FOREWORD
AT THE END OF THE 1990S, when the late Susan Atefat-Peckham began working on this collection, Middle Eastern American literature was gaining increasing visibility on the American cultural landscape. Although early in the twentieth century authors of Arab and Muslim background were publishing work in both English and Arabic, by midcentury authors writing specifically from, and of, Middle Eastern ethnic backgrounds seemed to have fallen into relative silence. It was not until around the 1980s, when a new generation of authors of Middle Eastern descent—usually, although not always, American born—began publishing in journals and anthologies, as well as in their own books, that a growing body of Middle Eastern American literature began to come into view.
Three anthologies paved the way for this emergence, or reemergence, of Middle Eastern American writing, and for its increasing visibility on the American literary scene: Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry, edited by Gregory Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa (1988); Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab American and Arab Canadian Feminists, edited by Joanna (now Joe) Kadi (1994); and Post Gibran: Anthology of Arab American Writing, edited by Munir Akash and Khaled Mattawa (1999). These collections, each groundbreaking in its own way, made visible the existence of a body of Middle Eastern American writing by authors of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish background, established a sense of this literature’s historical and cultural roots, and helped to create ground space for future growth. Grape Leaves linked early Mahjar (immigrant) and contemporary Arab American writing, asserting the century-long presence of this body of literature as well as insisting on both the specificity of its Middle Eastern thematics and on its Americanness. Food for Our Grandmothers brought women’s voices front and center, challenging the stereotypes that continue to beleaguer Middle Eastern women, while at the same time exploring feminist concerns and complexities. Post Gibran traced this literature’s cultural and multicultural roots in the Middle East back to the narrative of Gilgamesh, while at the same time emphasizing its contemporary explorations on American terrain. Although all three anthologies focused on Arab identity as a unifying framework—a focus emerging from the simple fact that most authors of Middle Eastern background in the United States at that time were Arab—complexities of identification and inclusion were nonetheless evident. In Food, for instance, Kadi included two Armenian American and one Iranian American contributor, noting that although these contributors were not Arab, as Middle Easterners they shared many things in common with Arab contributors. Kadi’s meditation on the complexities of which terminology to use—Arab? Middle Eastern? West Asian/North African?—remains compelling today precisely because there are still no easy answers: words bear the inescapable traces of historical, cultural, and political legacies, and every definition, every boundary line, both includes and excludes. Is this body of literature American? Ethnic? Arab American? Middle Eastern? (The fact that virtually every grouping of literature by authors of Middle Eastern origin has included Christian, Muslim, and Jewish writers suggests that religion is far from a defining category here, but there is nonetheless an ongoing discussion, too, about the relationship of Arab/Middle Eastern American literature to Muslim American literature.)
Had Atefat-Peckham’s collection been published in the early years of the past decade, as planned, it would have played an important role in furthering this discussion of what it means to write from the space where “Middle Eastern” and “American” meet. Atefat-Peckham’s tragic, untimely death in a car accident in 2004 meant the deferral of this publication and its contribution to Middle Eastern literature’s expanding visibility, and of discussion of its identity, location, and implications. Yet her collection is no less important today. The writers whom she chose to include here have for the most part become well-established writers, recognized for their contributions not just as Middle Eastern ethnic writers, but as American—and, in some cases, international—writers who are not constrained to an ethnic “niche.” Meanwhile, by bringing together Iranian American and Arab American authors of various national and religious backgrounds, the collection widened the scope of this body of literature. If, at an earlier time, there were so few Iranian American authors that the category “Arab American” could be invoked as more or less all-encompassing, the commonalities of experience and literary expression among Arabs, Iranians, and other Middle Easterners in the United States (e.g., Chaldeans, Copts, Armenians) compel us to expand our categories and consider the ways in which Middle Eastern identity more generally conceived has shaped the experience of writing from that meeting point of “East” and “West.”
The question of what it means to write as a Middle Eastern American was even more pressing because this collection was initially brought together in the years soon after the terrible events of September 11, 2001, when being “Middle Eastern” was too often identified as the antithesis of being “American,” and when the lines between Arab, Iranian, Pakistani, Sikh, and various other “foreign” identities, Middle Eastern or not, were frequently blurred in the general rush of grief, anger, and fear. Atefat-Peckham’s focus on a Middle Eastern American literature that could communicate from an ethnic sensibility without relinquishing its full claim to full American identity was crucial at this juncture, as was her sense of the role literature could play in achieving such communication. As she commented in the context of discussing her own poetry book, That Kind of Sleep, in an interview originally published in Poets and Writers on October 12, 2001, “I found that really what I was trying to do was build a bridge between the two cultures. . . . Literature, the visual arts, and music are a way for us to connect to one another. Art is empathy.”1
Meanwhile, her simultaneous focus on the diversity of the Middle Eastern American community and its literature connected to a growing awareness of the need to interrogate and speak beyond concepts of singular identity. Although literary texts participate in creating “imagined communities,” to use Benedict Arnold’s well-known term, such imagined communities are never homogenous; nor are they static. In recent years, Middle Eastern American writers have sought to grapple in increasingly complex ways with the relationship between identity and literary articulation. In the introduction to his anthology Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, published in 2008, Hayan Charara acknowledged that whether the writers included in his collection “like it or not . . . identity is, for their readers, typically both an entry and exit point to their poems.”2 Yet he also stressed that Arab American poems “do their part to trouble and reshape any notions of a literature or a people called Arab American.” The same might be said of Middle Eastern American literature more generally. While readers often approach such texts seeking stable answers to questions of identity, authors increasingly seek to disrupt overly easy answers—and seek, in many ways, to change the questions altogether.
Indeed, what the Arab American critic Steven Salaita terms the “searching diversities”3 of Arab and Middle Eastern Americans not only complicate any overly rigid consolidation into any singular identification, including ethnic identification, but also have complex effects on cultural expression. Contemporary Middle Eastern American writing increasingly explores the ways in which writers might resist the kinds of orientalist overdetermination that, as Atefat-Peckham shows us, have situated the Middle Eastern American writer within an almost impossibly overdetermined history. However, this resistance is increasingly articulated not simply by asserting opposing identities or correcting misperceptions, but also by attempting to change the way we think about identities in the first place. The emphasis on claiming both American identity and ethnic heritage that defined earlier generations of Middle Eastern Americans has shifted toward a greater focus on exploring and articulating transnational connections and diasporan sensibilities, with a simultaneous critique of the very notion of American identity itself. Indeed, much contemporary Middle Eastern American literature suggests that the idea of a stable cultural identity, even a hyphenated one, has been splintered—perhaps productively so—by what Charara calls this literature’s “varied and complicated engagements with language, style, form, meaning, tradition, class, gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, history, ideology, and of course the self.”4
Middle Eastern American literature has always explored that process of “talking through the door,” finding those openings between cultural spaces through which voices can slip. But the nature of that communication has never been singular or predictable; nor has the nature of the door—that opening, that linkage—remained exactly the same at all times. This collection goes far in showing us the kinds of communication that are possible between cultural spaces, and the kinds of doors that we might seek to open. Yet as the “great love” mentioned in the Rumi epigram to this volume also seems to subtly suggest, perhaps one of the most important legacies Atefat-Peckham’s anthology offers us is an understanding of the importance not just of finding ways to communicate between cultures and communities and peoples, but also of “talking through the door” between the different facets of one’s own self.
I never met Susan Atefat-Peckham personally, but like so many others I was devastated by news of her death. I remember reading e-mails about the tragedy from writers around the world, and feeling the world to be a small, fragile place. With her passing, Middle Eastern American literature lost a sensitive, intuitive, empathetic voice. Yet through this volume her voice is somewhat returned to us, albeit only in part, both through her own literary texts included here and through the warmth and vision that she brought to her understanding of Middle Eastern American literature. Although she did not see this book come to fruition, her words resonate beyond her passing, and offer sustenance.
Lisa Suhair Majaj
October 2013
Nicosia, Cyprus
1. Jodie Ahem, “Interview with Poet Susan Atefat-Peckham,” Poets and Writers, online only, posted February 12, 2004, http://www.pw.org/content/interview_poet_susan_atefatpeckham.
2. Hayan Charara, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008), xiii.
3. Steven Salaita, Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5.
4. Charara, Inclined to Speak, xvi.