist in Scratch magazine. Some artists also mix religiosity with Arab secular political discourse. The Seattle-based group, Sons of Hagar, are unabashedly Muslim and Arab and very political. In their song “Insurrection,” Allah Swordz raps: Your family checking and your missing I’m only seeing darkness in the horizon Staring daring me

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Arab American Hip-Hop “You Arab Muslim MC” Feel my pain My own country is trying to get rid of me Got no shoulder to lean on and I ain’t crying neither It’s the Arab hunting season And I ain’t leavin’31

Arab American artists also make cultural references, such as to shisha (a tall water pipe used primarily for smoking tobacco), food, or immigrants’ English accents and vernacular speech. For example, Noose, a young MC based in New Jersey, has a song that starts out with someone impersonating an Arabic accent. Arab American artists also stamp their identity into their logos. For instance, one party flier spells out “Get Lit Entertainment” and “Furious,” the name of a Bay Area rapper, in an English font derived from Arabic letters. Arab Canadian MC and singer Arabesque does the same with his ornate logo. Even those whose music does not reflect anything directly Arab—Arab Americans in Hip-Hop— use some symbols and references. For example, DJ Khaled, Miami’s leading DJ and a top producer in Fat Joe’s Bomb Squad, not only uses his real name— thereby asserting his identity—but he records in a studio named for his ancestral home, Jerusalem. One obstacle to the use of symbols is the potential to impose orientalism on oneself. One of the above-mentioned acts often performs with belly dancers on stage. The dilemma is about whether Arab American artists are reflecting their culture as it is, or shaping their acts to feed on and exploit stereotypes and misconceptions, as the Arabic Assassin did as a terrorist-rapper.

Mainstream Artists Arab Americans have been involved in hip-hop since its earliest days. One Arab American hip-hop artist, AJ, or Hagage aj Masaed, an Oakland-based rapper who sells his CDs at liquor stores, claims to have been rapping since the early 1980s. In 1982 an Algerian-French journalist (and indie record label owner) living in New York City named Bernard Zekri set up the first European tour of American hip-hop artists, as well as breakdancers and graffiti artists, one of whom put out a record and a music video, though he lasted on the scene only briefly. Ali Dee, a half-Egyptian, half-Russian MC from New York was the first Arab American to be signed with a major label (EMI Records in the early 1990s). Still, Arab Americans are not common in hip-hop’s mainstream.

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The Arab Americans most prominently involved in hip-hop are music producers and DJs. DJ Khaled of Fat Joe’s Terror Squad is Miami’s top hip-hop DJ and the producer of mega-hits such as “Lean Back.” He began by building a minimusical empire in Miami and gained national influence. St. Louis-based producer Waiel “Wally” Yaghnam is one part of the Basement Beats production team. They collaborated on many mainstream albums, including the St. Lunatics’ Free City, Nelly’s Nellyville and SweatSuit, Murphy Lee’s Murphy’s Law, including hit singles “#1,” “Shake Ya Tailfeather,” and “Over and Over.”32 Although DJ Khaled bears his Arab background in his name and records at his “Jerusalem studio,” neither his music nor Wally’s reflect their ethnic ancestry. While neither is forwarding Arab American hip-hop, they are highly successful Arab Americans in hip-hop. However, Fredwreck, a producer based in Los Angeles, has reached commercial success, partnered with Arab American MCs, and been openly political in both his activism and music. Working with rap’s top artists, including Snoop Doggy Dog, Mack 10, and Xzibit, his success has not kept him from expressing himself politically. He put together an anti-war anthem, “Dear Mr. President,” with some prominent stars, such as Cypress Hill’s B-Real, Evidence from Dilated Peoples, Mobb Deep, KRS-One, and Everlast. He also published a letter from a recent trip to Palestine in which he wrote: Then everywhere you go there’s a check point, and they don’t care if you have an American passport, but if you have an Arab name on it, you’re getting detained searched questioned. You can’t even step out the door of your house with out a soldier walking up to you with his AMERICAN MADE M16 pointed at you asking you for your “Haweeya” [identification].33

Wreck became Snoop’s authority on Palestine. The LA Weekly reported Snoop called him after seeing reports on the news: ‘Hey, cuz, what does this mean when muthafuckers going up to the Temple Mount, what is that shit all about, cuz, why they be tripping?’ or he’ll be like, ‘Why they building a wall around y’alls people’s shit. That’s fucked up, cuz.’ ”34

Conclusion Arab American hip-hop is still young and dynamic. Although most of the mainstream success belongs to Arab Americans in hip-hop, and producers rather than MCs, the prospects for increased visibility are high. Recently, Arab American MCs are showing more promise. Noose, for instance, released a mix

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tape album in collaboration with a famous DJ, Kay Slay. Furious of the Bay Area receives local radio play and performs alongside well-known MCs. Patriarch, who sports a Palestinian flag on his album cover, combines activist sentiment with mainstream style. He is political, yet his sound is geared toward popular consumption. The Philistines and the N.O.M.A.D.S. are receiving increasing press attention—including a music video profiled on Vibe magazines TV website35—and playing at established venues such as LA’s House of Blues. Narcy and Arabesque, both of whom are Arab-Canadian MCs, as well as the R&B singer Massari are all on the rise, with the latter two enjoying wide distribution deals. Massari is signed with Capitol Records. This is not to suggest that the mainstream success should be the ultimate goal. To value mainstream acceptance above all else is to run the risk of tokenization. A “terrorist-rapper” might gain mainstream exposure fairly easily, but it would be in the tradition of the “gangsta rapper”—a human caricature profiting from stereotypes that demean his or her people. The ultimate challenge is whether Arab American hip-hop can build an audience and retain its authentic voice, creativity, and political activism. The most important steps toward building Arab American hip-hop’s audience include seeking greater cooperation between the established Arab American producers with the up-and-coming Arab American MCs. Working together, those new to the game will gain from the experience and the sound of those who are more experienced. Those who reach mainstream success should bring up other Arab American artists as much as possible. At the same time, Arab America should support and promote Arab American hip-hop. We should encourage burgeoning artists to develop their talent by setting up shows for them, investing in their album production, and spreading the word about their work. Artists with communities of support are much more likely to find success; and any artistic movement needs a supportive audience and benefactors. Of course, Arab American artists themselves must pay their dues by learning as much about music and the music business as possible. Getting as much experience in production and performance as possible is essential. They should look for mentors and seek out partnerships and collaboration with others. This will solidify the sense of Arab American hip-hop as a dynamic, creative movement. Finally, Arab American MCs should see themselves as part of a global movement. Hip-hop has long had an Arab face in France. However, the only instance of cross-Atlantic Arab hip-hop collaboration is a song about the war on

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Iraq “Maraket Baghdad” produced by French-Morrocan producer Manethon. It featured Ragtop of the Philistines, Roibeur, Wlad al Bosta, Iron Sheik (another version also featured DAM and Joker).36 With such talented rappers in Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, and Lebanon, Arab American hip-hop artists should increase international collaboration. In short, to sustain and grow this movement, Arab American hip-hop must be globally-minded, with artists and the communities they come from supporting each other. Hip-hop is not only a globalizing force; it can contribute to the empowerment of Arab Americans and the evolution of an Arab American identity. Arab American hip-hop is important because it encourages Arab American youth to appreciate their ancestry and community in the face of growing anti-Arab sentiment and it allows Arab American youth to assert their ethnic identity through a new cultural medium. In the same way hip-hop politically mobilized the African American community and articulated its suffering, it can do the same for Arab Americans. The Arab American community should nurture and encourage this nascent artistic movement.

Notes 1

Will Youmans is the Arab American hip-hop artist Iron Sheik. Rapping is the verbalizing of lyrics to a beat in such a way that it sounds closer to speaking than singing. It can be done in a variety of styles with different pacing and rhythm. MC is the term used for the performer. 3 James Zogby of the non-partisan Arab American Institute; Mary Rose Oaker, former Democratic Congresswoman, of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. 4 Benjamin Duncan “Nader could cost Kerry Arab American vote” Al-Jazeera on-line, March 14, 2004: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FAABEE5C-7BB6-4340-9E4AB3840950A919.htm (accessed April 24, 2006). 5 Amartya Sen, “What Clash of Civilizations?” Salon (March 29, 2006): http://www.slate.com/id/2138731/nav/tap1/ (accessed April 24, 2006). 6 This 2002 film about an up-and-coming Detroit-based rapper is based on the experiences of Eminem. 7 Steve Zeitlin and Amanda Dargan, “Poetry Contests and Competitions,” People’s Poetry Gathering: http://www.peoplespoetry.org/pdf/contests_competitions.pdf (accessed April 24, 2006). 8 Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th ed. (Macmillan Press, 1970), p. 90. 9 E-mail exchange, March 30, 2006. 10 Interview via phone, March 29, 2006. 11 Interview via e-mail, March 30, 2006. 12 Interview via e-mail, March 30, 2006. 13 Interview via e-mail, March 31, 2006. 14 ASH ONE’s Myspace page: http://myspace.com/ashone (accessed April 24, 2006). 2

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Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993) 244–45. Interview via phone, March 29, 2006. 17 Ariana Speyer “DJ Deluxx, 2003,” Index Magazine (2003): http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/dj_deluxx.shtml (accessed April 24, 2006). 18 Louise Cainkar, “Space and Place in the Metropolis: Arabs and Muslims Seeking Safety,” City & Society 17, no. 2 (2005): 181–209. 19 Nathalie Handal, “Drops of Suheir Hammad: A Talk with a Palestinian Poet Born Black,” Al Jadid 3, no. 20 (Summer 1997): http://www.aljadid.com/interviews/DropsofSuheirHammad.html (accessed April 24, 2006). 20 Haya El Nasser, “U.S. Census Reports on Arab Americans for First Time” USA Today, 11/21/03: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-11-20-Arab Americans_x.htm (accessed April 24, 2006). 21 “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience” was first presented as a paper on April 4, 1997 at a symposium on Arab Americans by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University. It was also a chapter in Michael Suleiman, ed., Arabs in America: Building a New Future (Temple University Press, 2000). 22 “Shaheed,” New Orleans, Lousiana Palestine Solidarity: http://www.nolapalestinesolidarity.org/shaheed/shaheed.htm (accessed April 24, 2006). 23 Interview via e-mail, March 30, 2006. 24 “‘Arabic Assassin’ Loses Baggage Screener Job,” Reuters, July 15, 2005: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8587969/ (accessed April 24, 2006). 25 Isiah Carey, “Whatever Became of The Arabic Assassin”: http://isiahcarey.blogspot.com/2006/02/whatever-became-of-arabic-assassin.html (accessed April 24, 2006). 26 NaR’s MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/hotnar (accessed April 24, 2006). 27 Sylvia Poggioli, “French Rap Musicians Blamed for Violence,” Morning Edition, NPR, December 10, 2005: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5052650 (accessed April 24, 2006). 28 Daniel Williams, “In France, Anthems of Alienation,” Washington Post, November 24, 2005, A29: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/11/23/AR2005112302232_ pf.html (accessed April 24, 2006). 29 A hip-hop term for searching out obscure musical samples to incorporate into new beats. 30 Get Lit Entertainment, “Yalla’: http://getlitent.com/lyrics/Yalla.pdf (accessed April 24, 2006). 31 Sons of Hagar, “INSurrection”: http://www.sonsofhagar.com/lyrics.htm#INSurrection (accessed April 24, 2006). 32 E-mail exchange with his brother, Waheab R. Yaghnam (4/21/06). See www.basementbeats.net. (accessed April 24, 2006). 33 “Producer Fredwreck’s Open Letter From Palestine,” Davey D: http://www.daveyd.com/FullArticles/articleN1372.asp (accessed April 24, 2006). 16

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Ben Quinones, “The Mad Science of Fredwreck,” LA Weekly, June 9, 2005: http://www.laweekly.com/features/569/the-mad-science-of-fredwreck/ (accessed April 24, 2006). 35 My Vibe TV: http://www.myvibe.tv/ (accessed August 31, 2006). 36 To hear the first version: http://dimarap2.free.fr/download/system/telecharger.php?id=62 (accessed April 24, 2006).

CHAPTER THREE THE RISE OF CONTEMPORARY ARAB AMERICAN LITERATURE

SHALL WE GATHER IN THE MOUNTAINS? GREGORY ORFALEA

Not long ago, my family got lost in the mountains. You know the James Wright book of poetry, Shall We Gather at the River? Well, a good part of my family fell over a cliff in the mountains, or rather came close to falling over a cliff in the mountains. In any case, some of us (four exactly) were swallowed by the San Gabriels. And it struck me, as one family member after another was pulled by that darkness and by the lure of being a hero, that a short story was taking place before my very eyes. Or rather, by my flashlight. Three flashlights, actually. My cousin had two and I had one, though when I asked my cousin why he wasn’t shining both of his on the treacherous path, he said, “I’m preserving the batteries.” There’s a lot of preserving the batteries among Arab Americans. Couldn’t we just blast out those flashlights full bore and to hell with the batteries? Just once in a while? That’s what I want my writing to do: full bore, flashlights ablaze, flying deeper and deeper into the mountains. So here I’m going to put the flashlights on and flee into the mountains of Dearborn, Michigan (where this harebrained scheme was first hatched), and try and write this short story based on a March 2006 fiasco in the foothills behind Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab. And as I am writing it, I am going to lay bare how I write, how I take the real world and knead it and need it and bank on it and not bank on it because it doesn’t make any money to need it and knead it, but love it, and show you how, by loving it, we make a story. Frank Conroy, the memoirist and late director of the Iowa Writers Workshop, said that writing is an act of love of the world, of those out there from whom we are cut off. So in a way, when you are writing, you are in the dark mountains. And you may go deeper. Or you may flee down the slope and get killed. At the same time, I may reveal here some themes I think are common to the literature of Arab Americans, but don’t count on it. Don’t count on me paying close attention to family, war, and love in this strange culture we find ourselves

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set down in as I would if I were wearing a critic’s hat, that stiff homburg. No, I am wearing no hat and going up into the mountains. Let’s get the facts right before we distort them to tell the truth. My cousin has a son adopted during the Lebanese civil war named Christopher. Now twentytwo, Christopher was as an infant abandoned on the steps of a church in Damascus. This was before he became an American football player, wrestler, and an apprentice fireman. Christopher was the last person you would think would get lost in the mountains. But he did. He and his buddy, who did fall off a cliff—which was either 10 feet or 100 feet down, give or take a zero—they started up the trail in the San Gabriels on bicycles at 3:30 in the afternoon. Not smart. They had no lights. Not smarter. Their cell phones had only enough battery charge for one call. Least smart. By 10 o’clock at night, there was no word from Christopher and his friend. My cousin’s wife was getting worried, and naturally she was getting angry at my cousin. Wasn’t it his fault that Christopher was lost? “My fault? What do you mean? I didn’t tell him to go up there.” “But you should have.” “But he is twenty-two years old and bigger than me.” “It doesn’t matter. What if he falls off a cliff?” You can see where this is going. And I’m going to have a good time going there. But I may have to change something. My cousin’s wife is part Mexican and part Greek. I like that about her, but it is distracting from what I see developing here. I’m going to make her Arab American. I think her insouciance is the important thing, and the crazy insularity and clinging to family I may want to emphasize, the pull to the fire of family as obliterating as a dark mountain. I realize I am losing something in making my cousin’s wife of the tribe, so to speak. One could emphasize her sense of being outside of it all, and the anger that must whip up, or the incessant need to prove oneself worthy, or the sense of pride in being apart and able to survive in the outside world without reference to the West Bank and Gaza, or kibbee neyeh. Anyway, that’s my choice for now. I’m going to call her Fayrouz. She sings a lot—at people. I’m going to make her more old-world than the real wife of my

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cousin; the cousin character may just realize that getting the real thing from the old country isn’t exactly a guarantee of wedded bliss on these shores. She’s a loud one, this Fayrouz. But we’ll see, give her her due yet, up on that mountain. A call comes in, the one call. Christopher says not to worry, they are miles into the mountain, halfway to Mount Wilson, really, and it’s cold, they only have shorts on, and they have no lights, but they are going to ditch the bikes and walk out. Not to worry. They’ll make it in two hours. They are on a fire trail. This sounds promising. So we call off the rescue team, which sends the wife into a fit. But I think I’ll take that fire trail whole into the fiction. Because the trail my cousin and I discover is anything but a fire trail. It is a narrow thing along a precipice. This is true. We decide to meet the descending boys with some light. (We do not say we are afraid they don’t need us.) We take the wrong trail right from the start—the one marked with a sign “El Prieto Trail.” We fail to take the other trail because it is unmarked, thinking: Wouldn’t anyone rather take the marked trail? And right there, we have a failure of judgment. Twentytwo-year-old kids love an unmarked trail. It is we fifty-somethings that need the markers, not the kids. The kids plunge into the mountains like an uphill cascade of daring. They don’t long; we long. They long not to long; we long to long. And two hours into our hike in the darkness uphill with hard shoes on, we are really longing. We are longing for our son, our nephew, our cousin, and especially, hiking shoes. We have one bottle of water and it is going fast. Our backs are betraying us. The only thing we are thankful for is that my cousin’s wife can’t reach us to yell at us. Because our batteries are dead. You don’t own anyone in this life. A critic of Eugene Neill’s work said that. And that is hard for us, we of Arab stripe, to admit. I fought it for years. I laughed at Gibran’s “Your children are not your children, but life’s longing for itself.” How ridiculous! He never had children, that’s why he feels that way, I said. But the older I get, the more fallible I see people’s love, the more I see the American drive to identity and comfort can destroy that love, here where love is the first thing people spend for and the last thing they get, because it is not a getting thing, is it? It is a blessing and an act, an act of great courage, like going into the dark mountains not knowing where your loved ones exactly are. But wanting them, and wanting to matter, even if you don’t own them, owning up to that, yes, that you need this holding and touch. Above money and position and the house and the mortgage and quasi-identity of a thousand sorts. You need this belonging, this touch. This real identity that you are finally able to give up to the other, and in the giving gain it. How do you know who you are if you do not love?

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I mention Eugene O’Neill because I saw this great documentary on his life lately, and that happens with fiction. Something untoward enters the story. I’ve been an O’Neill man for a long time. An Irish-American playwright enters my story now. A great man of tragedy, who lost a brother to alcohol, a mother to morphine addiction, another brother to measles, and a father to Mammon. Who left a wife with two young children to plunge into the ravine of his past with a woman named Carlotta. This is not an Arab American proclivity, to abandon your children for the past. Or is it? What is the terrible pull of those mountains? And their darkness? And the hope of being, of joining at the glistening peak, the source of all this longing and pain of family you don’t own, touching in the darkness what God meant, perhaps, the unity of an early day in life when you looked at the sky where the sun touches the top of a mountain and said, “I want to be there. Maybe then I will know why I am here.” I confess that O’Neill appeals to me in another way. My own wife is IrishAmerican, and there is poetry in that and beauty and longing and great luck. There’s also stubbornness, Irish stubbornness, which may have its counterpart in Arab stubbornness. (I wonder sometimes, though, if flexibility, this drive to blend at all costs, may be the Arab Americans’ particular cross.) In any case, Irish and Arab certainly both share a sense of being on the outskirts of empire wanting in, of longing for the core. And though there are not as many mountains in Ireland as there are in Lebanon or California, both share a love of the sea, green or blue. And that is a lot of longing. O’Neill loved the sea off Connecticut as a boy. And off Big Sur as a man. So maybe we encounter an Irishman on our journey up the wrong trail of the mountain, and maybe he helps us, like a stranger really did. My cousin and I came upon a light in the woods. It was a tent lit from the inside, and a voice came out of it, “What are you doing here?” In truth, the man never came out of the tent. We were scared by the stern tone of his voice. It was late—past midnight. Did he have a woman in there, a man, a dog? A gun? We had no weapons but flashlights. We spoke across the stream at this eerily lit tent in the darkness, like a huge firefly lighting down. We spoke of our mission. The man’s voice said, “No one has been by here since 4:30 this afternoon and they were going the other way.” I looked at my cousin and said, “We are on the wrong trail.” I shined a light on my watch. It was two in the morning. We turned around and plunged into the darkness. Why do I think now of Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place? As he says, “All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character,

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fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in the world of my parents and four sisters.” Edward says it took him fifty years to feel “less uncomfortable” with his own name, “a fancy English name” as he calls it hard to link with “its Arabic partner”—Said: “I would rush past and emphasize ‘Said.’ At other times, I would do the reverse, or connect these two to each other so quickly that neither would be clear.” Why does that sense of disorientation occur to me now? After all, I am here. I made it down the mountain. But for that mountain moment I knew fear, but more: pure waste. The sense of being foolish, off-kilter. Maybe that’s why I think now to bolster the story by adding the Irishman. However productive in the outside world, I feel something of wasted time when I’m apart from my wife and hope she feels the same. You build a life with shared memories, like the one my cousin and I now have getting lost in the mountains. Anyway, I’m creating a character out of love for my wife and the need to be near her—but I am going to make her into a man, this man in the tent who is going to help us. He will give himself away as Irish by his brogue. He is going to pour us coffee. There’s going to be something wounded about him. He may have a dog named Joyce. He’ll read us a line from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” about a house of “clay and wattles made” where “peace comes dropping slow.” And for just a bit, my cousin and I relax, forget about our search for the lost boys, even wonder if the man has two more sleeping bags. But something in the solitary man’s demeanor, something strange, snaps us out of it—maybe it’s the way he scratches the scar on his forehead. We realize we are needed elsewhere, at least we hope so, and we go back down the night trail. Come the hoot owls. The croaking frogs (that is fiction, the owls fact). We scram into the darkness of the other ridge, knowing that’s where the boys are. But there is no answer and our cell phone is deader than the Green Line of Beirut or the Great Wall of Israel. We shine our lights at the ridge. Nothing. No answer to our light or our voice. Now my story is beginning to sound like the American critical response to Arab American literature. On the other ridge there’s the shadow of a radio antenna. We shake our heads, because one of the last things Christopher said before the phone went dead is that he was near a large antenna. We look up. There’s an antenna on our ridge. We have been fooled twice. And now I think of the mistaken identities, sometimes lethal, in Arab American fiction. Like the character of Martin Habib in Vance Bourjaily’s Brill Among the Ruins, who is murdered in a jealous rage

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walking out of a plumber’s shop, mistaken for someone else. Of the many wrong paths heroine Mayan Atassi takes searching for her father in Mona Simpson’s The Lost Father, hoping at one point that maybe he’ll have the appeal of Yasir Arafat, standing for something, instead of being what she finds him as—a waiter in a restaurant in Stockton, California. Yet for all his flaws, he is hers. Would that people who walk deaf, dumb, and blind into the Middle East would have the moral courage to simply see Arabs as Mona Simpson finds Mayan Atassi’s father, “He was only a man.” My cousin and I take several wrong turns going back, criss-crossing the stream, and we are getting lost. (This is not what happened—because I marked the trail, having lived two years in Alaska and being familiar with woods—our path back was near perfect.) But I want these two to really get confused, afraid, maybe even terrified—or more accurately, they want me to be that way for the time of our story. I love that title of Joseph Geha’s short story, “Everything! Everything!” We have such a hunger for life, and this story is beginning to have a terrible drive in it, a complete swallowing of darkness. Something on the order of the chaos Hemingway’s Nick Adams senses in the swamp at the end of “Big Two-Hearted River.” Lo and behold, a picnic table emerges in the dark! A real one! With real fictive opportunity. There the two rest, drink from a water bottle. (I think I’ll make them more intrepid and contingent—throw out the water bottle—and bow them low to drink from the polluted stream in all their confusion.) And while they get their bearings, they open up to one another, two cousins who have lived many years and miles apart and don’t really know each other as they once did, if they ever did. Now part of this is what took place. My cousin and I did speak some important things to each other. But we didn’t look up at the top of the mountain, think of Mt. Sannine in Lebanon, its snow-capped beauty and dread (Mikhail Naimy lived in Baskinta at the top in “The Valley of Skulls”), and I didn’t ask the lost boy’s father about how and why he was adopted during the Lebanese civil war. And soon they are speaking of that terrible fratricidal war and the current war on terror waged so blindly by our leaders. They might turn on Israel’s second attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, or it is the third? The fourth? The thousandth? Israel’s always had this “thing” for Lebanon, all the way back to the Song of Songs (“And the fragrance of your garments is the fragrance of Lebanon”). You want the mistress to sit still, to be on call, to want nothing, to counter nothing, to just be there and let you be, no matter what is left unsaid or

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undone that continues to kill in the night. You want a perfect mistress up north. Christopher’s father—his character—might wax on being pulled out of line at the airport and being fondled by a guard (is this that I just saw Crash?). How he lost a contract after 9/11 for electrical parts. How Christopher says he wants to find his blood mother and father and can’t stand America. This now is fiction. But this is the story I feel compelled to tell about the woods behind the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena in the Year 2006. I’m in a tradition. Gibran castigated the Lebanese over their factionalism in World War I, blasted the West and the Turks for the starvation of 1916, but people only remember him for his storybook of aphorisms, The Prophet. We still want the Arab to be wise and shut up. Wise, not a wiseacre. Samuel Hazo has his American couple kidnapped and a Socratic dialogue on terror take place between a guerrilla leader and the couple in The Very Fall of the Sun, a prophetic, long out-of-print book published in 1978. The wreckage of war, physical and spiritual, riddles Naomi Nye’s poetry and begs her climb out. The first Iraq war haunts the lover in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent. As for the interior damage of war, Patricia Sarrafian Ward displays it with great sensitivity in her stunning novel, The Bullet Collection. There the Lebanese civil war intersects with the personal agony of parent for damaged child: “My parents learned the truth first about Alaine; they locked cabinets and drawers; they slept on full alert, ready to spring up at the slightest provocation. The war outside was nothing; we slept through whole bombing raids, laughed at our own lassitude, but Alaine, the sound of her stirred even the deepest slumber.” So in the dark of the mountain, my cousin and I are going to talk about mental illness, the damage of war, the damage of inner war. We may talk about the suicide of my sister, and his worry for Christopher being lost down more than mountain trails. I’m going to change Christopher’s name to—what? I don’t know yet. But I want to protect the real Christopher, who is actually a balanced, sweet-hearted fellow who wants to be a fireman. I have no real idea of how his orphanhood from Lebanon may affect him inside, but my story can explore that. You see how fiction grabs reality and wrings from it some inner obsessions, truths that are hard to tell? That would be hidden in real life? That need out, because that is how we love, we writers, by shining the light in a dark mountain, a light that hurts the eyes and flares the heart into pumping more. We are pumping madly downhill and they’re all there suddenly; we’ve found the way by sheer grace, including an uncle who walked blindly up another trail, cell phone a-blazing. Several aunts, uncles, cousins mill about rubbing their

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heads, groggy, as it is halfway through the black morning. There are the glaring lights of the rescue SUVs, as well as Christopher’s friend’s mother, who put the final rescue call in. “Fayrouz” jabs her finger, wrist jewels tingling, at my cousin’s chest. Maybe I’ll have her file for divorce (as she really did) or not. I don’t want to distract with some predictable misery from the mystery of that collective dive into the mountain. It’s quite a scene, enough to rouse the Jet Propulsion Lab security guards: police, ambulance, the friend leaned back on a cot with his broken ribs and gashed leg. And there the helicopter lifts away. In truth, the boys made it nearly all the way back before they were beamed. And actually, there was no need for our rescue or the other rescue with its $1,000 price tag. It was all unnecessary. Except for the need for my cousin and I to get lost. And talk. One by one, relatives went into the mountain wanting to help. It was all unnecessary. It was all a function of the need to be a part of something greater, some dark mountain where we are as essential to each other as tree, rock, and brook. If I don’t get into divorce court at the end, I could give Christopher’s friend some permanent injury. There are mountain lions up there, you know! But that’s too much. Life is relentlessly excessive; it is fiction that zeroes in, to the island in the rapids, to the mountain before dawn, the wonder before the explosion. Wonder may precede disaster, it may be savior, or both. But I want always to be on the side of wonder. In truth, people die of the best intentions, though, thank God, no one did that night in back of the place where America’s spaceships are monitored long through the night so that even an astronaut is not alone. Not in this world, not with this family and its terribly beautiful love.

CELEBRATING THE HYPHEN: ARAB AMERICAN WRITERS TODAY ANDREA SHALAL-ESA

In recent years, we have seen the rise of a rich body of immigrant literatures, including many powerful works by Arab American women who have set out to interrogate their own, often fragmented identities. Unlike earlier generations of Arab American writers, these women are consciously building bridges to communities of color. Deriving strength from feminists, black theorists, and postcolonial thinkers, they are wielding their pens to chronicle decades of racism, oppression, and marginalization in the United States, and to begin uncovering the particularities of their own ethnic histories. This paper focuses on the works of three writers with a Palestinian heritage—Diana Abu-Jaber, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Suheir Hammad. Their works, either poetry or prose, resist any kind of totalizing narrative. They form a clarion call to challenge binary constructions of gender, race, class, or ethnic background, and to become more attentive to the specificities of each woman’s life. A careful examination of their work also reveals a marked departure from the days when at least some Arab Americans could pass as white to a more conscious move to identify as women of color and form alliances with other brown women. Collectively, Arab Americans have been subject to decades of racism, discrimination, negative stereotyping, and hostility in the United States. Arab American women, in particular, face additional pressures due to the gendered nature of Arab American society and the role they are often thrust into of maintaining an Arab identity for their families and communities. Their ability to communicate freely about the challenges they face as Arab women has often been influenced by concerns about deepening already debilitating stereotypes about Arabs in America. For many years, the real or perceived need for unity among a beleaguered minority has hampered an honest discourse by Arab American women about patriarchal structures, arranged marriage, and other controversial topics. But there are signs that this is beginning to change.

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Stereotypes are still prevalent, even in the academy. Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj published a collection of essays on the transnational reception of Third World women writers, a project that grew out of their frustration about just this phenomenon. They noted that even when they were invited to participate on panels, certain discursive, institutional, and ideological structures preempted their discourse and determined what they could and would say. Any critique of Arab society or culture they seemed to utter would confirm the audience’s vision about “the patriarchal, oppressive nature of Third World societies,” but when they challenged these stereotypes they were accused of defensiveness and their feminism was questioned. 1 Sadly, Arab American women remain subject to an orientalist proclivity to “exoticize” Arab women, robbing them of agency and firmly situating them as “other.” This has had profound implications for the works Arab American women writers have been able to publish—or not—and the way these works are eventually packaged and marketed. At the same time the reaction from within the Arab American community can be fierce if it perceives any kind of attack on or challenge to its prevailing social and familial structures, especially from one of its “own.” This breeds an insidious form of self-censorship that has—until recently—kept Arab American literature from engaging in unabashed discussions of sexuality, incest, or even mental health issues. By contrast, women writers in the Arab world have long explored lesbian relationships, incest, and other subjects that remain largely taboo in the Arab American world. Women writers in the Arab world face their own pressures, clearly, but they have been able to broach difficult subjects more freely in the absence of a judgmental, stereotyping external society, which in the case of the United States, could clearly use candid discussions of such issues to further vilify the Arab American community. The writers discussed here are forging a new discourse, although their approaches differ widely. Diana Abu-Jaber is a novelist who also teaches creative writing and currently splits her time between Florida and Oregon. Her award-winning 1993 novel Arabian Jazz brought the story of an Arab immigrant and his two daughters to a mainstream U.S. audience. W.W. Norton published her second novel, Crescent, in April 2003, followed by publication of a revealing and animated memoir, which is part essay and part cookbook, by Pantheon in March 2005. That book, The Language of Baklava, was just released in paperback this month. Naomi Shihab Nye is an accomplished poet and essayist, who has also published several children’s books and two novels for young adult readers in

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recent years. Although her Arab heritage is an important factor in her work, Nye’s writing draws on and reflects a wide variety of cultural contexts and sources, including the Southwest, where she lives, and the many places she has journeyed. Nye’s most recent work of poetry is You & Yours, a poignant and moving collection of poems that examines life in the United States and the war abroad. Spoken-word poet Suheir Hammad draws inspiration from her poor, workingclass childhood in Brooklyn, where she grew up mostly among Puerto Rican children, went to public schools, and experienced firsthand what it means to be poor and of color in America. Hammad’s poetry is filled with images of violence, sexuality, and rage, as well as compassion for the nation’s dispossessed and wrongly imprisoned. Her most recent poetry collection, ZaatarDiva, was published late last year by Rattapallax Press. It comes with a CD of Hammad performing, as well as small bag of zaatar (a traditional Middle Eastern spice mix of wild oregano or thyme, toasted sesame seeds, sumac, and salt). These three writers are concerned with dispossession, exile, loss, and grief— their own as well as that of others—but rather than sinking into an abyss of introspection, they envision possibilities for taking action, seizing power, and building alliances with other groups. One thread that unites these newer writers is a conscious decision to identify as—and with—women of color. They claim the margins as their native soil and honor the inherent contradictions of their identities. To understand their work, we must come to see identity not as a fixed essence but as a social construction, a product of the multiple and overlapping forces of geography, historical moment, gender, ethnicity, age, and class.

Diana Abu-Jaber In her first novel, Arabian Jazz, Abu-Jaber navigates a terrain fraught with overlapping cultural mores and tackles subjects that have long been taboo in both U.S. and Arab society. She confronts us with racism, abject poverty, female infanticide, and incest, all set against the backdrop of one immigrant family’s struggle to carve out an identity in upstate New York. Using multiple narrators and continually blurring the lines between past and present, the book provides a potent critique of materialist America, while casting an equally skeptical eye on the patriarchal vestiges of the Arab world. It tracks the journey of one of the main characters, Jemorah, as she begins to develop a clear view of the racism that surrounds her. After a devastating encounter with her loathsome boss, Portia Porschman, who concludes that Arabs “aren’t any better than

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Negroes,” Jem sees her familiar world through altered eyes, reflecting her growing realization of the marginal position she occupies in U.S. society. Abu-Jaber inherited her Irish-American mother’s coloring, which she describes as “an acceptable Anglo-pale,” but she is all too aware of this country’s “real issue” with color and the mixed messages that children of color receive. Growing up, she and her two sisters were encouraged, even forced, to identify with their Arab heritage, but their relatives were also constantly exhorting them to stay out of the sun to protect their milky white complexions so they could pass as white Americans. Yet Abu-Jaber firmly identifies herself as a woman of color, even choosing to keep the Arabic family name that caused her so much grief and misery as a child, and still requires tedious explanations, especially after the post-September 11 backlash. Abu-Jaber’s second novel, Crescent, delves further into the issues of exile and hybridity as the central character, Sirine, an Arab American chef, learns a new appreciation for her own tangled identity through her relationship with an exiled Iraqi literature professor. But the book also examines the lives of other so-called hybrids, people who navigate between borders, countries, languages, and ethnicities, providing an interesting mosaic of the many ways there are to be Arab, American, or some combination of the two. Like the fanciful characters in Abu-Jaber’s frame story2 for Crescent, which reads like something out of 1001 Arabian Nights, the author experienced her own life as “a bit magical. I lived between America and Jordan, like the mermaid who was neither fully human nor fish—I knew myself to be a creature of the in-between.”3 Abu-Jaber says writing gave her a way to imagine herself in the world, a “way to say the deepest sorts of truths that I had been taught it was not polite or reasonable for a young woman to speak out loud.”4 In Arabian Jazz, she used comedy and hyperbole to portray her characters and the difficult situations they encountered, but this approach backfired with the Arab American community. Mainstream reviewers loved the book, but Arab Americans found it deeply offensive that Abu-Jaber had dared to write about her community in such a farcical way. While a bit muted in Crescent, Abu-Jaber’s unflagging sense of humor flares again in her food memoir, although it seems less exaggerated in this case, presumably because Abu-Jaber is writing about real people—relatives and acquaintances whom she will have to answer to in real life. In the memoir, she writes about the “betrayed” readers of Arabian Jazz, who wrote to her to complain about a “sense of being unfairly cast, unrepresented, their unique stories and voices…unheard and ignored.” She empathizes, acutely aware of feeling alone in a country where “the only media images of Arabs are bomb

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throwers and other lunatics.”5 But at the same time, these critical voices leave Abu-Jaber feeling vulnerable and a bit exiled herself, cut off from family, home, and her cultural community—the very people she had hoped would provide her with a sense of acceptance and connection.6 In Crescent, even the main character in the frame story, Abdelrahman Salahadin, grapples with his identity. “Abdelrahman knows he might be free, but he’s still an Arab. No one ever wants to be the Arab—it’s too old and too tragic and too mysterious and too exasperating and too lonely for anyone but an actual Arab to put up with for very long. Essentially it’s an image problem.”7 We’ve certainly seen ample evidence of that in the recent controversy over a Dubai-based firm’s effort to take control of a handful of U.S. ports, and even in the media’s portrayal of the Islamic cartoon protests. The image problem looms large, but immigrants to the United States—and especially their children—soon realize their difficulties only begin with being Arab. It’s far more complicated than that; they are Arabs, but they are so much more. Aziz, a philandering poet who also plays a role in Crescent, chafes when asked if he is a Muslim. “I am large. I contain multitudes. I defy classification.”8 Truly it is worth noting that the Arab American community in the United States includes immigrants from more than a dozen countries, some Muslim, some Christian, and spanning an enormous range of educational, socioeconomic, and ethnic backgrounds. Identities are fluid, they change, subtly or abruptly, depending on external factors. There is no such thing as a fixed state of identity, especially not when you are moving between places, countries, and moments in time that leave you with what Abu-Jaber describes as “deep cultural ambivalences.”9 In her short story, “My Elizabeth,” Abu-Jaber weaves the tale of a newly orphaned Arab American girl who is brought to live with relatives in Wyoming, where her great-aunt Nabila, now known as Great Aunt Winifred, gives her a new American name and instructs her sternly, “‘Never, ever speak Arabic.…Wipe it out of your brain. It’s clutter, you won’t need it anymore. And if anyone asks,’ she said, then paused a moment, sighing over my brown skin, ‘you say you’re Mexican—no, no—Italian, or Greek, anything but Palestinian.’”10 Estelle, as she is now called, becomes friends with a Native American girl named Elizabeth, part of the Seqoya tribe. The two girls lack fathers, have secret names, and are haunted by the duality of shuttling between public and private languages. “We were descended from nations that no map had names or boundaries for,” writes Abu-Jaber in this poignant story of friendship, the jagged edge of memory, and the pain of growing up.11 In her memoir, Abu-Jaber puts the lesson more bluntly, “I learned early: We are Arab at home and American in the streets.”12

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This story poignantly underscores Abu-Jaber’s sense of connection with other marginalized peoples. Estelle eventually loses track of Elizabeth but continues to search for her, sometimes even stopping other women with the same striking blue-black hair. She stops other Native American women, women from Korea, one from Bombay, and one from Palestine, a reference to the “otherness” and often physical characteristics that bind together people of color in the United States, while at the same time hindering the assimilation afforded to earlier generations of immigrants. Food is a common thread that weaves it way through Abu-Jaber’s writing, a powerful and widely accepted means of maintaining a sense of cultural identity in the American “salad bowl.” Traveling back to Jordan in her own life helps Abu-Jaber excavate her own complicated archaeology, finding calming solace in things like the sound of the Arabic language and the scent of rice with fried nuts and cinnamon. Food is what binds Sirene to her Arab identity; it unites the community of exiles, immigrants, and students from Arab lands. In The Language of Baklava, Abu-Jaber describes the importance that food played in her own life, the way her father’s cooking connected her with her Arabic heritage, and the way she missed American foods like pancakes when the family moved to Jordan. Her love for sambusik cookies leads to interesting revelations about a little English friend in Jordan, who turns up his nose at the delicate cookies, saying, “I never eat native food. Neither should you.” The same boy delivers a damming indictment of “in-betweens. It’s not allowed” when AbuJaber plays with the Jordanian children in the neighborhood. “You don’t belong with them!…The sort you are belongs with the sort I am. Like belongs with like, Father says. No in-betweens. The world isn’t meant for in-between, it isn’t done. You know that.” 13 Abu-Jaber, he says, clearly belongs to the white world because of her color, while the other children in the neighborhood, the “natives” are dark. But even at age eight, Abu-Jaber knows better; she drops the English friend and rejoins her Jordanian pals, uneasy in the knowledge that the “native” foods are the ones her father prepares and that her skin is “grimy and golden with a telltale greenish cast” she’d never noticed until the English boy put his bony white arm next to hers. 14 At the same time she wasn’t quite like her Jordanian friends either; she wasn’t “dark.” She was, she realized, in-between.

Naomi Shihab Nye Naomi Shihab Nye, the best-known Palestinian-American poet by far, has an unusually positive interpretation of her bicultural heritage and says she felt lucky to benefit from the dual perspective inherent in her parentage. Being bicultural, she writes, allowed her to maintain some sense of “otherness” or

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detachment. Throughout her work, Nye challenges rigid boundaries of identification, calling attention instead to the multiple and often overlapping categories that constitute identity, including gender, ethnic origin, religion, and geography. Her emphasis, ultimately, is on cultivating the connections among people, be they in the same village or thousands of miles apart. More than a recurrent theme; connection amounts to a philosophy guiding Nye’s life and explains her involvement in putting together several multicultural anthologies of poetry, including This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World, as well as a collection of Mexican poetry for children. Born to a Palestinian Muslim father and a German-American mother, Nye has also written several children’s books, a coming-of-age novel marketed to teens and young adults, and most recently, a wonderful young adult novel about a courageous teenage girl who defies the growing corporate influences on her community. Like other second-generation poets, Nye has a keen and global sense of injustice. For instance, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is clearly an important theme for Nye, but she has also produced an illuminating cycle of poems on Latin America. Like Suheir Hammad, who has been active in the struggle to free U.S. political prisoners, Nye cannot close her eyes to other situations of oppression or injustice and remain human. If exiled Palestinian poets see or saw their mission as riveting the spotlight to the tragedy of Palestinian existence, then their daughters and sons are busy building bridges, connecting their experience to that of mainstream America—and importantly, to other marginalized communities. Nye’s poetry touches on many themes, including questions of identity, motherhood, friendships, and death. In an essay entitled “This Crutch That I Love: A Writer’s Life, Past and Present,” Nye uses her hometown of St. Louis to celebrate the rich, diverse tapestry that makes up the United States. Although she questioned the absence of Native Americans and African Americans, even as a child, as an adult, she returns to the modest neighborhood of her childhood—“that savory brew of a place, that fragrant mixture of histories—to find it “truly mixed by now, black and white families living side-by-side the way I’d wished it was when I was little too.”15 Writing gave her power to see the world around her more clearly, to record the lost details of everyday life that she found so crucial and precious. In the essay, Nye writes about her quest to read writers from “over the ocean” because they made her horizon seem wider.”16 But it was the writing itself that she found so powerful, because it allowed her to think about difficult things. It was “the daily declaration of independence, saying, I am part of all this magnificent diversity and intricate

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texture, but I am not this. I am more than this…I would stand outside the circle to see what went on.”17 Nye also talks about her connection—and that of many other American writers—with “cultures that were not their own to begin with,” and says living in San Antonio in a primarily Latino neighborhood has given her a “culture that was not mine by blood,” but one she grew to care deeply about.18 “Perhaps I had to live in a Latino city to learn what it really meant to be Arab American—how precious the spectrum of flavors, how many ways they intersect and blend.”19 Attending a poetry festival in Washington State along with members of the Swinomish tribe, as well as writers from a broad swath of America’s ethnic communities, Nye realizes that writing itself has become her home, and the other writers her second family. “The world of words that helped make a map of this mysterious living. How various we are in our eccentric, multi-colored land, our trails dotting so many landscapes, cultures and histories up till now.”20 While Nye has a positive vision of what the United States could be, she is not in any way blind to the divisions and pain that sear the American psyche. In her poem, “Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting,” Nye writes about three women in adjoining seats on a flight from New York to Dallas, who are so busy with their own handiwork that they never trade a word: “A grave separateness / has invaded the world,” she concludes.21 In another poem in her new collection, Nye juxtaposes the frustrations of her daily life in the United States with the agonies that Palestinians suffer under Israeli occupation. As her own home is torn apart and rebuilt to eradicate mold, Nye remembers the Palestinians being confined to their homes, while other houses are being demolished: The whole time we were putting our house back together, more Palestinians were losing their homes. Suicide bombers, those tragic people driven insane by oppression, do not come out of vacuums. They come out of demolished homes. They saw their fathers blindfolded, hauled off to prison in buses. They saw their friends gassed by poison, blown up, their intestines strewn in the dust. Their mothers wailing and bloody. Why is this almost never considered in the news? Sometimes where everything comes from is just as critical as where everything 22 is going.

The war in Iraq is a persistent theme in Nye’s newer poetry as she struggles with the question of how it could have been prevented. In another poem, an ode to “The Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab,” Nye implores, “Please forgive everyone who has not honored your name.” She paints a portrait of the “Arabs I know, generous to a fault, welcoming, with the same wish for a safe daily life as millions of other people around the world. Who packed the pieces, carried them, to a new corner. For whom the words rubble and blast are constants.” 23 In

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another piece, she muses whether sending Johnny Carson to Baghdad could have averted the war, by making the players on both sides look “agreeable, more agreeable, more like one another / the way they truly are, instead of this stupid / wreckage that lessens us / on both sides of the sea.”24

Suheir Hammad While Abu-Jaber employs humor and parody to get her point across, and Nye illuminates the connections among things and people by focusing on the minute details of daily life, Suheir Hammad adopts a much more direct and combative style in her poetry, which is written to be delivered orally. Born in a refugee camp in Jordan in October 1973, Hammad came to the United States when she was just five, after a brief sojourn with her father and then-pregnant mother in Beirut at the height of the Lebanese civil war. She grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, hanging out with Puerto Rican, Jamaican, Haitian, and African American kids, listening to hip-hop and speaking Black English, all the while negotiating the boundaries of her life as a Muslim girl in the fast and dangerous world of America. Her poetry throbs with the rhythm of urban life, a hip-hop beat pulsating to the words as they damn oppression, racism, fascism, and violence in any form—in the war zones of our families, streets, and nations. A regular on the New York hip-hop scene whose work has been broadcast on the BBC World Service and Pacifica Radio, Hammad is fervently and unabashedly political, voicing her support for causes ranging from the campaign to free death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, to the Palestinian struggle for selfdetermination. She has raised funds to aid Afghan children and provide health care to Palestinians injured in the new intifada, or uprising, which began in September 2000, and regularly volunteers in juvenile detention centers and prisons. She has written and performed poems about Abu-Jamal’s struggle for a new trial, the brutal police shooting of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, and the televised shooting of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammad AlDurra, who died in his father’s arms after forty-five minutes of Israeli gunfire that also claimed the life of an ambulance driver who tried to save them. Hammad locates herself proudly as a woman of color, as evidenced by the title and content of her first book of poetry, Born Palestinian, Born Black. The title is taken from “Moving Towards Home,” a poem that African American poet June Jordan wrote in response to the massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps after Israel’s 1982 invasion. In that poem, Jordan proclaims: “I was born a Black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian.” 25 Hammad, writing in the foreword to Born Palestinian, Born

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Black, says that line of Jordan’s changed her life: “I remember feeling validated by her statement. She dared speak of transformation, of re-birth, of a deep understanding of humanity.”26 Like Nye and Abu-Jaber, Hammad is conscious of the connections among people from different backgrounds and ethnic groups. In her memoir, Drops of This Story, published when she was just twenty-three, Hammad uses the metaphor of wetness to connect a series of vignettes from her own life and experience. A spirit of sisterhood pervades her work as she relates her experiences to those of other immigrant children, and especially girls, growing up on the streets of Brooklyn, although she is careful not to gloss over the differences among them. Hammad’s first prolonged contact with a white community came when her family moved to Staten Island when she was in high school. There she was quickly disabused of any sense of superiority she might have enjoyed in Brooklyn because her skin was a shade lighter: “Staten Island let me know that any shades other than pale winter pink and temporary summer tan weren’t cool. They let me know it with their oh-so-polite questions regarding what I was. What the hell was I?” When she answered “Palestinian,” Hammad often encountered bizarre responses such as “I bet you can dance real good,” or “Why do you people make so much trouble? Don’t you know what the Jews have been through?”27 And there was no question that her teachers and peers saw her as belonging to the minority camp, which was ghettoized save for basketball games and international food fairs. In the days after September 11, 2001, Hammad realizes that “most days / most folks operate on / fear often hate this / is…mic check…your / job and i am/ always random.”28 Uncovering racism and sexism in her essays and poetry, Hammad urges women of color to accept themselves as they are. In “Bleached and Bleeding,” Hammad catalogues the misery of young women living under the yoke of these Westernized ideals of beauty: “we bleach our skin / burn our hair / flatten our curves / we straighten our nose / purse our lips / bite our tongue / we chop off our tongue / staple our stomach / sew up our vulva /…close our eyes / kill our soul/…we blame ourselves / we hate ourselves / we kill ourselves.”29 Only by accepting themselves as they are, can women of color finally be free, Hammad argues in a poignant vignette about women “bleaching their hides to reach an impossible shade of porcelain,” when their skin was so beautiful in its natural state. “Don’t need blush, even on sallow days…This beauty is of earth; ain’t no plastic here.”30 She recognizes that the ideal is imposed from the outside but clearly exposes the complicity of women in internalizing the standard and

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continuing to abuse their bodies. And while she rejects the imposition of an artificial, Westernized ideal of beauty, the rituals of applying nail polish and doing her hair remain important to Hammad. She sees these things as a survival strategy, a way to stave off memory and consciousness about all the evil in the world. These are repetitive, mindless acts that she says help her function and find some normalcy in a world that is often cruel and overwhelming.31 Risking the wrath of some members of the Arab community, Hammad also begins to expose sexual abuse and harassment of women—within the Arab community and the larger world—although she is cognizant that this is not a problem confined to her culture: “This story I’ve heard whispered in all languages, all accents.”32 As for Diana Abu-Jaber, this is difficult terrain for Hammad; many would rather silence Hammad’s voice than grapple with such difficult subjects. But she persists, a voice for those who cannot describe the pain. In “Letter to Anthony (Critical Resistance),” a letter poem to a friend in prison,” Hammad writes about working on poetry with women in prison: “… and their stories / are not original or fictional / a woman will tell you / every home she has ever inhabited / has been broken into / starting with her body.”33

Celebrating the Hyphen All three of these writers seek to revamp our understanding of identity as something fixed, positing instead that subjectivity is an ongoing construction. Their work is informed by the call to specificity that many feminists, women of color, immigrants, and postcolonial theorists have made. But they are also concerned with linking people across the multiple and overlapping sites of power that define their lives, and empowering women to resist those “scattered hegemonies” that shape their lives. As evidenced by these three writers, Arab Americans are increasingly identifying as, and with, communities of color, but their status as a “minority” remains ambiguous within the racialized discourses of ethnic studies, legal rights, and feminist scholarship. Arab Americans have also been pulled in opposite directions by the urgent calls of Arab American groups to create a unified front, on one hand, and the academic deconstruction of totalizing myths of identity, on the other. Instigated by powerful forces within academic discourse, this deconstruction questions ethnic or racial groupings as too simplified because they tend to obscure the many differences that exist within such groups, such as class and sexual orientation. But Therese Saliba, an Arab American scholar at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, argues that the struggle for Arab American rights must not be abandoned simply because one recognizes the myriad ways in

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which identities are mediated, narrated, and constructed. Instead she calls for construction of a “strategic identity…woven from the multilayered fabric of Arab life in the United States” and argues that transnational feminism, which emphasizes political, economic, and cultural inequalities alongside gender, has proven more relevant to Arab American women’s scholarship and activism than the current racialized discourses of ethnic studies in the United States.34 Such a transnational approach, as articulated by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Brinda Bose, and others, emphasizes feminist practices and interventions and understands the multiple and often overlapping sites of power and resistance that shape women’s lives. In the Arab American context, it also provides a good prism for analysis because of its attention to the ways in which feminist issues are integrally bound up with U.S. hegemony and foreign policy. For instance, consider the way the Bush administration mobilized support for its invasion of Afghanistan by highlighting the Taliban’s treatment of women. Much has changed in the past five years—and one can fairly speak of a burgeoning field of Arab American artistic endeavor. Efforts to analyze Arab American women’s lives and their expanding cultural production are still in their infancy, but even a short excursion into this arena underscores the richness of the material being produced by writers like Abu-Jaber, Nye, and Hammad— and the depth of their insights. It is truly here in the space created by the hyphen, that the most exciting and transformative energies can be found. Each of these writers in her own way helps illuminate these sites, opening up the power of the hyphen and mining once marginal spaces for the visions, critiques and resistances that are buried there.

Notes 1

Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj, eds., Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 3. 2 A frame story is an overall unifying story, within one or more tales are related. The 1001 Arabian Nights is one of the best-known examples of the use of a frame story. 3 Diana Abu-Jaber, , “A Life of Stories,” in Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing; ed. Susan Muaddi Darraj (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), 122. 4 Ibid. 123. 5 Diana Abu-Jaber, The Language of Baklava (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 319. 6 Ibid. 7 Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 47. 8 Ibid., 92.

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Abu-Jaber, Language, 235. Diana Abu-Jaber, “My Elizabeth,” in Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction, ed. Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004), 297. 11 Abu-Jaber, “My Elizabeth,” 299. 12 Abu-Jaber, Language, 5. 13 Abu-Jaber, Language, 49. 14 Ibid., 50. 15 Naomi Shihab Nye, “This Crutch That I Love: A Writer’s Life, Past and Present,” U.S. State Department: http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/writers/ (Accessed Westminster, February 27, 2006). 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Naomi Shihab Nye, “Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting,” You & Yours (Rochester, New York: BOA Editions, 2005), 18. 22 Nye, “Renovation,” You & Yours, 42. 23 Nye, “The Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab,” You & Yours, 57. 24 Nye, “Johnny Carson in Baghdad,” You & Yours, 70. 25 June Jordan. Naming Our Destiny (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989), 143. 26 Suheir Hammad, Born Palestinian, Born Black (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), xi. 27 Suheir Hammad, Drops of This Story (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 73. 28 Suheir Hammad, “Mike Check,” ZaatarDiva (New York: Rattapallax Press, 2005), 62. 29 Hammad, Born Palestinian, 75–76. 30 Hammad, Drops, 90. 31 Hammad, “Truth and Offering,” ZaatarDiva, 94; “Santa Clause and Self-help Books,”: http://sapienta.hunt.cuny.edu/~olivetree/otr-frames1/spring97/poetry/sh=santa/html (Accessed August 31, 2006). 32 Hammad, Drops, 45. 33 Hammad, “Letter to Anthony (Critical Resistance),” ZaatarDiva (New York: Rattapallax Press, 2005), 65. 34 Therese Saliba, “Resisting Invisibility,” in Arabs in America, ed. Michael W. Suleiman (Philadelphia, 1999), 306. 10

THE STRATEGIC VOICE OF WESTERN POETICS IN ARAB AMERICAN POETRY RICHARD HISHMEH

The aim of this paper is to establish a pattern in Arab American poetry wherein a specifically Western poetic voice seems to have been adopted to forward a political and cultural agenda that is often at odds with mainstream Western culture. Beginning with Kahlil Gibran, and evident in many contemporary Arab American poets, such as Naomi Shihab Nye and Lawrence Joseph, the conscious or unconscious incorporation of Western poetic voices into poems that often forward non-Western agendas can be read as a strategic maneuver that allows marginalized Arab American poets access to mainstream audiences. To exemplify this pattern, I will look at Gibran’s use of Walt Whitman’s voice, Nye’s use of Pablo Neruda’s voice, and Joseph’s use of Wallace Stevens’s voice. These comparisons will demonstrate the strategic and subversive ways in which these voices are employed, as well as challenge other readings that dismiss these poets’ uses of Western styles as the work of hacks or amateurs.1 Two theoretical models that are useful in explaining the potential for political subversion and resistance in Arab American poetry are strategic antiessentialism and disidentification. The cultural critic George Lipsitz coined the first of these theories, and he describes the process of strategic anti-essentialism as follows: When people confront obstacles to direct expression of their aspirations and interests, they sometimes take a detour through fictive identities. These may seem escapist. They may involve the appropriation, colonization, or eroticization of difference. But appearances of escape and appropriation can also provide protective cover for explorations of individual and collective identity. Especially when carried on by members of aggrieved communities—sexually or racially marginalized “minorities”—these detours may enable individuals to solve 2 indirectly problems that they could not address directly.

Strategic anti-essentialism, then, is an indirect mode of resistance that works from the inside-out. Arguably, a process similar to this can be seen in Arab American poetry, wherein poets, consciously or unconsciously, have adopted a

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poetic form and voice that is consistently Western, and using this voice, intentionally or consequently, forward an identity or agenda that often runs counter to Western ideals. José Muñoz’s idea of disidentification also describes this sort of resistance, as it posits an identity that both accepts and rejects dominant modes of identification. As Muñoz explains: Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning…[it] is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.3 What arises out of Muñoz’s process is a counterpublic figure that is able to use dominant modes of expression, or dominant modes of publicity, against the very systems of power to which these modes belong. Counterpublicity is a way of operating within institutions of power, against institutions of power. What Lipsitz and Muñoz both show is that marginalized groups often survive, or resist, through calculated and complex intersections with mainstream culture. Many Arab American poets engage in similar processes as they attempt to retune their voices to a key in harmony with Western poetics and culture. Building on the works of Lipsitz and Muñoz, I have labeled such processes collectively as those of strategic genius. By this, I mean the conscious or unconscious use of the voice of Western romanticism toward ends that are often highly critical of Western politics and ideals.

Gibran’s Prophet and Gibran’s Whitman Despite Eugene Paul Nassar’s 1980 essay on Gibran, which called for a significant critical reappraisal of the oft-ignored poet, little of note has been written in English on Gibran over the last two decades.4 This is especially surprising because Gibran achieved more fame and renown than any Arab migrating to the United States in what is commonly known as the first wave of Arab immigration. Indeed, very few figures of Arab descent have so penetrated the American popular imagination, and Gibran’s acceptance is so thorough that his very Arab-ness has practically been negated. Gibran’s ability to transcend his Arab ancestry—by dissolving his ethnic heritage into an image much more palatable to an American public—has much to do with his immense and continued popularity; yet, embedded in Gibran’s public reputation is a counterpublic figure that was instrumental in gaining recognition for an Arab minority, largely invisible to mainstream America in the early half of the twentieth century. Gibran’s early decision to write in English rather than Arabic, a decision he struggled with throughout his life, is evidence that he deliberately sought such recognition. Moreover, long before the Middle East became an

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unsettling and highly mediated signifier in U.S. politics, Gibran was an advocate and activist for Arab causes, both globally and in the United States. Such activism is apparent in Gibran’s Thoreauvian antimaterialism, apparent throughout works like The Prophet, as well as in works such as his 1925 essay, “The New Frontier,” where he wrote against Ottoman oppression in his home country of Lebanon and about the state of the Middle East more generally. Nothing in Gibran’s oeuvre compares to the success of his 1923 work, The Prophet. In this work, Gibran’s visionary poetics are most manifest. Framed around the story of Al Mustafa, the Chosen One, this work tells of the hero’s departure from the city of Orphalese. While leaving, he is stopped by a crowd and asked to speak on various subjects. Ranging from love, houses, clothes, and time, the work addresses twenty-six topics in all, concluding with those of religion and death. Gibran’s oft-quoted advice on marriage is among these, wherein, reminiscent of Rilke, he instructs, “But let there be spaces in your togetherness, / And let the winds of the heavens dance / between you.”5 Whitman’s influence is also present in lines such as, “And I say that life is indeed darkness / save when there is urge / and urge is blind save when there is / knowledge.” 6 Here, Gibran directly echoes “Song of Myself,” wherein Whitman decrees, “Urge and urge and urge / Always the procreant urge of the world.”7 Gibran’s prophetic declaration, “And I say,” is also borrowed from Whitman, who uses it throughout “Song of Myself.” Whitman declares, “And I say that it is as great to be a woman as to be man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.”8 A few lines later he writes, “And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and / composed before a million universes. / And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God.”9 Such echoes resound throughout The Prophet, aligning Gibran with the visionary romanticism best illustrated in William Blake, Whitman, and, following Gibran, Allen Ginsberg. Gibran again directly borrows from Whitman in his section entitled, “On Work.” As the Prophet reflects on the topic of work, he says the following: “But I say, not in sleep but in the over-wakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass; And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.”10 Echoing any number of lines from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” these lines directly reference Whitman’s own title, Leaves of Grass, as well as the numerous allusions to grass throughout Whitman’s poem. In section 31 of “Song of Myself,” Whitman claims, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” a sentiment very similar to that found in Gibran’s passage.11 Gibran follows Whitman by pointing up the universality of

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all men and by delighting in nature, where he finds his most adequate metaphors. The passage’s repetition of the word “sweet” also resonates with lines from “Song of Myself,” such as, “clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul” and “I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.”12 Even Gibran’s use of the word “song” seems inextricably bound to Whitman. Still, such parallels do not, I think, simply denote the work of a hack. Rather, through the use of Whitman’s voice, Gibran enacts something like Lipsitz’s anti-essentialism. Performing as the other, Gibran seeks to illustrate his own cultural uniqueness. Posing in the clothes of the Western romantic genius, Gibran’s Prophet asserts himself as a viable Eastern voice worthy of Western attention, and from this position Gibran was able to solicit attention to causes such as Lebanese independence and issues surrounding Arab identity in the United States. As Muñoz would describe it, Gibran’s recycling of Whitman works to empower his own minority status as an Arab American. When Gibran died in New York of liver failure in 1931, his body was taken back to Lebanon, where he was buried in his hometown of Bsharri. Perhaps the biggest testament to Gibran’s successful penetration of the American cultural fabric is the 1991 dedication of a memorial garden to the poet in Washington, D.C. Occurring as it did sixty years after the death of Gibran, this event was seemingly cast in honor of one of the country’s best-selling immigrant authors, but its timing also suggests a political ploy intended to demonstrate U.S. tolerance of Arab people. Capitalizing on Gibran’s American reputation to quell accusations of racism and injustice as the United States invaded Iraq for the first time, this event is a good example of the ways in which the figure of the poet can be publicly manipulated. For, implicit in this 1991 event was the continuing, limited understanding of Gibran as a popularizer of Arab mysticism, reiterating even further why he and his work require thorough re-evaluation. What readers of Gibran continually overlook, and what those who saw this dedication as a political panacea at the onset of Desert Storm also fail to recognize, is that beneath the palatable poetics that Gibran used to penetrate the fabric of American culture was a politics that would have been highly critical of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. That Gibran’s politics would be lost in his attempt to capture an American audience through the use of a familiar Romantic poetics is a risk he was willing, perhaps even compelled, to take. Under what might be called “The burden of The Prophet,” later generations of Arab American poets have had to deal precisely with this misunderstanding of Gibran, carefully negotiating their own reputations toward at least two ends: avoiding the stigma of selling out by becoming essentialized versions of Arab mystics, while nonetheless finding a

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way to assert their own authority and cultural legitimacy. Their evocation of the trope of genius has needed to be even more strategic than Gibran’s.

Speaking for Others, as Others: Naomi Nye and Pablo Neruda Perhaps the most noted name in post-1960s Arab American poetry, Naomi Shihab Nye is a contemporary Arab American poet, who, following Gibran, incorporates a Western poetic voice into her work. Whether or not Nye intentionally employs this voice in her work toward strategic ends, the very presence of this voice, especially when read in the context of other Arab American poets who evoke such voices, achieves a strategic effect. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1952 to a Palestinian father and an American mother, Nye lived briefly in Jerusalem between 1966 and 1967, but was primarily raised in Texas. Her second and most noted collection of poetry, Hugging the Jukebox (1982), was selected for the National Poetry Series and was an American Library Association Notable Book in 1982. In 1988, W. S. Merwin chose Nye to receive the prestigious Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. In addition to writing her own poetry, Nye has played an active role in the Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA), successfully translating a number of Arabic language poets into English. Since 1974, she has worked as a “writerin-the-schools” for the Texas Commission of the Arts. She served as Holloway Lecturer of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a poetry lecturer at the University of Texas, Austin. All of these positions demonstrate Nye’s ability to work effectively within institutions of power while simultaneously producing a counterpublic narrative that brings attention to Palestinian oppression and Middle East politics. Nowhere is this more evident than in Nye’s work with the United States Information Agency’s “Arts America” program. As part of this program, Nye presented her poetry in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Jordan, the West Bank, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and India. Given that much of her poetry is openly critical of U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly regarding Palestine, her work for the USIA may seem surprising. Yet, through this work Nye enacts something akin to Muñoz’s concept of disidentification, working within institutions of power in order to transform the codes, institutions, and assumptions of the mainstream. In her first collection of poems, Different Ways to Pray (1980), Nye utilizes the visionary voice of Pablo Neruda. By consciously or unconsciously modeling her voice so closely on Neruda’s, Nye distances her work from what might be perceived as a canonical, white-majority position. This modeling provides the

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appropriate voice through which to recount her travels in Central America. In a poem about these travels, entitled “The Indian in the Kitchen,” Nye writes: …Tell me the story you have not told anyone, the tale braided into your skull and tied with a string. Describe the sky on the night you wandered out into the village, calling for your father who left Huehuetenango and never returned. The shift in your mother’s eyes— how suddenly there was a rock ledge no one could climb. Tell me of the brothers dancing with piglets The day before they were sold or the nights the goats were restless in their pens and the rooster crowed at the wrong hour, Before Volcan Fuego spit hot sand into the air. My hands would learn the colors your hands know, blue and purple, threaded together on the loom. How you weave the ducks and frogs so they line up end-to-end across the cloth. Listen, no one introduces us, yet all evening it is you I am visiting.13

I quote at length here both to retain the beauty of Nye’s language and to show the exactness with which she adapts Neruda’s voice in The Heights of Macchu Picchu. In the twelfth and final section, Neruda writes: Look at me from the depths of the earth, tiller of fields, weaver, reticent Shepard, groom of totemic guanacos, mason high on your treacherous scaffolding, iceman of Andean tears, jeweler with crushed fingers, farmer anxious among his seedlings, potter wasted among his clays— bring the cup of new life your ancient buried sorrows. Show me your blood and your furrow; say to me: here I was scourged because a gem was dull or because the earth failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone. Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled, The wood they used to crucify your body. Strike the old flints to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips

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glued to your wounds throughout the centuries and light axes gleaming with your blood. I come to speak for your dead mouths.14

Just as Nye’s poetic voice closely models Neruda’s, so, too, does her use of that voice to effect a visionary romanticism that is often critical of Western imperialism and complacency in the third world. Whereas this is certainly only one dimension of Neruda’s and Nye’s poetics, it is perhaps the most significant point at which their poetics intersect. Like Neruda before her, Nye uses images of individual suffering to show the effects of this imperialism and complacency. Through a process similar to Lipsitz’s strategic anti-essentialism, Nye uses Neruda’s visionary voice, a voice familiar and palatable to Western readers, in order to assert her own cultural uniqueness as an Arab American. Like Neruda, Nye asserts a political agenda that if addressed more directly, would have been reluctantly received by a mass American audience..15 Neruda’s voice and imagery appear throughout Nye’s collection, especially in the poems “Negotiations with a Volcano,” “Bolivia,” and “Adios.” Nye’s poem entitled “Coming into Cuzco” is perhaps the best example of her disguising a political agenda in the romantic voice of the visionary. Once the capital of the Incas, Cuzco is the gateway to Macchu Picchu and Nye’s poem immediately recalls Neruda’s masterpiece The Heights of Macchu Picchu. Nye incorporates many of Neruda’s central images into her poem. For example, her, “I was a broken jug, / nothing could fill me,” evokes both Neruda’s “empty net, dredging through streets and ambient atmosphere, I came” and his more specific metaphor of mortality as the “black cup they trembled while they drained.”16 Likewise, Nye’s journey in her poem—from bus, to plane, over the mountains, and into Cuzco—mimics the movement in Neruda’s poem from the depths of despair to redemption at the heights of Macchu Picchu. The key to Nye’s use of Neruda, however, is found midway through the first section of the poem, where Nye, like Neruda before her, hypothesizes a universal, human suffering often overlooked by middle-class America. Nye achieves this through the symbol of her father, imagining, “I was listening to the herd of them wailing on the runway, / thinking the man in the center was the same shape as my father, / thinking, this is Peru, this is more than Peru.”17 In another poem from this collection, “My Father and the Fig Tree,” Nye uses her father to show the struggle of Arab Americans to maintain their cultural heritage while living in the United States: For other fruits my father was indifferent.

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The Strategic Voice of Western Poetics in Arab American Poetry He’d point to the cherry trees and say, “See those? I wish they were figs.” In the evenings he sat by my bed weaving folktales like vivid little scarves. They always involved a fig tree.18

Nye’s father becomes a symbol for a culture in transition, and his struggle to keep old country habits and traditions alive in the United States—where such values are often misunderstood and neglected—spiritually binds him to the people Nye encounters in Peru. The image of her father “weaving folktales” links her father to the woman weaving in the above-cited lines from “The Indian in the Kitchen,” a connection made explicit in the lines about her father in “Coming into Cuzco.” In these lines, as in so much of Neruda’s own work, the suffering of the people of Peru becomes greater than Peru; Nye’s displaced Palestinian father, “the same shape” as the Peruvian man, signifies a shared, human suffering where the oppression of any people, anywhere, is a universal injustice.

Visionary Romanticism and Lawrence Joseph’s Nod to Stevens Arab American poet Lawrence Joseph, like Gibran and Nye, also uses Western visionary romanticism in his works. Born in 1948 among the large population of Arabs living in Detroit around that time, Joseph’s parents were of Lebanese and Syrian origin. His first collection of poetry was awarded the Agnes Lynch Starret Prize by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1982, and in 1984 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award. In 1988, he published a second collection of poems, entitled Curriculum Vitae. An attorney by trade, Joseph has practiced law before the Michigan Supreme Court and has taught law at both University of Detroit Law School and St. John’s University School of Law in New York City. Like Nye, Joseph has been able to work successfully within the systems of power while bringing attention to Arab American minorities and the issues that concern them. Given his profession, it may not be surprising that Joseph should choose Wallace Stevens as his visionary romantic model.19 Many critics have gone to great lengths demonstrating how Stevens brought to modernism some of the concerns and tropes most often found in Romantic poetry, including attributing a religious importance to poetry. 20 Indeed, in early works like “Sunday Morning,” Stevens evokes romantic thought by contemplating a place for poetry that can replace religion in an increasingly secularized culture. More important for Joseph, however, may be the tropes most often associated with Stevens’s later work. In addition to poems like

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“Rubaiyat,” “Sand Nigger,” and “In the Beginning Was Lebanon,” where Joseph directly confronts issues of Arab American identity, many of his poems also interestingly use the same visionary, self-questioning figure that animates Stevens—a figure caught up in imaginative revelries, which, for Stevens, underlie a preoccupation with rational thought and provide the ground on which mere reality can stand. Perhaps indicative of their shared personal professions as lawyers, Joseph and Stevens center many of their poems around this imagining figure, who both considers carefully the constructed world in which he lives and envisions new imaginative realms within that world. This is especially true of late Stevens, evidenced in poems like “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and inherent in the haunting poem, “A Quiet Normal Life.” As seen in this poem, Stevens’s figure never fully escapes the confines of the material, constructed world in which he sits, but by contemplating it, and by trying to envision ways beyond it, he rallies against it. The poem concludes by striking a balance between the mundane existence of Stevens’s figure and the possibility of something more. Stevens writes of some unnamed insight, heard “above the crickets’ chords”: Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound. There was no fury in transcendent forms. But his actual candle blazed with artifice.21

Evoking the creative fire of visionary romanticism, these final lines underscore the human need to discover the imaginary in places where the imaginary is seemingly outmoded, and more importantly, where the most basic sensory experiences may themselves constitute a sort of re-envisioning or re-imagining. By incorporating this late visionary romantic voice into his work, Joseph similarly depicts the desperate need for imagination within the overtly constructed worldviews inherent in much postmodern thought. Joseph begins his 1988 collection Curriculum Vitae with a passage from Stevens’s essay, “Three Academic Pieces”: “Both in nature and in metaphor identity is the vanishing point of resemblance.” In many ways, this epigraph is the key to what Joseph achieves in this collection. Stevens’s passage is not inconsistent with Lipsitz’s notion of strategic anti-essentialism, wherein individuals are able to assert one identity by forwarding another.22 Indeed, throughout his collection, Joseph is concerned with the slipperiness of identity formation and its specific relevance for Arab Americans. In the title poem, for example, Joseph begins, “I might have been born in Beirut, / not Detroit, with my right name.”23 Under the collective title of Curriculum Vitae, it should not surprise that much of Joseph’s collection, including this poem, deals with the

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ways in which identities are constructed and reconstructed. For Joseph, the rigidity of identity becomes surmountable through his emulation of Stevens. As a poetic figure through which Joseph can model his poetic voice in an act similar to that of disidentification, and as a voice that allows for imaginative acts in the world of postmodernism, Stevens becomes a necessary channel through which Joseph, intentionally or not, asserts his individual politics. Stevens’s visionary romanticism is present throughout Joseph’s work, in poems on topics as various as the global economy, Arab American identity, and world politics, and Joseph effectively uses this voice to critique what he sees as the many inequities surrounding these issues. Still, it is Joseph’s seemingly direct allusion to Stevens in “That’s All” that demands specific attention. Joseph’s poem begins as follows: I work and I remember. I conceive a river of cracked hands above Manhattan. No spirit leaped with me in the womb No prophet explains why Korean women thread Atomic Machinery’s machines behind massive, empty criminal tombs.24

The enjambment between the first and second line of this poem creates a strong emphasis on the poet’s role as one who “conceives.” Consistent with notions of not only the Cartesian self, but also more explicitly romantic genius, the poet’s ability to conceive emanates from within rather than from external sources. Thus, in the next two lines, the poet reiterates his individuality, perhaps even his own godliness, by insisting on his isolated nature. In the womb, there is no external spirit, but there is very certainly a “me.” Likewise, if there is no external prophet, as indicated in the fourth line, understanding and prophecy must emanate from the speaker himself. These lines point back to Stevens’s claim in “Sunday Morning” that “Divinity must live within herself.”25 Why do I make my fire my heart’s blood, two or three ideas thought through to their conclusions, make my air dirty the rain around towers of iron, a brown moon, the whole world?26

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If Joseph’s “air” that “dirt[ies] the rain around towers of iron” recalls Stevens’s oft-cited weather of the mind, it does so for all of the above-cited reasons.27 Joseph evokes Stevens in the same way that Nye evokes Neruda and that Gibran evokes Whitman and other visionary romantics; all of these poets, through a process I call strategic genius, attach their own poetic voices to those familiar to American audiences. In doing so, they assert unique identities, performing what Muñoz might term counterpublic acts. At times, Joseph’s visionary romanticism seems to combine elements of both Stevens and Gibran, and it is important to see that Arab American poets like Joseph are rarely able to fully escape the shadow of Gibran. Indeed, much of Joseph’s poem, “That’s All,” seems haunted by Gibran’s prophetic voice. Joseph writes, “Truth? My lies are sometimes true / Firsthand, I now see God.” Here, as determinations about truth and self are described as written by the speaker rather than on the speaker, the poem’s visionary voice prophetically asserts a sort of individual legitimacy. Identity becomes a creative, imaginative act, and in a Gibranian prophetic voice, Joseph, like Stevens, searches for ways to assert individual identity in a world where meanings are constructed. The poem concludes: I don’t deny the court that rules my race is Jewish or Abyssinian. In good times I transform myself into the sun’s great weight, in bad times I make myself like smoke on flat waves.

Subverting the court that seeks to control his identity, the speaker in Joseph’s poem reclaims the authority of the visionary romantic and “transforms” his identity to match his own desires. Finally, in “London,” another poem found in Curriculum Vitae, Joseph makes his relationship to visionary romanticism transparent: “Aged malt whiskey and cigarettes / consumed to enhance consciousness / —read Blake.”28 These lines open Joseph’s poem, a poem that proceeds to discuss economic and social inequalities seen throughout London. Like William Blake’s own poem “London,” Joseph’s poem is fervent in its politics, especially in its critique of the economic inequities that pervade contemporary society; moreover, it is deeply concerned with questions of identity formation and subjectivity. Like the other works discussed throughout this essay, “London” demonstrates yet again how many Arab American poets

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revitalize Western romantic tropes by offering them new modes of expression. In the works of these poets, the political relevance of visionary romanticism is reinvigorated, and through processes similar to those described by Lipsitz and Muñoz these poets assert their political legitimacy and individual identities. Other Arab American poets and artists have brought their voices even closer to the mainstream—fluctuating between a voice that is sometimes Western and sometimes not—progressively redefining what it means to be both Arab and American.

Conclusion While all of the works discussed in this essay are texts written before the current political climate in the United States, brought about largely by the events of 9/11 and perpetuated by the war in Iraq, as well as the more recent conflict between Lebanon and Israel, reading these poets in this climate proves critically instructive, as each of these poets, beginning with Gibran, models a way in which Arab American voices can actively, from within institutions of power, speak out. Through subversive strategies similar to those described by Lipsitz and Muñoz, Gibran, Nye, and Joseph have found ways to address highly contentious topics, including those surrounding Arab American identity, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the displacement of Arabs from their homelands, and the independence of Arab states from the powers of Western hegemony. More often than not, these are topics that fall on deaf ears when presented to a largely unsympathetic and largely uninformed, Western audience. Yet, written as they are, in a voice familiar to Western ears and consonant with Western themes, these works have penetrated, however subtly, the consciousness of this audience. In one of Gibran’s more famous aphorisms from his 1926 work Sand and Foam, he declares, “Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.” Revisiting this passage in the context of this essay charges the passage with new implications, underscoring the extent to which Gibran was aware of the duplicity of his message and suggesting an intentional subversion on his behalf. Following in the footsteps of their Arab American literary forebear, Nye and Joseph have replicated this subversion in their lives and works. Together, then, the lives and works of these poets demonstrate the ways in which marginalized figures can operate within systems of power to gain exposure for their causes and to enact, subversively, monumental political and cultural changes. As these poets and theories attest, speaking to power in its own voice may be one alternative, perhaps even a more effective alternative than other modes of resistance.

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Notes 1

Consider, for instance, the common critical dismissal of Gibran’s work that evokes the obvious pun “The Profit.” Even more unsettling, however, are remarks by critics who claim to champion Gibran but similarly dismiss The Prophet for its success. In the introduction to their anthology of Arab American poetry, for instance, Gregory Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa write of The Prophet: “Those whose disregard for Gibran rests only on reading that overwritten, aphoristic book should be encouraged to examine some of the early lyrics such as the powerful ‘Defeat’…” (p. xvi). While this point is well taken, it seems to dismiss unnecessarily many of The Prophet’s merits on the basis of its popular appeal. See Sharif Elmusa and Gregory Orfalea, eds., Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry (New York: Interlink Books, 2000). 2 George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads (New York: Verso, 1994), 62. 3 José E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Cultural Studies of the Americas, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), 31. 4 . Eugene Paul Nassar, “Cultural Discontinuity in the Works of Kahlil Gibran,” MELUS 7, no. 2 (1980): 21–36. 5 Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 15. 6 Ibid., 26. 7 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 31. 8 Ibid., 48. 9 Ibid., 86. 10 Gibran, Prophet, 28 11 Whitman, Leaves, 59 12 Ibid., 31, 47 13 Naomi Nye, Different Ways to Pray (Portland: Breitenbush Books, 1980), 4. 14 Pablo Neruda, The Heights of Macchu Picchu, trans. Nathaniel Tarn (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1966), 67. 15 Despite Neruda’s overt Marxism and a politics that is often strenuously anti-capitalist, he remains a beloved poet in Western markets, including the United States. His collections such as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, and Odes to Common Things, as well as his status as a Nobel Laureate, have much to do with his continued reputation. Certainly Nye would not have overlooked Neruda’s ability to negotiate his division between that of a popular, beloved Western poet and one whose politics often ran counter to those of Western capitalism and imperialism; it is therefore probable that her evocation of Neruda is an attempt to establish a similar position—a position, at once, popular and subversive. 16 Ibid., 3, 13. 17 Nye, Different Ways, 47. 18 Ibid., 20.

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While Stevens’ profession as the vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity is widely recounted, worth mention here is that he entered the insurance business as a bonding attorney for the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Co. of St. Louis in 1914. He had graduated from New York Law School in 1903 and passed the New York bar in 1904. 20 See, for instance, Joseph Carroll’s work, Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism. Also, for a good collection of critical essays on Stevens, see Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese’s, Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens. 21 Stevens, Wallace, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, Library of America 96 (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 1997), 444. 22 I am not suggesting that Stevens’ passage is in any way directly related to notions of individual identity; rather, his observations in this piece about the three types of imaginative resemblances can, in fact, inform such discussions of identity. This is especially true for minority writers like those discussed in this essay, who, through imaginative acts, try to re-envision personal identity. 23 Lawrence Joseph, Curriculum Vitae (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 7. 24 Ibid., 34. Here, I would also note that Joseph’s image of “atomic machinery” also sounds strikingly similar to Allen Ginsberg’s “hydrogen jukebox” from “Howl,” an important observation because of Ginsberg’s reputation as another late romantic visionary. 25 Stevens, Collected Poems, 53. 26 Joseph, Curriculum Vitae, 34. 27 See, for instance, the poem, “A Clear Day and No Memories,” where Stevens asserts, “Today the mind is not part of the weather. / Today the air is clear of everything.” Stevens, Collected Poems, 47. 28 Joseph, Curriculum Vitae, 47.

Layered, Erased, and Embedded Narratives Doris Bittar

Figure 1. In the Sun’s Blood, 1997, oil on linen, 5 x 16 feet.

Figure 9. Stripes and Stars: From Saragossa to Shiraz, 2001–2, oil on twelve canvasses, 33 x 44 inches.

"Light, Freedom and Mystical Presence" The Artistic Works and Ideas of Sari I. Khoury Christopher M. Khoury

Figure 3: Untitled, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 36 by 48 inches. Khoury Family collection.

Figure 4: Antique Symmetry, mixed media on paper, 1994, 33 1/2 by 31 ½ inches. Khoury Family collection. .

Stories My Father Told Me: The Personal Narrative in Visual Arts Helen Zughaib

Figure 2: Charity and Compassion

Figure 11: Eid al Salib

CHAPTER FOUR: PALESTINIAN ART: BRIDGING THE POLITICAL AND AESTHETIC

"LIGHT, FREEDOM AND MYSTICAL PRESENCE" THE ARTISTIC WORKS AND IDEAS OF SARI I. KHOURY CHRISTOPHER M. KHOURY

Introduction In recent years, there has been an emerging interest in the modern works of painters originating from the Arab and/or Islamic Middle East and immigrant artists from said countries. In the case of Palestinian-origin artists, this interest has taken the form of organized exhibitions1 and the opening of European and American galleries featuring art from "war-torn" areas such as Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon. Much of this art is seenthrough the lens of politics, war and religion often associated with Arab countries. This paper surveys the childhood and early development, influences, and the role of exile in Khoury's work. I will investigate the stages of artistry of my late father, Sari I. Khoury from before and after his exile from Palestine by examining his selected paintings, personal history, interviews, essays, personal statements and records. By tracing his early life and artistic development, explaining the inspirations drawn both in his childhood in Palestine and later in the West, and comparing his approach to theories on exile and Palestinian Art, I illuminate the ways in which both his early life in Palestine and experiences after exile shaped Sari Khoury’s artistic style, subject and approach.

Childhood and Early Artistic Development Sari I. Khoury was born to Ibrahim and Adla Khuri in Jerusalem, Palestine in 1941. He was the youngest of eight children, with four sisters and three brothers. Today, he is survived by his wife, Soheila, his three children, and four sisters who all live in the United States. His father, Ibrahim Shehadeh Khuri was a leading secular educator in Palestine who taught and served as headmaster of Al-Nahda College (Jerusalem). At this time, Palestinians who were under the yoke of British colonialist rule feared Zionist militias. Consequently, at the age of 7, Khoury and his family fled Jerusalem, leaving their home and belongings behind. Like most Palestinians, his family was initially hopeful that they would

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shortly return to their original homes and their previous lives. Thus, they took only bare essentials on their exodus. They settled temporarily in their ancestral home of Birzeit which was the home of his deceased grandfather, Shihadeh. Describing this time, Sari recalled, My fondest childhood memories were of our Birzeit house where we used to play around Sidi Shihadeh’s grave. In Birzeit also my late brother Basil, and I were initiated into country living. He and I used to roam around the best 2 vineyards of all of Palestine.

When Khoury was aged 10, the family moved to Ramallah where his father became a teacher at Al-Kulliah Al-Wataniah, the school Khoury also attended for his primary and secondary educations. Remembering his elementary school days, he would share humorous stories of classroom drawings of the teacher and the accompanying British-style punishment for his transgressions. He described his early artistic experimentations in his family environment, To ease the tragedy of our exile my sisters sang and drew, my brother and I created our own sculpture and toys out of simple wire and scrap wood. My mother was a dress designer, and my father always taught us not to be ashamed 3 to use our hands—to construct, to fix, and also how to till a garden.

This supportive environment included his older sisters who would share their colored pencils and watercolor paints with him. These early lessons inspired his adult life in the form of stretching canvases, framing works, building his own furniture, and tilling his vegetable garden. Perhaps due to his own family's forced exile and his witness to the less fortunate plight and influx of thousands of Palestinian refugees from pre-1948 Palestine, he developed an early sense of social justice. I became more preoccupied with serious themes, and I became more introspective searching for the meaning of life and human suffering associated with the Palestinian tragedy. So I directed my energies in creating social themes. Using oils and watercolors I painted people in suffering, old people, poor children, refugee camps, and political prisoners.4

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Figure 1: The artist in the mid 1970s. By age 18, he dreamed of continuing his art studies formally at either a European or American institution. His efforts resulted in a full scholarship to Ohio Wesleyan University. Interestingly, his scholarship was funded by an anonymous Palestinian-American. As of this writing, the sponsor's identity remains unknown. Focusing in painting and sculpture, he graduated with a BFA

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in 1963. At the same time, his parents and other family members, increasingly disillusioned in Palestine, immigrated to the United States and settled in Washington, D.C. Having family nearby influenced Khoury’s decision to spend one summer as an intern at the National Gallery of Art. Afterwards he continued his studies at the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI), obtaining an MFA in 1965. He married my mother, Soheila Ghannam on October 29th, 1967. His first teaching experience was at the unique Berea College (Berea, KY). Berea College's mission was to provide an education to students from extremely poor regions of Appalachia while also employing students in useful trades such as woodworking and other craft-oriented fields. After Berea College, Khoury took a position at Central Michigan University (Mt. Pleasant, MI) in 1967 where he would reside, the rest of his life. Fondly calling it his "new Birzeit," he taught painting and drawing for twenty nine years, and also served as head of the art department for two years (1992-1993). Reflecting on his vocation, Khoury explained, "My work as a teacher of art and as a practicing artist, go hand in hand. I teach to communicate my ideas and principles, and I paint to communicate my feelings."5

Inspirations Khoury drew from a variety of inspirations and influences that became more nuanced as he immigrated and pursued formal art education in the United States. But earlier inspirations, in the form of religion, art and politics, derived from his experience growing up in Palestine continued, rather than being superceded. Both in Palestine and in the United States, he admired the great modernist and abstract expressionist painters of the 20th century, particularly Paul Klee, Arshile Gorky and Wassily Kandinsky, all of whom experienced some form of exile. As Matisse once said, of the work of an abstract expressionist painter: "My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there."6 By its nature, expressionism conveys a temporal and immediate action based on the emotions and thoughts at a given time. Abstract expressionism is individual and personal, influenced by every day personal experiences and memories. Khoury would describe his quest "to achieve spontaneity in line, color and placement" as a critical part of his discipline. Influences deriving from his early life in the Middle East included Orthodox Christianity, the religion of his birth, Arabic calligraphy, geometry, and the spiritual environment in Jerusalem remained in his consciousness throughout Khoury's life. In Orthodox Christianity, icons act as propositions to divine experience, and serve an equivalent purpose to the written word in religious

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texts. They can tell a story or share a narrative of someone's life, and the often stoic and intense stare of icons can be so powerful that it can lock the witness in a state of meditation or ecstasy. Artistically, icons represent a centuries-old style that conveyed an acceptance of the two dimensional limitations of the wood that they were painted on. The deliberate flatness of iconic images is due to the artist's disinterest in depicting an illusionary three-dimensional shape. Also, art from the Ancient Near East affected Khoury during his many trips to museums throughout the world. Ancient Mesopotamian and the abstract South Arabian7 stone statues and figurines, as compared to Roman statues of the same period, had simplified mouth structures, large, dark eyes, and distinct noses which are all recurrent elements in his work. These statues were considerably less ornamented than their counterparts in Persia and Mesopotamia, but a common theme was the use of high contrast inlaid stones for the pupils and whites of the eyes to ensure a visual connection with the viewer. The influence of Arabic ligatures, Arabian sculpture, and mystical iconography is in evidence. Yet, rather than stoicism, fluid scenes of upheaval, yelling, and torment reach out to the viewer (Figure 2 and 3). For instance, in Figure 2, Arabic script and letters are seen in the lower left quadrant. In particular, the unique ability called “full justification” of Arabic letters to fill up empty space when necessary provides a unique structural backbone for his artwork.

Christopher M. Khoury

Figure 2: Untitled, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 42 by 48 inches. Khoury Family Collection.

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Figure 3: Untitled, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 36 by 48 inches. Khoury Family collection. While in exile, Khoury remained deeply moved by and connected to the political situation in his homeland, which became thematic in his artwork. Both of these untitled paintings, which are acrylics on canvas, were completed at a time when images of great urgency and calamity had reached much of the American public through television and newspapers. Palestinians were shot in the streets of their occupied cities and villages by Israeli soldiers during the first intifada and the world had finally taken notice. These extremely private paintings have never been publicly exhibited. For my father, they were part of a cathartic process of mourning and recognition of the sacrifices of a new generation of Palestinians. The latter painting literally conveys a scene of mourning by depicting a parent figure in the foreground that wears a traditional Palestinian keffiya and carries his pale and emaciated, deceased son. Almost mummy-like, this young boy still clutches a large white rock, the ubiquitous symbolic weapon of resistance, in his right hand. The surrounding crowd gradually fades into the warm orange earth. Toward the right is a red-cloaked lone woman looking out of the canvas toward the viewer; she hovers over the

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crowd like a passing archangel, with white brush strokes surrounding her head, possibly her wings. Much of Khoury's work in the late 70's and early 80's focused on large canvases and the perfection of an airbrush method, typically used in commercial art, to unveil large landscapes and window motifs that seek a world outside of captivity.8 This new technique utilized gradients of wide color spectrums and large polygons formed out of masking tape templates. Large geometric objects can be seen suspended or otherwise balanced. Another direction in his work from the early 1980's used charcoal and rough drawing paper that continued the masking and rigid geometry techniques but utilized shadow and texture for depth. The use of dualistic symbolization as a method of balance is apparent throughout much of Khoury’s work. This method helped Khoury explore the themes of fragmentation and unity, captivity and freedom, darkness and light are at times placed in levitation or surrounded by open space. This can be seen in the mixed media piece, Antique Symmetry (Figure 4). Elements from his earlier explorations in masking and airbrushing are recreated in the large, rigid geometric shapes, but on a paper using mixed media. The white space guides the eye into a path surrounded by cloud-like texture, or possibly flowing water. Two delicate curvilinear lines intersect and frame a sculptural centerpiece. A thick black line is counterpointed against the white background. All in all, his style displayed in Antique Symmetry, as his earlier larger airbrushed works from the 1970s, show a deliberate precision and control of the contour. Also influenced by Western art and technique, there were at least three modern painters who had a strong impact and similar experiences of exile. Paul Klee, shared a preoccupation for the celestial, the mystical, and the dualistic along with a commitment to the importance of the line. Khoury would have been in agreement with Klee’s reference to himself as "not belong[ing] to the species, but a cosmic point of reference."9 Klee also went through a period where death and destruction lay prominent, surely from his own suffering and witness to World War II under Germany's National Socialist regime.10 Like Klee, Khoury did not attempt to psychologically escape from the daily horrors inflicted on the Palestinians and Lebanese in 1982, and again starting in 1987 with the first intifada. Khoury also admired Arshile Gorky's works. Similarly, Gorky’s childhood greatly affected his work and as a survivor of the Armenian genocide, Gorky immigrated at a young age to the United States to pursue artistic studies. Khoury could also relate to Gorky's "loneliness, emptiness, and nostalgia for his

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country (Armenian Turkey)."11. Lastly, Khoury looked to Wassily Kandinsky who too had a cross-national life experience and whose driving force was his mystical inner necessity, emanating from deep within his spirit. Both Khoury and Kandinsky maintained a commitment to exploring abstraction and both interestingly gained an acute understanding of musical composition and the physical sciences. While many of Khoury's paintings were composed with the sounds of his favorite classical composers or jazz musicians, Kandinsky had the unique advantage of synaesthesia, the ability to hear his colors. As Khoury cautioned against simply resurrecting the past art forms of Arab civilization by modern Arab artists, Kandinsky stated, "Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born."12

Figure 4: Antique Symmetry, mixed media on paper, 1994, 33 1/2 by 31 ½ inches. Khoury Family collection.

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On the role of Exile An ongoing dialogue about artistic roles and responsibilities to homeland continues in the works and written opinions of Arab artists and scholars alike13. The artist and scholar, Samia Halaby, described the changing character of Palestinian art14 in the 1970s and 80s as "primarily an art of liberation growing within the social groundswell for freedom." She classifies modern Palestinian artists in the 21st century into two categories: "artists who direct their discourse to their own population…"15 While not necessarily at odds with each other, the other category of artists, is at the "other pole," and described as "carry[ing] the message of Palestine to the outside world, directing their discourse primarily to English-speaking audiences."16 In summary, these two groups are categorized and bound by geography: liberation artists who live in Palestine and explicatory artists living in Diaspora. Although the bulk of Khoury's artistic output was in the Diaspora, he does not easily fit in the category of explicatory artist because while he adopted both style and influences during his life in exile, he did not let his audience in the Diaspora dictate the themes, subjects or style of his work. When Khoury was forty-eight years old, he further addressed the question of an artists' contribution to cultural identity. He felt that it was not enough to simply employ "standard historical motifs, calligraphic canons, and geometric designs"17 to fulfill Arab cultural identity. While he agreed that the employment of these traditional symbolic art forms act as a method of preservation, the artist must strive to successfully incorporate the "spirit of the past, personal vision, and awareness of diverse contemporary creative choices."18 In a sense, the artist in exile has an opportunity to participate in the new aesthetics, materials and styles of his environment. In an essay Khoury wrote about immigrant Arab artists in 1989, he spoke of the different challenges associated with their relation to their new lands of residence: As immigrant artists, we are left in the position of proving our creative potential in an alien and often crass milieu. We are expected to function within, and to contribute to, a new system of professional galleries, art organizations, and educational institutions. We are also expected to spice up the melting pot of art with motifs of our native culture for the benefit of our curious peers and intellectual colleagues. In addition to all that, we follow our sense of noblesse oblige in honor of our national heritage and for the sake of our compatriots. All in all, we find ourselves performing a complex juggling act.19

From this quotation, one can see a certain disdain and rejection for the institutions imposed on Arab and other immigrant artists. He differed in attitude from the "explicatory artists" who Halaby describes as being "molded by the preferences of European and American museum curators and dealers." Yet, he

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eagerly participated in the conventions and membership of the nascent AAUG (Arab American University Graduates), exhibiting his works at the second annual conference (1969), titled "The Palestinian Revolution: Its International, Social, and Technical Dimensions." Whether practicing in the Arab world or elsewhere, he strongly believed that Arab artists must "transcend local appeal and seek a broader audience." In contrast, the explicatory artists identify with "internal liberation movements," addressing issues of race and gender, for example. He categorized these audiences, either real or perceived, into four different groups: (1) art buyers, (2) exhibits for cultural promotion, (3) creation for art's sake, (4) and creation out of technical, professional or idealistic requirements. The trend of outside impositions on Arab artists and Arab American institutions continues unabated. Edward Rothstein, New York Times Art Critic, subtly suggests in a review of the Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, MI), "perhaps as the museum evolves…sensitive issues might be more forthrightly taken on, particularly Islamist terror…"20 Khoury believed that the responsibility of Arab artists was to tell the outside world what they think of their own past, rather than the past being dictated by others. Yet, he cautioned against the "indiscriminate use of cultural resources" resulting in overuse, redundancy, and the "inbreeding of style." He believed that the tools of cubism, abstraction, and expressionism were common to artists wherever they may be, as international languages of their own. Thus, the Arab artist could use these tools in equal fashion and authority to a European or American artist. Khoury's position as an exile, unable to return to a homeland no longer in existence, also played a paradoxically positive role in his creative output. Edward Said believed exile affected intellectuals in unique ways. Exile exists as both a physical and metaphorical condition. For Khoury and so many other Palestinians, it existed on a physical level in the loss of their homeland and the pain of being banished while still watching from afar as another 50 years of destruction unfolded. Exile in the metaphysical sense is "restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others."21 Adorno, another exile and large influence on Said's thinking, unwittingly had sage advice for Palestinian intellectuals, saying "For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live."22 In that sense, Khoury substituted his painting for his homeland, and the elements of movement and restlessness are apparent in much of his work.

Painting: A Place to Live Privately, he spoke openly of his sense of isolation. Like many Palestinians, it may be said he had a sense of pessoptimism, as coined by the playwright and

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Palestinian radical, Emile Habibi23. While Habibi used the term to describe the Palestinian population in Israel, it is also apropos of the Diaspora experience. On the one hand, Khoury spoke of his home in Mt. Pleasant, MI as his "new Birzeit," But on the other hand, his locale prompted feelings of isolation despite his involvement with Palestinian and Arab issues and the community. In order to dispel his isolation, he sought contact, support, and collaboration with other Arab artists, sometimes over long distances and eagerly embraced the advent of electronic communications. Even before the Internet was available, he joined what to the author's knowledge was the earliest electronic assembly of Diaspora Palestinians in the world, on a listserv called P-NET. Here for the first time, reconnected with thousands of other Palestinians like himself, he was able to break through his long-term feelings of isolation. In the artistic realm, he reconnected with many fellow Palestinian artists and participated in "It Is Possible,"24 a combined Israeli and Palestinian art exhibition of twenty-four different artists, curated by Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata and Israeli artist Yona Fischer. The exhibition took place in 1988 at The Cooper Union School of Art Gallery (New York). The artists also signed a joint statement in Arabic, English and Hebrew along with numerous intellectuals in Palestine, Israel and the Diaspora calling for the immediate establishment of an independent Palestinian state free of occupation and a just solution to the refugee problem. If at least one goal was accomplished through this risky exhibit, it was possibly the first time that leading American critics began to pay attention to Palestinian artists. The art critic Dore Ashton, admitted in the exhibition essay that she was "ashamed to note that the only artists I was familiar with were Israelis, and the reasons for that are all too obvious." She goes onto say, "Clearly there is something wrong here, and I must not let myself off the hook…. I, and my culture are guilty of cultural bias, something far more insidious than simple ignorance."25 Along with participating in exhibitions, Khoury maintained a connection to the greater Arab and Islamic homeland through multiple sabbaticals. During one trip in the early 1970s, he studied Islamic art and architecture throughout the Levant. Carefully taking notes, photographs, and sketch studies, he began incorporating geometric figures or shapes and motifs found in the architecture of mosques, the decorative and functional wooden windows that filter and bend light, and the religious mosaics of earlier Byzantine Arab civilization. His final sabbatical in 1996 took him to Spain for several weeks where he studied Moorish Islamic art and architecture along with modern art works in Madrid's glorious museums. This final trip would spur a flurry of creative output resulting in some of his most ambitious works, such as that shown in Figure 5. The bold

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red and blue stripes are indicative of building decoration and architecture in North Africa and Southern Spain, with blue diamonds embedded among a white backdrop. In this work, his two distinct styles are united in complex fashion, the biomorphic objects and actors appear again, as do the airbrushed gradients from his earlier 1970s period reappear as brushed acrylic gradients. Simplified dark eyes stare out from the center, and large hard-edged polygons emerge from the lower left and right corners.

Figure 5: Untitled, Acrylic on canvas, 1996, 64 3/4 by 55 inches. Khoury Family collection.

Conclusion After a long and difficult bout with glioblastoma multiforme, a severe form of brain cancer, Khoury succumbed to his death in June 1997 at the age of 56. In those last months of his life I wonder whether his longstanding love for the works of Paul Klee, who himself suffered through a difficult illness at age 57, passed through his mind.26 In an essay published with the Made in Palestine exhibition, Salwa Mikdadi-Nashashibi describes Palestinian art in the past sixty years as "punctuated by Nakbas [catastrophes] and interspersed with short periods of near normal existence when artistic production seemed more diverse in style and content, less focused on the immediate daily tragedies."27 It would

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be hard to fit Khoury into this definition, given his prolific artistic output over decades and wide range of styles and methods. A conflation between influences from his early childhood in the Arab world and all that he encountered in the West in exile are synthesized in Sari Khoury’s work. Only recently The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) in a group exhibition "Without Boundary" conceded somewhat ambiguously, "The exhibition seeks to emphasize diversity by questioning the use of artists’ origins as the sole determining factor in the consideration of their art." This may be indicative of a more sophisticated appreciation of Palestinian and Arab artists. It can be said that Palestinian art has followed a similar trajectory to their Western counterparts: from the abstract toward the conceptual. Some of these pieces are, at times, inflected with angry and immediate visceral narratives. Some use English or Arabic words, either superimposed or as a title, in conjunction with imagery to supplant these narratives. Throughout, one can still see the motifs, shapes and colors that perhaps emanated from the best memories of Khoury’s childhood in Palestine. And while every Palestinian can automatically identify with the themes of steadfastness, resistance, martyrdom and struggle, I believe Khoury would continue to challenge those to move beyond the immediate and into a more mystical realm. His country of origin certainly influences but did not solely define his work by any means. Certainly, one can look near and far and just as easily stumble upon the mythical, mystical and abstract among the rocks in the collective Palestinian memory. The greatest overarching themes in Sari Khoury's work were not linked to the political movements in Arab art, but rather evolved from his lifelong discipline and commitment to the process of artistic discovery and rediscovery. He sought to master many mediums and techniques from charcoal, silkscreen, oil, to air-brushing large and miniature canvases. He left behind a massively productive body of work: hundreds of paintings and drawings, with over 50 group and individual exhibitions around the world.28

Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Jenny Gheith (Art Institute of Chicago), Rena Barakat (University of Chicago), Farris Wahbeh (The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art), and Holly Arida (Cranbrook Schools) for helpful discussions and critiques.

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"Light, Freedom and Mystical Presence" The Artistic Works and Ideas of Sari I. Khoury

See for example Multi-Exposure, a gallery in England that focuses on "British, Israeli, and Palestinian" art. The Station Museum (Houston, TX) featured an exhibit of Palestinian artists in 2004. DePaul University Museum (Chicago, IL) also featured a group exhibit of Palestinian artists in 2005, and separately, Iraqi artists. 2 "An Interview with Sari Khoury," Birzeit Society Magazine 1992. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Henri Matisse, "Notes of a Painter," in Problems in Aesthetics, ed. Morris Weitz (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1960). 7 The Detroit Institute of Arts has a collection of ancient South Arabian and Mesopotamian artifacts that Khoury had visited. He had also taken sabbaticals to Spain, Syria and elsewhere to study the architecture and artwork of Islamic and pre-Islamic periods in the Middle East. 8 Jeffrey Ghannam, "Images of Sari Khoury," Arab Perspectives, August 1985. 9 Robert Wernick, "A Riddle within a Mystery inside an Enigma: Klee," Smithsonian 1987. 10 Ibid. 11 Wikipedia, Arshile Gorky [Website] (Wikimedia Foundation, 2006); available from http://en.wikipedia.org/Arshile_Gorky. 12 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1977). 13 The arts publication, bidoun, covering Arab and Iranian artists in the Middle East and abroad is a recent publication that has featured essays and artistic statements. 14 Samia A. Halaby, "The Subject of Palestine," (DePaul University Museum: 2005). 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Sari I. Khoury, "Immigrant Arab Artists: Themes of Alienation," (Unpublished, 1989). 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Edward Rothstein, "A Mosaic of Arab Culture at Home in America," New York Times, October 24 2005. 21 Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual : The 1993 Reith Lectures, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). 22 Ibid. 23 See "The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist," Imil Habibi, S.K. Jayyusi, T. Legassick, Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Trevor Le Gassick (2001, Interlink Books, Northhampton, MA). 24 Kamal Boullata, "Israeli and Palestinian Artists: Facing the Forest," in It Is Possible Exhibition Book (Cooper Union, 1988). 25 Dore Ashton, "It Is Possible Gallery Essay," in It Is Possible (Cooper Union, 1988). 26 Gunter Wolf, "Endure!: How Paul Klee's Illness Influenced His Art," The Lancet 353, no. 1 (1999).

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27 Salwa Mikdadi-Nashashibi, "Palestinian Artists Working under Siege," in Made in Palestine (Houston, TX: Station Museum, 2003). 28 An on-line exhibition of Sari Khoury's artwork, photos and writings can be seen at http://www.khouryart.org/. Contact email is [email protected].

MOVING IN FROM THE MARGINS: CONTEMPORARY PALESTINIAN ART JESSICA ROBERTSON WRIGHT

The issue of regionalism in the visual arts is controversial. Most artists deflect national or ethnic categorizations to avoid the tendency of critics and viewers to interpret their work only within that ethnic context, to see them not just as artists but as somehow “other.”1 An Iranian artist living and working in New York City has made the observation that while artists may be extremely identified with their ethnic or national roots, they often long to break free of the narrow understandings implicit in viewing art through an ethnic lens. While his sentiment may be true, the reality of the statement is often very different, and most certainly if the origin of the art is related to Palestine or the Palestinians. The case of contemporary Palestinian art presents its own unique set of complexities because the reductivist understanding from which artists desire to distance their work is the very approach applied to Palestinian art by curators and exhibit organizers. For reasons which this paper will explore the evaluation of Palestinian art occupies a category of its own that surpasses mere aesthetic critique, moving into the treacherous terrain of political and social bias. This situation has led to the marginalization of Palestinian art and artists in ways that are at best, disappointing, and at worst, discriminatory. This paper will briefly examine three exhibitions that took place within the last two years in the United States. After narrating the events around the exhibits, I will attempt to elucidate some shared patterns and conclusions in order to better explain this marginalization. Finally, I will propose some approaches to working with galleries, arts institutions, and the arts community to better explain Palestinian art, as well as to effectively advocate for its inclusion in mainstream galleries and exhibits. Before looking at the specific case studies, it is important to clarify several items. This paper will explore the challenges unique to exhibiting contemporary Palestinian art in the United States, and for the sake of brevity, will not draw comparisons with similar exhibits in Europe or elsewhere. As a gallery curator in the United States who focuses on exhibiting contemporary Palestinian art, I

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have had many opportunities to work with artists who have encountered significant obstacles to showing their work both individually and in group shows. There are dynamics at play in the U.S. art world that are specific to it, and, thus, the discussion will limit itself to patterns and suggestions that respond to these dynamics. Additionally, while the term “Palestinian art” is inherently reductivist, for the purposes of this paper, it will have to suffice as a means of referring to this body of work; this use, however, by no means implies that Palestinian art is homogenous or univocal. The discussion will focus on exhibits and artists where the works reflect a Palestinian identity in some way, an identity that has a “political” connotation here. While many artists choose not to reflect what could be termed a political identity in their work, the exhibits and artists discussed throughout this paper convey specific messages about Palestinian identity, be they intensely personal or part of the larger metanarrative of the Palestinian experience.

I. Three Case Studies A. “Where We Come From” (An exhibit by Emily Jacir, shown at the Ulrich Museum, Wichita, Kansas) In January of 2005, the Ulrich Museum in Wichita (affiliated with Wichita State University) hosted the exhibit “Where We Come From,” by conceptual artist Emily Jacir. Kevin Mullins, curator of exhibitions at the Ulrich, invited Jacir to show the series after seeing her work in New York City and reading about her in a number of art journals. He felt the series would be a good fit for the one of the spaces at the museum called the Projects space, which brings visiting artists to exhibit and talk about their work. Mullins was moved by the works’ humanity and struck in particular by how “it humanized the demons that [the American press] makes.”2 Jacir, who divides her time between New York and Ramallah, has had a successful career nationally and internationally, with many of her creations addressing the complexities of the Palestinian and/or Arab identity and experience. In this particular project, she asked fellow Palestinians the question “If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” She then took these requests, and with the relative freedom of movement afforded her by a U.S. passport, she attempted to fulfill them. The requests were all ones that the requestors could not carry out themselves, due to myriad restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation in Palestine. They ranged from “pay my phone bill” to “put flowers on my mother’s grave” to “enjoy a day in Jerusalem walking freely.” The final product of this piece is a series of photographs and texts that hang together, detailing both the request and the attempts to fulfill it, with the photographs capturing some aspect of each attempt. This series has

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been shown to high acclaim all over the world, including at the Istanbul Biennale and the Whitney Biennial in 2004, with unanimous rave reviews. Prior to the show coming to the Ulrich, the museum director, believing that the exhibit would create some tension, decided to preemptively approach the Jewish community leaders to let them know about the show. The response was exponentially stronger than the director anticipated, with the Jewish Federation of Kansas demanding that they be granted “access to the museum in order to place a poster and political materials ‘balancing’ Emily’s work” just outside the gallery for the duration of her show.3 One rabbi protested to the local media and dismissed Jacir’s work as “propaganda” and “a blatant anti-Semitic attempt to breed hatred.”4 In all of the cases of protest, no one had seen the entirety of the series or any of the images in person to actually justify this type of response. The director of the museum refused to grant the Federation’s request, so the group took the matter before the University administration. The administration, thinking it sounded like “a nice idea,”5 told the group to proceed. At this point, Jacir issued an open letter in which she said, “This is a complete infringement on my right to free speech, not to mention as insult to me as an artist…[they are] contextualizing and framing my work in ways I have no control over…This modifies my installation and the work is no longer what it was intended to be. I think people should be able to see my work on its own terms and be able to form their own opinion.”6 The furor continued in the newspapers, on the web, in phone calls and e-mails. The decision to open up adjacent gallery space to provide for a different viewpoint was finally rescinded, and the decision became to either hold or cancel the exhibit. Eventually, the administration capitulated and allowed the museum to go forward with the exhibit “without conditions or limitations that could be considered to compromise the integrity of Ms. Jacir’s work as an artist.”7 David Butler, the museum director, commented, “It’s so much easier to do something that isn’t politically sensitive, but if we’re going to avoid controversy altogether, then we’re really not doing our job. For an institution that’s dedicated to showing what’s new and what’s important, it’s inevitable that we’re going to show things that people might find objectionable…like all good art, it will help people reflect on their own situation and feel a sense of connection with a situation on the other side of the world that we ignore at our peril.”8 The exhibit opening was a great success, with many in the community coming who had never set foot in the museum before. Protesters picketed the event and passed out pamphlets that outlined the “myth vs. reality” of each photo in the exhibition. The protests did not hinder the success of the exhibit, which continued to receive a steady stream of visitors through the duration of its

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stay. The Ulrich, previously somewhat unknown in the art world, achieved its own recognition for hosting this controversial exhibit, and, as Kevin Mullins put it, they “couldn’t have paid for that kind of publicity.”9

B. “The Subject of Palestine” (A group exhibit of contemporary Palestinian artists, shown at the DePaul University Museum, Chicago) In February of 2005, the DePaul University Museum hosted a group exhibit of sixteen contemporary Palestinian artists entitled “The Subject of Palestine.” Samia Halaby, Palestinian artist, writer, and curator, organized the exhibit at the request of a student group on campus, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The initiative for this exhibit followed an incident involving a DePaul professor who approached the student group’s table at an activities fair and engaged them in a heated debate about the Palestinian issue that quickly became belligerent and incendiary. The professor was suspended without pay, and the student group decided to organize an exhibit to increase the campus and community’s awareness of the Palestinian narrative. In a DePaul University news release, SJP president Salma Nasser said, “We wanted to give DePaul’s population and communities beyond the university a clearer understanding of what it means to identify oneself as Palestinian. We also wanted to shed light on the suffering and humanitarian injustices that Palestinians struggle with daily. What better way to do this than through the eyes of the artists?”10 The pieces selected for this exhibit were chosen to show the difference in artistic approaches between artists living in Palestine and Palestinian artists in the diaspora. They ranged from smaller works on paper, such as Tayseer Barakat’s series of abstract figures on the theme of suffering, to the intricately patterned ink drawings of Abd al Rahman al-Mozayen honoring the Palestinian woman as a symbol of the homeland, to a large installation piece by Rana Bishara constructed as an homage to children who have died in the conflict. During the weeks leading up to the show and during its time at DePaul, the newspapers and blogs were teeming with commentary about this exhibit, with accusations being leveled at DePaul for “cultivating far-leftist anti-Semites and haters of America.”11 The controversy over this particular show stirred up again the conversation that had taken place around the hire of faculty professor Norman Finkelstein, which had generated its own share of heated debate, with accusations made that Professor Finkelstein was “universally regarded as a Holocaust Denier, a Jewish traitor and anti-Semite, and at the very least a fraud and pseudo-scholar.”12 The process of putting together the exhibit itself also hit

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some very rough waters. The museum director was extremely nervous about the content, contested the images to be used on the invitation, and made substantial edits to the accompanying essay. However, once the exhibit finally made it onto the museum walls and into the space, it was extremely well received. The Chicago Tribune gave it a strong review, which came as a surprise given the amount of negative press that the show had received prior to its opening. The Tribune art critic, Alan Arnter, said of the show, “The Subject of Palestine…so cogently presents the work of 16 contemporary Palestinian artists that even the least informed of viewers is likely to come away with the sense that they have seen and grasped something important…little stands in the way of the works’ broad humanity…no matter the medium, the art communicates strongly, immediately on the level of feeling…these artists have voices that need to be heard, especially at an institution dedicated to the free play of thought. Congratulations to DePaul on its incisive presentation.”13 The pivotal importance of a show like this taking place cannot be underestimated. Not only did it provide many with the rare opportunity to see a broad spectrum of contemporary Palestinian art, it did so in such a way that the art could be appreciated for its artistic merit, diversity, and content. The controversy surrounding this exhibit did not focus on the aesthetics of the show. It, did however, generate enough attention that those who saw the exhibit were exposed in new and thought-provoking ways to a strong body of work reflecting a human tragedy that has been summarily dismissed and ignored for decades.

C. “Made in Palestine” (Group show of contemporary Palestinian art; originally opened at The Station, a museum in Houston, before traveling to San Francisco, Montpelier, Vermont; currently on view at the Bridge Gallery in New York City) This groundbreaking exhibition opened at The Station in Houston in 2003. When the curator, James Harithas, first decided to organize this show, he traveled with his staff to Palestine and some of the surrounding Arab countries, meeting artists and collecting works to bring back to the United States. Curator and artist Samia Halaby accompanied the group and was instrumental in introducing them to many of the artists and helping to select the work. The show opened to enormous acclaim in Houston, which has a sizable Palestinian community, and was extended from a three-month to a six-month showing due to its overwhelming popularity. The show reflected to a great degree the extreme diversity of expression and geography of the artists who were included.

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Among the works shown were crayon drawings on cloth created by Zuhdi Al Adawi and Muhammad Rakouie, self-taught artists imprisoned in Israeli jails; a large-scale black silk dress installation by Mary Tuma, a Palestinian artist living in North Carolina, whose work reflects on Palestinian women and identity; the monumental Masonite cut prints of Mustafa al Hallaj, showing a fable in which the artist cast himself as man, god, and devil released from the boundaries of political regimes; the small ceramic tree sculptures of Vera Tamari numbering 660 and symbolizing the thousands of olive trees cut down and destroyed by Israeli forces. The pieces in the exhibit ranged widely in material, content, and overt political expression, with all demonstrating a deep awareness of history, a highly sophisticated artistic aesthetic and profoundly felt emotions. There was virtually no controversy prior to its opening or during its stay in Houston. The museum produced a catalogue, which included several scholarly essays and many photographs of the works. After its remarkable success in Houston, Harithas felt that it was imperative to tour this show, given the rare and unprecedented opportunity of having an exhibit on this scale with all its substantial pieces already in the United States. As he began to contact other museums, the success of Houston was quickly overshadowed by refusals from over ninety museums and galleries. In a Mother Jones interview, Harithas, the former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., said, “I thought I had enough contacts to get this exhibit shown in museums across the nation, but I found out that even people who I considered close contacts said off-the-record they would lose their funding if they were to hold an exhibit that was pro-Palestinian.”14 Many institutions rejected the exhibit before they saw a single piece of work from the show. With the exhibit sitting in storage in Texas, and no official institution willing to take it on, various groups and organizations around the country took up the daunting task of trying to bring the exhibit to their cities. Faced with the challenges of mounting a show of such size and scope, organizations had to raise tens of thousands of dollars for space rental, insurance, installation costs, publicity, and various event costs. In all three cities to which this exhibit has traveled, the organizers have all been volunteers. “Made in Palestine” went on view in April of 2005 in San Francisco, where the Justice in Palestine coalition headed up the efforts to bring it there, with ten groups combining their resources to support the show, and two artists donating exhibit space at a San Francisco arts and cultural center called SomArts. The space allowed for approximately 60 percent of the show to be exhibited. The second mounting of the exhibit took place in Montpelier, Vermont in October of 2005 at the Wood Art Gallery. It was brought to Montpelier by the Vermonters

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for a Just Peace Coalition and the exhibit was made possible by a grant from the Lintilhac Foundation. They were able to mount about 50 percent of the show in the space available. Neither city encountered any significant or notable controversy prior to the exhibit or throughout the duration of its display. There was significantly more resistance to the exhibit in the lead-up to the show’s opening in New York City in March of 2006. Halaby, the primary force behind bringing this exhibit to New York, along with a band of extremely committed volunteers, combed the city for possible venues. In an interview on World Press.org, Halaby says, “We knocked on the doors of every museum and every alternative space…when they finally all rejected us, the reason seemed mostly that the upper layers of their administrations, the directors, the head curators, had all rejected the show. They would lose their funding if they showed Palestinian art.”15 When it became apparent that the group would basically need to create their own gallery, i.e., rent space and make it habitable for the exhibit, they began to hold a series of fund-raisers to generate enough income to rent gallery space in the heart of the arts district in Chelsea. In response to an event scheduled to take place in White Plains at the Westchester County Center, N.Y. State Assemblyman Ryan Karber issued a statement calling on Westchester County to cancel the “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas exhibit.” Karber was referring to a planned fund-raiser showcasing Palestinian art, poetry, and music, along with slides of the works that would be shown at the “Made in Palestine” exhibit. He insisted that the Westchester County Center was going to be hosting an art exhibit that “glorifies terrorism and denounces Israel.” Karber went on to say, “This exhibit is a propaganda show for assassins…the pieces included in this exhibit are offensive to me as a Jew, as an American, and as a civilized human being.” The fund-raiser eventually went forward and was very successful. Most importantly, after two years of intense labor and commitment, the show opened on March 14, and the opening gala on March 16 saw nearly two thousand people come through. The exhibit continued to receive positive reviews, even in the New York Times, known for its difficult critiques.16

II. Patterns of Marginalization Several patterns emerge from the history of the three exhibits outlined above, which highlight the challenges inherent in exhibiting Palestinian art that reflects the Palestinian experience. It is important to note this experiential reflection: if Palestinian artists painted landscapes of views from the Golden Gate or George Washington bridges, it is unlikely that those works would ignite the same kind of furor that arises around more overt “Palestinian” subject matter, and likely that the artists would not encounter nearly as much difficulty in exhibiting their

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work. There is however, a spark that flies when the work reflects on uniquely Palestinian themes of loss, displacement, oppression, exile, anger, and resistance; when the art is, as Halaby stated in an interview “about epic tragedy, [about] a population going through a tragedy of proportions that simply fills the cells of the artists.”17 Because much of contemporary Palestinian art reflects on life experiences that have political roots, i.e., displacement and exile as the result of an outside, illegal occupation, it is often inherently political, and its politics are not popular here. The visual exposure of the full panorama of the Palestinian narrative implicates the state of Israel and poses serious questions that many would rather not explore. While some might argue that Palestinian art is marginalized because it has somehow sacrificed aesthetic standards for political means, that argument simply does not hold given the positive responses by viewers and art critics alike to the works once they are displayed. The accusation that all Palestinian art is propagandistic in nature also rings false, since “propaganda” implies a deliberate attempt to convince others of a particular cause, and most Palestinian artists create work that reflects their own experiences, and not specifically to manipulate viewers emotionally or politically. A review of “Made in Palestine” in the Christian Science Monitor noted, “While this Palestinian art exhibit does have political overtones, it is meant to be more an expression of cultural identity.”18 It is clearly the Palestinian narrative and Palestinian identity itself, juxtaposed as it inevitably is, with the Israeli narrative that causes the most tension. It forces the curator and the viewer to consider a decades-old conflict from a different perspective, utilizing new language and ways of seeing that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable. As a commentator from Mother Jones noted, “[T]he question of Palestine has become so difficult to discuss, so thoroughly politicized, that anyone who acknowledges the existence and mistreatment of Palestinians is seen either as sanctioning terrorism, or being anti-Semitic, or both.”19 This discomfort is somewhat paradoxical, given that the contemporary art world is stereotypically known for its ability to surprise, shock, and startle its viewers.20 In this case, it appears that a complex political issue has percolated into the arts community and the Israeli narrative of what has transpired in Palestine has established itself as the only credible one. What then happens is that any Palestinian artistic narrative is viewed with suspicion or simply disregarded. That is a very troubling tendency, given that the arts have often led the way in questioning established narratives and their legitimacy and have had an important role in significantly impacting social, cultural, and even political assumptions. “Art’s role in culture has been to both reflect human life and

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revolutionize human thought by questioning the authoritative ‘reality.’”21 However, in putting forward a narrative that challenges popularly held opinions in the United States, some Palestinian art has been branded with terms that most Americans would avoid being associated with at all costs, such as “supporting terrorism,” “promoting extremism,” “glorifying martyrdom,” “anti-Semitic,” and “anti-American.” The persistence of these terms makes it difficult to exhibit Palestinian art without calling forth extremely negative associations that prejudice the viewers. There is also a strong tendency to assume that art with overtly political content necessarily sacrifices aesthetics for nationalistic or propagandistic sentiment. This may be the case in a rare instance of Palestinian or any political art, but Palestinian art as a whole is not by any means characterized by any such compromise. This type of essentialism, which delegitimizes all Palestinian art as inherently propagandistic, imposes on Palestinian art a “negative” categorization that relegates it to an inferior position and removes it from serious consideration. That essentialism comes into play shows both a false understanding of contemporary Palestinian art, as well as a simple lack of exposure to it. As the exhibits discussed have shown, one can deduce from many artists’ work that the aesthetic has not been compromised, and that the artists have been able to express “political” sentiments, such as resistance, steadfastness, hope for freedom from oppression, and other such things, in highly sophisticated, aesthetically rigorous, and intellectually challenging ways. The political nature of Palestinian art is not likely to diminish in the near future. Even if Palestinian artists actively choose to avoid overt politics in their work, inevitably, if they attempt to reflect on their personal, human experiences, politics will be there. Palestinian artist Vera Tamari described Palestinian art in this way, “Many of the works…are not directly political, but they are political in the sense that we want to tell the story of what’s happening in Palestine. People ignore the fact that there are Palestinians who have the same potential as other people in the world, that Palestinians are like other people, that they can live, can produce art and music.”22 Curator James Harithas responded to a remark about the “Made in Palestine” exhibit being “caught up with politics” with the retort that “under conditions of occupation, everything is political.”23 Another issue that comes to bear with exhibiting Palestinian art is the question of “balance.” Most Palestinian artists who exhibit in the United States are often asked to exhibit with Jewish or Israeli artists.24 Sometimes, the intent is to produce an exhibition in which both the Israeli and Palestinian artists are creating art along a specific theme,25 but at other times the goal is to make sure that Palestinian art does not hang alone but is countered, explained, or balanced

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by an equal display of Israeli or Jewish art.26 The odd thing about the issue of balance is that it has no curatorial or artistic merit. Several curators commented on the specious nature of the “balance” question by pointing out that in no other situation are opposing ideas or narratives automatically exhibited together, unless the entire point of the exhibit is to display divergent artistic responses to a common theme. Curators would normally never insist that balance be the singular driving force behind an exhibit or suggest that an exhibit of a specific artist’s work, like that of Emily Jacir in the case of the Ulrich, be juxtaposed with an entirely unrelated exhibition whose sole purpose is to “counterbalance” the content of the original show; exhibits of Irish art do not require that Catholic and Protestant artists be equally represented to shed light on both sides of the sectarian conflict in Ireland, nor would exhibits of Cuban art necessitate that pro- and anti-Communist sentiments be expressed. For that matter, curators would not show abstract and representational art together, or art by males and females, merely for the sake of insuring that each “side” is adequately accounted for. Clearly, the political undertones and overtones of Palestinian art are such that is it difficult to show works based on artistic merit alone—generally the common denominator for most exhibits. Artistic creation is generally understood to be the expression of personal or collective experiences and reflections that are valid because they exist, not because they are on the right or wrong side of a particular issue, or because they project a “balanced” approach to an experience. With the issue of balance comes a certain naiveté that predominates in this regard, particularly in the arts. There is a well-intentioned but misguided desire on the part of arts organizers in the United States to try to use the cross-cultural power of art to “bring peace” and to “bridge gaps.” This naïveté manifests itself most strongly in the notion that if Israeli and Palestinian artists are just able to paint together, dance together, sing together, or make music together, that something gets accomplished to advance an end to the conflict. While there are certainly ways that art communicates powerfully across borders of language and ethnicity, this particular case is far more complex than merely uniting two different viewpoints in art. For Palestinian artists, their primary life-defining experience is the illegal, repressive Israeli occupation that has been in place for decades and simply hanging their work side-by-side with that of Israeli artists does not change those realities. Unfortunately, what this tends to do is to create a new context for the art and force an interpretation on the viewer that was never the intention of the artists in the first place. These symbolic “unity” gestures come about almost exclusively when the issue at hand is exhibiting Palestinian art, which is rarely allowed to stand alone as its own unique expression but is frequently shown against the backdrop of the Israeli narrative. This has

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frustrated Palestinian artists, who deal with this dilemma in a number of ways. Some artists have taken the approach that they will not display their work with an Israeli artist under any circumstances whatsoever. Other artists have decided that if the Israeli artists are clearly opposed to the occupation and understand the narrative of the Palestinian experience, then that is an acceptable exhibition partnership. For others, the choice is not to exhibit overtly political work or to go the route of exhibiting works with a call for peace that is shared with the Israeli artists. Institutional funding also plays a decisive role in whether or not Palestinian exhibits go forward. When the “Made in Palestine” exhibit went up in Houston, it was shown in a private museum, funded through a private foundation, and put together by a director who had ultimate say over the content. When the exhibit was then presented to other institutions, the main terms of refusal centered on issues of funding, and the loss of support should such a controversial exhibit take place. Most arts institutions rely on wealthy trustees and donors to remain operational, since actual income derived from the institution’s activities is generally much smaller than expenditures. With that funding comes a level of expectation from those donors as to the content and direction of the exhibits. There is particular anxiety around exhibits that would be widely accessible to the public, as they would be at major museums or on university campuses, as was the case of both the Wichita and the DePaul exhibits, and many donors are concerned with controlling that publicly accessible message. In the case of Palestinian art, the perceived message is that it glorifies terrorism and promotes anti-Semitism, both of which are anathema in the public sphere. In some cases, institutions have strong enough directors to over-ride opposition—as was eventually the case at the Ulrich. The Whitney received large amounts of hate mail and various other letters of protest and pressure when Jacir’s work was part of the Biennial, but the exhibit went forward; the Whitney disregarded the mail and chose not to inform Jacir about the protests of her work until after the show was over.27

III. Recommendations for Increased Visibility In order for contemporary Palestinian art to gain a credible viewing audience in the United States and for it to be granted exhibition space on an equal footing with other bodies of work, following are several proposed recommendations: 1. Curatorial Engagement. It is vitally important to identify and support curators who understand or desire to understand both the context of

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contemporary Palestinian art, and its artistic merit.28 Curators need to have at their disposal examples of strong, sophisticated, and intelligent contemporary Palestinian art.29 Because Palestinian art will be subjected to additional scrutiny, as well as assumptions and stereotypes, the more examples curators have of art that stands the tests of aesthetic merit and artistic impact, the better. To this end, artists who are able to establish themselves and break through some of the barriers to exhibiting their art should advocate for other, rising artists. As one gallery owner put it, “We always pay attention to what our artists like,” referring to an instance when the gallery took on another Palestinian artist at the recommendation of an artist that they already represented who was also Palestinian and whose work they highly respected. 2. Funding. Because funding in the arts is often the determining factor in whether an exhibit goes forward or not, it is vital that there be a strong presence on boards of museums or arts organizations to advocate for greater understanding of contemporary Palestinian art. Curators who wish to show Palestinian art, but are hesitant to do so because of threats to withdraw funding, will have to turn down such exhibits unless there are sympathetic or influential members on their museum boards to advocate strongly for a particular exhibit. There is also a lack of vision in the Arab American community for how funding the arts can have a significant impact on public opinion about the region. This is not to say that the Arab American community does not give generously—it does, but it tends to give to more humanitarian causes, which rightfully seem much more pressing. Particularly when it comes to Palestinian art, donors are more concerned with the basic survival needs of Palestinians living under occupation, seeing the arts as a luxury to be enjoyed at a different, more stable time. This unfortunately comes at great cost to artists and to establishing a serious artistic voice in the United States and the global community. If artists are of secondary importance in their own communities, that marginalization will only increase in less hospitable environments. 3. Exhibition in non-Palestinian specific shows. While an exhibit like “Made in Palestine” powerfully thrusts the art and the issues into the public eye, equally important is public exposure through less direct means. There are those who would be unlikely to attend an exhibit that is composed entirely of contemporary Palestinian artists. While that may be a political or ideological choice, it can also be a matter of perceived lack of relevance or simple lack of interest. However, exhibits in which Palestinian artists are included alongside other artists of different backgrounds with overall

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themes that pull the exhibit together can increase exposure of Palestinian artists. This can be successful in that it can place the Palestinian experience within a global context, drawing on broad themes that most viewers can relate to or that may be of more current interest. An example of this is a show that was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City titled “Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking.” The aim of this exhibit was to examine the work of a number of artists who come from the Islamic world but do not live there, as a way of questioning regionalism in art. This exhibit included works by Emily Jacir and Mona Hatoum that call attention to Palestinian identity in one way or another. The accompanying catalogue explores this identity and the questions that both artists pose through their work.30 4. Exhibition in smaller venues. An important avenue of exposure is exhibiting on a smaller scale, in communities or venues that would have less exposure to Palestinian art but where exhibits actually end up drawing more attention. For instance, the Ulrich Museum, while certainly a great institution, is not necessarily known in the same way that other larger museums are known. However, the publicity and exposure generated through Jacir’s show meant that many more people came to see the exhibit, engaged with the issues, and hopefully went away with more understanding of what it means to be a Palestinian living under occupation. Exhibiting on college campuses is also key, as is evidenced by both the DePaul and Ulrich exhibits. On university campuses, the galleries are usually accessible to students, professors, and the community at large, and exhibits get reviewed in campus and local newspapers. These are all extremely important venues for raising awareness. In addition, smaller venues can be helpful for earlycareer artists by establishing exhibit provenance for their work that will help to legitimate their work for consideration in other shows. 5. Scholarship in English. Most current writers about contemporary Palestinian art at some point or other lament the dearth of scholarly or research material on this issue. Many of them construct their research from a few resources in Arabic, from essays in exhibition catalogues and articles in various journals, but mostly, from personal interviews and encounters with the artists. This work is invaluable, and the reality is that few things will advance exposure to Palestinian art in the United States as much as strong, articulate, and thoughtful writing about it. The visual arts need a literary context—the two go hand in hand, and the Palestinian visual narrative must be explained convincingly through the written word.

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The challenge of exhibiting contemporary Palestinian art in the United States is significant. However, experience shows that once exhibits go forward, they are reviewed well and the responses are overwhelmingly positive. The burgeoning of exhibits over the past several years has created positive momentum around exhibiting contemporary Palestinian art, and it is imperative to capitalize on that momentum. The fact of the matter is that people are more likely to be willing to see an exhibit than to attend a heated political debate about a highly polarized issue. Art can communicate a message with a profundity unmatched by any other medium. Contemporary Palestinian art captures the full spectrum of the human experiences of exile, disorientation, dislocation, dispossession, resistance, steadfastness, and hope. It is deeply reflective, highly introspective, jarringly challenging, witty, somber, hopeful, despairing, defiant, beautiful, intimate, complex, and achingly human. Above all, Palestinian art commands our attention and is worthy of our respect and deepest admiration.

Notes 1

Salwa Mikdadi comments on the issues of religious and geographic categorization of Arab American artists in her essay accompanying the exhibit “In/Visible: Contemporary Art by Arab American Artists,” held at the Arab American National Museum, May 19– October 30, 2005. The exhibit catalogue was published in 2005 by the Arab American National Museum. 2 From an interview with Kevin Mullins on February 23, 2006. 3 From a note forwarded electronically by Professor Kamran Rasteger of Brown University: http://www.artistnetwork.org/news15/news701.html. 4 Quoted in an online article by Jedd Beaudoin: http://www.f5wichita.com/arts/index.php?pubdate+2005-01-27&story=2252. 5 From an interview with Kevin Mullins on February 23, 2006. 6 From an online letter circulated by Emily Jacir on December 10, 2004: http://www.artistnetwork.org/news15/news701.html. 7 From a statement issued by Elizabeth King, vice president for University Advancement: http://fromthefloor.blogspot.com/2004/12/emily-jacir-exhibition-to-proceed.html. 8 Quoted in an online article by Jedd Beaudoin: http://www.f5wichita.com/arts/index.php?pubdate+2005-01-27&story=2252. 9 From an interview with Kevin Mullins on February 23, 2006. 10 Online news release: http://sherman.depaul.edu/media/webapp/mrNews.asp?NID+1279. 11 Online article: http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17728. 12 Ibid. 13 Online review: www.chicagotribune.com. Review has been archived but can be found in document form at www.neiu.edu/~ncaftori/israel/Tribune.doc - Supplemental Result -.

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14 From an interview by Onnesha Roychoudburi in her review of the show for Mother Jones, May 11, 2005: http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2005/05/palestinian_art.html. 15 From an online interview with Remi Kanazi, March 5, 2005: http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/2280.cfm. 16 Holland Cottor’s review can been accessed online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/arts/design/24gall.html?_r=1&oref=login. 17 From a KQED interview with Michael Krasny on the radio program Forum, April 12, 2005. Interview can be found online in the program archives at www.kqed.org. 18 Kris Axtman, “An Artistic ‘Road Map’ to Progress,” The Christian Science Monitor, May 28, 2003: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0528/p02s02-ussc.htm. 19 Onnesha Roychoudburi, Review of “Made in Palestine,” Mother Jones, May 11, 2005: http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2005/05/palestinian_art.html. 20 Examples of this type of “shock” value abound in the arts, beginning with the Impressionists who horrified the Paris Salon and continuing on through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a classic example of an iconically shocking work being Judy Chicago’s piece The Dinner Party, which challenged the prevailing notions of feminism, art, and female representation. 21 Mary Fifield and Margaret Michniewicz, “Made in Palestine: Meditations on Truth,” Vermont Woman, March 2006: http://www.vermontwoman.com/articles/1205/made_in_palestine.shtml. 22 Quoted in an interview by Onnesha Roychoudhuri in her view of “Made in Palestine,” Mother Jones, May 11, 2005: http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2005/05/palestinian_art.html 23 From a KQED interview with Michael Krasny on the radio program Forum, April 12, 2005: Interview can be found online in the program archives at www.kqed.org. 24 Artist Rajie Cook noted in an interview on February 20, 2006, that more than 50 percent of the exhibit invitations that come to him include the qualification of exhibiting with Israeli artists. 25 One example of this is a project called “Piece Process,” a visual art show at ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Inc. “Piece Process” included seventeen Israelis, Palestinians, American Jews, Arabs, and Muslims from around the United States and was held January 16–February 28, 2004. Palestinian artists Mary Tuma and Rajie Cook participated in this exhibit. 26 I should note that this same standard of “balance” is never applied to exhibiting Israeli or Jewish art. 27 Conversation with the artist in April 2005. 28 In a recent conversation with the chief of exhibition design at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., he said, “Is there actually contemporary Palestinian art? Is it any good?” This is a good example of a substantive gap in people’s knowledge of this body of work. 29 The catalogue for “Made in Palestine” is an example of both high-level scholarship and excellent visual content that provides a compelling presentation of contemporary Palestinian art.

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30 The challenge with exhibits like this is that the works are often then taken out of context and subjected to interpretations that may or may not be in line with the artists’ thinking—a risk that artists should consider when submitting their works to such shows.

CHAPTER FIVE: TELLING MY STORY: PERSONAL NARRATIVE IN THE VISUAL ARTS

STORIES MY FATHER TOLD ME: THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE IN VISUAL ARTS HELEN ZUGHAIB

Kan ya ma kan, There was, there was not, Shall we tell stories, Or sleep in our cots?1

The author Alice Walker wrote, “Storytelling is how we survive. When there is no food, the story feeds something, it feeds the spirit, the imagination. I can’t imagine life without stories, stories from my parents, my culture. Stories from other people’s parents, their culture. That is how we learn from each other, it’s the best way. That’s why literature is so important, to connect us, heart to heart.” In the Arab world, older relatives use stories, proverbs, and parables to educate younger generations. This tradition of wisdom sharing has been passed down from generation to generation. All aspects of life are addressed through these stories. The young are taught about relationships, how to face adversity as well as success, how to conduct business, tend to health, and ultimately, how to become a productive member of society. This tradition of storytelling is widespread throughout the Arab world, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey. Storytelling is so important that there are even paid storytellers, hakawati, who travel from village to village and home to home to tell their stories.2 In Turkey, these storytellers traditionally were women as they were the only ones who would be allowed into harems. The women in these harems were quite secluded, so the storytellers were gratefully received. The hakawati also tell stories that are ongoing, night after night, told after the evening meal and the day’s work were completed. Even now in Damascus, Rashid Abu Shadi, a grocer by day and hakawati by night, tells the story of Antar, son of a slave, and Abla, a virtuous beauty, fictional characters caught in an impossible love affair. Rashid Abu Shadi can be found every night in the Al Nawfara Café, telling his stories to a crowded room.3 Many times, with his audience listening intently, the hakawati would break off his story at the most dramatic moment, take a long sip of tea, only beginning again after enough coins were tossed his way.4

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My brother and sisters and I are fortunate enough to have our own “hakawati,” a storyteller whose stories stem from his love of his children and a desire to both educate and entertain. “Let me tell you a story.” And so it would begin. The noise around the dinner table would quiet down, and we would all turn our attention to our father, who would then tell one of his stories. These stories might relate to the general dinner conversation, events of the day, mention of a relative, or one of us would simply beg our father to please tell a beloved story, possibly to amuse a guest, or just for our own pleasure. One evening, my father began telling us a particularly funny and engaging story about our grandmother, Teta, crossing the Litani River in Lebanon. We could easily envision the scene she must have caused, screaming loudly on the horse she was tied to while crossing the rushing river. After dinner that evening, my mother decided that we must record my father telling us his stories. Thinking about my mother’s resolution a few days later, I approached my father with the idea of painting his stories, using his narrative as my inspiration. This is how the series Stories My Father Told Me began. Though my father doubted the success of this project, my mother never did, and she encouraged me to keep painting. I did and have now painted seventeen of my father’s stories. In selecting which stories to paint, I included stories that were told to my father by his father, stories about my father’s childhood in Damascus and Lebanon, stories about traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church, stories about village life in Lebanon, and, finally, my father’s stories about the major events of his young life. On a personal level, these paintings illustrate my father’s childhood, my childhood, and my Lebanese heritage. I look at the paintings and I hear my father’s voice. As an artist, however, I hope to reach a larger audience. I want the viewer to read each painting’s accompanying narrative, to recall their own stories and their own childhood as they experience my father’s stories through my paintings, and share those common experiences that cross all borders and link different cultures together.

Stories Told to My Father My father grew up listening to many stories and proverbs told to him by his father and other older relatives. He repeated these stories to my brother, sisters, and me because he did not want us to miss out on such an important aspect of our education. Many of these stories are personal and mean little outside our family. Others have a more universal meaning. Here are three stories that teach a moral lesson.

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The Transaction

My grandfather, Jiddu, was a good Greek Orthodox and had great respect for Tsarist Russia. After the Bolshevik revolution and the tsar’s exile, Jiddu, believing this was only temporary, saw an opportunity to make a fortune. He sold his land, cattle, family possessions, and jewelry to buy Russian rubles, which by then had become almost worthless. All the rubles were stacked in wooden boxes and stored in a big closet in Jiddu’s house. In the beginning, my father and his sisters could not touch the rubles; they could only look at the hoard from a safe distance. Time passed, the tsar and his family were killed, and Jiddu’s rules were gradually relaxed. His children were allowed to handle the rubles, count them, admire their various sizes and denominations, and in Jiddu’s absence, show them to their friends. Finally, the rubles lost their mystique. Even Jiddu would occasionally laugh at his folly, although no one else would have dared to bring up the economic details of that transaction. When Jiddu told my father the following story, he prefaced it by saying his father had told him the story and admonished him to never forget it.

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Charity and Compassion

Once there was an emir, a wise and powerful ruler, who owned a horse so strong and beautiful that it was known all over the land. Other rulers were envious and offered to buy the horse, but the wise emir always refused. Selling the horse, he said, would be like selling a member of his family. One day a crook came to one of the envious rulers and offered to steal the horse for a price. The ruler agreed and the crook set out to steal the emir’s horse. The crook waited by the side of the road where the emir and the wonderful horse passed each day. When the emir rode by, the crook began to cry and beg for help. The emir stopped and asked “What’s the matter my good man?” The crook wailed that he was very sick. The emir told the man to climb onto his horse so that he could take him to a doctor. But the clever crook cried even louder and said that he was too sick to climb up on the horse by himself. So the emir dismounted to help the crook onto the horse. Then, as soon as he was seated in the saddle, the crook kicked the horse and started off at a fast gallop.

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Immediately, the emir shouted, “Stop, and the horse is yours!” The crook stopped and returned to the emir, knowing that the emir would never go back on his promise. “You may keep my horse on one condition,” the emir said. “Do not say that you stole this horse. Say instead that I gave it to you. Do this so that our people will always be charitable and compassionate.”

Planting Olive Trees

The next story, although experienced by my father, is also a lesson taught to children all over the Middle East. Visiting his Jiddu and Teta in their mountain village in Lebanon was an enormous treat for my father. Special sweets and his favorite food were always prepared for him by his Teta. Best of all, however, was when my father’s Jiddu would take him to the fields to plant olive trees. They would set out early in the morning with a donkey carrying their provisions and small olive plants. During their lunch break, my father told his Jiddu that he would return next year to help him harvest the olive crop. Smiling, his Jiddu said it would be difficult because many years would pass before the olive trees would bear fruit. Disappointed, my father asked why they were bothering to

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plant olive trees if they would be dead before the trees bore fruit. My father’s Jiddu looked at him and said, Zara’u fa akalna, nazra’ u fa ya’ kuln. They planted so we could eat; we plant so our descendants will eat.

Stories About My Father’s Childhood in Damascus and Lebanon The following stories about my father’s childhood in Damascus and Lebanon do not necessarily impart any moral. My father simply likes to tell stories about his childhood.

Sanduk al-Firji, or The Showbox

Long before cinema or television entertained Lebanese children, there was the sanduk al-firji. The sanduk al-firji was a brightly decorated, semicircular box that was strapped to the back of an itinerant entertainer. The entertainer came into the village loudly chanting previews of the stories he had, going from hara to hara, street to street, and ending in the village square.

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First, the entertainer would unstrap the sanduk. It was about eighteen inches high and had six glass holes equidistant from each other. On either end of the box were two small inner poles attached to a scroll with bright glossy pictures telling one or more of the fabled Arab stories such as “Antar and Abla” or “Abu Zayd al-Hilali.” Then the entertainer would place the box on a stool and set up a circular bench facing it. The village children took turns handing him their kharjiyyi, spending money, and in groups of five or six, they peeked into the box through the glass holes and watched the story unfold. The entertainer rolled the screen, chanting about the beauty of the ladies, the courage of the men, and the strength of their horses. Usually the lucky viewers would briefly give up their places to siblings or friends who did not have enough kharjiyyi to see the show. When all those who wanted to see the story were accommodated, the entertainer strapped the sanduk to his back, picked up the stool and bench and walked to the next village, chanting previews and enticing viewers. My father expressed his amazement at how the entertainer was able to synchronize the chanted story with the pictures on the rolling scroll. Most of all, he expressed his admiration for the beautiful sanduk with its colorful pictures and many tiny mirrors, which was a source of wonder, even without the stories.

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Evenings in the Kroum

Every summer my father spent several weeks in Zahle, a village in Lebanon. His Jiddu took him up to the kroum, or vineyards, where they would spend a week working in the field. His Jiddu spent the days not only talking to my father but also to the trees and grapevines, as if they were people visiting him. In a way, the kroum had become intertwined with the family and part of the community. As he worked, he told my father that this tree was planted when Aunt Wadi’a

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married, this one for As’ad’s baptism, and this was planted when Uncle Jamil was born. Trees were also planted for national or international events. The fields and the kroum had become a diary of family history, which he passed on to my father. Every evening, after supper, Jiddu would light the kerosene lamp, brew some herbal tea over the charcoal fire, and then begin to tell stories about our family. He would tell stories about those who had gone abroad, those who did well and those who did not—the good sheep and the black sheep. And then, if he wasn’t tired, Jiddu would recite poetry or tell stories which usually had a moral or lesson to learn. He never preached but he always made sure my father got the message. More than anything else, however, my father’s Jiddu loved poetry. He loved to recite poems and he loved to hear poetry being recited. Sometimes he would ask my father to recite poems he had learned in school. My father would try his best but he could not satisfy his grandfather’s thirst for hearing one poem after another. Once, when my father was about thirteen, his Jiddu asked him to recite poetry, but he could only remember one poem and part of another one. When my father stopped reciting, his Jiddu turned the kerosene lamp off and they went to sleep. The next night he asked my father to recite more poetry. He repeated the same poem and part of another that he had recited the night before. Jiddu protested that this was the same poetry that he had recited the previous evening, and my father confessed that it was all he knew. Jiddu looked at my father for some time before saying that if after eight years of school, all he could remember was a poem and a half, then he was wasting his time, and his parents’ money, and that he had better quit school and start working. After that, Jiddu never asked my father to recite poetry, but he continued to tell him stories, and to teach him about various plants in the kroum.

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Making Kibbeh on Sunday Morning

One of my father’s most cherished memories of his summers spent in Zahle was the preparation of the Sunday brunch. On Sunday mornings, at his grandparents’ house, the brunch preparations began by the pounding of kibbeh in the jurn, making tabbouli, and drinking arak. The cooking and eating would take all day and anyone passing by the house was invited to come in for a bite to eat and join in the discussion of local and national events. When no one could eat or talk anymore, everyone went to rest. My father liked to nap on the cool balcony.

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Later in the afternoon, he would have a cup of Arabic coffee, mostly to have his fortune read by one of his aunts.

Making Raisins and Drying Figs

Every summer, my father and his sister would visit their grandparents in Zahle. One of his favorite memories is of making raisins and drying figs in the kroum. Early in the morning, my father and his sister would leave for the kroum with Jiddu and Teta. They had to leave very early in the morning because Jiddu insisted that they pick the figs and grapes when the dew was still on them. Jiddu and my father would climb the fig trees, fill their baskets with ripe figs, and then

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lower it to Teta and my father’s sister. They spread the figs on cloth sheets, flattened them, and then covered them with a clean cheesecloth to protect them from dust and insects. After about ten days, the figs would be dried and ready to put in storage for the winter. Making the raisins, however, was more complicated. My father’s Teta took bunches of grapes and laid them neatly on white sheets covered with straw. My father’s sister wanted the rows of grapes to be separated by color, long neat stripes of red, black, and white. Teta humored her, even though once the grapes were dried, they would be all mixed up together. After the grapes were lined up, Teta sprayed them with a special mixture. She dipped bunches of herbs, called tayyoun, that grew wild on the slopes adjacent to the vineyard, into a mixture of ashes, water, and other ingredients. She then shook this liquid mixture over the grapes. Every day they would return to the vineyard to check on the drying figs and raisins and to moisten the grapes as they dried. When it was time to return home at the end of the summer, my father and his sister left with dried figs and raisins, and new stories to tell their friends in the city.

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Playing Baasra

Baasra is a simple card game taught to young children in Lebanon and Syria. When they could not play outside, my father and his sisters begged their grandmother, Teta, to play baasra with them. They loved to play this game with their Teta because she overlooked minor cheating and would make sure that one of the children always won. To her grandchildren, she seemed very old. At the time, they did not know anyone older. Teta wore a colorful headscarf, a mendeel, trimmed with little beads. She also wore several skirts, layered one over the other, with a bright apron, or maryul, on top. My father and his sisters were fascinated with the skirts. Under two or three of them, she wore a homemade cloth bag, a dikki, tied around her waist with a ribbon. In this bag, Teta kept keys and some change, or “nigl’s.” One key was especially important to my father. This key opened a small, wooden cupboard in Teta’s room in which she kept cookies, sweets, and other treasures. After the game, my father and his sisters would pester their Teta

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to open the cupboard for the sweets. If there were no sweets, she would distribute her small change to all the children.

Traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church Religion was an important part of daily life and many of my father’s stories centered on the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church.

Eid Mar Elias, or Feast of Saint Elias

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Traditionally in Lebanon and Syria, children celebrate their saint’s day instead of their birthday. Celebrating a saint’s day is a community affair. Eid Mar Elias is my father’s feast day. He remembers that when he was a child, the celebration lasted all day. It began by going to the church named Saint Elias. In the main courtyard of the church, musical bands, called nawbis, from surrounding villages would assemble. Sword and dabki dancers provided additional entertainment. Adding to the confusion, children, dogs, and beggars thronged the churchyard in large numbers. Young men tried to impress the young women with their prowess in footraces, weight lifting, and, occasionally, horse races. Those children named after the saint were given new clothes and extra spending money to sample the treats being offered by various vendors. In the late afternoon, tired and happy, my father returned home to wait for friends and family, who brought him more gifts and good wishes.

Palm Sunday Procession

In Christian communities of Lebanon, Palm Sunday was a very special day for parents and children. Girls wore colorful new dresses and the boys had new suits. In many instances, these were the new clothes for the year.

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The Palm Sunday procession was an important part of the church service. The procession assembled in the back of the church and proceeded up the aisles, with children holding candles as long as each child was tall. Young children were usually carried by their fathers. This experience was especially memorable for my father—the music, prayers, incense, new clothes, and special sweets only eaten during Easter time. At the end of the service, people gathered in the courtyard to wish each other’s families and children well, praying to return a year later with an even longer candle and a taller and healthy child.

Eid al Salib, or Feast of the Cross

On the night of this feast in Lebanon, huge bonfires are lit from village to village to symbolize the pilgrimage that Saint Helena made to search for the cross used in the Crucifixion. My father remembers the intense competition to see who would have the largest fire. Unguarded piles of hoarded wood would mysteriously disappear and be used to enlarge a competitor’s bonfire.

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After the bonfires had died down, and most people had gone home, a few young boys lingered, daring themselves and others to jump over the hot ash and embers. Younger or timid boys skipped around the edges, vowing to return the next year and jump over the fire at its widest point.

Village Traditions practiced in Lebanon and Syria My father often relates stories about village traditions practiced in Lebanon and Syria to people not familiar with the Arab world.

The Wedding

Traditionally, after the ceremony in the village church, the bridal procession slowly makes its way to the groom’s house, accompanied by musicians, dancers, relatives, and wedding guests. Before the bride enters her new home, her mother and mother-in-law perform a ritual that has been repeated in villages for as long as people can remember. The bride’s mother attempts to stick a specially prepared roll of dough, the khamir, to the upper part of the front door.

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If the dough sticks to the stone arch, the bride’s female relatives sing a congratulatory zalagheet to signify that the marriage will last. The mother-inlaw then places a ripe pomegranate on the doorstep for the bride to step on with enough force to break the fruit open. This scatters the pomegranate seeds, staining the bride’s dress and shoes in the process, and signifies that the marriage will be fruitful, with many children and grandchildren blessing the house. Festivities follow in the garden as musicians play the oud and dirbakki, with singing and dancing lasting well into the night.

Mishwar ‘Al El’Ayn, or Walk to the Water Fountain

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Long ago, the only water supply for villages was the communal water fountain. Young women, sabaya, walked to the fountain at sunset, balancing large, colorful water jugs, jarra, on their heads. This walk, over time, became a much anticipated social event known as the mishwar. At the fountain, the sabaya would show off their fine dresses, chat and gossip. The young men of the village, shabbab, also gathered at the fountain to watch and innocently flirt with the women. Occasionally, a young man or woman would muster enough courage to talk to a special person. In time, the mishwar became a daily ritual in the village. And now, long after running water has been installed in most homes, young men and women still meet, admire each other, and flirt from a safe distance—practicing the mishwar.

Making Molasses

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In the village of Kfeir in Lebanon, there was a festival centered on the making of molasses. By October, the grapes had ripened and were ready to be harvested, soon to be made into raisins, arak, wine, and molasses. Making molasses was a wonderful three-day ritual involving the entire village. Even the village school would close so that the children could help in harvesting the grapes. After being harvested, the grapes would be packed in wooden crates to be taken to the communal molasses-making site on the edge of Kfeir. There, the women of the village would crush the grapes and strain the juice. The juice was then poured into several large vats to boil over wood fires. The grape juice would boil, getting thicker by the hour, and the women would stir the juice, skimming the raghwi, foam, from the boiling grape juice. Best of all, the women would ladle out some raghwi and some of the thickened grape juice as a treat for the many children eager for a taste. At lunchtime, children would bring potatoes and chestnuts for the women to roast in the hot ashes. For those children who didn't bring any, there were always extra potatoes and chestnuts to share. My father remembers this event as one big happy mess: men carrying crates of grapes; women and children crushing the grapes; fires being stoked, with warnings to children to keep away from the boiling liquid and open fires; potatoes and chestnuts being roasted; and children, dogs, and chickens running all over the place. After several days, the molasses was finished. Each family in the village then received enough molasses to last through the winter, whether or not the family had contributed to the molasses making. Interestingly, no money was ever exchanged, and no one measured how much each family contributed or who worked the hardest. This was truly a communal event in which every family in the village shared.

Major Events in My Father’s Life Finally, my father told stories about some of the major events in his young life. Some of these stories were sad, some funny, but they all reveal the difficulties of my father’s eventual journey to America.

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Crossing the Litani River

In 1940-41, the British forces in Palestine attacked the Vichy French in Lebanon and Syria. One of the invasion routes was through Jdeidet Marjayoun, where my father lived with his sisters and mother. Everyone in the village decided to leave before the arrival of the troops. Clusters of people assembled in some disorder and began walking toward the Litani River. Those who had brought food shared it with those who had none. Except for the sound of artillery shells exploding in the distance, the whole event seemed like a slowly moving picnic. The villagers reached the river and waited for morning to cross. In the morning, Teta realized she had fled without any documents. She refused to proceed without them and sent my father home to get them. His trip back was uneventful except for some stragglers who kept asking him why he was going in the wrong direction. He found the steel tube where Teta kept the family’s important documents—birth certificates, identification cards, and school diplomas—and began the long walk back to the Litani. By the time he reached his mother, most of the villagers had already crossed the river on horseback.

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Teta, however, had refused to leave without my father. Teta then admitted to another reason for not wanting to go; she was afraid of riding a horse to cross the river. The river was deep and wide, the current was fast, and the fighting was getting closer. With no alternative, three men and a horse were hired, one man to lead the horse and the other two to hold Teta on the horse. The crossing was noisy but safe, with Teta screaming and waving the metal tube all the way to the other side of the riverbank. Although their payment was doubled, the owners of the horse vowed never to help another hysterical woman cross the river again.

Saying Goodbye

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After a very long wait, permission to travel to America had been granted and reservations secured on a ship from Beirut to New York City. The goodbyes began in the village. Relatives, friends, and neighbors came to drink coffee and share stories about others who had already emigrated. Finally, two days before their departure, my father’s family traveled to Beirut to stay in a hotel and say their final goodbyes. Gifts were bought for relatives in America, including a large oriental carpet for Teta’s sister. Teta put the family’s passports, important papers, and valuables in her handbag and held onto this handbag even in her sleep. Teta also had to be certain that the oriental carpet for her sister and the suitcases packed with gifts for relatives in America were safe. Hotel employees, relatives, and especially my father were fully occupied on guard duty for two days. The morning of their departure finally arrived, but the ship was too big to come to the pier. The passengers, suitcases, gifts, and the carpet had to be put in a large rowboat manned by four sailors. Teta insisted that she sit on top of the rug, despite the threat to the stability of the boat. When they were safely on board the ship, Teta demanded that the sailors put all the suitcases and the carpet in her cabin. The sailors argued that everything not needed on the voyage had to be put in the hold. It finally took an officer of the ship to intervene and guarantee that nothing would be stolen. Today, the carpet rests in a place of prominence in my sister’s house.

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Coming to America

It was the end of a long sea voyage. During dinner the night before their arrival in America, my father learned that their ship, the Vulcania, would be passing by the Statue of Liberty at about 4:00 a.m. the next morning. Some of the younger passengers made a spontaneous decision to see the Statue of Liberty. And so, sixteen days after leaving the port of Beirut for New York City, an exuberant group of young people from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine stayed up all night to greet the dawn and the Statue of Liberty. My father remembers it was a clear morning. In sharing these stories and treasured memories with both Arab and non-Arab audiences, I have found that they evoke many reactions. The non-Arab audience has found the stories to be a charming insight into another culture and a different childhood. For the Arab listener, the stories have brought back sweet memories from their own past. Many times these stories prompt their own versions of “Making Kibbeh on Sunday Morning,” “The Mishwar,” or “Coming

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to America.” What brings both these audiences together is that these paintings and stories illustrate the universality of shared tradition and a sense of strong family life and community. I hope the reader will look at life through someone else’s eyes and listen through someone else’s heart, creating empathy, understanding, and, ultimately, acceptance of other cultures and societies. This empathy and dialogue lead us to understand the kinship and community we all share. My father is still telling us his stories, but now he has his grandchildren, Emily, Catherine, and Laithe, and must begin them all over again.

Notes 1

Inea Bushnaq, ed., Arab Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), xv. Selma Ekrem, Turkish Fairy Tales (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1964), vii. 3 Douglas Jehl, “Breathing Life into Arab Folklore of a Golden Past,” The New York Times, September 16, 1999: http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/damhak.htm 4 Bushnaq, Arab Folktales, xvii. 2

LAYERED, ERASED, AND EMBEDDED NARRATIVES DORIS BITTAR

“No ideas but in things” —William Carlos Williams

Introduction: The Elusive Narrative

Figure 1. In the Sun’s Blood, 1997, oil on linen, 5 x 16 feet. Narrative (storytelling) is often the most versatile and compelling tool for teaching and learning. However, narrative can be elusive, especially within the visual arts where “things” are infused with meaning and dependent on their juxtaposition within fabricated environments. William Carlos Williams’s adage implies that ideas are within the things and references around us. A modified version of this adage could be, “No stories but in things,” suggesting a symbolic interpretation. If inverted it could read “No ideas but in stories,” a more lyrical or conceptual interpretation. All three phrases represent facets of the variety of viewpoints presented in my artwork. The environments that my works describe are often framed within a historical context that stems from the experiences of immigration, exile, and being in the minority, both ethnically and cognitively. I

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use myriad references, and at the same time question these references, as I develop the formal structure of each piece. My works are deeply embedded and referenced environments of figures, objects, and landscapes that quietly suggest a personal narrative intertwined with a historical one. Specifically, my paintings employ a decorative language that borrows from Arabic calligraphy, French colonial wallpaper patterns, Islamic geometric designs, photos of family, and quotations from European artworks from the past. I often weave Arabic letters and patterns together so that they present a seamless unit, much in the way examples of Arabic calligraphy meld into a floral or geometric motif. To grasp the historical legacy of colonialism, I take from the language of Western art, including the European classical and Romantic periods, as well from the canons of modernism and minimalism. I mix, merge, and layer these components to form hybrid visual phrases or realms that balance ideas with sensations of color and texture. My intent is to begin a conversation that does not dictate specific conclusions but asks questions and initiates a dialogue. Themes from this conversation may include identity issues and how to rewrite the history of the perceived Eastern/Western divide, as well as how various political, social, and personal interventions weave into that shared but fractious relationship. Taken as a whole, the paintings grapple with being both explicit and elusive, a desire to reveal and equally to conceal. This duality is tied to a tension or anxiety determined, to some extent, by being an American Arab. By selectively silencing the narrative within my artwork I mirror the on-again–off-again experiences I have had within American culture. Because the voices of Arabs are alternately heard and silenced depending on the shifting political climate, I employ a strategy that anticipates and expresses these fluctuations. The nonfigurative elements create hybrid poetic realms that promote multiple and contradictory readings. For example, my use of large-scale shaped canvasses that brutally frame the figures contrasts with the softened all-over patterns that harmoniously pull the parts together. Often, I partially conceal, fragment, or erase figures, objects, and landscapes by using the softer pattern as a weave that passes in and out of these elements. This presents a formal contradiction that expresses the discomfort and difficulty of telling a story that walks through several metaphorical minefields. In the following project descriptions that encompass the years 1989 to 2006, I will discuss how these elements affect my work and how each series expresses particularly focused personal, historical, and political concerns. The first four

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series of paintings, Orientalism (1989–92), People of the Book (1992–97), Lebanese Linen (1998–99), and The Wandering Ishmael (2000), express ideas surrounding the legacy of colonialism in light of contemporary conflicts. The series Stripes and Stars (2001–05), which pairs equally compelling images of the American flag and Middle Eastern patterns, began after 9/11 and continues today. In the portrait installation series Semites (1999–2004), portraits and stories of Arabs and Jews stand side by side. Kul Shay/All Things (2004– present) is a massive photographic project comprising photographs largely taken during a six-month sojourn in Beirut, photographic constructions, and photo essay installations.

Figure 2. Valance/Valence: Nahar Al Barad Camp, 1950, 1989, oil on canvas, wingspan 80 inches.

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Orientalism, 1989–92 In this series patterns and places are infused with meaning and point to a historical narrative that incorporates geography, topography, and time. Part of the allure of pattern and ornament is that while it indulges in beauty it also describes a period of time or an era that guides and informs the context. For example, I cannot look at French wallpaper patterns from the mid-nineteenth century and not see them as icons that merge the brocaded Ottoman empire and the heroic European painting tradition. These patterns are also emblematic of the legacy of colonialism. Orientalism (the title of the series was lifted from and inspired by Edward Said’s seminal book) explores the visual language of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. The fabrics, largely borrowed by the French from the Ottoman Empire, are cross-pollinations between the European realist painting tradition and contemporary perceptions of the exotic Orient. The landscapes over which these fabrics hover evoke the idea of homeland, or baladi, an Arabic word specifically meaning the merging of place and culture. The Orientalism series was also partly inspired by reading Arabic poetry and A Thousand and One Nights, where beautiful and rich prose is combined with narratives of brutality. The beauty and depth of the storytelling style gave me license to use pattern and ornament within a negotiated terrain. In the pivotal diamond shaped painting, Valance/Valence: Nahr Al Barad Camp, 1950 (fig. 2), a large and gently twisted green velvet fabric adorned with golden brocade floats above an abstracted tented refugee camp interpreted from the famous photograph of Nahr Al Barad Camp in Lebanon, circa 1950. This painting sealed my fate because it inspired me to dedicate myself to finding such expressions within decorative spheres. You Open Your Eyes Under the Oblivious Sun of the West (fig. 3) expresses my feelings of alienation during the first Gulf War. During this time I felt abandoned by my American culture, which seemed to transform over night into an unforgiving culture of forgetfulness and superiority. I used quotations from Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s War and Peace paintings to mirror the antiseptic television fantasy of the war as a simulated video game, echoing this French Rococo artist's use of cherubs to mask the horror of armed conflict, then layering over the image two phrases of large Arabic letters which impose a commentary on that fantasy.

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Figure 3. You Open Your Eyes Under the Oblivious Sun of the West, 1991, oil on canvas, 72 x 144 inches. I formulated a conceptual framework in which I could use the language of the colonial master. I wanted to find, even within European depictions of the Arab world, an interpretation of the strength that lay within Arab people and culture. I looked at everything that French artist Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) drew and painted, preferring his drawings to the paintings because of their spontaneity, which somehow rendered the Arabs more human. In his paintings, the selfconscious and deliberately classical approach seemed to calcify the Arabs into stereotypical roles. When I fixed my gaze on his drawings, I felt that his animated characters could gaze back at me, that they could ask questions. I wanted my work to be a mirror in which this gaze could be returned, one that not only details a historical legacy but can also question our Western-held assumptions and privileged position.

People of the Book, 1992–97 People of the Book is a large-scale painting series that dominated my attention during much of the 1990s. The series title refers to the biblical children of Abraham. In these multi-paneled and epic-like paintings I borrow from Eugène Delacroix’s nineteenth-century paintings and drawings of Jewish and Muslim Arabs. These images remind us that the histories of the Jews and the Muslims

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have been tightly interwoven and that, until this century, the relationships had been harmonious. In 1992, I began a series of large pieces titled Watching Jacob 1, 2 and 3. They held my attention for years, and now, over ten years later, I still think about continuing the series. These were based on Delacroix’s epic painting Jacob Wrestling the Angel [Gabriel], which hangs in the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris.

Figure 4. Watching Jacob 1, 1992, oil on canvas, 60 x 180 inches. In Watching Jacob 1 (fig. 4), the viewer is cajoled, through the use of Arabic calligraphy and segmented canvasses, to view the painting from right to left, rather than left to right. The far right panel dominates and attracts because of its dramatic scene of Jacob wrestling with the angel. The Arabic text begins on this panel, which reinforces its dominance. The far left canvas is much diminished in size and is punctuated by a wreath of roses pointing back to the left, designating it as an implied ending. The central panel shows an Arab gesturing at Jacob, following the Arab's gaze also encourages the viewer to begin with the right side. Because audiences from Western cultures tend to look at an artwork the way they look at text—from left to right—experiencing Watching Jacob 1 results in a circular tension, as one cycles through various ways of seeing.

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Figure 5. Watching Jacob 3, 1996–7, oil on canvas, 84 x 192 inches. Figure 6. Alternate view of Watching Jacob 3 In the kinetic piece Watching Jacob 3 (figs. 5 and 6), the moving striped panels act as shifting parenthetical elements, literally cropping and reframing the moiré texture of the narrative behind them. An unexpected but significant result is that the narrative is sometimes completely concealed, silencing the narrative. When the panels are placed in a centered and symmetrical way the renditions of Jacob, the angel Gabriel, and the Arab are hidden and the story rendered mute. The green and white striped moving panels allow the viewer to gain perspective and to experience subjectivity by cropping or framing the seminal narrative of Jacob wrestling with the angel. When the figures are covered all that can be seen are two patterns, a striped one over a rich brown moiré. This particular phenomenon of negation brings into question the need to have a narrative to begin with, while at the same time exemplifying the imposition of silence experienced by many Arab Americans.

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By the mid-1990s I had deepened my investigation of pattern and ornament. I became motivated to assign pattern a more aggressive role, one in which it could be an integral part of the formal structure and backbone of the artwork. As in the Watching Jacob paintings, challenging the viewer to become part of a rhythmical and choreographed visual realm, where the decorative elements, along with the segmented panels and Arabic calligraphy help to circulate the viewers’ eyes, continued to be an important goal. The piece In the Sun’s Blood (fig. 1) reinforces these strategies. The canvasses themselves become a repeating zigzag pattern that echoes the alternating red stripes and floral designs to create a rhythmical arena for the fragments of figuration to reside. The structure cajoles the viewer to begin on the right side with the lighter colored panel and its large sweeping letter Eain. The curved Arabic letters slow down our reading of the narrative. In this piece, the ideas of erasure and revelation through the patterns and the figural elements literally appear to weave in and out of each others’ domains. Here the pattern dominates over the figures; there the figures are layered over the pattern in an uncertain and disappearing tension.

The Wandering Ishmael, 2000

Figure 7. The Wandering Ishmael: Franco-Arabe Tour 1, 2001, oil on linen, 34 x 102 inches. Ishmael, or Ishmaelite, is a term that loosely describes the Arabs of the Middle East. The reference to the word wandering draws a direct parallel to the migrations and experiences of Jewish tribes as they sought their way to their spiritual homeland. Specifically, the title alludes to the reality of the forced migrations and immigration of Arabs, beginning with Ishmael who was the first-

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born son of Abraham and was ultimately banished into the desert with his mother, Hagar. Of course, the present-day wanderers are the Palestinian people as they struggle to salvage a homeland. The Wandering Ishmael series combines elements of European Orientalism and personal narrative to express an encompassing experience of immigration and history. I also wanted these paintings to look like travel brochures. The use of a moving panel in The Wandering Ishmael: Franco-Arabe Tour 1 (fig. 7) signifies the experience of travel more than the muting of voice. The slippers panel, using a motif taken from a Delacroix still life, glides across the canvas on its track and appears to adjust like a compass to its shifting context. This series is an extension of People of the Book but with an eye to the migrations of Arab populations throughout Europe and the United States. Of course, these paintings reference my personal immigration to the United States and the confusion of growing up in an Arab family that embraced European culture, especially that of the French.

Lebanese Linen, 1998–99

Figure 8. Folding Linens Filigree, 1999, oil on linen, 34 x 68 inches. I cannot look at French wallpaper patterns from the mid-nineteenth century and not see the legacy of colonialism. I cannot look at certain patterns and styles in my mother’s home without remembering a certain time in the early to late 1960s when we immigrated to New York from Beirut—a time of promise, of stripes and bright colors. This series was a shift toward intimate and personal work with specific images from my family, many from slides that my grandfather took. Lebanese Linen captures a close-knit family in the 1960s, a “golden”

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period in Lebanon’s history. In retrospect, these images are harbingers of the impending war and emigration. At the same time, they are loving reminders of the complexities within families. The patterns act as veils between the viewers and the images, thus emphasizing our inability to completely know or grasp the past (fig. 8). As the patterns tie all the parts together, they also metamorphose from objects to air, from wrought iron to lacy arabesque. These paintings carry the traces and residues of the ancient past, the colonial past, and the recent past. They speak of Roman ruins, of Islamic mosaics embedded into a Phoenician history, of the French decorative style so embraced by the Lebanese, and of the layered, intertwined lives of a family on the precipice of a civil war.

Stripes and Stars, 2001–Present In the summer of 2001, I examined the possibility of making paintings without specific, general, or historical narrative references: no scenes, just patterns from around the world. I wondered about mixing French embroidery with Japanese prints and patterns. The structural format would be to use plaids and stripes as a framing device. I did about three small paintings in this vein until September 11, 2001, after which both the American flag and the familiar patterns from the Middle East that I collect merged and floated in my mind and in my dreams. I found myself identifying with both and saw them fused together as the most profusely patterned flag in the world with the most profusely decorated culture in the world. There are no figures, landscapes, or objects in these paintings, leaving us with a post 9/11 duality. Although the two designs do not signify a narrative, they are loaded with symbolic meanings that capture my curiosity. With each painting, I wonder about the designs’ ability to produce harmony, tension, or ambiguity within various spaces. I am always interested in how “stories” may emerge from this duality because both themes come with a set of loaded expectations and assumptions that cannot help but express historical legacies and attitudes.

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Figure 9. Stripes and Stars: From Saragossa to Shiraz, 2001–2, oil on twelve canvasses, 33 x 44 inches. Stripes and Stars: From Saragossa to Shiraz (fig. 9) is composed to loosely resemble a map that spans from Iran in the east to southern Spain in the west. The two layers of patterns are harmoniously floating past each other like two ships at sea. They acknowledge their similarities and differences, bringing up the possibility of a normal relationship.

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Figure 10. Stripes and Stars: You Have Mail, 2003, oil on nine canvasses, 33 x 33 inches.

Doris Bittar

Figure 11. Stripes and Stars: From Baghdad to Jerusalem, 2005, oil on primed paper, 20 x 24 inches.

Figure 12. Camo Flag: Baghdadi Weave, 2005, oil on primed paper, 20 x 48 inches.

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The tragedy of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were beginning to wear on me, and my emotional tie to the flag shifted. What it represented in these wars was troubling to me as is shown in Stripes and Stars: You Have Mail (fig. 10). The latest manifestations of this theme, works on paper in 2005 and 2006, show a more contemplative curiosity that is interested in the fashions of militarism. In these examples, such as Stripes and Stars: From Baghdad to Jerusalem (fig. 11) and Camo Flag: Baghdadi Weave (fig. 12), the patterns float and travel around a fenced-in flag that is in values of gray or in camouflaged patterns. Clearly, the flag has morphed into a symbol of 1950s retro-nostalgia and desert garb militarism.

Semites Installations, 1999–2004

Figure 13. Taghrid, 2001, charcoal, pastel, and India ink on paper and fabric, 84 x 54 inches Figure 14. Jamal, 2003, charcoal, pastel, and India ink on paper and fabric, 84 x 54 inches

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For this series, in a journalistic manner, I collected dozens of stories and sketched dozens of smaller portraits of Arabs and Jews. The sketches and texts, in turn, culminated in full-size portraits. The dozen or so ethereal portraits are life-size pastels with a fabric layered over them. The fabric is covered with text so that the story is present with the storyteller rather than being presented alongside. Unlike my previous artwork these are stripped of elaborate and referenced environments and do not employ the use of shaped perimeters or a language of pattern that conceals an embedded narrative. Despite the spare aesthetic, the figures are physically veiled by the narratives, which have a twenty-inch gap to allow a peek at the figures behind. Most of the stories are about Palestinians and Israelis, at times in dialogue with each other. The stories from the Palestinians’ Al Nakba (catastrophe), such as Jamal and Taghrid (figs. 13 and 14), stand alongside stories of Jews from Arab lands, such as Lidia and Rahmim, a family from Mosul, Iraq. The portrait/narratives teach us that the stories can coexist without dilution. Rather, they serve to enrich our understanding by keeping the door open for future interactions.

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Kul Shay/All Things: Photographs, Photo Constructions, Photo Essays, 2005–6

Figure 15. Tante Muna Serving Coffee, Dahr Asawan, Lebanon, 2005, pigmented archival print, 11 x 14 inches.

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Figure 16. Horj Vegetable Cart, Beirut, Lebanon, 2005, pigmented archival print, 11 x 14 inches.

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Figure 17. Saida Candy Factory, Saida, Lebanon, 2005, pigmented archival print, 11 x 14 inches.

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Figure 18. Boys and Nurse Lynn in Alley, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut, Lebanon, 2005, pigmented archival print, 11 x 14 inches. Kul Shay/All Things catalogues and articulates my Arabic heritage and how I negotiate between several locations and contexts within the Middle East. Through my eyes, Middle Eastern culture ties, builds, innovates, and synthesizes ideas and form. In turn, these photographs and shadow-box constructions are culled from a wide array of subjects, places, and events during a six-month sojourn in Lebanon during 2005 that included the onset of the country's political upheaval. Kul Shay/All Things includes a database of nearly four thousand digital photographs taken in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Thus far, it has manifested itself in three forms of expression: traditional photographs, photo construction shadow boxes, and photo essays. Unlike my paintings, the straightforward and unmanipulated photographs exude a sense of verity. It is the default reading. The photo constructions or shadow boxes bridge the world of verity with that of manipulated realms. And the photo essays are visualized observations and stories that will be expanded into larger wall installations.

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These images are from our neighborhood in Beirut, family gatherings, the Palestinian refugee camp of Borj al Barajni, visits to Syria, and a visit to several cities in Iran. It may be difficult to put your arms around this exhibit, yet its title, Kul Shay—which means “All Things” in Arabic—is an apt and convenient phrase that both excuses the inclusion of experiences and describes my feeling about Middle Eastern cultures as a mix of decorum, abundance, and contradiction. For me, the Middle East is a cradle that rocks me and a pillow on which to rest my head. It is not strange or exotic. It is home. Promulgating variety and a compulsion toward nurturing are the Arab traits that are most familiar to me, and I was happy to see them still deeply entrenched in the culture, as can be seen in Tante Muna Serving Coffee, Dahr Asawan, Lebanon (fig. 15). Likewise, Horj Vegetable Cart, Beirut, Lebanon (fig. 16) and Saida Candy Factory, Saida, Lebanon (fig. 17) are shrine-like images of nurturing. Boys and Nurse Lynn in Alley, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut, Lebanon (fig. 18) offers a generous view of the complicated relationships between aid workers and those they serve, including children playing under the most unpromising circumstances. In the playful photo constructions verity and the documentation of real places is pushed aside for the sake of creating poetic realms. I return to hybrid environments similar to those of the paintings, where symbolic things, poetic and coded referents, encourage viewers to decipher their own meanings. Unlike the paintings, the parts of these works are photographic certainties, thus creating a kind of suspended state of verity. Again, these realms refer to a myriad of influences from Byzantine and Islamic art to storytelling and random playfulness. They couple images of place with symbols of domesticity, such as teacups and kitchen tables. A Tempest in a Tea Glass, Pappie in Egypt, 1955 (fig. 19) and Three Golden Rings, Borj Al Barajni (fig. 20) are examples of portraits which construct an iconic environment that connects the former to ancient Egypt and the latter to Byzantium. Other images include references to monuments, landscape, and sea glass. Within these constructions, the focus varies from environmental and political issues to landscapes and portraits.

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Figure 19. A Tempest in a Tea Glass, Pappi in Egypt, 1955, 2004, photo construction printed on archival paper and Plexiglas, 15 x 15 inches.

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Figure 20. Three Golden Rings, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut, 2005, photo construction printed on archival paper and Plexiglas, 15 x 15 inches. The photo texts are extracted from written observations I dutifully recorded while living in Beirut. They are a part of the larger photo database that like a biologist I am continually scanning and sorting through. Uncle Hanna’s Electric Heart Story, Kfarhoune, Lebanon, 2005, details the story of my great uncle’s tie to his homeland. Khaldiyeh’s River Rock Story, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut, Lebanon, 2005, expresses Khaldiyeh’s need to have a land that she can claim for her children. Through her incessant and heroic compulsion to literally build her home, Khaldiyeh created a refuge within the refugee camp, poignantly

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interspersed with the myriad objects that her mother brought from Palestine in 1948.

Conclusion: Creating a Bank of Knowledge and Tools My paintings, installations, and photographs evoke narratives and take their cues from many sources, as I grapple with various strategies for how to define Middle Eastern culture and its relationship to the West. Western culture tends to view my land of origin in simple and unforgiving terms. This compels me to seek perspectives from both ends of the divide, and in this way, I gain an enlightened view of that divide. Stories take on a life of their own when they are expressed through individual and historical circumstances that are manifested in concrete imagery—in things. These images, icons, references, and stories are not accepted in the broad population, nor in the intellectual mainstream. Furthermore, within the visual arts, the somewhat cynical and myopic belief that everything has been seen or done prevails. I challenge this unchallenged conceit through my insistence that stories must be looked at repeatedly and through various lenses. I take a circuitous path toward examining and portraying my individual struggle. Hence, I am the primary architect in forging hybrid images that carry the conceptual and theoretical arguments that surround the East-West divide and my own experiences as an exile creating poetic realms.

CHAPTER SIX: COMING TOGETHER: THE COLLECTIVES

ARAB ART COLLECTIVES AND THE REMAKING OF THE WHOLE YOUMNA CHLALA

An art collective is like a small-scale utopia—a forum that functions outside of public expectations. It allows for the manifestation of ideals at the same time that it provides a venue for artists to invent new standards of exchange. As the market-driven art world thrives and identity politics continue to be woven into public discourse, an art collective is not only a creative haven but also a form of defiance. It is often the case that a critic, gallery owner, or curator creates the terms that the rest of the art world then uses to understand an artist’s work. By functioning as a group, artists set their own terms based on the multiplicity of their mediums and concepts. In the case of artists who are from the Arab world and living in diaspora, the formation of a group takes on an additional meaning. It becomes a direct response to the disjointed identity of migration. Groups allow for a reseaming and re-affirming of identity. As art theorist Miwon Kwon suggests, a collective artistic praxis involves “a provisional group, produced as a function of specific circumstances on the very conditions of the interaction, performing its own coming together and coming apart as a necessary incomplete modeling or working out of a collective social process.”1 This essay investigates the role of art collectives as models for Arab artists based in the United States by focusing on the Arc Collective, an Arab art collective in the San Francisco Bay Area. By moving through significant moments in the formation of this group, this analysis attempts to elucidate the role of an identity-based collective whose artists are driven by conceptual notions of art-making.

Context In contemporary art discourse, collectives are associated with social interventions, events, and site-specific installations. Groups form in order to

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break the boundaries of place (gallery, museum). The projects created by collectives are usually interactive events that include a public or some form of social engagement. In a way similar to what is done for installation-based work, the projects are often recorded and documented. By continuing to exist, sometimes exclusively, outside of particular moments in time, the meaning of the work continues to transform. The contemporary art collective also takes on the challenge of identity formations. As an artist participating in a collective, the burden of holding an identity or identities (i.e., Arab, woman, immigrant) is diffused, shared, and sometimes negated for the sake of artistic process. At the same time, identity has the potential to play an even greater role, especially if the collective is working in the realm of social and community interventions. Internationally, the recent resurgence of collectives demonstrates the ways that artists are reclaiming their roles in the art world. In the Arab world, a number of collectives have formed to document both historical and current realities, including Walid Raad’s fictitious The Atlas Group and The Arab Image Foundation, an organization that aims to catalog and promote photography and film as documentation of the region. Simultaneously, theater, film/video, literature, music, and art groups have developed informally in many countries, including Palestine, Algeria, Egypt, and Lebanon. Simultaneously, there is a renewed commitment to create networks and to elevate the contemporary art discourse, as groups such as Ashkal Alwan in Beirut aim to create dialogue about contemporary art based in the region. The United States has a history of identity-based art collectives ranging from the Black arts movement and Chicano artists to collectives of women artists (Guerilla Girls). There are recent groups such Godzilla, a collective of Asian American and Pacific Islander American artists, prototyped from a 1970 alliance of artists in Chinatown. As the identities of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians in the United States have become conflated, artists have come together to pull apart the differences and create a new visual and political understanding. The VISIBLE collective in New York formed with the mission of questioning and challenging the image of, as well as ideas and theories about, these communities. The Other collective, based in Detroit, is specifically aiming to create a community-engaged arts and media organization that promotes selfrepresentation for Arab Americans. These recent shifts in contemporary art practice have translated into “heightened attention to how a given collaboration is undertaken, as artists are increasingly judged by their working process.”2 Therefore, each moment in the evolution and production of a group takes on a larger significance.

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Forming As an international curator, Salwa Mikdadi has been promoting Arab art in the United States for over twenty years. In the fall of 2004, she invited a group of artists to her Berkeley, California, home. The room was filled with filmmakers, painters, illustrators, sculptors, installation artists, architects, photographers, writers, and curators from Palestine, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, and Egypt. The questions began to emerge. What did it mean to come together as a group of artists from the Arab world? Would our identity/lived experience prescribe conversations? We decided to keep meeting. Over the next few months, we visited studios and homes, attended openings, and began to rely on each other for critiques. We studied videos in progress, viewed series of photographs, debated the materials used in sculptures, and began to build a shared language about our work. It was not until we spent time with the Other collective in Michigan and saw the impact joining together had on their work that we recognized that the need to formalize as a group had become both strategic and inevitable. The process undertaken to form the Arc Collective varied significantly throughout. We began by naming our individual positions about art and identity and continued to meet as way to keep our personal work moving forward. However, because the core group was consistently changing, we had to allow for uncertainty and fluidity. As individual artists, our commonalities were that we used words, structures, and images to interpret culture and make sense of our displacement. However, our strategies differed widely and we were reluctant about negotiating the vastness of our individual practices. It was then that a shift took place. The challenge became how to be attentive to our artistic process as a whole, in order to shape a collective identity. The group that emerged as the founding members of the Arc Collective were primarily women artists who were born and raised outside the United States, in Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt. Our work ranged from sculpture and painting to videos, writing, and photography. We were aligned and driven by one question: could such a collective thrive? We began to meet regularly in each other’s homes. Cafes became the setting for the development of concepts and living rooms the site for the realization of projects. The International Council for Women in the Arts/Cultural and Visual

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Arts Resource (ICWA/CVAR) generously offered to be our fiscal sponsor. We could now prioritize our needs. We wanted to find a central location, a consistent space to work, and invite more artists to participate. All of these goals would take significant time to be realized. Determining how to create our own resources was vital. If our core vision was based on working outside of prescribed notions of groups and identity, then building a collective art practice that did not rely on traditional methods of growth was just as important. This meant making deliberate choices about how to raise funds, where to show work, how much to participate in the local art, and the local Arab, communities.

The Arc Collective Now This section outlines the mission and values and describes the first project of our group.

Mission Based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, the Arc Collective is a group of artists from North Africa, the Arab world, and west Asia. Our current mission is to serve as a forum for artists working in the visual and literary arts. Our transnational vision of artistic practice moves us toward the creation of new work as well as partnerships and collaborations with Arab artists and arts organizations.

Values Name as malleable: Our name and mission are malleable and elastic. We are not bound to the meaning or definition, and we reserve the right to change them at any time we determine necessary. Collaboration as medium. By identifying collaboration as the medium, we use multiple disciplines. This also creates an opportunity for furthering a legacy of work where collaboration is the centripetal force. Projects as movable: All of our projects should have the ability to be dismantled and shipped to various locations, ideally in the Arab world. This is at the core of our collective theory and practice. Our installations are to be shipped, broken down, reassembled. Our work must in essence mutate.

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Project 1

Some of These Things Are Beautiful, 2006, glass, glue, living space.

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Our first project (realized by Hiba Kalache, Nada Shalaby, and Youmna Chlala) was a large-scale installation. Some of These Things Are Beautiful was installed inside a room in a house. As the “family room,” it functioned as the place where people gathered to talk, take naps, and where the children played. The location itself was simultaneously transient and intimate. By clearing out the furniture and the children’s toys, we were left with a revised version of a white cube. Using a large quantity of found material, the installation was composed of 22,000 small glass bottles. As the process unfolded, we became a hybrid of scientist/artist. We filled, stuffed, tested, reversed, and flipped the bottles. We explored the function, form, and failures of the material, and the push and pull of conceptual and aesthetic ideas guided the work. The installation was based on an invented system of mapping. By decoding our personal movement in public spaces, we created a collective topography. The glass bottles were unstable and a tension was built between their fragility and the formality of the room. The objects appeared to unravel (falling from walls and windows) as they also climbed along surfaces (floor, walls, and ceiling). The number of individual pieces was significant. Large groups and gatherings are often perceived as intimidating, disruptive, and associated with massive displacement or migration. The installation tested the notions of fear and replaced them with the force that comes from both literal and metaphoric amassment. The pieces became solid and seemingly unbreakable in their formation. The glass mimicked the movement of both people and landscapes. The process itself was invisible to the public and the (temporary) final piece was photographed and documented. It will be installed in public spaces (galleries and museums) and will therefore have to reinvent itself. It will also be relocated to other private spaces as we continue to build and install, dismantle, and then reinstall it.

Individual/Collective The following interviews further examine our individual approaches and ideas regarding the role of identity in the arts and the specific ways that the Arc Collective and its members function within such boundaries. Interviewed members of the Arc Collective include: Hiba Kalache, Nada Shalaby, May Hariri Aboutaam, and Youmna Chlala.

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Arab Art Collectives and the Remaking of the Whole Q: Are you an Arab artist or Muslim artist? A Lebanese or an Egyptian artist? Are you an Arab American artist? How do you identify? Nada: I had never really thought about this question until coming to the States. You’re not labeled an “American artist” in Egypt even if you have a U.S. passport. But here it seems you have to pick a label that will distinguish you within a crowd of minorities and prove that you are different and unique. There is something defensive about the whole thing. On a certain level I like the (fictitious) community of it. On the other hand, I’ve never identified myself as an Arab let alone an Arab American. As an artist, faced with the question, I would choose to identify not with nationality but with my work. Hence, our aversion to labels and definitions, which I think all of us in the group share. Are you asking about nationality? We have specific answers about the citizenship(s) we hold. Are you asking about our art? Then identifying it in these terms (Arab/Egyptian/Lebanese) implies a cultural bias that serves one of two purposes, either to make a statement and align with certain political views or to use identity to garner public attention/validation that you would not receive unless you were viewed as exotic and different. I don’t feel it necessary to do either. The issue of how to identify ourselves seems to be a distraction from the real work: producing art. We should not be taking ourselves too seriously or else these definitions/labels will end up restricting the work we do. The identity of the artist is immaterial. Hiba: I identify as an artist period. I happen to be Muslim Lebanese only by coincidence. I am a Lebanese-American artist always carrying her past and totally engaged in her present. I just can’t separate one from the other. Religion is not of relevance, thus I refuse to represent myself as a Muslim artist. I do not make Islamic art, nor anything that reflects on it. May: My inquiry into my own identity parallels a concern of contemporary art with the problem of identity in general. Living in an age of terminological uncertainty, labeling myself is problematic by all measures. Every term I use has its own implications. Labels, such as a contemporary, Lebanese, Islamic, Arab American artist, are constantly in question, highly fragmented, politicized, and defined by certain circumstances that limit my role as an artist. As someone living in the Lebanese diaspora, being Lebanese is a nationality, not a profession. To be a Lebanese in the United States has its own implications. This contradictory situation has led me to further investigate the roles played by time and memory in the production of subjectivity. As a Muslim woman I am challenged to break codes about Islamic art and provoke new positive assumptions about art produced by a Muslim woman. Youmna: I was born in Beirut and currently live in San Francisco. I identify more with the specifics of a city than an entire country. I am incapable of representing an entire culture or nationality, much less a region of the world that spans three continents. Am I glad to have been born in a place with so much

Youmna Chlala beauty, history, and dignity? Absolutely. Am I sometimes nostalgic or unrealistic? Sure. Does that manifest itself in my work? Most likely. Q: How can we as Arab artists in diaspora make work that is not in reaction to the geopolitical moment but also acknowledges it? Nada: The process of creating work involves acknowledging geopolitical realities, it’s a personal process unique to each artist. For me, using the term diaspora for example infuses this subject with sentimentality, which doesn’t resonate with me. Having no particular allegiance to place is a kind of freedom, which I think we share in many ways. Hiba: We cannot make work that is not a reaction. We are a product of this geopolitical situation. We breathe it. It has infiltrated every aspect of our life. But the work doesn’t necessarily need to be didactic or copying all the works that are out there addressing the same issue. By reflecting closer on our life and bringing out the very personal, and by seeking inspiration in our everyday, one can (maybe) (successfully) do interesting work that she then owns. May: Knowing that I can’t act from a power position, my art production is often perceived beyond my intention. Therefore admitting that I am an outsider and living at the intersection of two different cultures challenges my value system, creates new beliefs, and transforms my work. What seemed to be a self-imposed exile or a voluntary displacement is a camouflaged reality. Most of us as Arab Americans are forced to leave our homelands for political, economic, or intellectual reasons and are often empowered by the ability to build crosscultural values. Those who can identify and cast themselves as agents rather than just observers challenge power structures and can bring about change. Youmna: It feels more instinctual to pay attention and take note than to react. It feels false to always be hyper-aware of a situation, sometimes it’s just about living through it. And it is in the specifics that the aesthetics and meaning can emerge. Q: Will making ourselves visible as Arab artists shift all of these discourses? Nada: I hope that our increased visibility as artists will shift the prevailing discourse from identity politics to pushing creative boundaries through our work. Hiba: Only by actually drawing on a global issue not necessarily Muslim or Arab but universal. Depending on what kind of visibility, it can simultaneously feed on the misreading or create new discourses. May: By living in between two cultures, it makes me whole and visible at the same time. I am owned by the past. I privilege autobiography as an analytical tool to negate the past in the present but also position the living experience within its present historical reality.

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Arab Art Collectives and the Remaking of the Whole Youmna: The ways that this occurs might not be so massive in scale. We are dispersed, but so are most people. It is not so much about the joining back together of the parts but making each part more visible. Q: Should it be the burden of the artist to work within these categories of identity (i.e., Arab artist)? And how can we remake them? Nada: Redefining our focus from ourselves to our work is I think the best way to refuse to work within these categories, and the best way to create work proactively not reactively. Hiba: Not necessarily and, yes, absolutely. The work can easily be categorized and misinterpreted, and not to the artist’s advantage. And we remake them by being in close control to what kind of reviews our work is getting. May: All art is categorized, however, I am most successful when the essence of my message is kept intact. I refuse to build my art based on preconceptions, but I also give the viewers, and myself, the right to reinterpret, rename, and rethink the artwork. It is this sense of freedom that allows the work to exist beyond its categorization. Youmna: The dynamic quality of making (art, words, objects, image, etc.) is inherent with the ability to transform. Why shouldn’t identities undergo the same process? Q: What have been the external expectations of our collective and how has the group been able to transform them? Nada: There are undoubtedly expectations for Arc to represent the interests and concerns of the Arab community in San Francisco or to align ourselves (predictably) with certain political causes. While our individual interests may include activism in other areas, our collective’s mission remains simply to produce work and if possible to do so together. Hiba: They’re rather unpredictable. We need to define them for ourselves, and they will be constantly changing within the time and place that the work is being done. This is one of the driving forces behind our work. But what is clear for us as a group is that it’s of utmost importance that we produce a collective body that involves equal effort and input from each one of us. We’re driven by this challenge, and it’s working out well for us. May: I always believed that simplicity contains and embodies an unspoken complexity. When cultures come into contention and so much controversy is gathered around us, our role as artists is to visually emphasize hope. Youmna: I’m not sure if considering the world right now, we can ever exist outside of preconception or expectation. Sometimes, it seems that we are simply

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expected to document catastrophe. But I am more interested in triumph, so we just have to keep making work about what feels true to our experience.

Artistic Impulses As a group of women artists born in the Arab world, there are expectations that we fulfill and others we resist. The identities we carry in diaspora are specific and binary and can often be constraining. We have come to acknowledge them at the same time that we set them aside. And we continue our investigation into ideas of art, form, and concept. The Arc Collective’s primary challenge is to maintain our artistic impulses. By focusing on impulse, there is room for change. It allows for a movement forward as well as the possibility of transformation. It is a way for us to acknowledge the personal and political forces of change. By coming together as a body of artists who are interested in similar questions, we have found more opportunities for naming the terms used to describe our work. We have created a platform. By choosing to mark our experiences through art, we can take note of how we are affected by the places we find ourselves. In a collective, there is room for complexity. Instilled in our principles is the core belief that artists should take the time to develop their personal work at the same time that they participate in the group. There are times when the geopolitical situation is prioritized, and when we account for each other’s needs and caprices. We shift between loss and celebration. There are also moments when we are suddenly and simultaneously drawn to a similar medium, concept, or form. Ultimately, our collective work might simply be about the ways that, sometimes, we are all in synch. The Arc Collective functions like a laboratory, a place of experimentation. There are constant successes and failures. Each meeting and project leaves room for both. We continue to grow. New members have joined and past artists have returned to participate in projects and create new collaborations. We maintain momentum at the same time that we do not hold on too closely to structure. We will be changing our name soon, and the mission will continue to take shape. We have recently initiated two new projects. Project 2 is a drawing exchange and Project 3 is a site-specific social sculpture. Our interest remains rooted in the process, seeing it as a site-specific work in and of itself.

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In the global context, the Arc Collective is but one attempt at addressing the pressures and possibilities of being an Arab artist at this time. The questions raised and the decisions made have the potential of impacting the way that art made by Arab artists is viewed and understood. By remaining actively engaged in art making, the Arc Collective can serve as a model where the creative act is fully rooted in all of the complexities of the self and the whole. Hiba Kalache was born in Beirut and received her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She is simultaneously engaged with the formal aspects of sculpture and painting and the social concerns of power and personal narrative. Hiba is also interested in the multifaceted layers of space, place, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity. She investigates the private sphere of the home, letting her daily encounters and surroundings inform her work conceptually and technically. Nada Shalaby was born in Cairo and received an MA in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo. She is a visual artist and cultural researcher. Nada is concerned with questioning predominant conceptions and challenging existing assumptions (both in the United States and in the Arab world) regarding art, identity, and gender. She is also interested in the application of satire and humor in art and the historical use of art as a method of defiance, resistance, and social change. Youmna Chlala was born in Beirut and received her MFA from the California College of the Arts. As writer and visual artist, she is interested in text and image functioning as sculpture and soundscape. She is also captivated by the hybridity of buildings and body and is furthering her investigation on how fate and architecture are intertwined within cities, specifically in Beirut and Los Angeles. May Hariri Aboutaam was born in Beirut and received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Boise State University. Her work questions the power of representation and counter-representation in the stereotyping of East and West. She considers the process of art making as an act of resistance. Her references to the female body echo the physical environment and geopolitical reality of Lebanon.

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Notes 1 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002). 2 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum (February 2006), 178–81

THE RISE OF ARAB AMERICAN COMEDY DEAN OBEIDALLAH

The last four years have seen a growth in the acceptance and support of Arab American comedians by the Arab American community, mainstream comedy club audiences, and the entertainment industry. Each group has embraced our comedy for different reasons. The political climate galvanized Arab Americans to come together in professional organizations and to perform together in an unprecedented way. I will describe here my experiences as an Arab American and performer. The interest in the community changed following 9/11 in a way that transformed both the audience and performer of Arab American comedy. The Arab American communities’ support of Arab American comedy can be tied directly to the post 9/11 climate in America. In the months after 9/11, Arab Americans felt that we were under siege as a group. Arab Americans were the victims of hate crimes and racial slurs and were frequently subjected to broad attacks in the media. At that time, we “circled the wagons” in an effort to protect ourselves and seek support from fellow Arab Americans. Many Arab Americans, including myself, became more in touch with our Arab heritage, and for the first time in our lives, we became active in Arab American organizations. It was in this climate that Arab American comedy began to emerge. The first all Arab American comedy show I ever performed in was in New York City, a little over a year after 9/11. This show was organized by the New York Chapter of the Network of Arab American Professionals (NAAP), a group of young Arab Americans, which formed only after 9/11. As fate would have it, I joined NAAP only the day before they sent out a group-wide email looking for comics of Arab American heritage living in New York. They didn’t know I was a comic when I joined, and they had not heard of any other Arab American comics in New York. The NAAP wanted to organize a comedy show because an Arab American comic from Chicago, Ray Hanania, had been fired as the opening comic for Jackie Mason, after Mason found out that Ray was of Palestinian heritage. The NAAP members heard about Ray’s story and wanted to publicly support him by producing the first ever all Arab American comedy show in New York’s history.

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When the NAAP organizers asked me to be a part of this show, I was supportive but I frankly was not certain that we would sell that many tickets. To my amazement, we sold out not one, but two, back-to-back shows at one of the big comedy clubs in New York. The comics included Nasry Malak, Ray Hanania, and myself. The audiences were almost exclusively Arab American and. their response was so supportive that it inspired me to want to do more Arab-themed comedy shows. So began the emergence of Arab American comedy in New York. This was the genesis for the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, which was created in 2003 and is discussed later in this paper. I would say “so began the emergence of Arab comedy in America”; however, I found out that a short time before 9/11, there had been a series of all Middle Eastern-American comedy shows in Los Angeles called the “Arabian Nights” featuring Arab American comics, Ahmed Ahmed and Aron Kader, along with Iranian-American comic Maz Jobrani. In the years that followed, these New York– and Los Angeles–based Arab American comics have performed together in numerous shows across the United States and abroad. I have wondered if the Arab American community would have been as supportive if these shows had been held before 9/11. I’m not sure because the Arab American community, in New York at least, was not as cohesive, and the comedy itself was different. Prior to 9/11, when Arab American comedians told jokes about being of Arab heritage, they were viewed as ethnic, just like someone who tells a joke about being Italian or Irish. For example, one of the few jokes I did that mentioned my Arab heritage was one in which I shared my dream of starting an Arab boy band called “SKB,” shish-kid-bob. Certainly, there was no political message in this joke; it was simply intended to get a laugh. However, after 9/11, my comedy became centered around my Arab identity and very political. I really had no choice because since 9/11, when you get on stage and say that you are Arab, it has political connotations. My material no longer dealt with boy bands but addressed issues of how Arabs are portrayed in the media, racial profiling, and the struggles of being Arab American in the post9/11 world. My material on these topics was intended to make people laugh as well as to raise issues that are important to express to my fellow Americans. I believe there are several reasons why the Arab American community embraced our comedy. First, it is funny, which is very important. Second, they understand that our comedy is a form of activism. In the post-9/11 world, where being of Arab heritage is often greeted with distrust, or even anger, comedy is a

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way of reaching out to our fellow Americans in a positive, nonthreatening way. By also making non–Arab American audiences laugh, we are hopefully dispelling stereotypes and misconceptions. I can say without exception that all the Arab American comics I know strive both to make audiences laugh and to foster cultural understanding. I also believe that the reason our comedy has been well received by both Arab and non–Arab Americans is because it is still a novelty. There isn’t a long history of Arab American comedy in the United States. Obviously, there have been some well-known Arab American comedians, such as Danny Thomas, and more recently, successful Arab American comedic actors, such as Emmy– award-winning actor Tony Shalhoub, Jamie Farr of M*A*S*H fame, and Kathy Najimy. However, in reality, there are still only five or six full-time Arab American comedians performing in the United States. In recent years, we’ve reached a non–Arab Americans audience because we’re writing material with that audience in mind. The more established Arab American comics, such as Maysoon Zayid, Ahmed Ahmed, Aron Kader, Nasry Malak, and I are truly funny comedians, and we make both Arabs and non–Arab audience members laugh. Most of us perform numerous times a week in comedy clubs across the country, where typically, there are no people of Arab heritage in the audience. Consequently, we must write jokes to make the average American laugh if we are going to succeed. Another reason non–Arab Americans are coming out to see our shows is because they are intrigued by Arabs and Muslims. There are certainly parallels between the way many Americans currently view the Arab and Muslim worlds and the way many Americans viewed the Soviet Union during the Cold War. People want to know about the “other side.” Regardless of whether the non– Arab Americans attending our shows are progressive, open-minded people who are intrigued by a different culture or those who want to study “the enemy,” I can say that they usually end up laughing. We have been fortunate to receive a great deal of media coverage since 9/11, which has also made us known to non–Arab Americans. Most Arab American comics have appeared on national and even international television news shows such as CNN, CNN International’s Inside the Middle East, ABC’s 20/20, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, and television shows in Japan, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. We have also been featured in numerous newspaper articles worldwide in English, French, Italian, and Arabic, and we have been featured on various radio networks such as NPR, BBC, and Air

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America. This increased attention has made it easier for us to reach out to people outside of our own ethnic group. This is not only important in selling tickets to events but very important in using comedy as activism. I, along with my fellow Arab American comics, believe strongly that comedy is a great way of fostering understanding. Stand-up comedy is an American form of entertainment, and it has a history of addressing the issues of race and politics. Certainly Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and Jon Stewart have been able to raise important issues through their comedy, sparking debate and challenging peoples’ misconceptions or prejudiced views. I also believe that if people are laughing, it makes it harder for them to hate you. It was the support of the Arab American community that inspired my fellow comedian Maysoon Zayid and I to create an event we hoped would bring even more media attention to the talented Arab American artists and attract positive coverage for the community as a whole. In 2003, Maysoon and I began the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival (www.arabcomedy.org). The festival began as a one-time event held over three days, showcasing comedic actors, playwrights, filmmakers, and comedians. Our success was due in large part to the fact that a group of talented Arab Americans, a total of thirty our first year, volunteered their time to work collectively. The overwhelming support of the New York Arab American community in 2003 encouraged us to make the festival an annual event. In fact, in November of 2006, we will hold our fourth annual festival in New York City. What began in 2003 as a three-night event with four shows has grown to five nights with eight shows. Over one thousand people attended the 2005 festival, and all events were sold out one week in advance. We were also very fortunate to receive a great deal of positive media coverage for the festival, the performers involved, and the Arab American community. Newspaper articles about the festival appeared literally across the world, from New York to Los Angeles, from Dubai to Kansas. We also were featured on CNN and other national radio networks. In January 2006, we took the festival to Los Angles so that we could show our work to the Arab American community there as well as to the entertainment industry. The three-day Los Angeles Arab-American Comedy Festival sold out in advance, and for the first time, we attracted a great deal of interest from the Hollywood entertainment industry. Only recently has the entertainment industry shown a sustained interest in our work. For years, we received a great deal of positive media coverage individually as performers and as part of the Comedy Festival but only brief glimmers of interest from the industry. Finally, things appear to be changing for

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the better. The industry finally seems ready to take a chance on Arab American performers who are actually talking about being of Arab heritage. This is in large part due to the success that the comics and the Comedy Festival have achieved in selling out shows across the country. There are several indications that we are in the process of going mainstream, including a few deals in the works for several of the Arab American comedians. Ahmed Ahmed and Aron Kader are on the verge of recording a comedy DVD for a well-known national comedy producer. If it goes well, this DVD could end up in major stores across the country. Also, Comedy Central has recently agreed to air an Arab American stand-up comedy show for its Internet channel, Motherload. This show, entitled The Watch List, is being produced by me and my producing partner Max Brooks, and it will feature around ten Arab American comics. This marks the first time ever that an American entertainment network is providing Arab Americans their own show. While we wish the show were on Comedy Central’s television channel as opposed to their Internet channel, it still is a big step for us as a group. If the show is successful, it might pave the way for a show on television in the near future. Of course, as is true in everything in show business, these deals could both fall apart. However, what is important is that the industry has finally begun to embrace our work as Arab Americans. If we are able to succeed and become more visible, it will undoubtedly inspire more Arab Americans to become involved in the entertainment industry. The more we become involved, the sooner we can impact the final product and start redefining who we are in the eyes of our fellow Americans. That is the only way we can ensure that the industry will stop producing entertainment that presents us in a purely negative light. For many of us, both as comedians and as Arab Americans, it has been an interesting, painful, fun, exciting, and at times frustrating journey over the last five years since 9/11. It is my hope that we will continue to grow as performers and that, in time, we will have a visible presence in mainstream American entertainment. This will go a long way in defining us accurately in American pop culture, which in turn will dispel misconceptions about us as a group. While I cannot say where we as Arab American comedians will ultimately end up, I can say without hesitation that we would have never made it this far without the help of the Arab American community. Their truly amazing support has carried and inspired us along each step of our journey. We hope to make the

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Arab American community proud of our work as comedians and to be ambassadors of good will for our community.

CONTRIBUTORS

Doris Bittar is an international visual artist primarily known for her paintings, photo constructions, and installations. Her art has been widely honored by museums, art journals, and civic institutions. Throughout her career, Bittar has combined diverse activities, ranging from art making, teaching, and writing to travel and activism. She currently lives in San Diego and teaches at the University of California at San Diego. Leila Buck is a Lebanese-American actress, writer, storyteller, and teaching artist whose award-winning one-woman show, ISite, has been performed around the world and featured in the New York Times. She runs an international program using drama to teach about the Arab world and is the artistic director of the Nisaa’ Arab American Women’s Collective, a founding member of Nibras Arab-American Theater Collective, and a member of the Mixed Company BiCultural Theater Company. Buck writes and performs for the New York ArabAmerican Comedy Festival. Youmna Chlala is a writer and visual artist who was born in Beyrouth and currently lives in San Francisco. She is a founding member of the Arc Collective and the founding editor of Eleven Eleven {1111}, a journal of literature and art. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts and has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and at Hedgebrook. Nominated for a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, she has been published in the Anthology of Arab-American Writers and the MIT Journal of Middle Eastern Studies among others. She is working on her novel about architecture and fate in Beyrouth and Los Angeles. Suheir Hammad is an original writer and performer of the Tony Awardwinning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, as well as a featured poet on every season of the HBO series. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Audre Lorde Poetry Award. She is the author of three books, the latest of which is Zaatar Diva, published by Cypher Books.

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Nathalie Handal is a poet, writer, and playwright. Her latest works are the poetry CD Spell and The Lives of Rain, which was shortlisted for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series. She has two forthcoming anthologies, Arab American and Arab Anglophone Literature and Contemporary Poetry of the Eastern World (Norton, 2007). Richard Hishmeh earned his doctorate in English at the University of California Riverside and currently serves as assistant professor of English at Palomar College in San Marcos, California. He writes regularly in the fields of American literature, American studies, and film and visual culture. As an American of Palestinian descent, he has a special interest in Arab American literature, Middle East politics, and Arab culture. Christopher Khoury is an American-born Palestinian and the son of the late artist Sari Khoury. He was trained as a biomedical engineer and is currently pursuing an MBA at Ohio State University. Christopher was also a founding member of the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, where he acted as director and curator for two years. Karim Nagi is a performer and educator who emigrated from Egypt to Boston in the 1970s. He produces, performs, and teaches both traditional Arab music and folk dance, as well as contemporary works, all over the United States. His projects include the Sharq Arabic Music Ensemble, Turbo Tabla Arab Electronica, the Zaitoun Dabka Troupe, ReOrientalism, and the Arab Music and Dance School Education Initiative. Dean Obeidallah is a former lawyer turned stand-up comedian who has appeared on numerous national and international television programs, including Comedy Central, CNN's American Morning, ABC's 20/20, and CNN's Inside the Middle East. He has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair (Italian edition.) He is the co-founder of the annual New York Arab-American Comedy Festival and the co-producer of a show for Comedy Central's Internet channel featuring all Middle EasternAmerican performers entitled The Watch List. Gregory Orfalea is the author of The Arab Americans: A History and Messengers of the Lost Battalion, a memoir of his father's ill-fated unit in World War II. After many years, he just completed a first novel, The Fiends. The father of three boys, he divides his time between Washington, D.C., and Claremont, California, where he teaches fiction and nonfiction and directs the Center for Writing.

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Andrea Shalal-Esa has worked for over eighteen years for Reuters, the world's largest news agency, where she currently covers defense technologies and the Pentagon. She has interviewed many Arab American writers and musicians and often writes and lectures about Arab American women writers. She helped pioneer a diversity initiative at Reuters and has been active in promoting multicultural education in Maryland. Jessica Robertson Wright is the assistant director of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development and the curator of the Jerusalem Fund Gallery. Born and raised in Jordan, she graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a degree in art history and Near Eastern studies. She lives with her husband in Arlington, Virginia, and writes on contemporary Middle Eastern art and cultural diplomacy. Will Youmans writes about politics and Arab American affairs for the ArabAmerican News and his blog, www.kabobfest.com. As the hip-hop artist, Iron Sheik (www.ironsheik.biz), he performs and records music regularly. He also serves on the board of directors of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development in Washington, D.C. (www.thejerusalemfund.org). Helen Zughaib was born in Beirut and lived in the Middle East and Europe before coming to the United States to study art at Syracuse University, where she received her BFA from the College of Visual and Performing Arts in 1981. Zughaib has lived and worked as a painter in Washington, D.C., since 1985. Her paintings are in over eighty private and public collections, including the White House, Library of Congress, the World Bank, and the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

INDEX

AAUG, 108 Abdel-Aziz, Nesma, 37 Abdullah, Sarah, 27, 31 Aboutaam, May Hariri, 187–90, 192 abstract art Barakat, Tayseer, 117 Abu-Jaber, Diana, 2, 68, 70, 72–75 Arabian Jazz Crescent Language of Baklava, The My Elizabeth activism, 25, 81, 85 art collectives and, 189 comedy and, 195–96, 197 hip-hop and, 42, 50–51, 53 Al Adawi, Zuhdi, 119 Adios (Nye), 89 Adonis, 46 Adorno, 108 Ahmed, Ahmed, 195, 196, 198 Ahmed, Yasmine, 27, 31 AJ, 54 Aks eSayr, 38 Aksser, 52 Al-Kindi Ensemble 38 Amireh, Amal, 71 Antique Symmetry (Khoury), 105, 106 Arab American and Arab Anglophone Literature and Contemporary Poetry of the Eastern World (Handal), 201 Arab-American Comedy Festivals, 4, 195, 197 Arab American National Museum, 4, 108 Arab American Theater Collective, 23– 24 Arab American University Graduates (AUG), 108

Arab Americans: A History, The (Orfaela), 201 Arab Image Foundation, The, 183 Arab Music and Dance School Education Initiative, 201 Arabesque, 52, 54, 56 Arabian Jazz (Abu-Jaber), 71, 72–73 Arabic Assassin, 51, 54 Arc Collective, 5, 182, 200 challenges, 190–92 evolution of, 184–85, 190 mission and values of, 185–87 projects, 186–87, 191 Arida, Holly, commentary by, 1–6 art collectives, 182–93 sense of identity within, 182, 183, 190, 191 and visibility as artists, 189– 90, 192 See also Arc Collective art exhibitions funding for, 120, 124, 125 It is Possible, 109 joint Palestinian-Israeli, 109 Made in Palestine, 110, 118–20, 121, 124, 125 of Palestinian art, 114–27 Subject of Palestine, The, 117–18 Where We Come From, 115–17 artists explicatory artists, 107, 108 liberation artists, 107 See also art collectives; art exhibitions; specific types Arts America, 87 ASH ONE, 48, 50 Ashekmann, 38 Asher, James, 31 Ashkal Alwan, 183

204 Atlas Group, The, 183 el-Babbly, Sami, 37 Barakat, Tayseer, 117 Bek, Rayess, 52 Bishara, Rana, 117 Bittar, Doris, 4, 157–79, 200 paintings Camo Flag: Baghdadi Weave, 169, 170 Lebanese Linen series, 159, 165–66 Orientalism series, 159, 160– 61 People of the Book series, 159, 161–64 Semites series, 159, 170–71 Stripes and Stars: From Baghdad to Jerusalem, 169, 170 Stripes and Stars: From Sargossa to Shiraz, 167 Stripes and Stars series, 159, 166–70 Stripes and Stars: You Have Mail, 168, 170 Taghrid, 170, 171 Valance/Valence: Nahar Al Barad Camp, 1950, 159, 160 Wandering Ishmael, The, 159, 164–65 Wandering Ishmael, The: Franco-Arabe Tour 1, 164, 165 You Open Your Eyes Under the Oblivious Sun of the West, 160, 161 photographic works Boys and Nurse Lynn in Alley, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut, 175, 176 Horj Vegetable Cart, Beirut, Lebanon, 173, 176 Khaldiyeh’s River Rock Story, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut, Lebanon, 178–79

Index Saida Candy Factory, Saida, Lebanon, 174, 176 Tante Muna Serving Coffee, Dahr Asawan, Lebanon, 172, 176 Tempest in a Tea Glass, A, Pappi in Egypt, 176, 177 Three Golden Rings, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut, Lebanon, 176, 178 Uncle Hanna’s Electric Heart Story, Kfarhoune, Lebanon, 178 use of Arabic calligraphy, 158, 161, 164 use of French colonial wallpaper patterns, 158, 160, 165–66 Bleached and Bleeding (Hammad), 79 Bolivia (Nye), 89 Born Palestinian, Born Black (Hammad), 49, 78–79 al Bosta, Wlad, 57 Boullata, Kamal, 109 Bourjaily, Vance, 66–67 Boys and Nurse Lynn in Alley, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut, Lebanon (Bittar), 175, 176 Brill Among the Ruins (Bourjaily), 66– 67 Brooks, Max, 198 Buck, Leila, 4–5, 19–31, 200 Bullet Collection, The (Ward), 68 calligraphy, 158, 161, 164 Camo Flag: Baghdadi Weave (Bittar), 169, 170 Charity and Compassion (Zughaib), 135–36 Chashama, 23 Chehlaoui, Maha, 27, 31 Chicago Palestine Film Festival, 201 Chlala, Youmna, 5–6, 182–93, 187, 200 interview with, 187–90, 192 Clotaire K, 52

Etching Our Own Image: Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement coexistence, as portrayed in art, 167, 170–71 collectives. See Arab-American Comedy Festival; art collectives; Nibras colonialism, 160, 161, 165–66 comedians, 196. See also Obeidallah, Dean comedy as activism, 195–96, 197 audience for, 196 and mainstream entertainment industry, 198 media coverage of, 196–97 to promote cultural understanding, 196, 197 Coming into Cuzco (Nye), 89, 90 Coming Together – DIWAN, 4 conceptual art. See Bittar, Doris; Jacir, Emily Cooper Union School of Art, 109 counterpublicity, 84 crayon drawings al Adawi, Zuhdi, 119 Rakouie, Muhammad, 119 Crescent (Abu-Jaber), 68, 71, 73, 74 cross-cultural experiences, 189. See also ISite Crossing the Litani River (Zughaib), 152–53 cultural understanding, 156, 196 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 48, 50, 52 curators, 124–25 Halaby, Samia, 107, 117, 118, 120, 121 Harithas, James, 118, 119, 121 Mikdadi, Salwa, 184 Mullins, Kevin, 115, 117 Wright, Jessica Robertson, 2, 114– 29, 202 Curriculum Vitae (Joseph), 90, 91–92, 93 dabke, 34 DAM, 38, 52, 57

205

Darwish, Mahmoud, 46 Dee, Ali, 54 DePaul University Museum, 117–18, 124, 126 diaspora, as theme in art in music, 32, 39, 40, 49, 52 in visual arts, 107–109, 117, 182, 188–89, 191 Different Ways to Pray (Nye), 87 Dirty South Joe, 49 disidentification, 83, 84 DIWAN, 4 DJs, 38, 54, 55 Drops of this Story (Hammad), 79 Eid al Salib (Zughaib), 147 Eid Mar Elias (Zughaib), 145–46 Eleven Eleven (journal), 200 El-Zafeer Ensemble, 39 emigration, 3, 12, 164–65, 166, 182, 187 Euphrates (hip-hop artist), 47, 50, 51, 52 Evenings in the Kroum (Zughaib), 139– 40 Excentrik, 2, 47, 48, 51, 53 exile, as theme in art in hip-hop, 49, 52 in poetry, 76 in prose, 73 in visual arts,121, 157, 189. See also Khoury, Sari I. explicatory artists, 107, 108 Fakhri, Sabah, 34 Farr, Jamie, 196 Fayrouz, 37, 46 Feast of Saint Elias (Zughaib), 145–46 Feast of the Cross (Zughaib), 147–48 Fiends, The (Orfaela), 201 film, 19, 50 film festivals, 201 Five Percenters, 53 Folding Linens Filigree (Bittar), 165 Foulen, Ibn, 52 Fredwreck, 47, 55

206 Freij, Maysoun, 27, 31 Furious, 56 Gamil, Alfred, 38 Gaza Strip (MC), 51 Get Lit Entertainment, 53 Gibran, Kahlil, 2, 62, 68, 84–85, 93 use of Western voice by, 85–87, 94 Habibi, Emile, 109 hakawati (storyteller), 132, 133 Halaby, Samia, 107, 117, 118, 120, 121 Halihal, Rachid, 36 al Hallaj, Mustafa, 119 Hammad, Suheir, 2, 8, 76, 78–80, 200 Born Palestinian, Born Black, 49, 51, 78–79 Drops of this Story, 79 Poem for Women of the Arab Worlds, A, 8–10 ZaatarDiva, 72 Hanania, Ray, 194, 195 Handal, Nathalie, 11–16, 201 on homeland, 2, 8–12 on literature as political vehicle, 12 Maher Salem’s Deaf Father, 15 Wall Against Our Breath, 13–15 Harithas, James, 118, 119, 121 Hatoum, Mona, 128 Hazo, Samuel 68 hip-hop, 38, 39, 42–59 activism and, 50–51, 53 artists AJ, 54 Fredwreck, 47 Iron Sheik, 50, 51, 57. See also Youmans, Will Kakish, Robert, 53 Masade, 47–48 Narcy, 47 Sons of Hagar, 53 See also MCs DJs, 38, 54, 55 improvisation and, 46

Index mainstream artists, 54–55, 56 political diversity of, 44 slang and symbols in, 53–54 uses of, 47–49, 50 Hishmeh, Richard, 2, 83–96, 201 homeland, as theme in art, 2, 12 in music, 39 in poetry, 94 in visual arts, 107, 108, 118, 160, 165, 178 See also diaspora; emigration; exile Horj Vegetable Cart, Beirut, Lebanon (Bittar), 173, 176 Hugging the Jukebox (Nye) 87 identity, 3–4, 5, 26, 50, 70 collective, 182, 183, 184, 187–90 in literature, 72–76, 80–81, 91–93 in music, 39–41, 44–45, 49–50, 57 post-9/11, 1, 5, 49–50, 194 in visual arts, 107, 115, 121, 126 In the Beginning Was Lebanon (Joseph), 91 In the Sun’s Blood (Bittar), 157, 164 Indian in the Kitchen (Nye), 88–89, 90 ink drawings Rahman al-Mozayen, Abd al, 117 installation art, 189–87 Bishara, Rana, 117 Tuma, Mary, 119 See also Bittar, Doris Iron Sheik, 50, 51, 57. See also Youmans, Will ISite (Buck), 5, 19–22, 31, 200 It is Possible, 109 Jacir, Emily, 115–17, 123, 124, 126 Jamal (Bittar), 170, 171 Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development, 202 Jerusalem Fund Gallery, 202 Jobrani, Maz, 195 Joker, 57 Joseph, Lawrence, 2, 90–94 use of Western voice by, 90–93

Etching Our Own Image: Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement journalist. See Shalal-Esa, Andrea Kader, Aron, 195, 196, 198 Kakish, Robert, 53 Kakish, Wael, 35 Kalache, Hiba, 187–90, 192 Kalamati, 48 Kan Zaman, 35 Kassab, Yousseff, 35 Kazkaz, Rana, 31 Kennedy, Sarena, 27, 31 Khairat, Omar, 37 Khalaf, Bassam, 51 Khaldiyeh’s River Rock Story, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut (Bittar), 178–79 Khaled, 54, 55 Khalife, Marcel, 37 Khalil, Rania, 27, 31 Khoury, Christopher M., 3, 98–113, 201 Khoury, Sari I., 3, 98–113 Antique Symmetry, 105, 106 biographical notes, 98–101 on cultural identity, 107 education of, 100–101 inspirations and influences, 101– 108, 111 role of exile, 98, 99, 100, 104, 107–108, 109 sense of social justice, 99 as teacher, 101 techniques of, 105 themes of, 104–105 Untitled works, 103, 104, 110 use of dualistic symbolization by, 105 Koury, Omar, 31 Kul Shay/All Things (Bittar), 159, 172–79 Kulthoum, Um, 46 Kweli, Talib, 51 Lababidi, Jeanne, 31 Lammam Brothers, 36 Language of Baklava, The (Abu-Jaber), 71, 73, 74, 75

207

Lebanese Linen (Bittar), 4, 159, 165– 66 Letter to Anthony (Critical Resistance) (Hammad), 80 liberation artists, 107 Lidia and Rahmim (Bittar), 171 literature and Arab American themes, 62, 64, 65–66 and self-censorship, 71 See also novelists; playwrights; poetry; short stories Lives of Rain, The (Handal), 201 London (Joseph), 93–94 Los Angeles Arab-American Comedy Festival, 197 Lost Father, The (Simpson), 67 Made in Palestine (exhibition), 110, 118–20, 121, 124 Maher Salem’s Deaf Father (Handal), 15 Making Kibbeh on Sunday Morning (Zughaib), 141–42 Making Molasses (Zughaib), 150–51 Making Raisins and Drying Figs (Zughaib), 142–43 Malak, Nasry, 195, 196 maqam, 37 marginalization in art, 2, 114, 120–24 in literature, 70, 75, 76, 83, 84 Marji, Sahdia, 27, 31 Masade, 47–48 aj Masaed, Hagage, 54 Massari, 52, 56 mawwal, 46 Mazen, 51 MCs (hip-hop), 45 Arabesque, 52, 54, 56 Arabic Assassin, 51 Dirty South Joe, 49, Excentrik, 2, 47, 48, 51, 53 Furious, 55 Gaza Strip, 51 Kalamati, 48

208 Mazen, 51 Noose, 54 Patriarch, 50, 56 Shaheed, 50 Tru Bloo, 51 media exposure, effects of, 25–26 Messengers of the Lost Battalion (Orfaela), 201 Metwally, Omar, 31 Mikdadi-Nashashibi, Salwa, 110, 184 Mishwar ‘Al El’ Ayn (Zughaib), 149– 50 Mixed Company Bi-Cultural Theater Company, 200 Mos Def, 51 Moufawad-Paul, Vicky, 19 Mrad, Said, 38 Mujaj, Lisa Suhair, 71 Mullins, Kevin, 115, 117 music audience and, 33–34 dabke, 34, 36 dance, 36 ethnic diversity and, 32–34, 41 Egyptian, 34 hafalat, 36 innovative, 35, 37–39, 40 khaliji, 36 Lebanese, 34 Saudi, 36 shaabi, 34 traditional (purist), 34–36, 37, 38, 39–40 trends in Arab American, 32 See also hip-hop musical instruments, traditional, 35, 36, 38, 47 musicians, 36, 37 innovators, 37, 38 traditional, 35 See also hip-hop; Nagi, Karim My Elizabeth (Abu-Jaber), 74–75 My Father and the Fig Tree (Nye), 89– 90 NAAP, 194–95

Index Nagi, Karim, 3, 32–41, 201 Najimy, Kathy, 196 naR, 51 Narcy, 47, 51, 52, 56 narrative. See storytelling Negotiations with a Volcano (Nye), 89 Network of Arab American Professionals (NAAP), 194–95 New Frontier, The (Gibran), 85 New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, 195, 197, 200, 201 Nibras Arab-American Theater Collective, 5, 23–25, 200 Nisaa’ Arab American Women’s Collective, 5, 24–30, 200 N.O.M.A.D.S., 50, 56 Noose, 54, 55–56 novelists. See Abu-Jaber, Diana; Bourjaily, Vance; Simpson, Mona Nye, Naomi Shihab, 2, 68, 71–72, 75– 78 Hugging the Jukebox; Different Ways to Pray, 87 Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting, 77 Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab, The 77 This Crutch That I Love: A Writer’s life, Past and Present, 76 use of Western voice by, 83, 87–90, 94 You & Yours, 72 Obeidallah, Dean, 4, 194–99, 201 occupation (of Palestine), as theme in art in poetry, 2, 13, 77 in visual arts, 104, 109, 115, 121, 122, 123, 126 Oddisee, 53 Offendum, Omar, 50 Orfalea, Gregory, 3, 62–69, 201 Orientalism (Bittar), 159, 160–61 Other, The (art collective), 183, 184 oud, 38, 47, 53 Out of Place (Said), 65–66

Etching Our Own Image: Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement painters. See Bittar, Doris; Khoury, Sari I.; Zughaib, Helen Palestinian art, 114–29 challenges facing exhibits of, 122– 27 changing character of, 107 marginalization of, 114, 120–24 Palm Sunday Procession (Zughaib), 146–47 Panel, The (Nisaa’), 27–30, 31 Patriarch, 50, 56 People of the Book (Bittar), 159, 161– 64 performing artists. See Buck, Leila; Hammad, Suheir; musicians; Obeidallah, Dean personal narrative. See storytelling Philistines, 50, 56, 57 photo constructions. See Bittar, Doris photography. See Bittar, Doris Planting Olive Trees (Zughaib), 136– 37 Playing Baasra (Zughaib), 144–45 plays. See ISite; Panel, The; Sajjil playwrights. See Buck, Leila; Handal, Nathalie Poem for Women of the Arab Worlds, A (Hammad), 8–10 poetry mawwal, 46 political subversion and resistance in, 83, 86, 89, 94 saj, 46 spoken-word. See Hammad, Suheir use of Western voice in, 83–96 zajal, 46 See also poets poets. See Gibran, Kahlil; Hammad, Suheir; Handal, Nathalie; Joseph, Lawrence; Nye, Naomi Shihab political theater. See Buck, Leila prints al Hallaj, Mustafa, 119 Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA), 87

209

Prophet, The (Gibran), 68, 85–86 PROTA, 87 Qantara, 38 Qithara, 38 Raad, Walid, 183 racism, as theme in art, 4, 48, 70, 72– 73, 79 Racy, Ali Jihad, 35 Ragtop, 50, 57 Rahbani, Ziad, 37 Rahman al-Mozayen, Abd al, 117 Rakouie, Muhammad, 119 rap. See hip-hop Raphael, Timothy, 31 ReOrientalism, 201 resistance, in art, 1, 2 in hip-hop music, 50, 52, in poetry, 83–84, 86, 89, 94 in visual arts, 104, 111, 121, 122, 127 Rogue State, 47 Roibeur, 57 Roustom, Kareem, 39 Rubaiyat (Joseph), 91 Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, 200 El Saadawi, Nawal, 1, 5 Saba, Bassam, 38–39 El Saffar, Amir, 36 Said, Edward, 160 Cultural and Imperialism, 48, 50, 52 Out of Place, 65–66 on role of exile,108 Said, Najla, 31 Saida Candy Factory, Saida, Lebanon (Bittar), 174, 176 saj, 46 Sajjil (Record) (Nibras), 23–24, 31 Saliba, Therese, 80–81 Salloum, Jackie, 50 Samhan, Helen Hatab, 50 Sand and Foam (Gibran), 94

210 Sand Nigger (Joseph), 91 Sanduk al-Firji (Zughaib), 137–38 Sarror, Samir, 37 Saying Goodbye (Zughaib), 153–54 scholars, of the arts. See Hishmeh, Richard sculpture Tamari, Vera, 119, 122 Semites (Bittar), 159, 170–71 Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting (Nye), 77 shaabi, 34 Shaheed, 50 Shai, Founjan, 52 Shalaby, Nada, 187–90, 192 Shalal-Esa, Andrea, 2, 70–82, 202 Shalhoub, Tony, 196 Sharq Arabic Music Ensemble, 36, 201 Shasheen, Simon, 38 Shawwa, Afaf, 31 short stories My Elizabeth (Abu-Jaber), 74–75 Showbox, The (Zughaib), 137–38 Shusmo, 39 Simpson, Mona, 66–67 Slingshot Hip-Hop, 50 Some of These Things are Beautiful (Arc Collective), 186 Sons of Hagar, 53 Spell, 200 stereotypes, 4, 25–26, 70–71, 125, 196 storytelling, 5–6 in art, 157 to educate, 132–37 and emigration, 151–56 and family and community life, 137–44, 148–51 personal, impact of. See Buck, Leila and religious traditions, 145–48 See also Zughaib, Helen strategic anti-essentialism, 83–84, 86, 89, 91 strategic genius, 84, 93 Stripes and Stars (Bittar), 4, 159, 166– 70

Index Stripes and Stars: From Baghdad to Jerusalem (Bittar), 169, 170 Stripes and Stars: From Sargossa to Shiraz (Bittar), 167 Stripes and Stars: You Have Mail (Bittar), 168, 170 Subject of Palestine, The (exhibition), 117–18 Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab, The (Nye), 77 Swordz, Allan, 53 tabla, 47, 53 Taghrid (Bittar), 170, 171 Tamari, Vera, 119, 122 Tante Muna Serving Coffee, Dahr Asawan, Lebanon (Bittar), 172, 176 tarab, 35 Tempest in a Tea Glass, A, Pappi in Egypt (Bittar), 176, 177 Terror Alert, 51 That’s All (Joseph), 92, 93 theater, 22, 30 multiple perspectives represented. See Panel, The; Sajjil political. See Buck, Leila Theaters Against the War, 23–24 theatrical journalism, 24 This Crutch That I Love: A Writer’s life, Past and Present (Nye), 76 This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World (Nye), 76 Thomas, Danny, 196 Three Golden Rings, Borj Al Barajni, Beirut, Lebanon (Bittar), 176, 178 Transaction, The (Zughaib), 134 Tru Bloo, 51 Tuma, Mary, 119 Turbo Tabla Arab Electronica, 201 Ulrich Museum, 115–16, 123, 126 Uncle Hanna’s Electric Heart Story, Kfarhoune, Lebanon (Bittar), 178 Uzuri, Imani, 51

Etching Our Own Image: Voices from Within the Arab American Art Movement Valance/Valence: Nahar Al Barad Camp, 1950 (Bittar), 159, 160 Very Fall of the Sun, The (Hazo), 68 Wahhab, Abdel, 35 Walk to the Water Fountain (Zughaib), 149–50 Wall Against Our Breath (Handal), 13– 15 Wandering Ishmael, The Bittar), 159, 164–65 Wandering Ishmael, The: FrancoArabe Tour 1 (Bittar), 164, 165 war, as theme in art, 4, 23–24 Bittar, Doris, 160, 166, 170 Buck, Leila, 20–21 Handal, Nathalie, 13–16, in hip-hop music, 50, 55, 56–57 Nye, Naomi Shihab, 68, 77–78 Ward, Patricia Sarrafian, 68 Watch List, The (Internet show), 198, 201 Watching Jacob (Bittar), 162, 163, 164 Wedding, The (Zughaib), 148–49 Weis, Jallaledine, 38 Where We Come From (exhibition), 115–17 Wilensky-Lanford, Brook, 27, 31 women, 2, 5 in literature, 8–10, 72, 77, 79–80 multiple perspectives of. See Nisaa’ and stereotypes, 70–71 See also Arc Collective Wright, Jessica Robertson, 2, 114–29, 202 writers. See Orfalea, Gregory; specific types

211

Yaghnam, Waiel, 55 You & Yours (Nye), 72 You Open Your Eyes Under the Oblivious Sun of the West (Bittar), 160, 161 Youmans, Will, 2, 39, 42–59, 202 ZaatarDiva (Hammad), 72, 200 Zaitoun Dabka Troupe, 201 zajal, 46 Zayid, Maysoon, 196, 197 Zekri, Bernard, 54 Zughaib, Helen, 3, 132–56, 202 Charity and Compassion, 135–36 Crossing the Litani River, 152–53 Eid al Salib, 147 Eid Mar Elias, 145–46 Evenings in the Kroum, 139–40 Feast of Saint Elias, 145–46 Feast of the Cross, 147–48 Making Kibbeh on Sunday Morning, 141–42 Making Molasses, 150–51 Making Raisins and Drying Figs, 142–43 Mishwar ‘Al El’ Ayn, 149–50 Palm Sunday Procession, 146–47 Planting Olive Trees, 136–37 Playing Baasra, 144–45 Sanduk al-Firji, 137–38 Saying Goodbye, 153–54 Showbox, The, 137–38 Transaction, The, 134 using stories to educate, 132–37 Walk to the Water Fountain, 149– 50 Wedding, The, 148–49