The Funambulists: Women Poets of the Arab Diaspora brings together and compares a selected group of poetry collections written by women poets who have lived part of their life either in an Arab country or in a first-generation Arab immigrants’ family. Poets Naomi Shihab Nye, Iman Mersal, Mina Boulhanna, Nadine Ltaif, Maram al-Massri, and Suheir Hammad are contemporaries, yet, so far, they have never been considered together. All of them are positioned on a precarious edge and share the challenging experience of “living and writing on the threshold,” as poet Mersal puts it.1 They walk on a rope stretched taut above the globe to connect languages, cultures, and faiths in a time dramatically marked by physical distancing, divisions, and tensions of all sorts. Despite their distinctive places of origin, their different linguistic choices, and their unique life and work trajectories, the poets included in this book participate in a joint project of aesthetic re-vision aimed at poetically reimagining the ways in which we see ourselves, others, and the world.
While the book covers a good number of poets and texts, it does not aspire to be an anthology; it wishes instead to be recognized as a work of literary criticism, in which close readings of poetic texts act as a springboard for addressing broad literary matters—namely, the ancillary role (if compared to the novel) accorded to poetry, particularly to poems written by women and issuing from experiences of migration and diaspora; the aesthetic, social, and political significance of the chosen texts for different audiences (local, regional, global); and the impact of artworks created in the diaspora on how we regard, study, circulate, and critically evaluate literary works, especially those that transcend the borders of the nation. Closely related to this final aspect are the effects produced by these texts on canon formations, on the organization of departments, and on current conceptualizations of world literature.2
In his introduction to the 2001 special PMLA issue on “Globalizing Literary Studies,” Giles Gunn reflects on the changes introduced by global flows and networks in different fields of knowledge and provocatively asks: “What influence have such globalizing tendencies had on revising inherited notions not only of the literary and the aesthetic but also of the cultural and the historical? . . . In what specific way has this new sensitivity to the interconnections among discursive fields and expressive practices, in and across cultures and in and across periods, changed the object of knowledge in literary studies?”3 This volume attempts precisely to find an initial and partial answer to these complex questions, by closely examining literary works that came into being in the Arab diaspora.
Unlike most studies that deal with the Arab diaspora more generally,4 and with Arab American and Arab Anglophone literatures more particularly, this book follows a transnational and multilingual approach comparing texts written in English, Arabic, French, and Italian, with the aim of exposing their peculiarities, while also acknowledging potential points of contact.5 Where available, I have used existing translations; in the case of untranslated texts, I have included my own English translations.6 Again, the selection of poets writing in English, French, Arabic, and Italian makes no pretense of being exhaustive or particularly original. One should note, however, that I have purposefully not included texts written in the languages of the two major nations within Europe, France and Germany, opting instead to analyze the poetry of Ltaif, who lives in Québec and writes in what is considered to be a minority language within North America. Likewise, my reading of Boulhanna’s two poems written in Italian—a minor language within Europe—is meant to shift the readers’ attention from Europe’s center to its often despised southern periphery.
In line with Edward Said’s idea of the “contrapuntal,” I have congregated in this book different poetic voices with no intention of harmonization but rather in an attempt to emphasize the uniqueness of each single voice.7 The wider, underlying scope of this project is to avoid using circumscribed national and linguistic categories to identify the selected writers and to refrain from confining their literary works within imprisoning compartments, such as “migrant writing” or “ethnic literature.” The study further wishes to challenge conventional readings of national literatures, histories, and languages as complete in themselves and standing happily on their own, with the label “migrant writing” being employed reluctantly by some critics to refer, at the most, to an annoying appendix they would gladly do without. This is why I have selected poets and texts that defy easy classifications and that metaphorically refuse to “stand still.”
Together with Jahan Ramazani, I share the conviction that an analysis of poetry aspiring to be truly transnational must take into consideration the macroscopic as well as microscopic dimensions, addressing both “circuits of poetic connection and dialogue across political and geographic borders,”8 as well as “aesthetic particulars without which the poetry of poetry would be lost.”9 I will embrace this bifocal approach throughout this book.
“Diaspora” as a theoretical term that resists qualification and refuses to be pinned down is at the core of this project.10 Texts issuing from the diaspora oscillate between the local and the global, the here and the elsewhere, contesting fixed origins, a univocal sense of belonging, and monolithic identities. Yet, as the book’s subtitle suggests, this study performs a rather unusual shift from identity to space. This is in line with the book’s content, particularly with its detailed and reiterated discussion of the theme of im/mobility, with its attempts to fashion an alternative, subjective and poetic, revision of geography, and with its bottom-up and creative reconfigurations of atlases and collective imaginaries.11 For a long time, diaspora has been considered an exclusive, even if dolorous, condition of a specific group, the Jewish one. By defining diaspora also as “Arab,” my aim has been to underline the fact that innumerable individuals and groups today have to endure forced removal, displacement, and dispersal across the globe. Undoubtedly, these experiences leave devastating marks on the psychological, material, and affective level; from an aesthetic perspective, however, they can also be extremely fruitful. In the next section, I will explore further the tension between rupture and creation.
The book is built on the concept of “tension,” recently theorized by Cristoph F. E. Holzhey as “an unstable equilibrium on the verge of transformation, providing the condition, energy, and direction for processes that can be productive as well as destructive.”12 A concept borrowed from physics and theorized, among others, by scientist and historical of science Thomas S. Kuhn, “tension” is a key term also for Islamologist Mohammed Arkoun and for philosopher Jacques Derrida. I build my own critical work on their theories and employ the concept of tension to illuminate both the breaking points and the creative energies that traverse the poetic production under examination. The concept is deployed likewise to regard the contemporary world fraught with tensions. I see both the texts and the planet as being traversed by potentially productive yet also destructive tensions, urgently demanding that we take charge of them.
In The Essential Tension (1977), Kuhn argues that tension—and, more specifically, the tension between convergent and divergent thinking, tradition and innovation—represents an essential force propelling the advancement of scientific thought. To quote Kuhn: “Only investigations firmly rooted in the contemporary scientific tradition are likely to break the tradition and give rise to a new one. That is why I speak of an ‘essential tension’ implicit in scientific research.”13 Moving from the sciences to the humanities, Arkoun employs tension both as a method of analysis and as an object of study in itself to rethink Islamic Studies in more dynamic terms. In his foreword to the English translation of Arkoun’s work Ouvertures sur l’Islam (1992), Robert D. Lee underlines Arkoun’s revolutionary look, by explaining: “For Arkoun, the history of Islamic society is inextricably linked with that of the West: There is no dichotomy between Western reason and Islamic reason. The two have fed upon each other.”14 Rather than conceiving faith and reason, divine Revelation and its human enactments, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, Shi’ism and Sunnism, West and East in opposition, Arkoun tirelessly foregrounds in his works the vital exchanges, historical entanglements, and modern ruptures characterizing the relation between the two.
An uncompromising thinker, working constantly on the edge of a variety of languages, cultures, and disciplines, Arkoun, in Essays sur la Pensée Islamique (1973), considers Islamic thought as being inextricably bound to rather than in conflict with other cultural and religious movements and develops the notion of “tradition vivante” (living tradition) to foreground the creative, animated, and dynamic character of Islamic studies as a discipline filled with its own inconsistencies, contradictions, and paradoxical elements.15 A visionary in his own way, Arkoun foresees in the lively and dialectical character of Islamic societies the seeds of a potentially revolutionary effervescence, which we witnessed during the first (2010–11) and second wave of protests (2019) that have stormed the Arab region. As Arkoun writes in his 1973 work: “Contemporary Muslim society is in its full revolutionary effervescence. To approach and understand it, it is important to situate oneself within its own perspective which is socio-dynamic and dialectical.”16
The poetic collections analyzed in these pages are also traversed by a similar revolutionary effervescence. While partaking in a common and well-established poetic tradition—that of the lyric—the poets included in this book twist to their own purposes easily recognizable literary, linguistic, and stylistic conventions, while at the same time eroding classical literary genres and canonical forms, thus introducing not only formal but more substantial changes both in literature and in society. As we will see, a sense of deep indebtedness as well as a “filial lack of piety,” to borrow Derrida’s poignant expression, mark their writing indelibly.17 This is why I employ the concept of “tension” to explore and illuminate the different pressures that traverse their texts. The figure of the funambulist personifies these tensions.
The book revolves around seven poets-funambulists, who use their art of balance and flexibility together with a good portion of courage and transgression to walk a tightrope stretched out across continents, cultures, and faiths. These funambulists train patiently and make constant adjustments to find a precarious balance in a world dangerously and increasingly leaning toward extremism; they make incessant attempts to connect what from below may appear simply as unreachable ends.
Since they are aware of at least two cultures, settings, and homes as well as the gender differences that mark humanity, these poets embody a Saidian “plurality of vision” that enables them to fruitfully contrast essentialist and extremist claims.18 These funambulists are indeed acquainted with the danger of living one’s specificity as a nonnegotiable difference and of the subsequent rejection of the very idea of a common ground. Hence, the everyday—as a simultaneously shared yet highly heterogeneous site of dwelling—becomes for them a sort of new canvas on which to redraw with significant and at times surprising brushstrokes the bright, connecting details of daily life that bind together individuals, collectivities, and histories.
Despite their different sociopolitical and geographical locations, their distinctive stylistic choices, and multifarious imaginations, the poets addressed in this book are pushed toward writing by a set of common preoccupations, which are not only locally or regionally significant but also globally relevant. In singular and complex ways, these poets address issues of public concern by examining sentiments and affects. Opposition against gender oppression and authoritarianism, historical depredation and memory effacement, problems of religious practice and spirituality, matters of race, class, gender and sexuality as well as the horrors of war, colonialism, and ethnic cleansing resonate across their writings.
By developing a lucid and well-balanced poetics that is inclined, responsive, and polyphonic, these poets-funambulists cannot but stand out from a whole mass of stiff sovranists, religious fanatics, impassive autocrats, and dull technocrats. Far from cultivating the Andalusian myth of communal life as happy convivencia, these poets put readers on guard against the tensions and divisions that threaten our living together, showing, for instance, that the violent manifestations of the present may have roots that extend into a widely forgotten yet still burning past. Through an intricate and defamiliarizing poetics and the activation of unattractive affects, such as boredom, frustration, resentment, and nervousness, these funambulists detect and intensify social and political ills that have generally come to be accepted as normal. From the heights of their wire, readers clearly spot authoritarian drives and democracies in crisis, resurgent forms of obscurantism and fanaticism one thought buried forever, the danger posed by mythic origins and entrenched states as devilish “engines” producing harmful divisions, fatal exclusions, and devastating wars. Their funambolic art accords stunning vistas, yet each one of them performs a tightrope walk that is unique: either hesitant, audacious, or poised.
The book’s exclusive focus on women poets and the poetic genre has been motivated by the need to delimit the territory of my analysis but also as an attempt to redress the gender imbalance and double invisibility that mark the condition of migrant women and their representation in the arts. This asymmetry and double invisibility has been lamented, among others, by scholars working in the social sciences such as Rutvica Andrijasevic and Monica Boyd.19
In migration and diaspora studies, women are generally underrepresented as agents and almost absent as poets; in diasporic literature, the novel is considered to be the diasporic genre par excellence. It follows that women and diasporic poetry are two emerging fields of interest that tend to remain separate; in this book, an attempt has been made to bridge this gap together with suggesting that the feminist claims uttered by the chosen poets offer the possibility to redefine politics in terms that are necessary and urgent for everybody.
As I am writing this book, I myself occupy the position of a precarious female scholar who feels rooted in one place but has been on the move for quite a while, both as a matter of choice but also out of necessity, and whose position within the academy is inflected by economic insecurity and by the act of juggling multiple jobs. This project was initially triggered by my particular interest in finding out the ways in which these poets managed to balance their life and work, endured everyday frustrations, and reacted to critical moments. “Dark times,” as Hannah Arendt rightly notes in her 1968 collection of essays, Men in Dark Times, “are not only not new, they are no rarity in history.”20 I share with Arendt the conviction that “even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth.”21 I see the women included in this book as shedding that kind of light.
To what extent, I ask in this book, do the selected poets help readers see and grasp the dramatic transformations, structural problems, and numerous crises that we are currently witnessing? What is their contribution to ongoing debates about politics and the political, migration and belonging, gender and sexuality, individual and collective agency, violence and commemoration, the limits of policy choices and the potential of the imagination to cast better futures in terms of dignity, justice, and sustainability? Finally, which kind of affects do these writers mobilize and why?
Let me forewarn readers that they will not find in this book prophetic figures predicting cataclysmic events nor subversive intellectuals invoking armed revolt. The poets at the center of this book are first and foremost ordinary women, whose discreet poetic voices are often in conflict with the rhetorical bombast of certain political pronouncements and, quoting Arendt again, the “‘mere talk’ that irresistibly arises out of the public realm.”22 Moreover, the affects they mobilize (i.e., tedium, weariness, frustration) do not excite powerful sentiments nor inspire extraordinary deeds. The events and people they describe are most of the time extremely common and apparently unimpressive. Still, the feminist revision of the everyday they stimulate in readers is radical and bound to last.
In her original reading of the works of the Beirut Decentrists—a group of women writing in and about the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s and 1990s—Miriam Cooke argues that their decentered position within the Lebanese nation together with their feminist analysis of the everyday allowed these writers to develop representations of the war that were radically different from the ones produced by men, which accentuated violence, chaos, and nonsense.23 As Cooke writes in War’s Other Voices: “Only women’s literature which focuses on the dailiness of survival can capture and develop the subtleness of an irrationality that becomes categorized as madness if it is presented in black and white. Only feminine literature documents details that seem too trivial and personal to note. Yet these same details suggest transformations of feeling that finally weave, for each individual, the fabric of war experience.”24
Thanks to their liminal position as insiders/outsiders and the female invocation of the intimate details of the everyday, the poets included in this book subtly disclose literary, social, and political aspects that would otherwise go unnoticed. By effect of a creative re-vision deeply rooted in the quotidian, these poets bring to light everyday injustices and inequalities, material devastations and human atrocities, thus stimulating in readers the desire for things to happen in a different way. Through an unusual, intricate and disorienting, aesthetics that assembles antithetical elements, demands active engagement on the part of readers, and often disrupts their expectations, these poets intervene rather than stay away from politics and the political.
In opposition to the media’s largely spectacular and sensationalist coverage of global wars, refugee crises, natural disasters, and health emergencies, the poets considered in these pages favor a shrinking, less imposing approach. Some of them, for instance, write in fragments or opt for a minimalist form, while others describe “ambivalent situations of suspended agency” and mobilize affects such as boredom, delusion, and frustration in opposition to more excitable passions such as anger and terror.25 Their minor, yet extremely incisive, responses to forms of denigration, marginalization, and institutional effacement produce an aesthetic change in the “regime of the visible” that stimulates an ethical rebellion and together with it the desire for a radical political change.26 Their poetic reconfiguration is indeed not an automatic reaction to a given situation but rather a creative retelling that contributes to expose as well as shift the power dynamics that are at play. For example, by composing a poetry of testimony and memory that refuses to condone violence and avoids the danger of being manipulative or divisive, poets such as Ltaif and Hammad promote a hard labor of excavation, analysis, and ultimately reflection aimed at promoting a prise de conscience and an assumption of responsibility, which all together represent, according to Marianne Hirsch, “the first anti-war act.”27
In the current political scenario marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, acclaimed negationist and sovranist leaders, global environmental risks, and the military confrontation of rival superpowers, the poets discussed in this book turn simultaneously inward and outward, writing with discretion not only about the widespread material devastations and the human desperation that follow war but also about the hushed desolation of a daughter sitting at her father’s hospital bed and the imperceptible sense of abandonment experienced by a yellow glove, which a neglectful child lost on her way home. In sum, they patiently compose a polyphony out of soloist voices, by according full dignity to minor events and neglected places, people, and objects on earth.
Their invitation to zoom in and look more closely at the mechanisms that construct Others as threatening and out of reach comes together with an invitation to zoom out and extend one’s horizon and hopes with the intention of finding alternatives to the spreading imperative of keeping Others at arm’s length. In opposition to political discourses that circulate fear and predicate the benefits of social isolation, the poets considered here make endless attempts to heal divisions and bridge gaps, while also mobilizing affects such as mutual care and trust in place of the mounting consternation and distrust. In doing so, they produce a shift in perspective, urging readers to take on responsibility and collaborate through the performance of considerate and solicitous acts toward the construction of a more just, livable, and nonviolent community of planetary size.
In open contrast to a plethora of political leaders who are self-absorbed if not self-interested, have lost touch with society at large, and are therefore unable to hear and respond to the disappointment, irritation, and exasperation that individuals and groups articulate at various levels, the funambulists included in this book bend down toward their public. In so doing, they show what politics is mostly lacking in its current manifestation: inclination toward others, recognition, and concrete actions directed to assure a dignifying and flourishing life for all. These poets, in particular, demonstrate in different ways that a meaningful politics should work toward the common good and not be divisive. It should be capable of responding to the material and affective demands that arise in times of crisis and be able to discern what can be monetized and what cannot (e.g., public health and education, access to public spaces and services, the preservation of cultural heritages and natural resources, civil and political rights, the right to work and have a life worth of this name). To truly matter, in other words, politics should resituate human dignity, social justice, individual and collective well-being at the center of its agenda and outline a set of clear actions aimed at redressing the economic inequalities, violent exclusions, and human violations that the citizens bemoan. This is, at least, one of the lessons that the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Lebanon—to name just a few examples of protests and movements that have involved the Arab region—should have taught us. And this, I argue in this book, is the perspective embraced and lyrically articulated by the poets addressed.
Because of the spreading disappointment with traditional politics, it is not surprising to find in this book individuals and groups who structurally lack institutional power or act outside contentious politics and formal institutional channels while carrying out micropolicies that are performed in the everyday.28 The book shows that these individuals and coalitions are not passive and feeble but politically interested and mobilized actors, who have certain principles and solidarities, are capable of acting on their own behalf, and pursue a future of freedom, equality, dignity, and justice for all.
Having lost not only its purpose, but also its credibility and legitimacy, the agonizing political power embodied by frugal technocrats, irresponsible sovranists, and bloody autocrats appears in this book as a mere abstraction, a specter (sometimes benign, most of the time terrifying and despised) haunting with its ghostly presence the local and global community. Intrigued by the unusual perspectives granted by the impressive walks performed by these poets-funambulists, I suggest that a politics reduced to mere bureaucracy, economic rationality, and securitization or conceived and practiced in authoritarian ways can only produce more damages and harm; it can only incite fright, dismay, and rage in the people it rules. To thrive again, the political must put human dignity, equal opportunities, and economic well-being at the center of its agenda and work closely with its citizens to reduce the inequalities and injustices that make the life of so many people unbearable. This is the larger, overarching narrative to which the single analyses and chapters tie in.
Since political claims are tightly enmeshed in the texts with intricate poetics, I employ in this study an interdisciplinary approach that spans from the humanities to the social sciences and includes, among others, the fields of literary theory and criticism, Arab and Islamic studies, philosophy, gender studies, sociology, and history. I further make use of a hybrid methodology that combines theoretical tools drawn from deconstruction, gender/sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, and the theories of the everyday. All these theories have indeed strived to spotlight and break down artificial boundaries and conceptual oppositions, such as writing vs. orality, man vs. woman, rationality vs. affects, the colonial metropolis vs. the colony, the extraordinary vs. the ordinary, inaugurating radical theoretical shifts and paradigmatic revisions that echo the aesthetic innovations and epistemic revolutions invoked and performed by the selected authors.
Readers will find throughout the book references to what are usually considered “big” names in critical theory, such as Jacques Derrida, Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Through my textually engaged practice of critical analysis, my historically situated and contrapuntal reading of the poetic texts, and my genuine interest in the global dynamics through which texts and knowledges travel, get translated, and transform global imaginaries, I hope to prove that I do not merely invoke such big names but rather concretely engage with their theories. Within the field of gender and sexuality studies, I found both inspiration and method in the works of Black feminist writers and theorists such as June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, who have taught me to think across the intersecting axes of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. The writing of younger scholars of color, such as Daphne A. Brooks and Therí A. Pickens, who have explored corporeality, performativity, and bodily fragility, as well as the social and political outreach of dissenting corporeal practices, has also been incredibly stimulating. Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work on sexuality and subversion, gender performativity, agency, and intentionality together with her more recent publications on individual and state violence, war, precariousness, and the difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of making sense of loss have deeply influenced the ways in which I approach and critically read the poetic collections included in this book. This is why I pay particular attention to performing acts of both discursive and embodied insurgency and interpret vulnerability as a resource—rather than an impediment—that enables new modes of personal connection.
Equally important is the affective and queer “turn” that has shaped gender studies in the past recent years. This study naturally takes up and continues a conversation first begun by feminist thinkers such as Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Heather Love, Judith Halberstam, Kathleen Stewart, and Jane Bennett, who have placed affects, ethics, and queerness at the center of their inquiry. I use the theoretical term “queer” in this book not to refer to actual forms of sexuality but to highlight the aesthetic deviations and political disruptions performed by the chosen poets in their collections. Given my double interest in the quotidian and the material, the theories of the everyday both from their early origins (with the Dada movement and the Surrealists) to their latest developments (with the Marxist thinkers Henry Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, to name just a few representatives) occupy a crucial position in this book. Throughout, I have privileged affective, materialistic, and political readings of the selected texts inspired by postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist theories concerned mainly with the implications and complications of (neo)colonialism, patriarchy, and finance capitalism. I have avoided, on the contrary, psychoanalytical analyses that would be less in tune with the book’s overall spirit.
Since this is first and foremost a book of literary criticism, it differentiates itself from existing anthologies on Arab-American poetry.29 Its unique focus on the poetic genre and its transnational approach further distinguishes it from more recent critical works on Arab-American fiction, aesthetics, and the Arab Anglophone novel.30 While my work relies on endeavors of all these studies, its inclusion of poetic texts in multiple languages, its bifocal (both micro- and macroscopic) approach, and its deployment of gender, affect, and especially queer theories distance it from the critical approaches of these other works. Among others, Nathalie Handal’s transnational anthology The Poetry of Arab Women (2001) has provided a crucial reference, given its focus on women poets writing in multiple languages and living both in the Arab region and in the diaspora. Still, while her anthology introduces readers to the poetry written by women from across North Africa, the Middle East, and the diaspora, my study is geographically more circumscribed and analytically more deeply focused, as it considers not only the aesthetic particulars but also the political impact of the works under examination, relating literature to wider cultural and sociopolitical concerns and debates.
The Funambulists is divided into six chapters grouped into three thematic parts of two chapters each: part 1 focuses on chance meetings taking place either in an enchanting (Nye) or in a stagnant (Mersal) everyday; part 2 takes into consideration maritime and oceanic crossings in Boulhanna’s and Ltaif’s poetry; part 3 emphasizes both aesthetic ruptures and radical political outlooks in al-Massri’s and Hammad’s poetry. The three parts—titled “Encounters,” “Crossings,” and “Breaks”—are not meant as divides between the authors but rather as keywords that resonate across the whole book and characterize, in different degrees, each single collection.
Part 1, “Encounters,” opens with a critical reading of a selection of Nye’s poems included in the collection Tender Spot (2008). I suggest that Nye’s emphasis on small, ordinary objects and on everyday, domestic practices operates as a form of micropolitics that has powerful ethical and political implications, since it contributes to a reevaluation of “things” (human and nonhuman alike) that normally pass as lives that do not count. Nye’s Palestinian heritage with its legacy of struggle that is carried out steadily on the ground through concrete daily actions and the use of material, quotidian objects is at the core of her aesthetic and political gesture, which is firmly rooted in the ordinary. Nye’s supreme art of balance and extreme resourcefulness together with the far-reaching and simultaneously grounded perspective she offers to readers have pushed me to include her among the finest funambulists.
Chapter 2 closely reads and critically discusses a group of poems originally written in Arabic by Mersal and included in the collection These Are Not Oranges, My Love (2008) translated by Khaled Mattawa. A strong-willed funambulist, Mersal struggles to find a precarious balance on a rope stretched taut between genders, generations, and worldviews. As the poet narrates the considerable obstacles and challenges encountered by her female speaker in the here, she further captures the trials and tribulations that she faces and endures as a migrant in the elsewhere. The chapter moves from the personal to the political, sparking a discussion on the apathy and vexations caused by an obstructive political, while at the same time putting readers on guard against the all too pleased and self-congratulatory attitudes engendered by multicultural policies.
Part 2, “Crossings,” opens with an analysis of two poems originally written in Italian by Mina Boulhanna and dating back to the 1990s. This backward look enables my reading of the two poems as paradigmatic of the slow yet powerful arrival of the migrant woman (as a yet-to-be poet) on the “scene” of writing. The chapter is built on the tension between invisibility and visibility, submersion and emergence, darkness and light. My intention in this chapter is to show what readers can gain when they accept to abandon the security and comfort of their habitual standpoint and follow Boulhanna on a tightrope stretched taut across the Mediterranean. As I celebrate Boulhanna’s first, hesitant steps into the world of writing, I further call attention to the feelings of inadequacy, abandonment, and failure that may seize a funambulist like her.
The chapter dedicated to Boulhanna may look particularly “eccentric,” since she is rather an obscure poet, if compared to the other more popular chosen writers. Still, Boulhanna is relevant to this book, since she is one of the first writers in the Italian context to have turned the reader’s gaze toward “Africa” and to have challenged the historical construction of Italian literature, using Caterina Romeo’s apt formulation, “as a white space.”31 Inspired by her daring act, I take the risk of juxtaposing Boulhanna’s neglected voice with that of a “world classic”: T. S. Eliot’s canonical poetic voice. The attempt aims to reveal unforeseen literary affinities between two poets that traditional reading practices would either mutually ignore or locate at the antipodes. Moreover, the irreverent act of placing an internationally acclaimed poet and a Nobel laureate alongside a little-known writer raises a set of thorny questions concerning not only Eliot and Boulhanna’s distinctive positions within their respective national canons but also their role in the now à la mode category of world literature. Let me ask provocatively: Since Eliot chose to live almost his entire life abroad and drew from a variety of literary sources and languages to compose The Waste Land, how does his experience of expatriation and his practice of borrowing from multiple sources alter his iconic image as a premier US poet? Conversely, to what extent has Boulhanna’s status as a migrant woman caught up in material challenges and with no multiethnic literary tradition to rely upon impacted negatively on her career as a poet?
These questions lead us to the digressions also included in Chapter 3 on two premodern notables: al-Idrisi and Ibn Rushd. The anecdote referring to Ibn Rushd’s burial, in particular, which Toni Maraini narrates in Ballando con Averroè (Dancing with Ibn Rushd) (2015), has no pretense of absolute veridicity yet is essential for propelling a rethinking of the Mediterranean Sea, and the Mediterranean basin more in general, from a battlefield and a graveyard to a vital site of bodily crossings and cultural cross-breedings. The fact that we may find this dynamic and interactive history strange and “embarrassing” says a lot about the need to change old paradigms. In opposition to the rather widespread belief, that sees Europe as wrapped up in itself and standing happily on its feet, the digressions on al-Idrisi and Ibn Rushd show that there are contagions—in the cultural field, for instance—that are not pestilential but beneficial and have historically contributed to the circulation, increase, and advancement of human knowledge.
Chapter 4 focuses again on the present, by shifting the attention from Mediterranean to oceanic crossings, as performed in Ltaif’s 2010 collection Ce que vous ne lirez pas (What You Will Not Read). Far from idealizing a mythic past and reinforcing existing divisions, Ltaif takes courageous steps forward on a global tightrope stretched taut above the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with the aim to build networks of relations and convergences that promise to destabilize fixed and therefore potentially deadly identities and categories. In her search for poise, lightness, and grace, she proves to be an impeccable funambulist.
Al-Massri’s poems, included in the bilingual Arabic-English collection A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor (2004) translated by Khaled Mattawa, open part 3, “Breaks.” A bold funambulist, al-Massri audaciously walks on the tightrope of love, training hard to find a precarious balance between two opposite poles: the pursuit of her speaker’s physical pleasure and the standards of morality that regulate gender relations in conservative societies or deregulate them in neoliberal societies. Al-Massri’s original combination of images and rhetorical expressions drawn from Islamic sources together with a lexicon of bodily parts and the activation of mutually exclusive affects, such as euphoria and delusion, make her sexual revolt unique, if compared to that of her literary predecessors and even contemporaries. Her immaculate yet abortive lyrics, which call to mind Sappho’s censored compositions, further call attention to the unfortunate communality that monotheistic religions share with ancient Greek and Roman cultures, namely the attempt to put women under the control and custody of men.
As discussed in chapter 6, Hammad simultaneously pays tribute to and breaks down the iconic image of the Palestinian refugee, by creatively entwining her personal story of forced uprooting, displacement, and relocation with other traumatic experiences of violence and community dissolution. A fierce funambulist, Hammad takes intrepid steps on the global tightrope in the attempt to help readers see the destructive consequences of global violence but also the mobilizing force of poetry and its capacity to build networks of solidarity across racial, cultural, and religious divides. Chapter 6 closes with a discussion of the remarkable ways in which the funambulist Hammad breaks religion in the name of interfaith through the simultaneously disruptive and binding force of the poetic word.
The book ends with a reflection on the stunning vistas enabled by the art of these poets-funambulists, as a point of entry to discuss issues pertaining to the literary and the political dimensions, to our dark times and their representation in the arts, to the role of poetry in shaping a less catastrophic vision of our time. Throughout, the book endorses a far-flung though grounded practice of reading literary texts that intersects temporal plans and geographic areas usually seen as separate. In Wai Chee Dimock’s apt formulation: “Literary space and time are conditional and elastic; their distances can vary, can lengthen or contract, depending on who is reading and what is being read. No mileage can tell us how far one author is from another; no dates can tell us who is close to whom.”32 Accordingly, some readers may be struck to find in chapter 2 the “degenerate” paintings and caricatures produced by the members of the Art et Liberté Group (jamā‘at al-fann wa al-ḥurriyya), who were active in Egypt in the 1930s, juxtaposed with Mersal’s often crude and bizarre poems composed at the dawn of the new millennium. Her mostly uneven and puzzling poetics evoke the rough and outlandish aesthetics of the so-called Egyptian Surrealists as well as their dream for a political comradeship that would be internationalist, anticolonial, and democratic in spirit.
After a long reflection, I have decided to eliminate national and linguistic labels (one exception being “Palestinian,” for evident reasons) to pin down the artists and intellectuals included in this book. I find these categories limited, misleading, and incapable of communicating the complexity and intricacy of their life and work trajectories. Instead of confining the poets discussed in imprisoning categories, I invite readers to gradually retrace the fascinating web of intertextual connections, elective affinities, and political alliances that the individuals mentioned in this book have fashioned in the course of their life. For example, the fact that Derrida was born in Algeria as a member of a Jewish minority and is internationally recognized as a French intellectual—a labeling that renders his Algerianness, let alone his Arabness invisible—is relevant to this study, which favors complexity over simplification, self-crafted and adaptable forms of identification over clear-cut and imposed categories. Derrida’s liminal position within Algeria and France, his geographical and disciplinary crossovers, and the dizzying vertigoes produced by his writing mirror to a certain extent the edgy positions, poetic innovations, and epistemic shifts occupied and performed by the chosen poets. I suggest that all the artists mentioned in this book belong to a loose grouping and are kept together not by the narrow nationalism of a flag or the fervent devotion to a religious creed, but by a shared aesthetic and political project based on experimentation and radicalism. Their suspicion of synthesis and reconciliation, for instance, together with their genuine interest for what is foreign and unfamiliar, contributes to tie these apparently unrelated artists and thinkers together.
Before embarking upon our walk on the global tightrope, however, a final word on the term “funambulists” is necessary. I have used this word in the title and will continue using it throughout the book, not to denote erudition or to catch the reader’s attention with an outdated Latinate term. Rather, the Latin roots of the word “funambulist” extend far beyond the contemporary period and our contingent geographical location catapulting us into that mixed and dynamic literary space—the Mediterranean region in premodern times, as described by Karla Mallette—that saw Latin coexisting along Arabic, Hebrew, and the local vernaculars and that ideally represents the book’s core. Instead of domesticating a foreign word and substituting it with a more familiar English term (such as “tightrope walker” or “wire walker”), I have preferred to stick to the word “funambulist,” with the intention to pay homage to the multilayered and dynamic history this word hides in itself as well as to underscore its threatened presence due to the monolingual ideal to conform and standardize. Needless to say, this is precisely what the author of this book along the lines of the chosen poets has attempted to do throughout—namely, to show the beauty of what is generally perceived as unfamiliar/strange and to exalt the uniqueness of what is in danger of being assimilated and disappearing, since difference is often considered in our speedy globalized world as a mere nuisance and a burdensome inconvenience. On a more poetic level, “funambulist” in the English context resonates with the verb “to fumble,” thus indirectly communicating an idea of “maladroitness” and “awkwardness,” which well describes the initial feelings experienced by the poets—and perhaps by the author of this book and its readers, too—as they take their first steps on the global tightrope.