INTRODUCTION

Voices from the Threshold: A Few Thoughts on Middle Eastern American Writing

IT WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME THAT, as an Iranian American student in the late 1990s at a large Midwestern state university, I encountered confusion regarding the classification of my heritage. The University of Nebraska’s renowned museum of natural history was exhibiting Persian tiles from the Abbasid period in its Center for Asian Culture. To the right of the display, a map confirmed in bold color what the museum considered Asia: all of modern-day Iran, stretching north to Turkey, south to India, and east to Japan.

Until then I had not known I could be considered Asian, although I had been miscalled Hispanic, Latina, Jewish, Arab, Indian, Russian, Italian, Greek, and Native American, among other ethnic labels. Now living in the state of Georgia, I have been mistaken for African American (“Is it true that your wife is black?” a student of my husband’s recently asked him). Wherever I am, whichever the largest dark-haired minority group happens to be, I am thought to be a member of it. But “Asian” was a first. When I approached the museum’s curator, he pointed out that the map portrayed modern-day Iran as a part of “prehistoric Asia.” And because they did not have a Middle East exhibit, “where else could we display the tiles?” he asked.

While completing a fellowship application several months later, I was unsure which box to mark for race (“other” was not an offered option). According to the graduate school, I was “white,” a race defined as “not of Hispanic origin: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East.” I marked “white” and also facetiously marked “Asian,” punctuating each with small question marks. The chancellor called me in response to say that I could not apply for the fellowship, for I was not Asian.¹

Our country harbors an insidious history of renaming people for convenience’s sake, and in this light, I use the designation “Middle Eastern American” with trepidation. Unlike academic fellowship applications and admissions committees that consider Middle Eastern Americans to be “white,” literary academia has at times placed Middle Eastern American writing under the rubric of Asian American literature. But this has not solved the problem of classification.

Scholars have begun to use the category “Asian American” to encompass increasingly divergent traditions. What began with the inclusion of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino/a American texts in anthologies of Asian American literature expanded later to include the texts of American Koreans, South Pacific Islanders, and writers whose lives and cultural contexts had been influenced by Asia.²

Asian American literature diversified even further when it began to include writers of Indian and Middle Eastern background, whose numbers surged in the latter half of the twentieth century. The literature of Middle Eastern Americans—like that of Indian Americans—possesses distinctly different historical, religious, linguistic, and cultural traditions from other groups included in the “Asian American” category.

I also hesitate to use the term “Middle Eastern American writer” because I do not wish to imply or support the notion that ethnicity is the only, or even the strongest, driving force behind the work writers produce. One writer in this anthology asked me, “Why do we have to be Middle Eastern American? Why can’t we just be American?” Yet I wonder whether we are as simply American as anyone should be. I believe we are, as writers of literary merit.

But we are no less American when we celebrate our ethnic community. Our ethnicity textures our experiences. Our conversations as people of Middle Eastern descent inevitably raise issues of common experience, which in the post–9/11 climate unfortunately includes infringements on our civil and human liberties.

Nonetheless, I am concerned that an anthology such as this one not be used by the academy to marginalize the literature it includes. A. R. JanMohamed and D. Lloyd affirm that the creation of “special units” in the humanities (such as ethnic studies, women’s studies, and gay/lesbian studies) has resulted in the relegation of those areas to the margins of the academy.³ All writers included in this collection, and the many excellent Middle Eastern American writers for whom space did not permit inclusion, write about various facets of what it means to be, simply, an American—whether or not this includes discussion of ethnicity. For many of these writers, ethnicity sometimes provides a looking glass into contemporary America, but it is not the only window.

Many of us share concerns over literary isolation. But there are other considerations; Joe (formally Joanna) Kadi, for instance, often discusses the importance of solidarity. This anthology does serve, ultimately, an important purpose that outweighs the risks of literary isolation. It celebrates and discusses the heritage we share and the writing we produce, offers some measure of peace, and opens intelligent dialogue about how the Middle East exists in America today.

When I first conceived this project years ago I was interested in presenting Middle Eastern American writers as a nonmonolithic group. The writers included here are descendants of multiple cultural heritages and reflect in some way the perspectives of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds: Egyptian, Iranian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Libyan, Palestinian, Syrian. They are from diverse socioeconomic classes and reflect multiple spiritual sensibilities: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, atheist, and so on. The Middle East is not a simple construct and never has been. Middle Eastern Americans are as diverse in ethnicity, religion, class, and sexual preference as any American subculture. Whether our sensibilities are Arab or Persian, Christian or Jewish or Muslim, we wish to separate our voices as little as possible and allow them all to coexist here as, simply, American voices.

When conceptualizing this project in early 1998, I keyed “Middle Eastern American writer” into an Internet search engine to see what Arab, Turkish, and Persian names I would find. The computer surprised me instead with Czech, Dutch, and British names of white American writers from Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. Our times have changed dramatically in the years since I began collecting the works in this anthology. The project received enthusiastic writer support and publisher interest a good while before the current media furor over the Middle East. My motives in publishing this anthology remain the same as when I began collecting the works: that these writers be celebrated for their merits as writers. Now, in particular, the intrinsic value of cross-cultural understanding among Americans of diverse ethnicities, and between Americans and people of Middle Eastern cultures, will be evident to any perceptive reader.

An informed cross-cultural understanding of contemporary Middle Eastern American writing relies on familiarity with Western literary and cultural portrayals of the East that shaped cultural interactions for centuries. Western interest in Middle Eastern themes first noticeably surfaced in medieval Europe and continued with a resurgence of the “oriental” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and England, finally reaching its peak in the European Decadent movement of the 1890s as well as in the early twentieth century. Take, for example, fragments of the unfinished “exotic” Eastern romance that begins one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387), “The Squire’s Tale” (as influenced by Sir John Mandeville’s famous travel narrative regarding Genghis Khan); or Daniel Defoe’s empowerment of the East-West, man-woman female voice in Roxana (1724);⁴ not to mention more subtle influences such as the smaller, albeit vivid, aesthetic details in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). The Decadent’s “oriental” interest in Middle Eastern icons such as Salome also appeared in the period’s music and visual art, inspiring a number of musical compositions, most notably the violent discord of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome (1905).⁵ Similarly, the portrayal of femininity changed dramatically in later Pre-Raphaelite paintings, ultimately leading to the image of the femme fatale. Sultry, black-eyed, wavy-haired models were in, whereas pristine, bun-tied, tight-mouthed models were out.

Eastern influences on European art from medieval to modern times shaped European and ultimately American perceptions of the Middle East and the Middle Easterner. Marwan M. Obeidat’s American Literature and Orientalism (1998) suggests that the influx of Near Eastern material into Europe served to satiate the public’s taste for the didactic, cathartic, and “exotic”; an unflattering image of Muslims was created, often weakly researched, which led quickly to legend and stereotype.⁶ Obeidat sites several other studies that relate to his, including Frederic I. Carpenter’s Emerson and Asia (1930), Arthur Christy’s The Orient in American Transcendentalism (1932), Dorothee M. Finkelstein’s Melville’s Orienda (1961), David H. Finnie’s Pioneers East (1967), and Franklin Walker’s Irreverent Pilgrims: Melville, Browne, and Mark Twain in the Holy Land (1974). The most intriguing portions of Obeidat’s study involve discussions of the historical and cultural relations between the Christian West and the Muslim East in the European literary tradition, as well as the concept of “romantic orientalism” and the impact of the Barbary conflicts on early American nationalism. Obeidat emphasizes Sufi influences on Emerson and the exploitation of Eastern exoticism in novels such as Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Melville’s Clarel (1876).

I am interested in connecting issues of the past with contemporary times. The Christian West viewed the Muslim East with “suspicion and hostility” (Obeidat, 9). The end result was a distorted perception of the peoples and the religion, which to some extent has held well into the twenty-first-century United States. Even now, contemporary political rhetoric is revealing; what has been presented as an “inevitable war” with Iraq as a result of a war on terrorism, for instance, is referred to by some as a “crusade.” Early distortions in the eleventh century resulted from a lack of personal contact with the region. Western Christians, often on military fronts, relayed second-hand or thirdhand accounts colored by religious zeal, condemning Muhammad as little better than the devil, and they commonly believed that Muslim rule laid the groundwork for the appearance of the Antichrist (Obeidat, 10). Three Christian and one Arab scholar first translated the Koran, albeit inaccurately, during the Crusades (1095–1291). By the time George Sale’s version appeared in 1734, many scholars in the West believed the Koran to be not only lascivious and frivolous but also dull, monotonous, and forged from the Bible. Muhammad, often referred to by deformed names such as “Mahound,” was credited with creating only a corrupt form of Christianity—pagan, anti-God, Satan protecting, heretical, evil, and based on idolatry. From the 1200s onward, many church scholars approached the Koran as the subject of refutation and polemical hostility. Among early anti-Islamic polemicists were John of Damascus and Nicetas of Byzantium, who regarded Muhammad as a liar and a Christian heretic (Obeidat, 11). According to Obeidat, throughout the Crusades, works such as William of Tripoli’s Treatise on the Condition of the Saracens and Ricoldus de Monte Crucis’s Confutatio Alcorani seu legis Saracenorum, as well as the many works of Ramon Llull, confirmed that the Muslim Prophet was “a lustful, voluptuous, veritable devil.” Arguments surfaced claiming that what was most vile about Islam spiritually was also most culturally typical of the Middle East (Obeidat, 12).

Needless to say, many of those participating in this vicious stereotyping also did not recognize the nonmonolithic makeup of the Middle East, nor did they distinguish their erroneous conclusions about Islam from the varied Middle Eastern ethnic and spiritual communities. Meredith Jones summarizes the stereotype of Muslims that appeared in Chansons de Geste: “[Muslims] are giants, whole tribes have horns on their heads, others are black as devils. They rush into battle making weird noises comparable to the barking of dogs . . . they eat their prisoners.”⁷ Dante’s Inferno depicts a cloven Muhammad, chest torn apart, face ripped open—a grotesque and beastly portrayal, even by medieval standards. In 1100, in La Chanson de Roland, dogs are depicted feasting on “Mahumet” (Obeidat, 14). The Saracen conversion at the poem’s end underlines a cultural as well as religious victory; its resolution is not so different from what can be achieved through assimilation and acculturation. A similar treatment appears in the Spanish Poem of the Cid (1140).

In Britain, one of the earliest portrayals of Muhammad appears in John Lydgate’s lines (ca. l400) in which the Prophet lies drunk and dying as swine eat him: “Off Machomet the false prophet and how he beying dronke was deuoured among swyn . . . Like a glotoun deied in dronknesse, / Bi excesse of mykil drynkyng wyn, / Fill in a podel, deuoured among swyn.”⁸ Muhammad didn’t experience better publicity in the Elizabethan period, during which a common legend about Islam was promulgated: the failed miracle in which the hill did not come to Muhammad, so Muhammad went to the hill (similar to our own contemporary American idiom: “If the mountain can’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to the mountain”). This story of the hill often went hand in hand with the legendary hostility and treachery of the Turks (the Ottoman Empire was now pushing at the perimeter of Europe). The Renaissance stereotype of the “despicable Turk” stood in for the medieval “vile Saracen” in plays such as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587–90), the hero of which is a Muslim who is part pagan, well read in the classics, unkind to Muslims, and somehow responsive and sympathetic to Christians (Obeidat, 17). The narrative ends with his conversion to Christianity.

Renaissance writers used texts of the Muslim East to satisfy the cathartic desires of a people who feared the outcome of bloody military battles, but who also lusted for the exotic, the mysterious, and the fantastic. A. Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights (1704–17) offered a magical and romantic portrait of the Orient. Despite increasing interest in the picturesque oriental other, polemical attacks continued well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with texts such as First State of Muhametism, or an Account of the Author and Doctrine of That Imposture (1678) and the True Nature of Imposture Fully Displayed in the Life of Mahomet (1697). The titles are revealing.

The British romantics updated fantastical portrayals of the “oriental” until they soon outnumbered polemical attacks. Robert Southey (Thalaba, 1801) and Thomas Moore (Lalla Rookh, 1817) glamorized the Orient with plentiful stereotypes. Typical of the period were Middle Eastern lusty men, sultry women, passionate romances, sensuous paradises, and fantastic settings, as portrayed by Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and others. In the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), Byron sympathized with the Christian Greeks (for whose cause he later gave his life) and castigated the “barbaric” Turks. He wrote with firsthand familiarity and experience that other Western European writers did not possess, and he attempted to understand and use the Eastern literary aesthetic in his writing by incorporating the Muslim calendar in The Gaiour (1813), for example, as well as by using traditional Eastern images and metaphors—pomegranates appear in the setting; the heroine’s eyes are depicted as a gazelle’s eyes; and for his heroine, he chose the name Leila, an often-used lover character of Eastern poetry (Obeidat, 23). Obeidat reminds us that Edward Said, in his groundbreaking study Orientalism (1978), collected the various beliefs and clichés described above through centuries of European philosophies, religious systems, and literatures. After the romantic period, “the West’s superiority over the East became ‘more definite,’ at least on the material level”; nonetheless, any judgment since the Crusades, argues Said, has been cast within the context of “Orientalism” (Obeidat, 24). “Orientalism,” then, is ultimately a cultural doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient becomes inferior to the West; this doctrine forced a “difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).” So the orientalist makes the “Orient” speak, using a generality of labels like “the Muslim” or “the Arab” versus “the Westerner” (Obeidat, 24).

Early American contact with “oriental” material appears minimal, but a few points of contact besides secondhand British texts existed; American travelers included John L. Stephens, George W. Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville, as well as small missionary groups, naval expeditions, and soldiers fighting in the Barbary Wars. Although American Transcendentalists often found parallels between Indian mysticism and their own spiritualism, they inherited much negative stereotyping from their British contemporaries regarding the “oriental.” Obeidat catalogues the “oriental” tales carried by American journals such as The Columbian Magazine, The American Magazine, and The Literary Magazine, and American Register—tales filled with intrigue, such as “Bathmendi” (1787), “Salyma and Ossmin” (1788), and “Omar and Fatima” (1807). Even a notable author such as Benjamin Franklin wrote a few “oriental” tales of his own: “A Narrative of the Late Massacres” (1764), “An Arabian Tale” (1779), and “On the Slave Trade” (1790). Ultimately the Barbary Wars (1801–5, 1815–16) initiated true American-Eastern contact. Early American attitudes toward the “Barbary pirates” held until the 1970s, when the Middle East once more came to the public’s attention through political issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iranian hostage crisis, and extremist terrorism in Europe in the 1980s.

Until contemporary times, mainstream attitudes in the United States held the “reductionist view of North African privateering and a horrific image of ‘the Barbary,’ exaggerated and enlarged” (Obeidat, 25). Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797) presents a picturesque account of American life and subsequently a nationalistic approach toward the “oriental.” The text references “our great government,” but this travel narrative concerns itself also with the fabulous “other.” It describes Algerian Muslims as a “ferocious” race and portrays Arabs eating prisoners. Although the text criticizes America’s own Christianity, it also dismisses the entire Islamic argument as invalid and inconsequential. In the end, the narrative proves patriotic and political, suggesting the superiority of the American government and its people (Obeidat, 27). Muslims appear as drunk, emotional and excitable, polygamous, and slave-abusing cretins in Richard Penn Smith’s The Bombardment of Algiers (1829). Joseph Stevens Jones’s The Usurper; or, Americans in Tripoli (1835) does not paint a more dignified picture: “Now how shall the darling passion of my soul be glutted. Plunder! Aye, plunder alone can raise our sinking realm. Peace has no charms for me . . .,” yells the motivated dey of Algiers.⁹ In the play, he takes American hostages, who spend a good while expostulating on their patriotic devotion to their country and the superiority of the American government. They are the martyred, seeking refuge from the “cruel, barbaric, and savage” Arabs. In the end, America triumphs as the American flag rises. Later representations of the “Orient” are no less stereotypical, and Obeidat (34) cites the examples of Edith Wharton’s In Morocco (1920), Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa (1935), Kenneth Roberts’s Lydia Bailey (1947), Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore (1951), and Violet Winspear’s The Sheik’s Captive (1979).

The popularity and ubiquity of television since the mid–twentieth century has furthered the spread of misinformation. Just as Tamburlaine presented the Middle Eastern villain as Renaissance entertainment, television in the 1990s replaced the Russian male with the Middle Eastern male as the popular villain in dramas such as JAG, X-Files, and other action and adventure shows. Hollywood films such as Naked Gun II feature a comic scene of Middle Eastern terrorists, and there are countless others. A “noble savage” rendition of a Saracen in Hollywood’s version of Robin Hood was thought to be a positive portrayal by some, though not by this writer. Popular fiction writers, such as Tom Clancy, have also often used the Middle Eastern villain, catering to the public’s appetite for this common enemy even before September 11. As a vigilant friend read passages of one novel to me in the late 1990s, I attempted to unveil the distortions. Ironically, on the morning of 9/11, Tom Clancy’s voice was one of the first I heard aired on television attempting to avert the racism that many feared would surface as a result of the attacks. Even Disney’s animated feature Aladdin bursts at the seams with stereotypes, from the goofy, bulb-nosed “oriental” storyteller who opens the piece to the relentless portrayal of evil characters as dark skinned. The evil vizier bears the closest ethnic resemblance to a Middle Easterner, whereas Aladdin, the good hero, sports the California surfer-dude look. Only Jasmine vaguely resembles a Middle Eastern woman, but her physical appearance is wrought with gender stereotypes I will not address here.

Contemporary portrayals of the Middle Eastern villain in popular media reached its height during conflicts between the United States and the Middle East, beginning with the wars in Iran and Iraq and the Israeli-Arab conflict and culminating in the period of grief and anger after September 11. The resulting negative ramifications have affected Americans of Middle Eastern descent as well as those who physically resemble them. We have heard tragic stories of victims of terrorism worldwide and witnessed the grief of victims’ families. Our personal sense of security has been severely fractured. We have read about or witnessed hate crimes—a Jewish man savagely beaten in Boston in the early 1990s (just after the outbreak of the Gulf War) by a group of young white men who thought that he was Arab American, or a Native American gunned down in Arizona when mistaken for a Middle Eastern American, ten years later, post–9/11. And there are many more stories like these. Physical violence, emotional abuse, and racial discrimination are plentiful. The “Orient,” while providing some people with an enemy they love to hate, and providing others with a source from which they draw their patriotism, has paid a high price. The images projected by literature or the media, in journalism, film, or television, have slowly, over the centuries, become, for some, a reality. Post–September 11, efforts have been made to prevent racial profiling and to promote cross-cultural understanding, but much remains to be done. A reality that began in medieval Europe still affects many immigrant Middle Eastern Americans, in particular, many first- and second-generation Middle Eastern Americans who, having been born and raised here, are an integral part of contemporary American culture.

Barbara C. Aswad confirms that the first travelers from the Middle East appeared on this continent long before Columbus arrived in 1492: “Among the belongings of Columbus was a book by the Arab geographer al-Idrisi which mentions that eight Arabs sailed from Lisbon and landed in South America, long before. . . . We are also told that Istephan, a Moroccan Arab, served as a guide to the Spanish explorers and conquerors in what is now Arizona and New Mexico in the 1500s (Mehdi 1978). The major populations arrived approximately a century ago primarily from the Syrian-Lebanon region. Most were Christian.”¹⁰ A large portion of these early immigrants, peasant farmers, left their homelands to avoid Ottoman conscription and taxation, and to realize the great wealth, prosperity, and freedom of the American Dream. The fast-changing economics of the Middle East, cash cropping, competition for goods resulting from the opening of the Suez Canal, and, finally, diseased Middle Eastern vineyards forced many to leave the Middle East. The author Michael W. Suleiman, as quoted in Aswad, describes pre–World War I immigrants as “a quiescent community, keeping their politics to themselves, and not feeling part of American society. Rather, they followed the politics of the homeland, some supporting the Ottomans, others supporting revolt against the Ottomans and others remaining neutral. Many feared repercussions upon return.”¹¹ Elmaz Abinader explores this period of economic crisis through family narratives; the characters in her memoir Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon experience these unfolding crises and the destitution and desperation of Ottoman occupation.

It wasn’t long after the proliferation of hostility, stereotyping, and cynicism in “oriental tales” published by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American journals, discussed above, that Arabic newspapers and English-language works written by Middle Eastern Americans were published in the United States.¹²

If asked to identify a Middle Eastern writer, most Americans today would likely cite Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883–1931). Many consider him among the founders of Middle Eastern American writing as well as among the most widely known American poets read by the American public, while at the same time the most ignored or blatantly scorned by academics. He was a member of the New York Pen League, the first Arab American literary society formed by a group of writers from Lebanon and Syria who often wrote in Arabic and published their work in collaboration with translators. Gibran and other writers of the Pen League were part of the first wave of immigrants who arrived in the United States at the turn of the century.¹³ Gibran, like our current-day Samuel Hazo, Jack Marshall, Khaled Mattawa, D. H. Melhem, Joseph Awad, Naomi Shihab Nye, and others, combined interests in family, longing for home, spirituality, injustice, violence, international politics, gardens, and dance in his writing. Although his love poetry in The Prophet brought him his greatest fame, Gibran’s social and political texts are arguably his best literary achievements and are often concerned with speaking to the masses and assimilating into his newfound culture (“My Countrymen,” “Khalil the Heretic”).

According to Aswad, “American nationalism in World War I pushed assimilation; restrictive immigration quotas of 1924 favored European migration and curtailed immigration from the Third World countries overall. Some American chauvinists feared that immigrants from some cultures would not assimilate to Anglo American traditions. . . . Those citizens who possessed second languages were not praised but made to feel ashamed. Their literature and history was deliberately and systematically ignored (Novak 1975). The melting pot ethos was in and was strengthened in the Arab community by the new second generation (Aswad 1974, 1992; Naff 1985; Pulcini 1993; Suleiman 1994).”¹⁴ In this anthology, Barbara Bedway writes of aging family members desperately wishing to learn English; in Eugene Nassar’s work, the younger generation is slowly lost to cultural assimilation.

While the Depression sent many immigrants home without jobs in the 1930s, those who stayed joined national and community groups. In the southern United States, where shopkeeping was stigmatized, Arabs and other minorities (who at the time were regarded as superior to African Americans) joined the mercantile business.¹⁵ Arab American immigrants of the northeastern United States, where many jobs were classified by ethnicity, were offered jobs in textile mills. These immigrants were peddlers, small shop owners, factory workers, and farmers. Women, essential contributors to the working family, also engaged in these occupations.¹⁶

The end of World War II brought with it a change in Middle Eastern immigration. New immigrants included refugees from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, students attending American colleges who married Americans (and never left the United States), as well as other upper-class exiled elites who left their homelands for political, religious, or social reasons. Changes in immigration laws favored “educated” émigrés from the Third World—professionals who were already heavily influenced by the West. Besides those from Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, Arab immigrants from Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, and Middle Eastern immigrants of ethnicities other than Arab, such as Turks, Iranians, and Kurds, also emigrated during this period. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (which ended favoritism toward European immigrants) was particularly influential in this regard. After the Israeli-Arab War of 1967, popular interest in the Middle East peaked: “The interest was not only due to the fact of US ethnic revivalism or . . . political turmoil in the Middle East and the fact that the US had replaced England and France as the dominant neo-colonial power in the area. The issues of protection of some Arabs for their oil and the increasing alliances with Israel caused frustrations in the American communities.”¹⁷ It was during this time that emotional and physical harassment of Middle Eastern Americans became more public and frequent, recurring with even more frequency during the Gulf War in 1991, and again in 2001 after September 11. This increase in immigration as well as the inflammatory political tensions inherent in America’s relationship with the Middle East coincided with a surge in the production and publication of Middle Eastern American literature in the latter half of this century.¹⁸

“If a literature’s life and energy are determined by the activity surrounding it,” then Middle Eastern American literature “is experiencing a renaissance,” writes Elmaz Abinader.¹⁹ Middle Eastern Americans have been writing and successfully selling books since the 1920s with Al-Mahjar (“immigrant poets”; otherwise known as the New York Pen League). Abinader cites Ameen Rihani, Gibran Khalil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, and Elia Abu Madi as the major figures of the period. From the 1950s onward, while Middle Eastern American writers such as Hazo, Melhem, and Etel Adnan were rarely identified by ethnicity, they were prolific. And scholarly attention to Middle Eastern American writers is gaining ground with the critical work of Evelyn Shakir, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Loretta Hall and Bridget K. Hall, Gregory Orfalea, Sharif Elmusa, Barbara Aswad, and Nathalie Handal, among others.

Scholarly progress depends on facilitating access to the works through anthologies and clarifying issues of classification. Amy Ling, in her essay “Teaching Asian American Literature,” affirms the difficulties involved in definitions: “At what point does an immigrant become an American? Should American citizenship be the sole criterion? Can’t a lengthy residency [qualify]? Where do mixed-race people fit . . .? [What about those racial authors who choose] not to write [about their] ethnicity? Is Asian American literature defined by the ethnicity of the author or by its subject matter?”²⁰

The answers to these questions will depend on the individual. Middle Eastern American writers, while possessing a distinct cultural and religious history, share many themes in common with Asian American writers: political marginality, the importance of tradition in alien environments, ethnic denial, isolation (Connie Young Yu, “The World of Our Grandmothers”), the power of the extended family and the community (Li-Young Lee, “I Ask My Mother to Sing”), the integration and assimilation of children into the dominant culture (Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter), the loss of the mother tongue (Sui Sin Far, “In the Land of the Free”), the difference between what America represents and what it really is (Carlos Bulosan, “Silence”), and the widening gulf between parents and children (Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior), among others. Many of these themes are shared by immigrant writers in general, regardless of racial background. The ultimate goal of all writing is to humanize. It is easy to hate an invisible and silenced enemy, but as Ling suggests, if readers who generally have no contact with people of a particular ethnic background are able to see, through the work, that they are “just people after all,” then “they have made a giant leap towards greater understanding.”²¹

Mutual understanding might be this anthology’s most important purpose. I ask readers to acknowledge and respect “our” differences (meaning the differences among the writers in the anthology as well as the differences between readers and these writers), and then to consider that we are simply the family who lives next door. We share much in common. The people of the Middle East and the people of the United States, while speaking different languages and following different political systems, and while nursing wounds born from long conflicts, must come to understand that they are global neighbors if there is to be any lasting and peaceful coexistence. Without empathy, this task is impossible.

The goal of art is empathy. In Middle Eastern culture, the best and most successful writing or art is considered to exist in service to one’s community. As the editors of Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry suggest, writing for the Middle Easterner is not isolated in the academy, “as too often is the case in the United States—but rather is a public treasure used on important occasions as a connector of people.”²² This anthology includes sixteen accomplished writers whose works take up a multitude of themes: from the familial cross-cultural misunderstandings and conflicts of Iranian American writers in Nahid Rachlin’s and Roger Sedarat’s work to the mysticism of Khaled Mattawa’s poems, from the superstitions that govern characters in Diana Abu-Jaber’s prose to the devastating homesickness in Pauline Kaldas’s characters. And while the goal of this volume is to collect the work produced by a number of Middle Eastern American writers and to provide empathy to readers who seek a new understanding, it also aims to recognize these writers’ vital contributions to contemporary American literature—to underline connections rather than to isolate differences. The themes surfacing in this anthology consistently demonstrate an ardent effort at reconciliation, connection, and finding one’s place among others.

We live in times of crisis and change. We struggle for a foothold in a country that is at once repulsed and intrigued by the many voices of its immigrants. And we struggle for a place in time that calls on us to speak the many languages of this world, a time that calls for an opening of many doors to intelligent discussion.

Dr. Susan Atefat-Peckham, Editor (2003)

 

1. Asian is defined as “Asian or Pacific Islander—A person having origins in any of the original people of the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, or the Pacific Islands. This area includes, for example, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Australia and Samoa.” This and the definition of the racial category “white” were taken from “Ethnic Origins” (provided by University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Student Information System—SIS). The University of Nebraska State Museum of Natural History (Morrill Hall) and the Graduate School, which are both a part of the university system, define the Middle Eastern peoples according to different terms. Whereas Morrill Hall cited cultural and historical grounds for identifying Iranians as “prehistoric Asians,” the university cited the Iranian language, Farsi (which is rooted in the Indo-European tradition), as well as the geographical location (just below the Caucasus Mountains), as grounds for calling Iranians “white.”

2. Amy Ling, “Teaching Asian American Literature,” Heath Anthology Newsletter (Georgetown University, 1996), http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/tamlit/essays/asian_am.html (accessed March 5, 2014).

3. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, eds., The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

4. This empowerment was far from complimentary. Roxana, taking on the stereotyped Eastern female role, ruins herself with sexual laxity and overzealous boldness. Although the text can be seen as empowering the female, it is a pathetic account of both the views Englanders held toward the peoples of the Middle East and the class and gender subjugation of the Western female; the Western woman must either become “oriental,” that is, a “sex fiend,” to gain power or must masculinize herself into what Defoe calls a “man-woman.”

5. The opera Salome, a story of sinister feminine obsession, premiered in 1905 and was widely condemned as blasphemous and salacious. Within two years the piece was performed at more than fifty opera houses.

6. Marwan M. Obeidat, American Literature and Orientalism (Berlin: Schwarz, 1998), 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text (Obeidat, page number).

7. Meredith Jones, “The Conventional Saracen of the Song of Geste,” Speculum 17 (1942): 203.

8. John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, quoted in Marwan M. Obeidat and Ibrahim Mumayiz, “Anglo-American Literary Sources on the Muslim Orient: The Roots and the Reiterations,” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 13 (2001): 47–72.

9. Joseph S. Jones, The Usurper; or, Americans in Tripoli, 1835, in America’s Lost Plays, ed. Barrett H. Clark (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 14: 153–54.

10. Barbara C. Aswad, “Arab Americans: Those Who Followed Columbus (1992 Presidential Address),” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 27, no. 1 (1993): 8, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23061491. Aswad cites Beverlee Turner Mehdi, The Arabs in America, 1942–1977 (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1978).

11. Ibid. Aswad cites Michael W. Suleiman, “Arab Americans and the Political Process,” The Development of Arab-American Identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 37–60.

12. Ibid. Aswad cites examples such as Kawkab Amerika (founded in 1892), Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet (published in 1923), and the English-language magazine The Syrian World (published in the late 1920s) to illustrate this trend.

13. Gregory Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa, eds., Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), xv.

14. Aswad, “Arab Americans,” 8–9. Aswad cites the following: Michael Novak, foreword to The Syrian-Lebanese in America: A Study in Religion and Assimilation, ed. Phillip Kayal and Joseph Kayal (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975); Barbara Aswad, ed., Arabic-Speaking Communities in American Cities (Staten Island: Center for Migration Studies Press, 1974); Barbara Aswad, “The Lebanese Muslin Community in Dearborn,” in The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration, ed. Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies and I.B. Tauris, 1992), 167–88; Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrants’ Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); Theodore Pulcini, “Trends in Research on Arab-Americans,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no. 4 (1993): 27–60; and Suleiman, “Arab Americans and the Political Process,” The Development of Arab-American Identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 37–60.

15. Aswad writes also of the comparison between the treatments of Arabs and African Americans: “[The Arab American’s] hard work was stressed by most academics. . . . However, it is also important to be aware that European and other immigrants were able to ‘make it’ to the middle class, while American blacks did not because of the politics of racial inequality in the US. The various national labor laws between 1930 and 1960 benefitted immigrant populations by enlarging job opportunities, controlling access to those jobs and providing supplementary income to the unemployed. These same benefits seldom helped the black worker until the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s (Smith 1987: 151–54).” Aswad, “Arab Americans,” 9–10. Aswad cites J. Owens Smith, The Politics of Racial Inequality (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).

16. Excepting Philip K. Hitti, sociological histories of these immigrants and their communities did not begin until after World War II, although the scribes of these communities wrote prolifically about upholding ethnic traditions and boasted proudly about their lives and ancestry. Philip K. Hitti, The Syrians in America (New York: George H. Doran, 1924).

17. Aswad, “Arab Americans,” 11.

18. Since the early 1980s, studies defending the public image of the Middle Eastern American have increased, the major proponents being third-generation Middle Eastern Americans. They explored their roots for the first time. Numerous books emerged on the subject, such as Sameer Y. Abraham and Nabeel Abraham, eds., The Arab World and Arab Americans: Understanding a Neglected Minority (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1981); Edmund Ghareeb, Split Vision: The Portrayal of Arabs in the American Media (Washington, DC: American-Arab Affairs Council, 1983); Jack G. Shaheen, The TV Arab (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984); and Michael Suleiman, The Arabs in the Mind of America (Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1988). Among the best sociological books written about Middle Eastern American ancestry is Gregory Orfalea, Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988).

19. Elmaz Abinader, “Children of Al-Mahjar: Arab American Literature Spans a Century,” U.S. Society & Values: Electronic Journals of the U.S. Department of State 5, no. 1 (2000): 11.

20. Ling, “Teaching Asian American Literature.”

21. Ibid.

22. Orfalea and Elmusa, Grape Leaves, xiv.