Arab American Women-Poets - PHD Study
Arab American Women-Poets - PHD Study
Arab American Women-Poets - PHD Study
by
Christina LaRose
Doctoral Committee:
This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my father, Daniel Clayton LaRose, and
my teta, Najla Simon.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank the University of Michigan for providing me with the financial support
following sources: the Rackham Merit Fellowship, the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, the
Community of Scholars Program, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the
Department of Women’s Studies. I also wish to thank the Mellon Foundation for providing me
to greatly improve my work: co-chairs Ruby Tapia and Evelyn Alsultany, and members Sidonie
Thanks to Maria Cotera who generously gave of her time for a directed readings course
in the Fall of 2013, and who served on my preliminary exam committee. Thanks also to current
and former University of Michigan faculty and staff who supported, influenced, and encouraged
me and my work: Lilia Cortina, Nadine Naber, Linda Gregerson, Leela Fernandes, Peggy
McCracken, Walter Cohen, Amy Germain, Jan Burgess, Natalie Bartolacci, Emma Flores-Scott,
and Dwight Lang. Thank you to Laura Schram for her assistance with my public humanities
McDonough and Sheila Waterhouse, and at Michigan Publishing with Jason Colman and
Meredith Kahn. Thanks to all my University of Michigan colleagues and friends for your
iii
companionship and support throughout this process.
I am indebted to the Arab American literary and scholarly community, especially the
Radius of Arab American Writers, Mizna: Prose, Poetry & Art Exploring Arab America, and the
Arab American Studies Association. Many thanks to Hedy Habra, Lana Barkawi, Louise
Cainkar, Leila Ben-Nasr, Marwa Helal, Jehan Mullin, and Eman Elshaikh. Thank you to the staff
of the Arab American National Museum for their research support and encouragement. I would
specifically like to thank Devon Akmon, Jumana Salamey, Matthew Jaber Stiffler, Kim Silarski,
Lindsay Robillard, Dave Serio, Petra Alsoofy, Isra M. El-beshir, and Kirsten Terry-Miller.
Thanks to my Purdue University Northwest colleagues, especially Rachel Holtz, James Darney,
Ohio State University: Lee Martin, Erin McGraw, Lee K. Abbott, and Michelle Herman, and to
my many wonderful friends and colleagues there. I had a great undergraduate education at the
professor and former director of the Honors Program in which I was inspired and challenged.
Thank you to Suzanne Bergeron for believing in me, for your good humor, and for your
consistent support. Thank you to Maureen Linker, Lora Lempert, and Melita Schaum for their
help and guidance. Thank you to Mrs. Susan Goodson, my sixth grade English teacher, and to
my high school English teacher, Mr. Don Dziuk, both of whom encouraged my love of literature.
Thanks to Carrie Landrum, Cheryl Phillips, Owen Cook, Alex Gonopolskiy, Paul
Neamonitakis, Christy Patterson-Hamilton, the Covert family, and Kate Gomane for their
enduring friendships and support over many years. Thanks to Latoya and Larry Gibbs for their
iv
to my many wonderful aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings—Justin, Amy, Jonathan, and Ryan. I
am grateful for my niece, Charlotte Rose, for all the laughter she brings me. And I can’t thank
my dear husband enough for his extraordinary companionship, generosity, support, and love.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii
ABSTRACT ix
CHAPTER
I. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..……..1
Boundaries……………………………………………………………………………..………113
VI. Conclusion……………………………………..…………………………………………..185
vi
APPENDICES 195
BIBLIOGRAPHY 207
vii
LIST OF APPENDICES
APPENDIX
C. Themes in Arab American Women’s Poetry about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 203
viii
ABSTRACT
This dissertation fills a research gap: to date there has not been a published scholarly
monograph exclusively about Arab American women’s poetry. The study focuses on an
insufficiently explored textual corpus: women poets with heritage in the Levant (Syria, Lebanon,
Jordan, and the Palestinian territories) because this is the region from which most Arab
Americans trace their ancestry. Analyzing the work of twelve Arab American women who
published at least one full-length poetry collection, composed in or translated into English, in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the dissertation takes as its source material poems
from Etel Adnan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Nathalie Handal, Suheir Hammad, Mohja Kahf, Elmaz
Abinader, Hedy Habra, Marian Haddad, Laila Halaby, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Deema Shehabi, and
Hala Alyan.
By using poems as case studies, the dissertation explores how Arab American women
poets represent the problem of violence and articulate peace-building strategies in the Levantine
region and transnationally. This research discusses how Arab American women poets address the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, the subsequent French and British colonial
interventions, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Lebanese Civil War, the Gulf War, and the
2003 U.S.-led war in Iraq following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. These poets,
writing in the diasporic afterlives of violent origins, often reflect on boundaries. A simple
definition of a boundary is a line that marks the limit of something; limits can be physical,
are reimagined by those who survived the traumas of violence and displacement. A
contemplative relationship to boundaries does not create lawlessness or chaos but promotes
considerations about how to improve the conditions of life. Although these poets or their
ancestors experienced or witnessed acts of violence, these poets do not view themselves as
victims, but as agents who contribute insights that benefit Arab Americans and a wider
collective. These poets conceptualize the writing of poetry as a process that, through engagement
with readers, results in healing from violence. Each chapter inquires how these poets claim
agency because of diasporic displacement, and how they respond to violent conflicts in ways that
Chapter 1 observes that Abinader, Kahf, and Handal ponder the nature of boundaries,
both spatial and temporal, and argues that these poets develop transnational Arab subject
formations that both extend and modify central ideas of the 19th century Mahjar (migrant)
literary tradition for late-twentieth and early twenty-first century audiences. The chapter also
attends to how Handal engages with Samuel Huntington’s (1993) “clash of civilizations” thesis.
Chapter 2 investigates how Shehabi, Halaby, and Adnan deliberate on the boundaries of the
human subject by placing their poetry into dialogue with contemporary theorizing on identity
and by highlighting their emphasis on relational identity. Chapter 3 questions how Abinader,
Majaj, Nye, and Shehabi contemplate the boundaries of childhood through child characters and
perspectives. In the process, the chapter examines how these poets’ work supports a critique of
epistemic privilege. Chapter 4 seeks to understand how Abinader, Hammad, Alyan, Habra,
Haddad, and Nye meditate on the boundaries of gender roles. Specifically, the chapter centers on
x
how these poets denaturalize neoliberalism and value caring labor as central to a post-neoliberal
social order.
xi
CHAPTER I
Introduction
The internecine war in Syria has brought international attention to the problems of
Arab regional violence and the resulting displacement of populations. Although the Syrian
refugee crisis began in 2011, mass migrations of people from the Middle East have been
occurring since the late nineteenth century. One voice uniquely situated to illuminate the
complexities of Arab diasporas is that of the poet Nathalie Handal, a descendant of exiled
Palestinians who was born in Haiti and has lived in Europe, Latin America, the Arab region,
and the United States. In her poem “The Traveler” (2012), Handal focuses on how diasporic
experiences have impacted both individual bodies and the collective body politics of the
nation states to which Arabs have migrated. Handal’s five poetry collections belong to a
larger textual corpus of Arab American women’s poetry, a body of work that seeks to
understand the complex dynamics of migrations from the Arab region to the Americas.
Although scholars have increasingly concentrated, especially over the past twenty years, on
1
Arab American literature and poetry, Arab American women poets have received limited
critical attention.
Arab American women poets merit inclusion in scholarship on American poetry, not
because they have been understudied, and not because they are an ethnic minority, but
because they illuminate some of the most consequential sociopolitical crises from the late-
nineteenth century to the present. Through their writings, Arab American women poets
provide insights into conflicts in the Arab region, and how those conflicts have led to political
instability, various forms of violence, and migrations of people around the world. These poets
help us to understand the human costs of political conflicts in the Arab region, including
boundaries.
Although Arab American women’s lives have been explored in both social and
particularly poetry. Scholars have long documented the ways in which poetic expression
through language, symbol, and story is ideally suited for addressing the range and depth of
traumatic experiences.3 In the case of Arab American women, traumatic experiences include
1
Cultural studies and social sciences research on Arab American women includes: Abdulhadi, Naber, and
Alsultany 2010; Karem Albrecht 2015; Cainkar 1988; Elia 2006; Gualtieri 2004; Hyndman-Rizk 2011; Jacobs
2014, 2015; Jarmakani 2008; Joseph 2009, 2012; Moosnick 2012; Naber 2012; Read 2004; Shakir 1997. This list
is by no means complete.
2
A comprehensive, though by no means complete, list of research on Arab American women’s literary and
artistic productions includes: Abdelrazek 2007; Darraj 2004; El Hajj and Harb 2016; Fadda-Conrey 2014; Golley
2007; Majaj, Sunderman, and Saliba 2002; Mehta 2014; Pickens 2014.
3
Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide, edited by Charles R. Figley. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012.
2
witnessing or directly experiencing physical violence, and undergoing forms of psychological,
social, and economic violence that result from displacement, migration, and refugee status.
This dissertation begins with the premise that we cannot understand the problem of violence
in the Arab region, and its consequences, without considering the voices of women who have
The term “Arab American,” in its broadest sense, refers to diasporic Arabs who
migrated to North and South America. Today, approximately nine million people of Arab
descent live in Brazil, about five million of whom trace their ancestry to Lebanon.4 The
second-largest number of diasporic Arabs live in the United States, where an estimated 3.7
million people trace their roots to an Arab country.5 The category “Arab American”
encompasses a diverse group of individuals who trace their origins to a geographical space
consisting of twenty-two Arab League countries. The Arab region consists of three main
areas: the Mashriq (the Arab east), which includes Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and the
Palestinian territories; the Maghreb (the Arab west), which consists of Libya, Tunisia,
Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania; and the Gulf region, which encompasses Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. While the term Arab American
creates group cohesion—a homogeneous ethnic identity category that facilitates comparisons
with other ethnic minority groups in the United States—the designation Arab American is
unable to capture significant differences in diverse histories, cultures, religions, and linguistic
4
This figure comes from “The Arabs of Brazil” in Saudi Aramco World,
http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/200505/the.arabs.of.brazil.htm. Accessed 31 Oct. 2016.
5
This figure comes from the Arab American Institute, http://www.aaiusa.org/demographics. Accessed 31 Oct.
2016.
3
dialects throughout the Arab region.
For this reason, I adopt a regional approach to Arab American literature. I attend to an
understudied textual corpus: Arab American women poets with heritage in the Mashriq, also
known as the Levant (I use these terms interchangeably), because this is the region from
which Arab emigration began, and the place from which most Arab Americans trace their
ancestry.6 Through a transnational analysis, I examine poetry that illuminates the heritage of
people from this region. Focusing on Anglophone women poets, I analyze those who were
born in, or trace their ancestry to, the Levant and who live, or have spent a significant part of
their lives, in the United States. Some Arab American women poets were born in the U.S. and
write about their ancestors who left the Arab region in the late-nineteenth century during the
decline of the Ottoman Empire. Others were born in the Arab region and later migrated to the
U.S. during periods of intense political instability as nation-states formed in the aftermath of
European colonialism. Although a detailed political history of the region is beyond the scope
The First World War had a significant impact on the Arab region, among other parts
of the world, as David Held (1998) observes, because it demonstrated that “war between great
6
The Arab American Institute states that most Arab Americans trace their heritage to Lebanon, Syria, Palestine,
Egypt and Iraq. http://www.aaiusa.org/demographics. Accessed 28 Oct. 2016.
4
powers in the industrial age could no longer be confined exclusively to the combatants on the
battlefield.”7 During WWI, the British and French seized Middle Eastern lands. In 1916,
British and French diplomats signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement which provided for British
control of Mesopotamia and Palestine, and French control of Syria and Lebanon. In addition,
the British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour, issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917
which called for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In the aftermath of WWI, the
The consequences of the First World War, particularly the aftermath of the Ottoman
Empire, had dire consequences in this region and marked the beginning of the Mahjar, the
Arabic term for the diaspora of Arabs around the world. Arab immigration to United States
has historically been characterized by a “wave” model. While some historians, such as Alixa
Naff (1985) and Michael Suleiman (1999), observe two major waves of immigration, from the
1870s to WWII, and from WWII to the present, other scholars, such as Orfalea (2006),
propose a three-wave model: 1870s-1924, 1940-67, and 1967-present. Yvonne Haddad and
Adair Lummis (1987) distinguish between five waves of Arab immigration: the first wave,
from 1875-1912, consisted mostly of young men from Lebanon and present-day Syria; the
second-wave, from 1918-22, was comprised of Arab relatives of the first wave; the third
wave, from 1930-38, was primary composed of relatives of all the previous Arab immigrants;
7
Held, David. et al., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999,
pg. 97.
8
The history in this paragraph is summarized from the entry on “Middle East” by Younes Abouyoub in The
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, edited by Peter N. Stearns. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
5
the fourth wave, from 1947-60, consisted of Palestinian refugees and urban elites seeking
higher education and better opportunities; and the fifth wave began in 1967 in response to the
U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which reversed the historic preference for
European immigrants.9 Although Haddad and Lummis propose a nuanced model, I adopt the
three-wave model throughout this dissertation because I believe that it captures the major
Data on the number of first generation Arab immigrants to the United States varies,
mainly because of their historically ambiguous position within U.S. racial classification
schemas. As Lisa Suhair Majaj (2000) has documented, in the late 19th century, Arabic-
speaking immigrants from Greater Syria were initially classified on US immigration forms as
“Turkey in Asia” or as “Other Asians.” In 1910, the U.S. Census classified Syrians,
Palestinians, Turks, Armenians, and others as “Asiatic.” In 1911, the Bureau of Immigration
and Naturalization ordered court clerks to reject applications for first papers from aliens who
were neither white nor African—a ruling that targeted “Asiatics” for exclusion. A series of
court cases followed, known as the “prerequisite cases,” in which petitions for naturalization
were challenged on whether the petitioners qualified as “white.” Sarah Gualtieri (2009)
examined racial prerequisite cases heard in U.S. federal courts between 1909 and 1923,
observing that Syrians’ ethnicity emerged in a U.S. racial order that scrutinized their identity
and repeatedly questioned whether they could become white Americans. At times, Syrians
were classified as “white,” and at other times as “not white.” As Majaj observes, whiteness
9
This description of Haddad and Lummis’ five-wave model of Arab immigration comes from Karen Isaken
Leonard’s Muslims in the United States: The State of Research. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003, pg.
10.
6
consisted of not just skin color but also geographical, cultural, linguistic, and religious
factors—intrinsic to the European “community of race” was Christian identity. In 1914, the
United States Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit court ruled, in Dow v. United States, that
Amid these racial classification complexities, scholars estimate that, between 1880
and 1924, approximately 95,000 people of Arab descent came to America.10 Most of these
immigrants were Christians from the Ottoman province of Greater Syria, also known as the
Levant, the Mashriq (Arabic for “the land where the sun rises”), and Bilad ash-Sham (Arabic
for “land of the North”), a region that now consists of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the
factors precipitated the mass exodus of people from Greater Syria, including the persecution
of Christians, the decline of silk production in the region, and the Ottoman Empire’s entry
into WWI on the side of the German Kaiser, which increased military conscription of men
from the region.12 A subsequent British and French blockade (1915-18) of the Syrian and
Lebanese coastlines impeded the entry of food and caused the deaths, from starvation, of
10
See Arab American National Museum – Arab American History:
http://www.arabamericanmuseum.org/Arab+American+History.id.150.htm. Accessed 28 Oct. 2016.
11
The Levantine region consists of former Byzantine territories of the Diocese of the East organized soon after
the Muslim Conquest of Syria in the mid-7th century. This region was a Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid
Caliphate province (632-1515), and then a province of the Ottoman Empire (1516-1918), which controlled it
until the end of World War I.
12
One of the earliest scholarly books on the experiences of diasporic Arabs who settled in the United States is
Phillip Hitti’s The Syrians in America (1924). Other influential scholars on this topic include Phillip and Joseph
Kayal (1975), Sameer and Nabeel Abraham (1983), Eric Hoogland (1987), Adele Younis (1993), Michael
Suleiman (1999), and Gregory Orfalea (2006).
7
more than 100,000 people—a quarter of the population.13
During this first wave of Arab migration to the United States, people from Greater
Syria almost immediately began to engage in literary production. By 1900, over half of
Syrians in America lived in New York City, home to a thriving immigrant community, “Little
Syria,” and the Mahjar (Arabic for “migrant”) poets.14 The “Pen League” (Al-Rabitah al-
qalamiyyah), founded by Nasib Arida and Abd al-Masih Haddad around 1916, included
Khalil Gibran as a member, who reformed and assumed leadership of the league in 1920.
These writers began a tradition of Arab American poetry, one that continued throughout the
twentieth century by a wide range of poets who contributed to literary magazines and
published single-authored collections.15 The first Arab American woman poet, Afifa Karam
(1883-1924), who wrote in Arabic, also composed fiction and nonfiction. As a journalist, she
contributed to the Arabic-language newspaper, Al-Hoda (The Guidance), and in 1911 she
founded a monthly women’s periodical, al-‘Ālam al-Jadīd al-Nisā’ī (The New Women’s
World) which gave way two years later to a second publication, al-’Imra’a al-Sūrīyya (Syrian
Woman).16
Although Arab American literature flourished in the early part of the twentieth
century, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Quota Act drastically limited numbers of new immigrants,
13
See Gualtieri’s Chapter 1, “From Internal to International Migration”; Evelyn Shakir’s Bint Arab: Arab and
Arab American Women in the United States (1997); and Gregory Orfalea’s The Arab Americans: A History
(2006).
14
A Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City (2002).
15
A great deal of this work has been collected in seven anthologies of Arab American poetry edited by: Gregory
Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa (1988), Joe Kadi (1994), Munir Akash and Khaled Mattawa (1999), D.H. Melhem
and Leila Diab (2000), Nathalie Handal (2001), Susan Muaddi Darraj (2004), and Hayan Charara (2008).
16
Shakir, Evelyn. Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger,
1997, pg. 55.
8
and during this period Arab Americans generally concentrated more on assimilation than on
wave of Arab migration to the United States began after the establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948 displaced an estimated 711,000 Palestinians.18 During this time, approximately
80,000 Arabs immigrated to the United States; the majority were Palestinians while the
second largest group was made up of Egyptians.19 The third wave of Arab migration began
after Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act (also called the Hart-Celler Act),
in 1965, which eliminated national origin, race, and ancestry as a basis for immigration. This
legislation enabled the entry of immigrants from the Arab region fleeing from numerous
conflicts including the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states in 1967, the Lebanese
civil war (1975-90), the First Gulf War (1990-91), and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003
By the late 1960s, annual immigration from the Arab world reached an average of
14,000 to 15,000; Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians, and Iraqis joined and often surpassed
Lebanon and Syria as major sources of new U.S. immigrants.21 The changes in U.S.
See Alixa Naff’s Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
17
UP, 1985.
18
In September 1949, the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated that 711,000
Palestinian refugees lived outside Israel.
19
Many of the Arabs who immigrated between 1950-65 were members of the established elite in countries like
Egypt, Syria, and Iraq who fled due to popular revolutions and the new regimes that came with them. See
Gregory Orfalea’s The Arab Americans: A History. Northampton: Olive Branch Publishing, 2006.
20
See Carol Fadda-Conrey’s Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of
Citizenship and Belonging. New York: NYU Press, 2014, pg. 105.
21
According to Helen Hatab Samhan’s “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab-American
Experience,” in Arabs in America: Building Toward a New Future, edited by Michael Suleiman. Philadelphia:
Temple UP, 1999.
9
immigration policy gave preference to relatives of U.S. citizens, to professionals, and to other
individuals with specialized skills. Because of these changes in immigration law, Arab
immigrants began to come from a variety of countries, mostly Muslim, and were often more
highly educated and more politically engaged than the previous generation of Arab
Americans.22 Arabs who came to the United States in this period began to write and publish
literature in English. During this time, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements created
new spaces for ethnic literary voices, including the publication of more works by African
Americans, Jewish Americans, Asian Americans, and other minority groups. In this context,
many Arab Americans found it easier to write about their ethnic heritage and find publishers
and audiences. The first book of English-language poetry published by an Arab American
Since the mid-1960s, Arab American women poets have meditated on their
1990s, these poets’ writings reflected a broader trend of Arab Americans identifying as people
of color and articulating alliances with other minority groups, rather than attempting to “pass”
as white—an identity to which previous generations of Arabs in America had aspired. The
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 transformed Arab Americans, as Amaney Jamal and
Nadine Naber write, “from invisible citizens to visible subjects.”23 Quickly denouncing the
attacks, the Arab American community, including Arab American poets, increasingly wrote
22
Majaj, Lisa Suhair. “Arab-American Literature: Origins and Developments.” American Studies Journal. 52
(2008).
23
This term comes from the subtitle of the book Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From
Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, edited by Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2008.
10
about ongoing political instability in the Arab region, civilian deaths, and mass refugee
migrations.
Although the field of Arab American literary studies has, over the past decade, begun
to include a focus on Arab American women writers, to date there has been little scholarly
research on Arab American women’s poetry. Currently, there are a handful of books that
center on Arab American women’s poetry, but none of them do so exclusively. Nawar Al-
Hassan Golley’s collection Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing
(2007) contains an essay by Keith Feldman which argues that the poetry of Etel Adnan and
Suheir Hammad revalues “Arab as a transnational category through which to forward specific
literary projects in order to imagine a viable and inclusive Arab society built in a transnational
context and through transnational solidarities.”24 In this same collection, Carol Fadda-Conrey
ruminates on how Mohja Kahf and Suheir Hammad highlight a collective Arab American
Hyphenated Identities and Border Crossings (2008) analyzes one Arab American women
poet, Mohja Kahf, arguing that Kahf “emphasizes hybridity and diaspora rather than roots as a
Belonging (2014) considers literary and occasional visual texts dating from the 1990s that
“Poetic Geographies: Interracial Insurgency in Arab American Autobiographical Spaces,” in Nawar Al-Hassan
24
Golley’s Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2007.
25
“Weaving Poetic Autobiographies: Individual and Communal Identities in the Poetry of Mohja Kahf and
Suheir Hammad,” in Nawar Al-Hassan Golley’s Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through
Writing. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2007.
26
See Abdelrazek’s Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities and Border
Crossings, pg. 68.
11
“produce anti-imperialist and antihegemonic modalities of Arab-American citizenship and
belonging that pave the way for more solid connections among various communities of
color.”27 Fadda-Conrey includes all genres of writing, and she also incorporates poetry by
Suheir Hammad, Naomi Shihab Nye, D.H. Melhem, Elmaz Abinader, Mohja Kahf, Pauline
Kaldas, Etel Adnan, Leila Halaby, and Dima Hilal. Finally, Theri Pickens’ New Body
Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States (2014)
occupied Palestine.
While all these scholars have provided valuable contributions, there is a need to
consider Arab American women’s poetry as a collective body of work. To fill this research
gap, I began my study of this poetry in 1966—the year Etel Adnan published Moonshots—
and continued until 2016. This dissertation analyzes twelve Arab American women who
published at least one full-length poetry collection, composed in or translated into English, in
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: Lebanese Americans Etel Adnan, Elmaz
Abinader, and Hedy Habra; Syrian Americans Marian Haddad and Mohja Kahf; Jordanian
American Laila Halaby; and Palestinian Americans Naomi Shihab Nye, Lisa Suhair Majaj,
Nathalie Handal, Deema Shehabi, Suheir Hammad, and Hala Alyan. This group encompasses
nearly all the Arab American women poets who have written at least one full-length
collection of poetry and who trace their heritage to the Mashriq.28 After closely reading all
27
Ibid., pg. 8.
28
Notable poets who are not analyzed in this disseration include Lebanese Americans D.H. Mehlem and Adele
Ne Jame, Iraqi American Dunya Mikhail, and Egyptian American Pauline Kaldas, whose works did not prove as
relevant to the lines of inquiry pursued in this dissertation.
12
these poetry collections—a total of nearly 1,400 poems—I identified the most prevalent
themes: violence, maternity, love, memory, nature, death, ancestry, religion, urbanity, and
Palestine.29 Because violence is the most prevalent theme in this corpus, I contemplate
specifically how the poets respond to violence. My approach prioritizes the impact of Arab
Theoretical Frameworks
I take seriously Steven Salaita’s (2007) proposition that “it is possible to extract a
sociological epistemology from literature without ignoring its aesthetic integrity.”31 Salaita
draws the distinction between politicized criticism, which treats literature “as a metaphorical
straw man to facilitate a polemic,” and aesthetic criticism, which “invokes the political” and
“illustrates how political events are rendered artistically.”32 I do not seek to advance a
polemic—at least not intentionally—nor do I solely notice how political events are rendered
artistically. Instead, I attempt to understand how Arab American women create poetic
imaginaries that are responsive to both historical circumstances and to their contemporaneous
sociocultural and political contexts. I comment on the broader significance of these poetic
29
See Appendix A for a more detailed catalogue of themes in Arab American women’s poetry.
30
Because of my methodological focus on these themes, I concentrate less on providing a chronological account
of the historical and sociopolitical factors that have caused Arab regional violence. I also focus less on other
dimensions of this poetry, for example, the use of language and aesthetics. It is my hope that scholars in the
future will take up these topics, among others.
31
Salaita, Steven. Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics. New York: Palgrave, 2007, pg. 52.
32
Ibid., pg. 60-1.
13
imaginaries, aiming to understand how these writers—when considered collectively—
articulate a normative vision for the future of Arabs, both in America and in a transnational
context.
addresses the impact of Arab regional violence. In recent years, scholars of Arab literature
have sought to understand the types of violence that impacts people from this region. In her
work on Arab women’s literary responses to violence, Brinda Mehta (2014) defines violence
perspective, physical acts of dismemberment include war, poverty, sexual violence, border
violence, detention, and clandestine migration. Symbolic acts of dismemberment, on the other
hand, include patriarchal credos, minority citizenship, and the omissions of women in
historical accounts. Mehta conducts close readings of postcolonial Arab women writers from
Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt, and investigates migrations from this region to
European countries, mainly France. In contrast, I analyze Arab women poets who trace their
heritage to the Mashriq countries and on migrations primarily to the United States.
I do not examine what Mehta calls “symbolic violence” but rather the material
consequences of political and economic violence because the poets more often address these
types of violence. These poets write about various forms of political violence—colonialism,
refugee populations in diaspora. I attend to three predominant forms of political violence that
the poets address: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which precipitated Arab exile from
33
Mehta, Brinda J. Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices Against Violence. New York: Routledge, 2014,
pg. 3.
14
Greater Syria at the end of the nineteenth century; the establishment of the state of Israel in
1948, which displaced approximately 711,000 Palestinians; and the U.S. wars in Iraq. The
poets also address forms of economic violence resulting from the penury that often
accompanies diasporic populations. For this reason, I contemplate how these poets discuss the
This dissertation draws together theoretical frameworks from Arab diaspora studies,
Arab American literary studies, women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. As Ottmar Ette
(2006) observes, the wars and persecutions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the
stateless persons, and migrants have created multicultural, intercultural, and transcultural
movements, producing various kinds of cultural juxtaposition amounting to what Ette calls
“nomadic interaction.” The United States has become a meeting point and platform for
diverse developments in the worldwide literary network. The mobile, dynamic, and transient
transnational poetry’s globe-traversing influences, energies, and resistances have styled and
shaped English poetry from the modernist era to the present. He asserts that English can be
classified as a world language for poets, or “at least a semi-global conduit through which
poets encounter, advance, and redirect cross-cultural flows of tropes and words, ideas and
34
See Ette’s essay, “Literatures without a Fixed Abode: Figures of Vectorial Imagination Beyond Dichotomies
of National and World Literature,” published in ArabAmericas. Literary Entanglements of the American
Hemisphere and the Arab World, edited by Ottmar Ette and Friederike Pannewick. Frankfurt: Vervuert Verlag,
2006.
15
images.”35 Ramazani investigates how poets’ imaginative as well as literal mingling and
merging creates new inter-geographic spaces and new compound identities. While Ramazani
does not analyze Arab American women who write in English, I extend his focus on
internecine wars, domestic instability, and foreign interventions on people in the Arab region
and those in diaspora. Edward Said examines how the experiences of colonialism and
diaspora have impacted literature. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), he argues that “literary
experiences overlap and are interdependent despite national boundaries and coercively
legislated national autonomies.” For this reason, he underscores how literature is “crossing
boundaries and charting new territories in defiance of the classic canonic enclosures.”36
Rather than what he calls “the partial analysis offered by the various national or
systematically theoretical schools,” Said proposes “contrapuntal analysis…in which texts and
worldly institutions are seen working together,” an analysis that takes “into account all sorts
topography.”37 I draw upon two elements of contrapuntal analysis in this dissertation. First, I
meditate on how Arab American women poets depict the experience of crossing boundaries
and charting new territories. Additionally, I concentrate on how Arab American women
35
Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009, pg. 20.
36
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993, pg. 317.
37
Ibid., pg. 318.
16
poets’ spatial and geographical practices elucidate a “complex and uneven topography”—one
that complicates boundaries of time, space, homeland, new country, the human subject,
scholars who have scrutinized how boundaries are not only coercive, but also provide
opportunities for contemplation and insight. Nabeel Abraham (2000), for example, argues that
the “unmarked areas that exist between, across, and in spite of sociopolitical boundaries are
not simply areas of exclusion; they are also areas of innovation, creativity, and fundamental
change.”38 Similarly, Lisa Suhair Majaj (1999) argues that “we need not stronger and more
boundaries.”39 More recently, Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber (2010)
have emphasized that the geographic boundaries between Arab homelands and diasporas are
fluid and overlapping.40 In my attempt to understand the role of boundaries in this poetry, I
dialogue with a wide range of scholarship that addresses boundaries in the context of
women’s diasporic experiences, identity, trauma and recovery, childhood, neoliberalism, and
caring labor.
38
Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream, pg. 32.
39
Majaj, Lisa Suhair. “New Directions: Arab American Writing at Century's End.” Post-Gibran: Anthology of
New Arab American Writing, edited by Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash. New York: Syracuse UP, 1999, pg.
77.
40
Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, editors. Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender,
Violence, & Belonging. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2010. See the preface.
17
Arguments and Organization of Chapters
Arab American women poets, writing in the diasporic afterlives of violent origins,
often reflect on boundaries. A simple definition of a boundary is a line that marks the limit of
relationship to boundaries, meaning that they do not view boundaries as sacrosanct, but rather
as capable of being reimagined and transformed by those affected by the traumas of violence
chaos but considers how to improve the conditions of life. Arab American women poets relate
to boundaries in ways that are often generative, reparative, and restorative. Although they or
their ancestors have experienced or witnessed acts of violence, these poets do not perceive
people who have experienced violence as victims, but as agents who can contribute insights
that benefit not only Arab Americans, but also a wider collective. These Arab American
women poets conceptualize the writing of poetry as a process that, through engagement with
readers, moves in the direction of healing from violence. Throughout this dissertation, I notice
how these poets claim agency because of diasporic displacement, and how they respond to the
reimagination of boundaries. These poets reflect on boundaries between the homeland and the
new country, and the past and the present (Chapter 1); the boundaries of the human subject
(Chapter 2); the boundaries of childhood (Chapter 3); and the boundaries of gender roles
(Chapter 4).
18
Boundaries,” I argue that critical practices of theorizing diaspora as a polarity between the
homeland and the new country are inadequate because they do not reflect the temporal and
women poets articulate a transnational Arab subject formation that both extends and modifies
central ideas of the Mahjar literary tradition for late-twentieth and early twenty-first century
audiences. The first two poets I analyze—Lebanese American Elmaz Abinader and Syrian
American Mohja Kahf—engage directly with the period in which the Mahjar writers
produced their work. I explore how Abinader and Kahf develop what I call ancestralism.
Next, I attend to how Palestinian American Nathalie Handal extends the philosophical
contributions of the Mahjar writer Ameen Rihani. Specifically, I highlight how Handal
creates a what I call a cultural synthesis approach and focus on how her poetry critically
Post-Anthropocentric Era,” I observe that Arab American women’s poetry does not elucidate
a unified vision of the Arab American subject. Some Arab American women poets, in
particular Suheir Hammad and Mohja Kahf, articulate a kind of identity politics by making
political their social locations. These poets mobilize poetry to register resistance and to make
calls for transformation. There are compelling reasons to embrace identity politics because it
provides a way for people to claim a history and find a voice. In this chapter, I concentrate on
critiques of identity politics that point out the limits of fixing a location in difference. Rather
than concentrating on how individual identity has been shaped by structural power
inequalities, the Arab American women poets I focus on in this chapter—Deema Shehabi,
Leila Halaby, and Etel Adnan—respond to the conditions of diaspora by imagining identity as
19
dynamic and by moving beyond politicized social locations. This conception of identity
prioritizes individuals’ coexistence with other people and the environment. I analyze how
these poets’ portrayals of identity resonates with feminists and post-humanists who are
of Arab-U.S. Boundaries,” observes that several poets—Elmaz Abinader, Lisa Suhair Majaj,
Naomi Shihab Nye, and Deema Shehabi—reimagine the boundaries and roles of the child.
This chapter is not about the boundaries of childhood, per se, but about the creation of
childhood as an epistemological space through which boundaries between America and the
Arab region can be opened for the purpose of understanding. The poets I focus on in this
chapter do not depict childhood as a period in the lifecycle but as an epistemological space
from which to articulate insights into the problem of violence in the Arab region. Through
children’s perspectives, these poets illuminate specific ethical positions on how to respond
domains—domestic spaces and the natural environment—and their work contemplates how
healing from violence in the Arab region can occur by integrating insights that emerge from
both spaces. Although these poets specifically address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wars
in Iraq, their insights also have more general application because they establish broad ethical
Caring Labor, and the Boundaries of Gender Roles,” evaluates how Elmaz Abinader, Suheir
Hammad, Hala Alyan, Hedy Habra, Marian Haddad, and Naomi Shihab Nye reimagine
boundaries of gender roles. These poets address the importance of caring labor, which
20
involves connecting to other people and trying to help them meet their needs. I focus on how
these poets portray depict caring labor as a response to violence in the Arab region and
transnational dislocation. I also explore how Arab American women poets politicize the
affective dimensions of caring labor as a collective body of knowledge and consider what
implications this knowledge might have for the body politic of American society. These poets
emphasize that, during an incident of violence or in the context of war, labor breaks down
traditional gender roles, and these changes persist in diaspora. These poets also notice how
caring labor, in the context of a web of kinship, becomes an act of political resistance to
imperial violence. By unfixing caring labor from its association with female gender, Arab
American women poets depict men in a wide range of caregiving roles, including in the
natural world, and these characterizations illuminate ecologically sustainable labor practices.
Moreover, Arab American women poets articulate formations of caring labor that merge the
natural and the human landscapes—a perspective that does not externalize the environment,
but rather integrates the environment into production processes. The use of caring labor as a
mechanism for attempting to resolve trauma can serve as a basis for sustainable economic
21
CHAPTER II
Introduction
In her poem “Young Women” from In the Country of My Dreams (1999), Elmaz
Abinader meditates, from her perspective in late-twentieth century America, on her mother’s
childhood in the region that was once the Ottoman province of Greater Syria. Abinader
portrays her relationship with her mother as a process of mutual effort in reconstructing their
ancestral legacy. “We examine each other’s lives,” she writes, “not able to distinguish one
line from the next, lost in the tissue of legacy.” In these lines, Abinader emphasizes that
ancestral connections cut through boundaries of time and space, a prominent theme that recurs
in the larger corpus of Arab American women’s poetry. This chapter investigates how Arab
American women who have experienced the conditions of diaspora reflect on boundaries,
both spatial and temporal, in their poetry. More broadly, the chapter aims to illuminate the
Arab American women poets, writing from diverse standpoints—secular, Muslim, and
transnational migrations. In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha observes, “Where,
22
once, the transmission of national traditions was the major theme of a world literature,
perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political
argues that “a range of contemporary critical theories suggest that it is from those who have
learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking.”42 Bhabha’s observations are
especially salient in the years after 2011, when the largest refugee crisis since WWII—mostly
and displacement. Arab American women poets attempt to negotiate, as Bhabha puts it,
between 1999 and 2012, a period of many significant events including the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks, the subsequent “war on terror,” the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the
destabilization of Iraq, the Arab Spring movements, the removal of Gaddafi, and the civil war
in Syria, which began in 2011 and displaced an estimated five million people outside of the
country. During this period, in the U.S., and indeed in most Western countries, an
increasingly polarized discourse about migration can be generalized into two broad
perspectives. The first, an assimilationist approach, prioritizes migrants adopting the values of
their new country. The second, a multicultural approach, encourages migrants to retain their
41
See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994, pg. 12.
42
Ibid., pg. 172.
43
Ibid., pg. 213.
23
original culture. Proponents of assimilation find the multicultural approach problematic
because they value the primacy of the nation state and a unified national culture. Advocates of
multiculturalism see flaws in the assimilationist approach because they believe that it does not
often recognize importance of migrants’ original cultures and may not adequately consider the
legacy of Western imperialism. This chapter examines how Arab American women poets
manner that does not recapitulate either the assimilation or the multicultural framework. The
poets, through their transnational and historicized accounts of Arab migrations, ponder the
Over the past decade, scholars have expanded the terrain of Arab American literary
studies to include transnational migrations. Steven Salaita (2007) advocates for a study of
Arab American literature that emphasizes transcultural interchange. Keith Feldman (2007)
forward specific literary projects in order to imagine a viable and inclusive Arab society built
(2008) argues that, in the late-twentieth century, Arab American writers moved from an
44
Feldman focuses specifically on the works of Etel Adnan and Suheir Hammad in his essay “Poetic
Geographies: Interracial Insurgency in Arab American Autobiographical Spaces” in Nawar Al-Hassan Golley’s
edited collection, Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing. Syracuse: Syracuse UP,
2007.
45
Abdelrazek, Amal Talaat. Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities and Border
Crossings. New York: Cambria, 2008, pg. 5.
24
dictated by the US nation state, producing “anti-imperialist and antihegemonic modalities of
Arab-American citizenship and belonging that pave the way for more solid connections
among various communities of color.”46 While all these scholars have made vital
contributions, what has been less studied is how contemporary Arab American writers, in
their transnationally-focused work, build on, and depart from, earlier Arab American literary
traditions.
A notable exception is Waïl Hassan (2011), who studies the development of Arab
American literature from its origins in the late-nineteenth century to the present. He observes
that the first Arab American writers—who identified their tradition as the Mahjar (migrant)
literary movement—aimed to synthesize what they viewed as the “East” and “West.” Ameen
Rihani’s novel, The Book of Khalid (1911), for example, envisioned a Hegelian dynamic that
would eventually blend east and west into a higher synthesis of civilizations. Khalil Gibran’s
visionary, Nietzchean idealist, Eastern mystic, and Christian evangelist. Hassan argues that
Gibran “embraced the role of Oriental prophet and hermit” and that Gibran’s spiritualism
monolith, the polar opposite of secular ‘Western’ rationalism.”47 Hassan’s analysis of the
Mahjar period is important because the writers of this period articulated philosophical
questions, thematics, and aesthetics that established an Arab American transnational literary
46
Carol Fadda-Conrey. Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of
Citizenship and Belonging. New York: NYU Press, 2014, pg. 4.
47
Hassan, Waïl. Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab
British Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011, pg. 73.
25
tradition that influenced several generations of Arab American writers. Hassan’s
investigations of the Mahjar writers’ contributions, however, has not yet been considered in
In this chapter, I seek to understand how Arab American women poets develop a
transnational Arab subject formation that both extends and modifies central ideas of the
Mahjar literary tradition for late-twentieth and early twenty-first century audiences. The first
two poets I analyze—Lebanese American Elmaz Abinader and Syrian American Mohja
Kahf—engage directly with the period in which the Mahjar writers produced their work. I
investigate how Abinader and Kahf represent what I call ancestralism. Next, I explore how
Palestinian American Nathalie Handal extends the philosophical interest of the influential
Mahjar writer Ameen Rihani. Specifically, I examine how Handal articulates a what I call a
cultural synthesis approach and explore how her poetry critically interrogates the viability of
Elmaz Abinader’s poetry collection In the Country of My Dreams (1999) and Mohja
Kahf’s E-mails from Scheherazad (2003) are unique among Arab American women poets for
their attention to late-nineteenth century Arab migrations to Brazil and the U.S. Abinader (b.
1954) is a second-generation immigrant, born in the U.S. to parents who migrated from what
is now the nation-state of Lebanon, while Kahf (b. 1967) is a first-generation immigrant, born
in Syria, whose family came to the U.S. in 1971. Both poets portray the earliest period of
Arab mass migration to Brazil and America by exploring the impact of political violence that
26
precipitated Arab exile from Greater Syria at the end of the nineteenth century. Both Abinader
and Kahf engage in poetic recovery projects by incorporating the lives of their female
ancestors and their descendants into the history of the Mahjar period.48
In this section, I observe in the work of Abinader and Kahf a response to the
phenomenon of Arab migrations that I call ancestralism. Although several Arab American
women poets incorporate ancestralism into their work, the strongest examples can be found in
Abinader and Kahf’s poetry. By ancestralism, I mean the ways in which diasporic Arabs
perform emotional and cultural labor to connect their new country to their homeland. The
Ancestralism is a personal and familial-focused endeavor that creates the conditions for Arab
The concept “maternal cartographies” signifies the method by which both Abinader
and Kahf articulate ancestralism. I use the word maternal to denote the ways in which these
poems do not necessarily center on mothers (although mothers are present in these poems) but
on the maternal as a concept. I use the term “cartographies” to indicate that this poetry draws
figurative maps of Arab migrations to North and South America during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. These maternal cartographies illuminate the ways in which
diasporic Arabs experience and portray dislocation from their homelands. Through maternal
cartographies, Abinader and Kahf characterize the responses of female ancestors to the
circumstances of the violence they endured in the Arab region, and their responses as
displaced people in Brazil. These poets use maternal cartographies to reimagine boundaries of
48
Except for Afifa Karam, the Mahjar period had a dearth of female writers and cultural representations of
women’s lives.
27
space and time. They do not use maternal figures to show how “the ancestral homeland is
mostly unattainable,” as Carol Fadda-Conrey argues.49 Rather, maternal cartographies are the
method through which these poets attempt to understand the problem of violence in their
ancestral homelands, and through which they articulate the process of building new lives in
the aftermath of violence. Through maternal cartographies, Abinader and Kahf connect their
homelands and the new land through the symbolic healing of intergenerational trauma.
Abinader’s In the Country of My Dreams was published in 1999, five years after Joe Kadi’s
Feminists. This anthology emerged in the context of U.S. women of color feminist thought
and aimed, among other goals, to establish Arab American women as a subject formation
analogous to other women of color in the United States, to establish a search for origins that is
cognizant of the historical legacy of colonialism, and to emphasize the impact of ancestors on
shaping heritage and identity.50 Abinader’s poetry collection was published two years after
Evelyn Shakir’s Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States (1997).
Shakir describes her book—a collection of auto/biographical essays based on her life and on
the lives of her mother, grandmothers, and the larger community of Arab American women—
in metaphorical terms as a maternal project. Shakir further characterizes her book as “the
49
Fadda-Conrey focuses on how Arab American literature often positions the grandmother as “an authoritative
representation of (for the most part) an unattainable ancestral homeland,” pg. 39.
50
See the introduction to Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian
Feminists.
28
house our mothers built” in which “all the branches of the family” converge, the “doors
thrown open to old and young and middle-aged, Muslim and Christian, Syrian, Lebanese, and
and the women of color feminist project of Kadi, does several types of cultural work. One
accomplishment is that Abinader writes women into the history of the Mahjar period by
reflecting, from the late-twentieth century, on the trauma her ancestors endured in this period
and the legacy of this trauma in the late-twentieth century. Abinader’s poetry is a
identity formations. Her writings develop an inclusive transnational Arab community that
privileges intergenerational relationships. Unlike the Mahjar poets, Abinader’s In the Country
of My Dreams is not concerned with synthesizing Arab and Western cultures; her interest is in
using poetry to symbolically heal the traumatic legacies of late-nineteenth century Arab
migrations.
In her poem “Pleasure is Freedom-song” (1999), Abinader calls attention to the impact
of violence perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks, specifically exploring how this violence
motivated her ancestors’ migrations to Brazil and the United States. Beginning in the mid-
1870s, more than 95,000 people from the Ottoman province of Greater Syria (now the nation-
states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories) left their homelands
51
Evelyn Shakir, Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States, pg. 196.
29
and immigrated mostly to the United States and Brazil.52 Immigration from this region to the
United States continued until 1924, when the U.S. severely limited immigration from non-
European countries. Abinader’s poem considers the same historical conditions as the Mahjar
writer Abraham Rihbany, who came of age in Ottoman-controlled Greater Syria. In his
autobiography, A Far Journey (1913), Rihbany describes the reign of Abdul Hamid II (1876-
1909) as “an iron cage against which our wings beat in vain…nothing was really secure in a
land where the ruler maintained a firm hold upon his subjects by promoting divisions and
instigating massacres among them.”53 Rihbany’s memoir examines his personal experiences
during the decline of the Ottoman empire, while Abinader creates a maternal cartography that
represents the relationships between the poet, her aunt, and her mother.
Abinader begins “Pleasure is Freedom-song” with an image of her Aunt Azzizy at her
home in the United States, standing in her living room, “surrounded by pictures of Christ.” In
estimated 90 percent of those who left to establish a new life abroad.54 As Anna Akasoy
(2006) observes, “During the two decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century
the Levant witnessed a mass exodus unprecedented in its history. Famines, political violence,
oppression and in general the severe socio-economic crisis the Ottoman Empire suffered
during the last years of its existence drove substantial numbers into exile, above all members
52
Most scholars, including Randa Kayyali (2006), estimate the number of Arabs immigrating to the United
States during this period at 95,000. Large numbers also immigrated to Brazil during this time.
53
Rihbany, A Far Journey, pg. 156-7.
54
Evelyn Shakir, Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States: “Most who came—90
percent or more—were Christian,” pg. 24.
30
of the Christian confessions.”55 During the long nineteenth century (1798-1922), as Donald
Quataert (2000) writes, the central Ottoman state exerted more power over its subjects and
over competing domestic power clusters than ever before in Ottoman history, due to its loss of
territory because of domestic rebellions and imperial wars.56 The central state employed an
expanding bureaucracy and military—and a host of other new technologies such as the
telegraph, railroads, and photography—to control, weaken, or destroy domestic rivals. In the
1830s, state surveillance systems attained new levels of intrusiveness. Networks of spies, at
Ottoman subjects immigrated to the Americas between 1880 and 1924.58 The vast majority
were Christians, and many left after 1909, when conscription of Ottoman Christians was
enacted. Abinader’s family migrated from the Ottoman province of Greater Syria, specifically
the territory that is now known as the nation-state of Lebanon. As Suad Joseph (2009) points
out, “Most Lebanese have histories of migration either internally within Lebanon, regionally
in the Arab world, or to non-Arab countries.”59 Indeed, between 1840 and 1870, about one-
55
Akasoy, Anna. “Exile and Alienation in the Poetry of the Early Southern Mahjar” in Ottmar Ette and
Friederike Pannewick, eds. ArabAmericas. Literary Entanglements of the American Hemisphere and the Arab
World. Frankfurt: Vervuert Verlag, 2006.
56
See Donald Quataert’s The Ottoman Empire, 1800-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, pg. 54.
57
Ibid., pg. 63.
58
See Arab American National Museum – Arab American History:
<http://www.arabamericanmuseum.org/Arab+American+History.id.150.htm> Accessed 9 Apr. 2016.
59
Joseph, Suad. “Geographies of Lebanese Families: Women as Transnationals, Men as Nationals, and Other
Problems with Transnationalism.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. 5.3 (2009): 120-144, pg. 139.
31
fourth of the population of Mount Lebanon left the region; and between 1890 and 1920, over
one-third of the peasant population of Mount Lebanon migrated to the Americas. During
WWI, a British and French blockade (1915-18) of the Syrian and Lebanese coastlines
impeded the entry of food and caused the deaths, from starvation, of more than 100,000
Imperial violence in the Ottoman province of Greater Syria interceded into the
domestic sphere with devastating effects. Abinader describes how her Aunt Azzizy “cried /
out to her dead father,” then transitions to a memory of his emigration from Greater Syria:
Azzizy “looks into his eyes / as he leaves the village to go to Brazil / afraid she’ll never see
him again.” At this point, Abinader situates herself in the scene as an observer who sees
Azzizy watching her father leaving, disappearing “into the mist that hides the Turks / who
arrive some days later to take / all they own: pots, jewelry, jars of food. / Everything but what
was hidden on their bodies.” In this stanza, Abinader asserts a desire to return to the scene of
her aunt’s traumatic memory: her father’s decision to leave Greater Syria to escape religious,
In Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (2011), Marianne
Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller reflect on the role of generational histories and genealogies in
acts of memory as well as fantasies of return. As they assert, “The desire for return always
arises from a need to redress an injustice, one often inflicted upon an entire group of people
caused by displacement or dispossession, the loss of home and of family autonomy, the
60
See Gualtieri’s Chapter 1, “From Internal to International Migration”; Evelyn Shakir’s Bint Arab: Arab and
Arab American Women in the United States (1997); and Gregory Orfalea’s The Arab Americans: A History
(2006).
32
conditions of expulsion, colonization, and migration.”61 Abinader’s maternal cartography
reimagines the boundaries of time and space by articulating an imaginary return to Greater
Syria amidst the moment of her aunt’s father’s migration. By situating herself as a witness,
and by dramatizing her aunt’s cries and fears, Abinader articulates a redress to the injustice
example of what Nancy K. Miller calls the transpersonal, which “emphasizes the links that
connect an individual not only back in time vertically through earlier generations but also in a
horizontal, present tense of affinities.”62 Abinader interacts with the Syrian homeland from
the perspective of the late-twentieth century United States. Her poetic imaginary breaks down
the boundaries of time and space to engage with her aunt’s traumatic memories during the
Mahjar period, thereby incorporating her aunt’s memories into the corpus of Arab American
literature.
Abinader also develops maternal cartographies through her mother’s memories of her
family’s persecution in Ottoman Greater Syria. Abinader’s mother migrated from Greater
Syria to the United States and later shared her experiences with her poet daughter, who
remembers these stories as vivid flashes of scenes: “My mother’s face closes as her stories
unfold: / the one of the uncle buried in a cave, his body / smothered in the mountains of chalk
and limestone, / another of a great uncle hung by his feet / while soldiers burned what named
them— / photographs, letters, diaries; old books.” Abinader contemplates the trauma of the
physical violence and deaths endured by her ancestors under Turkish rule, emphasizing
61
Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller. Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (2011),
pg. 7.
62
Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller. Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (2011),
pg. 5.
33
attacks on their identity as commemorated in the specific artifacts that gave her uncles’ lives
meaning as individuals. Abinader emphasizes how Turkish soldiers burned her great-uncles’
written work: their letters and diaries, items that “named them.” The collective social trauma
of Turkish repression entailed destroying Christian subjects’ writings, depriving them of the
ability to name themselves, to make their own meaning both in relationship to themselves, as
signified by their diaries, and in relationship with others, as represented by their letters.
written work to her own poetry—as an integral part of healing intergenerational trauma.
Although Abinader’s elucidation of her family’s experiences under Turkish rule includes a
literal image of excavation, as her mother’s memory of her uncle requires excavating the
memory of his body from its burial in a cave, these memories are not simply buried beneath
the surface. Abinader’s reflection on her ancestors’ traumatic memories in the Ottoman
province of Greater Syria does not position the homeland in the past; rather, it is imbricated in
the present and emerges from her mother’s memories in a visual tableau embedded in the
her mother: “She shivers touching her own belly, the womb / that held children who did not
live / and she stares at the once empty arms.” Here Abinader shows how her mother’s
individual psychological trauma of losing her children enables her to understand the collective
social trauma of losing her uncles in the context of Turkish political violence. Abinader’s
34
out, emotions are helpful and even necessary to the construction of knowledge. Women’s
work of emotional nurturance, Jaggar asserts, has given them a special acuity in recognizing
hidden emotions and in understanding the genesis of those emotions. Jaggar contends that
standpoint of women—is a perspective that offers a less partial and distorted and therefore
theory on the epistemology of emotions. First, Abinader’s maternal cartographies show that
Abinader’s poetry brings together the viewpoint of the author, who is writing in late-twentieth
century America, and the time she addresses: the late-nineteenth century migration of her
ancestors from Greater Syria. In this way, Abinader’s maternal cartographies emphasize an
Jaggar calls the “standpoint of the subordinated” can arise from embodied experiences such as
maternal loss.
reflects on the impact of her mother’s exile from Greater Syria. Throughout the poem,
embodied manifestations of pain, specifically in the hands. The poem explores the legacy of
pain as the poet imagines her mother preparing to immigrate to America—“on a steamer trunk
Jaggar, Alison M. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” The Feminist Theory Reader.
63
35
/ at twenty-four—two years a bride.” The narrator connects to her mother through an
empathetic understanding of the pains associated with domestic labor. At the beginning of the
poem, the narrator, while straightening a rug on her floor, notices that her hands are like her
mother’s and asks, “What kind of pain made your thumbs split? / Your wedding night, you
scrubbed the house on your hands and knees.” This experience of physical pain creates a bond
between the narrator and her mother, and the poem articulates the nature of their relationship
In this passage, the poet illuminates the reciprocity involved in understanding her relationship
with her mother: they examine “each other’s lives” as a process of mutual understanding. This
understanding comes through reflecting on the pain of intergenerational trauma, which, as the
phrase “the scar of hope” indicates, is inextricably linked to hope. Abinader uses an image of
a scar to show that the mother and daughter learn how to mend their pain. Importantly, this
experience of both mother and daughter using their scar-bearing, yet healed, fingers to
physically touch the “road maps” that have led both of them away from their homeland.
transmission of physical pain from mother to daughter, Abinader does not remain fixated only
on pain. She concludes the poem by expressing her desire to give her mother educational
opportunities as part of a liberatory process. The narrator searches her mother’s trunk “for the
36
signs of a young woman,” but is not able to find any reading material, so she wants to give her
mother a book. Abinader addresses her mother directly: “I want to give you one made / of rice
paper or send you to Rio / where you can dance. Where you can / wave your hands in the air
and no one / can capture them.” Here, Abinader emphasizes her desire to change the course of
her mother’s life by either providing her with educational access, or by sending her mother to
a new location—Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—home to the largest number of diasporic Arabs. The
image of her mother’s hands waving in the air creates a visual image of liberation,
illuminating Abinader’s desire to heal her mother from the pains of domestic labor.
the imagination. She resolves her mother’s traumatic experiences by imagining her mother
with educational opportunities and by envisioning her mother—liberated from the pain of
domestic labor—in a new location: Rio de Janeiro, a reimagination of both spatial and
temporal boundaries. Through her emphasis on the role of language and literacy in creating
imagined possibilities for her mother’s life, Abinader’s ancestralism portrays the process of
Greater Syria and their resettlement in Brazil are taken up by Mohja Kahf in her 2003 poetry
collection E-mails from Scheherazad. This collection, published in the United States shortly
after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, is often read as testament, as Suaad Muhammad
Alqahtani (2017) puts it, to the “unending struggles faced by Muslims to fit in the American
37
community.”64 While Kahf does indeed reflect on Muslim American subjectivity in the
context of increasing discrimination and surveillance, lesser studied are Kahf’s historical
poems, which develop a transnational Mashriqi perspective that considers her origins in
Damascus, Syria and emigration to America as a young child in 1971. Kahf’s book, published
in 2003, followed in the wake of two important contributions to Arab American feminist
scholarship. The first, Ella Shohat’s edited collection Talking Visions: Multicultural
minorities who have “analogical structure of feelings.” 65 The following year, in 2002, Rabab
Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber began a series of conversations which led to
a 2005 special journal issue and a 2010 anthology, Arab & Arab American Feminisms:
Gender, Violence, & Belonging.66 This anthology, as the editors write, “belongs to the
tradition of Arab and Arab American knowledge production” that “engages in a ‘theory in the
flesh’ or knowledge derived from lived experiences and producing critical lenses through
which we see and analyze the social and political world.”67 These editors state that the authors
in this volume aim to build alliances between Arab and Arab American feminists, Native
feminists, U.S. feminists of color, and diasporic feminists from the global South. Moreover,
64
Alqahtani, Suaad Muhammad. “Arab-American Poetic Resistance in E-mails from Scheherazad.” Studies in
Language and Literature. 14.5 (2017): 19-25. See pg. 20.
65
Shohat, Ella. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2001, pg. 32.
See the special issue “Arab and Arab American Feminist Perspectives” in the MIT Electronic Journal of
66
Middle East Studies (2005) and Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, editors. Arab & Arab
American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2010.
67
Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, editors. Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender,
Violence, & Belonging. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2010, pg. xxx.
38
book aims to “make clear how the geographic boundaries between Arab homelands and
diasporas are fluid and overlapping.”68 This sociopolitical milieu provides a context in which
Kahf’s “The Skaff Mother Tells the Story” and “Word from the Younger Skaff”—
both of which trace the history of Ottoman Turks’ conscription of men from Greater Syria to
fight wars on behalf of the languishing Ottoman Empire—might not, upon a first reading,
seem relevant to the late-twentieth and twenty-first century. Yet Kahf’s historical poems
U.S. and the Arab region. Kahf’s work, like Abinader’s, engages in a process of poetic
recovery to write the stories of women and their descendants into the history of the Mahjar
period. However, unlike Abinader’s historical poems, Kahf configures an Arab male
subjectivity that both humanizes Arab men and establishes a genealogy of Arab male ancestry
in the Western hemisphere. Kahf does not follow the Mahjar poets’ inquiry into the question
of whether a philosophical synthesis between the West and the Arab region is possible.
Instead, Kahf’s historical poems evince an eminently pragmatic approach to the phenomenon
of Arab migrations. Kahf underscores ancestral Arab culture as a basis for survival in Western
countries.
While Abinader’s poems locate the speaker in the late-twentieth century United States,
Kahf’s poem “The Skaff Mother Tells the Story” (2001) is a sestina written from the
perspective of a woman who helped her sons to flee Greater Syria, thus avoiding Turkish
conscription to fight the Balkan War (1912). The sestina form—comprised of six stanzas of
68
Ibid., pg. xxxv.
39
six lines followed by a tercet (a stanza of three lines)—is structured through a recurrent
pattern of the words that end each line. Kahf chooses the following end words: bundle, wool,
survive, away, war, and boys, reflecting the central themes involved in her evocation of
At the beginning of the poem, Kahf establishes the historical context: “The Safar
Barlik had begun—the Balkan War—And the Turks were conscripting all our boys, / Wasting
their lives.” Through the first-person point of perspective, Kahf describes the mother’s desire
to save her sons’ lives by preparing for their migration. Evelyn Shakir (1997) documents the
struggles of people during this period, when women in the Ottoman province of Greater Syria
bore the brunt of caring for their families.69 Like Abinader, Kahf portrays women’s caretaking
labor—the mother wraps a bundle for her sons with “mincemeat pies, a scarf of wool”—
undertaken amidst Turkish violence: “Turks stormed our homes, bayoneted the bundled /
Carpets to find the hidden sons, take them to war.” Kahf utilizes the sestina form to repeat the
image of the bundle, thereby drawing the connection between the bundled resources she
prepared for her sons, and the sons themselves hidden in bundled carpets—both are desperate
acts aimed at achieving the most basic of maternal goals: survival. Kahf illuminates the
specific type of violence attending military conscription in this period: political violence
interceding into the domestic space. The boys were saved by a “cousin who knew a merchant
who exported wool / And had a ship in port. They hid and sailed away.”
After her husband’s death from cholera, the woman is left with her thoughts,
69
Bint Arab, pg. 32
40
wondering about her sons’ fate: “are they cared for, have they survived / The sea, the tides of
life, these years?” With no one to care for, the mother has “spun forty years’ worth” of wool.
Over this period, she has contemplated her sons’ experiences: “Their lives’ small bundle /
Must have wasted smaller. Word stopped. We survived / On scraps, rumors passed across the
ocean about my boys.” Here Kahf connects the survival of her sons with the mother’s
survival. Left behind, in a community of similarly situated mothers, the narrator of the poem
equates her son’s physical survival with her own emotional survival. Ultimately, the mother
relates her individual psychological trauma to a collective social trauma experienced by many
people in Ottoman-controlled Greater Syria: “We sent them away, / I swear, to keep them
with us; they were only boys. / Fourteen and fifteen is too young to suffer war.” The
emotional cost is devastating, and tragically ironic: the mother’s desperation for her son’s
survival meant that she would have to suffer the loss of her sons. At the end of the poem, the
mother reflects on the “wool” of her heart, which “is threadbare after all these years and
wars.” She is left to “Keep in a bundle the names of my boys / Survive, we told them, and sent
them unthinkably away.” Through the voice of one mother, Kahf documents the struggles of a
While conventional immigration narratives tend to focus on Arabs’ lives after leaving
the homeland, Kahf’s poem centers on the lives of those who never left Greater Syria. Renate
Papke (2008) discusses how poverty and war force women to practice different forms of
mothering. When men are forced to join the international labor force or the army, they
abandon their families for long intervals or forever.”70 In Kahf’s poem, the woman’s husband
is not forced to join a labor force or army; he dies of cholera, while her sons end up in Brazil,
70
Poems at the Edge of Differences: Mothering in New English Poetry by Women (2008), pg. 37.
41
one of the major locations of Arabs who left their homelands. Kahf’s documentation of one
mother’s response to sending her sons away is an example of ancestralism produced through a
maternal cartography that connects women in Greater Syria to other regions of the world
where their children established new lives. Although Kahf depicts the emotional hardship of
the mother, to some extent relying on the “mater dolorosa” (mother of sorrows) archetype
(Cooke 1996), she also portrays the mother’s active engagement in her son’s survival, which
lives there after fleeing the Syrian homeland. What is important here—at the time of the
poem’s publication in a post-September 11, 2001 context—is that Kahf humanizes the Arab
son and situates him a transnational Arab community with a long history in North America.
Kahf reimagines spatial and temporal boundaries in the son’s response to the mother,
which is articulated in her poem “Word from the Younger Skaff” (2001). Kahf uses the form
of the son’s letter to reflect on ancestral transmission from a son in diaspora to his mother, left
behind in the Syrian homeland. The maternal cartography of this poem moves, as he writes,
“like the sea voyage / from Beirut to Brazil.” From Brazil, the adult son—“fifty-five now,
married”—writes to tell his mother about his physical and emotional journeys, specifically his
process of healing from trauma. Kahf begins the poem with the son’s description of the
artifacts his parents gave him: “The Ottoman liras / father gave us and the mincemeat pies /
you wrapped in a woolen bundle / were everything I and my brother / had from home. They
had to last a lifetime.” Kahf emphasizes survival, both physical and emotional, as the son is
aware that he will never see his parents again. The artifacts—both the father’s Ottoman liras
and the mother’s mincemeat pies—fixate, for him, the survival of his parents in his memory.
Kahf writes that the son’s hunger “still lurches” inside of him, “like the sea voyage from
42
Beirut to Brazil.” Here, Kahf depicts how the son’s memories of the sea voyage are still
lodged in his body, and how the hunger he feels provides a connection between his homeland
and his forced resettlement in Brazil. Kahf’s ancestralism collapses the spatial boundaries
between Beirut and Brazil, and the temporal boundaries between the time of the son’s
Throughout the poem, Kahf underscores the son’s literal and figurative hunger for his
homeland by showing how his ancestry becomes concretized in domestic labor, specifically
though the preparation of food with his daughter: “My little girl knows how / to make your
mincemeat pies. / I described them to her and we mixed / flour in yeast in different measures,
/ laughing at failures until we got it.” Here, the son’s active engagement with his daughter in
mincemeat pies—links the memory of his mother’s caretaking labor in Ottoman Syria to his
life in Brazil. The son’s collaborative effort with his daughter to produce mincemeat pies is
itself a maternal cartography, one that connects the memory of his mother in Greater Syria to
his daughter in Brazil. Kahf creates a maternal cartography that is inextricably tied to
ancestral relationships. The son’s wife is not able to learn how to make the mincemeat pies, as
she “cooked only dishes / she’d learned from her own avó.” Here, Kahf indicates through the
Portuguese word “avó,” meaning grandmother, that the son married a Brazilian woman. In the
last stanza of the poem, Kahf has the son address his mother with in Portuguese—“O mãe”—
which shows how his forced dislocation affected his linguistic patterns:
43
you or your kitchen fire, makes
Syrian meat pies proper,
baked golden and sealed
with your same thumbpress,
precise as an Ottoman coin.
In this stanza, the son, writing from Brazil after his mother’s death, memorializes his
mother by emphasizing the continuation of her heritage through her granddaughter. Kahf
heritage, and the importance of maintaining relationships through acts of domestic labor. The
son’s act of preparing food with his daughter is a transmission of his mother’s caretaking
ritual that was severed when the mother had to send her sons to Brazil to escape Ottoman
conscription.
observations about the role of food in Arab American women’s poetry. Handal (2006) argues
that food has been one of the most powerful cultural transmitters enabling Arab Americans to
preserve their roots.71 She observes how Arab American women poets use food to define Arab
societies, people, and the writers themselves. It is often through food that these women writers
experience Arab culture, become Arab, and pass this culture down to their children. Although
the preparation of food has often been seen as taking freedom away from women, Arab
American women writers have viewed being in the kitchen as liberating instead of being
oppressive, as offering avenues of creativity instead of being confining. They have used food
71
Handal, Nathalie. “Our Roots in the Mezze: The Politics of Food and Arab-American Women Poets.”
ArabAmericas. Literary Entanglements of the American Hemisphere and the Arab World, edited by Ottmar Ette
and Friederike Pannewick. Frankfurt: Vervuert Verlag, 2006, pg. 138.
44
rhetoric as a vehicle to create a new space where the kitchen is a place of expression, personal
and cultural, a place of self-development and enrichment. Arab American women view food
What is unique about Kahf’s interest in food is that a male figure performs the
domestic labor that maintains ancestral connections; the meat pies are transplanted from their
place of origin in Syria and survive in Brazil as a legacy of his mother’s life and work. The
son’s active engagement with his daughter in the process of remembering, and eventually
successfully reproducing, his mother’s mincemeat pies, links the memory of his mother’s
caretaking labor in Ottoman Syria to his life in Brazil. The son’s collaborative effort with his
daughter to produce mincemeat pies reimagines the boundaries between the two places,
maternal relationships through cooking—not only the process of cooking, but also the act of
writing about cooking. Through a letter, Kahf illumines the son’s process of healing from
trauma: cooking resurrects an ancestral caretaking ritual that he participates in with his
daughter. Kahf’s creation of a maternal male figure unfixes the maternal from its association
with biological female sex by showing how men can also perform maternal roles. This poem’s
2003 publication in the U.S., amidst the increased discrimination and surveillance,
subjectivity with a long history in the Western hemisphere. While Kahf and Abinader do not
examine, in these poems, the philosophical question of whether a synthesis between Western
and Arab cultures is possible, the poetry of Nathalie Handal takes up this issue, and it is to her
45
poetry on Palestinian exile that I now turn as a source of insight into another poetic response
Cultural Synthesis and Transnational Palestinian Exile in the Poetry of Nathalie Handal
Large migrations of Palestinians to the United States began in 1948 when the U.S.
Congress relaxed quotas and enabled 80,000 Arabs, most of whom were Palestinians, to
Nye, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Deema Shehabi, Suheir Hammad, and Hala Alyan—represent
American identity formations. While Handal is interested in these topics, her work is more
cosmopolitan in scope. Although like Handal, Naomi Shihab Nye considers her travels—
mostly to the Arab region and to Latin America—Handal’s poetry concentrates more on
transnational cultural exchanges between regions, not only between Palestine and America,
Handal was born in Haiti, in 1969, to Palestinians exiled from their homeland due to
the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. She defines herself as a “Bethlehemite—who
is also French and American—with Latin American, African and Asian influences,” and as a
“Mediterranean who is also very much a city person.”73 Although she has lived in several
72
See Michael Suleiman, Arabs in America: Building Toward a New Future. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.
73
From an interview with Nathalie Handal, by Rewa Zeinati, published in Sukoon Magazine, 13 August 2013.
Available at: http://www.sukoonmag.com/responsive/interview-with-nathalie-handal/. Accessed 6 Dec. 2016.
46
cities in France, the Arab region, the United Kingdom, and the United States, currently she
divides her time between Paris and New York City. When reflecting on her exile, Handal
explains, “I don’t have a mother tongue. I grew up speaking many languages, and these
different languages have slipped into my English. My English is cross-fertilized with French,
Spanish, Arabic, Creole…I love the idea of a bridge of words, a bridge of poems connecting
us...showing us what it means to be human.”74 Handal composes her work in English and
incorporates French, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Creole, and, to a lesser extent Russian and
Sanskrit words.
When reading Handal’s poetry, it is useful to place her poetry into conversation with
her contemporary, the Palestinian scholar Edward Said who in “Reflections on Exile” (2002)
distinguishes exiles from refugees, expatriates, and émigrés. The term émigré broadly refers
to anyone who emigrates to a new country, while the word expatriate signifies one who
voluntarily lives in an alien country, usually for personal or social reasons. The concept of a
refugee, Said argues, is “a creation of the twentieth-century state” and suggests “large herds
Said states that exile is “an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,
between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.”76 As Said
writes, “true exile is a condition of terminal loss” in which “exiles are cut off from their roots,
74
From an interview with Nathalie Handal, by Kaitlyn Seay, published in Wild River Review,
http://www.wildriverreview.com/lit/poetry/love-and-strange-horses-the-freedom-of-poetry/. Accessed 30 Sept.
2016.
75
Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002,
pg. 137.
76
Ibid.
47
their land, their past.”77 The role of exiled poets and writers, he contends, is to lend dignity to
a condition “legislated to deny dignity.”78 Said argues that “exile originated in the age-old
practice of banishment. Once banished, the exile lives out an anomalous and miserable life,
perspective on the nature of exile. Although Handal, like Said, discusses the misery and
stigma of exile, she also embraces traveling as a means of establishing peaceful cross-cultural
not available to most Palestinians. Despite this fact, her writings are significant because it
spaces. In this section, I read Handal’s poem “Amrika” from her collection The Lives of Rain
(2005) as a revival of the cultural synthesis approach articulated in the early-twentieth century
Mahjar (migrant) literary movement, applied to the sociocultural circumstances of the early
twenty-first century. In contemplating how Handal’s work revitalizes the central philosophical
themes of the Mahjar tradition, I examine the ideas of Ameen Rihani, the main figure of this
literary movement. As Waïl Hassan (2011) points out, Rihani, like other Mahjar writers,
envisioned a Hegelian dynamic that would eventually blend east and west into a higher
as Jacob Berman (2012) describes, “blends Orient and Occident, modern and traditional,
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid., pg. 143-4.
48
Islamic and Christian, America and Arabia to create Mahjar or migrant identity.”80 Rihani
accepted the Orientalist distinction between East and West, but rejected its historical
immutability in favor of a conception of East and West as values and attitudes of mind that
are not geographically determined and which can, therefore, circulate among cultures over
long historical periods.81 Rihani’s cultural synthesis is based on combining the positive values
of Arab cultural heritage with the positive values of Western civilization. Ultimately, his
writings developed an Arab-Western cultural synthesis that could be implemented in the Arab
region.82
Rihani’s interest in integrating Arab and Western civilizations to transform the Arab region,
Handal documents the process of a diasporic Palestinian who attempts to integrate an Arab
identity into a Western context. Handal does not aim to transform Western sociopolitical
structures, but to synthesize the strongest elements of both Arab and Western cultures to
generate the conditions for Arab survival in Western countries. Handal’s articulation of
cultural synthesis acknowledges the trauma of displacement while also constructing a future
that does not reject her cultural, linguistic, or spiritual heritage. The first-person narrator of
“Amrika” documents a yearning for a cultural synthesis but she is hindered in this pursuit by
80
Berman, Jacob Rama. American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary. New
York: NYU Press, 2012, pg. 29.
81
Ibid.
82
In the final section of The Book of Khalid, the narrator makes an explicit call for removing Turkish control and
building an Arab Empire grounded in an “up-to-date Koran.” See pg. 299-303.
49
Handal’s “Amrika” (an Arabic pronunciation for America) from The Lives of Rain
synthesis in several locations: France, the West Indies, England, and the United States. In her
descriptions of France, Handal describes of the impact of exile as a “tyranny,” and the
culture, and lived experience have made her conscious of being a minority in French society.
The year of her collection’s publication in 2005 is significant because in October and
November of that year, a series of riots occurred in the suburbs of Paris and other French
cities. The riots took the form of car-burning and fighting, with groups of youths (mostly of
immigrant descent and jobless) confronting the police.83 Many scholars have demonstrated
that the riots were a result of a process of ghettoization has been at work in France for over
While Handal’s poem does not comment directly upon the 2005 French riots, she does
depict the complexities of life for immigrants in France. She refers, for instance, to the
journey “from Jaffa to Marseille” and wonders how one can “begin to understand the
difference between Sabaah el Khayr and bonjour, / the difference between the city of light
and black-outs.” Here Handal highlights the linguistic and socioeconomic disparities between
Laurent Mucchielli, “Autumn 2005: A Review of the Most Important Riot in the History of French
83
Contemporary Society.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35.5 (2009): 231-51.
84
See Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Michael J. Balz, “The October Riots in France: A Failed Immigration
Policy or the Empire Strikes Back?” International Migration 44.2 (2006): 23–34; Koff, Harlan. “Understanding
'La Contagion': Power, Exclusion and Urban Violence in France and the United States.” Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies 35.5 (2009): 771-90; Dominique Duprez, “Urban Rioting as an Indicator of Crisis in the
Integration Model for Ethnic Minority Youth in France.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35.5 (2009):
753-70.
50
Arab—particularly Palestinian—and French culture, contrasting the stable living conditions in
France with the “black-outs” of the Palestinian territories. Although Handal seems to desire a
cultural synthesis between her Arab heritage and French culture, she acknowledges the
complexity of living in France as a Palestinian woman. For instance, she quotes a line of
darling,” yet she observes that “our names stay the same, / our eyes remain, our memory.”
She articulates, in French, an understanding that the experience of diaspora has produced a
change, yet there are still aspects of Palestinian identity that remain constant. For Handal, her
locates her identity in Arabic language and culture, as well as in her memories.
Nevertheless, Handal attempts to integrate her Palestinian identity into French culture:
“I sing Inshallah in French as I walk les banlieues Parisienne.” Here she uses French to state
an Arabic expression for “God willing” as she walks the banlieue Parisienne—the Paris
suburbs, which Brinda J. Mehta (2014) describes as “third-world” settlements and a “colonial
Palestinians in France, her poem is not optimistic for this possibility, given the exclusion of
many Palestinians from French society. However, in her travels to the West Indies, Handal is
more hopeful about the possibility of cultural synthesis. She discusses, for example, her
appreciation of “the Kreyol”—a French-based creole which includes elements of Carib and
Whereas in the West Indies, Handal’s poetry articulates the possibility of cultural
85
Brinda J. Mehta, Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices Against Violence. New York: Routledge, 2014,
pg. 151.
51
synthesis through language, her poetry about New England discusses the difficulties of
cultural synthesis. In New England, Handal notices “the difference between where we are
from / and where we are now.” The location of New England facilitates her awareness of her
father’s grief, which she describes as “the years behind a broken door…only later do I hear
the Arabic / in his footsteps.” The stark differences in the physical environment of New
England, in contrast to her native Palestine, makes Handal aware of her father’s grief over
losing his homeland. She depicts her father’s heritage as following him while he travels; it is a
grief that breaks down barriers of space and time. Although the narrator is in Boston, walking
“through Fenway Park, through / streets with names that escape me,” she is cognizant of her
Palestinian heritage, hearing “their stories of sea / their cries for a stranger’s grief. / I
understand—no one can bear partings.” Handal describes the feeling of being in exile—“time
looks different now, / it wears another hat and owns a car, / and we are comfortable in foreign
tongues / but the music that continues to move us / is a melody from the east— / an opening
of whispers in our shivers.” In her travels to New England, she experiences stark differences
in the physical environment, in contrast to her native Palestine; these differences make her
aware of her father’s grief over losing his homeland. Handal’s poetry about New England
reveals that although Palestinians in exile have settled in America to a certain extent, they are
still impacted by the Arab region from which they came. Cultural synthesis, though difficult,
Handal meditates on the limits and possibilities of cultural synthesis at the end of the
poem, when she travels to England and New York. In the seventh section, “Incantations,”
Handal discusses reading “Yeats and Beckett” while “smoking sheesha / on Edgeware Road.”
52
In these lines, both English and Arabic culture exist in a synthesis. Handal describes London
as a place “where I came to know / the silent rain inside of me / as the Thames had come / to
the rhythm of my breathing.” This experience makes her aware of her calm physiological
state, which indicates that her experiences in London are not entirely negative.
In the eighth and final section, “Debke in New York,” Handal presents another
configuration of cultural synthesis. As she writes: “I wear jeans, tennis shoes, walk Broadway,
pass Columbia, / read Said and Twain, / wonder why we are obsessed with difference, / our
need to change the other?” These lines emphasize cultural synthesis as a means by which
Handal is able to function in America. She questions the utility of an obsession with
difference—with the “need” to change others—and finds ways to embrace both Arab and
American cultures, specifically by exposing herself to the ideas of Said and Twain. Another
presentation of cultural synthesis occurs when the poet discusses going to “the tip of the
Hudson River,” where she “recites a verse by Ibn Arabi / and between subway rides, / to that
place I now call home,” listens “to Abdel Halim and Nina Simone / hunt for the small things /
I have lost inside of myself— / and at the corner of Bleeker and Mercer / though a window
with faded Arabic letters / see a New York debke…” At the end of the poem, she imagines
that she has found her “way home.” In these lines, Handal stresses the role of the poetic
imagination in facilitating the peaceful existence of Palestinians in the United States. The
individual can blend elements of both Arab and Western culture—poetry, music, languages,
and dance.
territories from which her family escaped, and how these memories of violence affect her and
53
her family, haunting her while she lives in exile and travels to different places. Yet Handal’s
work also contributes a different perspective about the nature of exile, in contrast to Said’s
formulation, who views only the negative affects associated with exile. Handal’s poetry
develops a more nuanced outlook on exile—a cultural synthesis—as she emphasizes both the
positive and the negative affects associated with being in exile. Handal is unique in this
approach because most Palestinian American women poets meditate on the legacy of trauma.
Handal’s perception of exile is not a life of banishment, as Said discusses, but rather is a
commitment to embracing traveling to other countries, and in the process, being exposed to
different languages and cultures. This immersion amplifies her understanding of her
Palestinian heritage due to its contrast with the new environments in which she travels.
Handal’s poetry creates a space for forging a path forward for Palestinians in exile, who live
as minorities in a different culture, but one that enables the possibility for a peaceful
women. Louise Cainkar’s study of immigrant Palestinian women in the United States reports
that Palestinian women “carry the burden of statelessness on their backs and do not forget it,
no matter what good fortune they may find outside of Palestine.”86 As Cainkar puts it,
“Palestinian pain is a communal pain” which is exacerbated by not feeling accepted in the
United States.87 However, Cainkar found that the Palestinian women in America also felt that
86
See Cainkar, Louise. Coping with Tradition, Change and Alienation: Palestinian Muslim Women in the US.
1988. Northwestern U, PhD dissertation, pg. 52.
87
Ibid., pg. 54.
54
that their lives were substantially better than their mother’s lives because of more education,
less time spent on household chores, more time spent with husbands, and fewer children.88
While very few women in Cainkar’s study expressed a desire to change places with American
women, the Palestinian women in America discussed a wish to integrate the best elements of
both cultures. As one woman put it, “We should take the good things from each culture and
Handal—a descendant of exiled Palestinians who has been exposed both to Western
and Arab cultures, languages, and histories—represents her experiences of exile in Western
geographical spaces by expressing her trauma, estrangement, alienation, and minority status.
Yet Handal also documents her agency by writing about her travels and her aim to establish
considers the late-twentieth century and early twenty-first centuries. However, it is also
important to study her poetry about an earlier historical period—medieval and early modern
discourses of migration.
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid., pg. 51.
55
particularly her part-year residency in France and her extended travels in Spain—have attuned
her to the complexities associated with Arab migrations in Europe. Handal’s interest in
Europe is a departure from most Arab American women poets who write about their status as
what might be called ancestral pride.90 In addition, Handal’s collection expands the historical
Specifically, Handal writes about medieval and early modern Europe, investigating
interactions between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish populations. Her poems document
alternating periods of Christian and Islamic rule and implicitly engage with Samuel
Huntington’s (1993) “clash of civilizations” thesis, which predicts that conflicts between
Islam and the West will increase because the West’s attempt to universalize values and
institutions, and maintain military superiority, has generated intense resentment within
Muslim communities. Huntington also posits that Muslim population growth has generated
large numbers of unemployed and dissatisfied youth that become recruits to Islamist causes,
Handal published her collection Poet in Andalucía in 2012, the year after the Syrian
refugee crisis began. However, large migrations of Arabs into Europe have been occurring
since the end of WWII, when mostly Maghribi men and women—recruited as “guest
90
See Elmaz Abinader (1999, 2014); Leila Halaby (2012); Suheir Hammad (1996, 2005); Mohja Kahf (2003);
Pauline Kaldas (2006); D.H. Melhem (1972); Deema Shehabi (2011).
91
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, NY: Simon
and Schuster, 1996. See pages 207-11.
56
workers”—moved north across the Mediterranean in large numbers.92 Currently, fifty-five
percent of international migrants from the Arab world live outside of the region; the majority
live in Europe. The following countries are home to ninety percent of current migrants from
Arab countries: France, the United States, Spain, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, the United
Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, and Belgium.93 Currently, there are approximately two million
reverse—the journey of poet Federico García Lorca, who traveled from Spain to New York.
Eighty years after Lorca’s journey to New York, which resulted in his collection Poet in New
York (1940), Handal went to Spain to write Poet in Andalucía. In this collection, Handal
observes “the persistent tragedy of otherness” and “acknowledges a refusal to remain in that
stark darkness” by searching “for the possibility of human coexistence.”95 Her intention to
civilizations” thesis which denies the possibility of multiculturalism. Handal’s poetry in this
collection—which she calls “a meditation on the past and the present”—interrogates whether
one civilization begins to decline, and another begins the process of arising to dominance.
Handal explains that she wanted to “weave hope into the poems, staying true to [her] vision
92
Cainkar, Louise. “Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas.” The Arab Studies Journal, vol. 21, no. 1,
2013, pp. 126-65. See pg. 136.
93
Ibid., pg. 135.
94
“Los musulmanes aumentan en España en 300.000 en cinco años.” El Pais. 10 April 2016.
https://politica.elpais.com/politica/2016/04/10/actualidad/1460313231_421587.html. Accessed 25 Oct. 2017.
95
Ibid.
57
while also understanding the fundamental forces that continue to lead us into conflict states
instead of conciliatory ones.”96 Her book “renders in poetry a region that seems to hold the
pulse of our earth, where all of our stories assemble. It is a meditation on what has changed,
and what insists on remaining the same, on the mysteries that trouble and intrigue us.”97
Handal takes as her subject Andalucía, a region located in the south of the Iberian
Peninsula which was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate in 711. Andalucía, known in
Arabic as Al-Andalus, was profoundly influenced by over seven centuries of rule by Muslim
caliphates and emirates. This region, as Handal writes, has “always been the place where
racial, ethnic, and religious forces converge and contend, where Islamic, Judaic, and Christian
traditions remain a mirror of a past that is terrible and beautiful.”98 The region of Andalucía is
Christianity, and Islam. Handal ruminates on the interstices of these religions in medieval and
time when Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in relative harmony in Islamic Spain. There
are numerous debates surrounding notions of tolerance in Al-Andalus during the Middle Ages.
However, Handal emphasizes that one cannot deny the rich and prosperous cultural and
artistic life that existed during that period—a life that these communities created together.99
96
From an interview with Nathalie Handal, by Rewa Zeinati, published in Sukoon Magazine, 13 August 2013.
Available at: http://www.sukoonmag.com/responsive/interview-with-nathalie-handal/. Accessed 6 Dec. 2016.
97
Handal, Nathalie. Poet in Andalucía. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2012, pg. vii.
98
Ibid.
99
From an interview with Nathalie Handal by Rewa Zeinati, published in Sukoon Magazine, 13 August 2013.
Available at: http://www.sukoonmag.com/responsive/interview-with-nathalie-handal/. Accessed 6 Dec. 2016.
58
Although this period is sometimes cited as an ideal example of interfaith harmony, it was
fairly short and was supplanted by the tensions, prejudices, and ill treatment of minorities by
both Muslims and Christians that have often characterized relationships between these
communities.100 By the 10th century the Iberian Peninsula was beset by hostilities between
the Christian kingdom of León in the north and the larger Muslim Al-Andalus in the south.101
Beginning in the 10th century, the Christians of northern Spain began the Reconquista, the
reconquest of Spain for Christendom. In 1492, the fall of Granada put an end to Muslim rule
Handal lived in Andalucía to write the collection, and her experiences as a Palestinian
in exile reflect Edward Said’s observation that, while “most people are principally aware of
one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision
phrase from music—is contrapuntal.”102 Said develops the concept of contrapuntal analysis in
Culture and Imperialism (1993), which scrutinizes the response to Western dominance which
cultural formation of modern Western empires connected to the expanding colonies of Britain
and France. Said explains his choice to concentrate primarily on novels because “stories are at
the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also
become the method colonized peoples use to assert their own identity and the existence of
100
See Smith, Jane. "Muslim-Christian Relations: Historical and Contemporary Realities." Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of Religion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015, and Darío Fernández-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian
Paradise. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2016.
101
Ibid.
102
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993, pg. xiii.
59
their own history.”103 Said’s contrapuntal analysis, as he makes clear here, distinguishes
between colonial powers and colonized territories. Yet his theory does not account for
geographical spaces in which there was not a clear separation between a Western imperial
power and the native inhabitants of a colonized region. The case of Andalucía is one such
civilizations in the same geographical region. Handal’s poetry shows that the phenomenon of
Arab migrations to Western countries cannot be understood through Said’s original binary of
Western colonial powers and colonized territories. Her work reveals that it is necessary to
modify contrapuntal analysis to highlight the existence of multiple civilizations within the
same geographical space. By focusing on how Handal’s poetry revises contrapuntal analysis,
it becomes clear how she implicitly engages with Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis,
and how she imaginatively returns to early modern Spain to consider Muslim-Christian
relationships—an important topic at the time of her collection’s publication, which occurred
In her poem “The Courtyard of Colegiata del Salvador” Handal reflects on the
unstable boundaries between Muslim and Christian rule in early modern Andalucía, and the
ways in which violence was required to maintain those boundaries. The title of the poem
references a 16th century church on the site of the former main mosque of Albayzín,
Granada—the old Moorish quarter of the city. The courtyard of what was once Albayzín’s
great mosque is attached to the church of the Colegiata del Salvador. Granada was the last
103
Ibid.
60
Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula. Although many Muslims in Christian-ruled Spain
emigrated to North Africa, those who remained under Christian rule became known as
mudéjars, and were permitted to practice Islam, subject to certain restrictions. However, in
1492 the Catholic monarchs completed the reconquest of Spain by securing the surrender of
Granada. Jews were expelled from Spain the same year and forced conversions of Muslims
followed in the first decade of the sixteenth century.104 Although Handal does not specify the
time in which the events of the poem occurred, she is most likely referencing the early 16th
century period.
In this context, Handal introduces an Arab Muslim man, Saïd, and represents his
adaptations to Christian Spain. As Saïd traveled “across the Strait of Gibraltar”—the narrow
body of water that separates Morocco from Peninsular Spain—he remembered his father’s
words, “We are strange when we are lost.” Once he arrived in Spain, Saïd was subject to
Christian conversion; he “learned to pray differently,” “knelt instead of bowed,” and “spoke
any language but his own.” The central moment of the poem occurs years later, as Saïd was
“sitting in a courtyard he is startled / by the loudness of the wind, / almost like the start of the
adhan,” the Muslim call to prayer. At this moment, he “feels a small fire / alongside his heart,
/ and hears his father’s voice— / we are nothing / but an image / growing from our sleep— /
how do we explain / our journey to others?” Handal documents Saïd’s response to the
confluence of the Christian church courtyard and what he hears as the Muslim call to prayer.
This confluence creates “a small fire alongside his heart” and, in this moment, he recalls his
104
Hendrickson, Jocelyn. “Andalusia.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, 2009.
http://www.oxfordreference.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780195305135.001.0001/acref-
9780195305135-e-1129. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017
61
father’s voice, which emphasizes the question of explaining his journey to others. This
journey could mean the physical journey Saïd took from North Africa to Spain, but it could
At the end of the poem, Saïd “looks at the grounds of the courtyard / where a mosque
once stood / and understands what his father hadn’t— / what’s sacred always returns.” Here,
Handal refers to the fact that the Colegiata del Salvador, the Collegiate Church of the Savior,
was built on the site of what was once a mosque. Because Saïd hears the Muslim call to
prayer in the courtyard of this church, he comes to understand that his Muslim faith has not
been lost, but rather “always returns.” Handal’s ending to this poem—“what’s sacred always
returns”—is a highly ambiguous phrase. One interpretation is that Saïd’s faith is strictly a
personal experience, and that the return of the sacred will not have a larger social impact in
Spain. However, another interpretation of “what’s sacred always returns” is that the Islamic
faith will return to Spain, although it is unclear whether Handal’s poem predicts a future
important to keep in mind Said’s definition: “contrapuntal analysis should be modeled not...on
a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble; we must take into account all sorts of spatial or
Christian culture in the context of early 16th century Spain and the inflection of Islam within
this setting. The resulting phenomenon—a Muslim man, in a church, recalling the historic
105
Ibid., pg. 318.
62
role of Islam in Spain—is an articulation of what Said describes as a “complex and uneven
topography.” Published in 2012, at a time of debates in Europe over Islamic immigration, the
poem attempts to focus on the dynamics that lead to conciliatory states between populations.
Handal’s choice of a male character is important because she portrays a Muslim man who
can be read as an articulation of what Handal calls the “possibility of human coexistence”
between Christian and Muslim populations, an attempt to counter the “clash of civilizations”
While Handal meditates on Muslim and Christian relationships in her poetry about
Grenada, in her work on Córdoba, she ruminates on that city’s once “thriving and
multicultural community consisting of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian artists, writers, scholars
religious society. The poem highlights the city’s Roman, Spanish, Jewish, Christian, and Arab
tolerance”— Handal establishes the setting: “the garden of la Mezquita,” which refers to the
home to a Christian church. When Muslims conquered Spain in 711, the church building was
divided into halves between the Muslims and Christians, until 784, when the Christian half
was purchased by the Emir 'Abd al-Rahman I, who demolished the original structure and built
the grand mosque of Córdoba on its ground. Córdoba returned to Christian rule in 1236, and
the building was converted to a Roman Catholic church. The area around the Mezquita, which
means mosque in Spanish—now called the Mezquita-catedral—is today one of the most
63
impressive examples of Spain’s Moorish heritage.106
unnamed person who tells her, “People will build together again,” an optimistic statement that
indicates Handal’s hope for the possibility of tolerance and peaceful interfaith coexistence.
Handal writes of Córdoba, “The past is here, / the song of the Arabs here, / the song of the
Jews, / the Romans, / the Spaniards,” emphasizing the multicultural heritage in this
geographical location that is not concretized in the past, but still exists in the present. Handal
discusses the influence of both Christian and Muslim faiths in Córdoba by invoking “Mary,
Jesus, and Moses,” and by observing that, in Córdoba, “Fatima is everywhere— / her five
fingers / the five laws / of the Koran.” Handal also emphasizes the Jewish heritage of
Córdoba: “see Córdoba, as I have— / enter Bab al-Yawz, now Almodóvar Gate.” Here
Handal refers to the only surviving gate of the nine built by Abd al-Rahman I. The Almodóvar
Gate leads “to the Judería,” the Jewish Quarter. Handal mentions important Jewish figures
who lived in this region—Maimónides, a Sephardic Jewish philosopher and astronomer, and
Judá-Levi, one of the greatest Hebrew poets—in addition to Casa de Sefarad, a museum
At the end of the poem, Handal invokes the “Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos,” the
Castle of the Christian Monarchs, which was once a palace under the Umayyad and Abbasid
Caliphates. After Christian forces took Córdoba during the Reconquista, Alfonso XI of
Castile began building the present-day structure on part of the site in 1328. The Inquisition
began using the Alcázar as one of its headquarters in 1482, and it was the site where Isabella
106
Handal, Nathalie. Poet in Andalucía. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2012, pg. 117.
64
and Ferdinand met Christopher Columbus as he prepared to take his first voyage to the
Americas. By using this location as the title of her poem, Handal emphasizes how both
Christian and Islamic history are inextricably linked to the conquest of the Americas. She also
returns to the Islamic foundations of the castle, which was once a palace under the Umayyad
and Abbasid Caliphates. Handal makes a direct address to the readers: “pray east, / then walk
to the Torre de la Calhorra,” the Calahorra Tower, a fortified gate in the historic center of
Córdoba, Spain, of Islamic origin, built during the late 12th century to protect the nearby
Roman bridge. Handal’s poem illuminates that there is not a linear progression of history, but
that history is often cyclical, and the past is always imbricated in the present.
Handal’s poem about Córdoba, when placed into dialogue with Said’s Culture and
contrapuntal analysis. Said argues that there are phases of emancipation from imperialism,
first with nationalist independence movements, and second with liberation struggles. Said’s
In contrast, Handal’s poem about Córdoba stresses the cyclical nature of history. At the end of
the poem, Handal reimagines spatiotemporal boundaries by writing the present into the past
and the past into the present. Handal discusses how she stands and looks at Córdoba, allowing
“it to be what it is, glorious and alive.” She further underscores the existence of the past in the
present. Although the city is “without flag and music, / without guards and rules, / without
singers and poets, without guitars and ouds,” there are still elements of the multicultural city
that remain, specifically the wall of Córdoba, the poems of Sufis, the Spanish language, and
Andalucía—“its pomegranates, almonds, / oranges, / its ancient walls / and its heart.” In these
lines, Handal reflects on the passage of time, observing that although the multicultural
65
heritage of Córdoba has, to some extent, been lost, this heritage has left a legacy in the city
through language, literature, and architecture. These cultural products are the result of various
medieval and early modern Andalucía portrays the fragile coexistence of multiple faiths,
showing that Handal considers—and indeed hopes for— the possibility of multiculturalism.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I observed three Arab American women poets’ explorations of the
poets’ engagements at the time of their production and in the context of their reception.
Specifically, I analyzed how Arab American women poets implicitly dialogue with central
ideas of the Mahjar literary tradition for late-twentieth and early twenty-first century
audiences. The first two poets I evaluated—Lebanese American Elmaz Abinader and Syrian
endeavor, ancestralism does not attempt to change Western countries, but rather to create the
conditions for Arab survival in those countries. In the second section, I argued that Handal’s
eminent Mahjar writer Ameen Rihani. Specifically, I explored how Handal develops a what I
call a cultural synthesis approach that attempts to integrate Arab identity in a Western context,
not to remake the Western society to make it more Arab, but to synthesize the strongest
elements of both.
66
In the final section, I analyzed Handal’s 2012 collection, Poet in Andalucía to argue
that Said’s concept of contrapuntal analysis requires a revision. While Said’s contrapuntal
distinguish between colonizer and colonized because the region experienced alternating
periods of Christian and Muslim control. Handal’s intention is to interrogate the “possibility
of human coexistence” between Christian and Muslim populations, and her poetry remains
open to the possibility of multiculturalism. In the next chapters, I will turn to the third period
of Arab migration to America, which began in 1968 when the Immigration and Nationality
Act of 1965 went into effect and increased migration from the Arab region to the United
States. I will attend to how Arab American women poets who immigrated to the U.S. during
this period address important social, political, and economic issues in the contemporary
United States.
67
CHAPTER III
Anthropocentric Era
Introduction
In her 2008 collection Seasons, Etel Adnan portrays identity as radically unstable.
“The whole system named the ‘I,’” she writes, “is unreliable, unbalanced.”107 This chapter
addresses how Arab American women poets offer insights that contribute to contemporary
theorizing on identity. Some Arab American women poets, notably Suheir Hammad and
Mohja Kahf, articulate an identity politics by making their social locations political. The term
“identity politics” signifies “a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the
shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups.”108 There are compelling
reasons to embrace identity politics because it provides a way for people to claim a shared
history, find a collective voice, and effect social transformation. The poets I analyze in this
diaspora by imagining identity as dynamic and by moving beyond politicized social locations.
107
Seasons. Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 2008, pg. 23.
108
Heyes, Cressida, “Identity Politics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta,
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/identity-politics. Accessed 1 Dec. 2017.
68
Rather than calling attention to how individual identity has been shaped by structural power
inequalities, these poets provide insights into the epistemological consequences of considering
a capacious view of power that includes the beyond-human world, by which I signify spiritual
their writings into dialogue with several theoretical frameworks relevant to this topic:
intersectionality, affect theory, new materialism, and post-humanism. In the first section, I
examine some limitations of one of the most prominent approaches to theorizing identity:
intersectionality. Specifically, I focus on raised by Jasbir Puar (2011) and others that
might not be as emphasized in other cultural contexts. I also reflect on the claim that
factors. By observing how these poets write about identity, I find that they do not concentrate
on the individual, autonomous subject; rather, they illuminate what I call relational identity. In
the second section, I define the concept of relational identity and argue that this type of
identity is important for intersectional analysis to evaluate because relational identity has
benefits—in the form of collective social goods—that may be more difficult to discern by
In the final section, I read the work of Etel Adnan as a way of understanding complex
poetry, I analyze how her accounts of what I term the networked mind contemplate the
69
human-environmental interactions. Finally, I show, through my readings of Adnan’s work,
how she addresses an oversight in intersectionality: the general absence of spirituality and
religion as a category of analysis. I examine how her perspectives on spirituality can serve as
introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founders of critical race theory in the U.S. legal
separate systems of oppression, isolating and focusing on one, while occluding others.110 By
placing Black women at the center of her analysis of U.S. discrimination law—at the
109
Although Crenshaw introduced the term “intersectionality,” the concepts she explored have a long genealogy.
As early as the 19th century in the United States, Black women confronted the simultaneity of gender and racial
oppression—see Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892). Additional precursors include Beal’s
concept of “double jeopardy” (1970), King’s idea of “multiple jeopardy” (1988), and the Combahee River
Collective’s (1977) articulations of “interlocking oppressions.” The 1980s saw an upsurge in scholarship about
race and gender by women of color (Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982; Davis 1983; hooks 1984; Giddings 1985;
Anzaluda 1987).
110
See Carastathis, Anna. “The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory.” Philosophy Compass, vol. 9,
no .5, 2014, pp. 304-14, pg. 305.
111
In her 1991 essay, “Mapping the Margins,” Crenshaw offers a threefold definition of intersectionality. The
first, “structural intersectionality,” refers to “the ways in which the location of women of color at the intersection
70
of Black women in a legal context, it became more widely applied in the social sciences and
humanities in order to examine the ways in which power structures interact to produce
disparate conditions of social inequality that affect groups and individuals differently (Cho
2013).
In a more recent article, Crenshaw, along with Sumi Cho and Leslie McCall (2013),
“not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the
process of creating and being created by dynamics of power.”113 As Vivian M. May (2014)
academics as “the most important contribution that women’s studies has made so far,”115
of race and gender makes our actual experience of domestic violence, rape, and remedial reform qualitatively
different than that of white women.” The second, “political intersectionality” describes the fact that, historically,
feminist and antiracist politics in the U.S. “have functioned in tandem to marginalize issues facing Black
women.” The third, “representational intersectionality,” concerns the production of images of women of color
drawing on sexist and racist narrative tropes, as well as the ways that critiques of these representations
marginalize or reproduce the objectification of women of color. See Crenshaw, pgs. 1245, 1283.
Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies:
112
Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs, vol. 38, no. 4, (2013), pp. 785-810. See pg. 795.
113
Ibid., pg. 788.
114
“‘Speaking into the Void’? Intersectionality Critiques and Epistemic Backlash.” Hypatia, vol. 29, no. 1, 2014,
pp. 94-112.
McCall, Leslie. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs, vol. 30, no. 3, 2005, pp. 1771-800. See pg.
115
1771.
116
Theorists have debated the problem of using categories at all, suggesting that what is needed is a more
transversal approach—a thinking across categories (Yuval-Davis 2006). Discussions have also emerged about
71
Kathy Davis (2008), for instance, observes that theorists have long debated which
difference came to matter in intersectional analysis because of a concern with how people are
located differently in relation to systems of power. As Alice Ludvig (2006) puts it,
intersectionality theorists are faced with a definitional problem: “who defines when, where,
which, and why particular differences are given recognition while others are not?”117 Helema
intersectionality: gender, sexuality, race or skin color, ethnicity, national belonging, class,
and status in terms of tradition and development. However, in practice, intersectional theorists
usually analyze fewer categories. Leiprecht and Lutz (2006) assert that race, class, and gender
are the “minimum standard” for an intersectional analysis, although other categories can be
added, depending on the context and the specifics of the research problem. Most frequently,
intersectional analysts attend to gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability status.
When performing an intersectional analysis, should one use poetry as source material?
Although Jennifer Nash (2008) argues that poetry has been used as a “primary vehicle for
evoking the experiences of marginalized subjects,” she asserts that a reliance on poetry
the scope of intersectional analysis. Should it be primarily concerned with theorizing identity (Staunaes 2003;
Buitelaar 2006; Prins 2006) or is the problem that it has been too focused on identity to the detriment of social
structures? In addition, theorists have argued about how intersectional theory should be applied to solve social
problems (Burman 2003, Carastathis 2008, Bilge 2013).
117
Ludvig, Alice. “Differences Between Women? Intersecting Voices in a Female Narrative.” European Journal
of Women’s Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2006, pp. 245-58. See pg. 247.
72
suggests a shortcoming in the methodological orientation of intersectional theory. 118 She
contends that using poetry as source material indicates that intersectionality theory “has yet to
levels of consciousness that form the basis of their study of identity.”119 On this point, I
Confessional poetry, in which the author describes parts of his or her life that would not
experiences resulting from their unique social locations.120 Confessional poetry, which
reduces the distance between the persona and the author, often addresses experiences of
relationships, affective responses, and trauma. Over the past few decades, types of
confessional poetry, such as spoken word and slam, have become increasingly popular in
marginalized communities as modes of expression for individuals who have experienced the
consequences of social inequalities. For this reason, poetry, especially in the autobiographical
or confessional mode, can serve as valuable source material for understanding how
produced power imbalances shape subjects, Arab American women poets open the possibility
118
In her article, “Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” Jennifer Nash discusses the use of poetry in intersectional
theory, citing A.K. Wing’s article, “Brief reflections toward a multiplicative theory and praxis of being.”
Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 1990, pp. 181-201. See pg. 182.
119
Ibid.
“Confessional Poetry.” The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, edited by Ian Hamilton and Jeremy Noel-
120
73
for a form of intersectional analysis that does not ignore or transcend these power imbalances,
but rather expands the discourse of identity to an understanding of human life that is less
attached to the individual subject and centered more on commonalities among subjects. One
might argue that, if these poets are not attuned to power disparities between individuals, then
they are not performing an intersectional analysis. However, I contend that Arab American
women poets are attuned to power disparities, but that they develop a capacious
understanding of power that extends beyond the human. Arab American women poets
articulate at least two important insights that might be useful for intersectionality: turning
broadening the definition of power to include nonhuman power dynamics. These insights are
individual, which might not be as prioritized in other cultural contexts. Jasbir Puar (2011)
critiques what she calls the “Euro-American bias” of intersectionality, arguing that it
problematically “produces an Other, and that Other is always a Woman Of Color (WOC),
Transnational and postcolonial scholars have emphasized that the categories privileged by
intersectional analysis—starting with race, class, gender, and now including sexuality, nation,
religion, age, and disability—are the product of modernist colonial agendas and regimes of
121
Puar, Jasbir. “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective
Politics.” Transversal, 2011.
74
formation.122
Joseph found that most Arab women do not conceptualize themselves as singular subjects but
rather in a relational context of familial matrices that are crucial to Arab societies.123 For Arab
women, as she writes, the person “may not be the most productive points of departure for
locating the subject, or at least not the exclusive point of departure.”124 Instead, Joseph argues,
notion of identity that is always in motion.”125 She uses the term “connectivity” to describe
the relationality of identity. Rather than theorizing a singular subject, Joseph asserts that we
constructing identity.”126 I analyze how Arab American women’s poetry articulates these
“methodologies of observation.” By centering on how these poets portray identity, I find that
they do not focus on the individual, autonomous subject; rather, they explore relational
Second, I argue that Arab American women’s poetry calls attention to how
intersectionality as an analytic is limited by its focus on how individual subjects are impacted
122
Ibid.
Joseph, Suad. “Thinking Intentionality: Arab Women’s Subjectivity and its Discontents.” Journal of Middle
123
East Women’s Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2012, pp: 1-25. See pg. 14.
124
Ibid., pg. 16.
125
Ibid.
126
Ibid., pg. 17.
75
reinvestment in the subject,” especially since many scholars have seriously questioned
whether the marginalized subject is still a viable site from which to produce politics, much
less whether the subject is a necessary precursor for politics.127 Puar argues that
supplemented, and perhaps complicated, by the concept of assemblages, which comes from
Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980).128 Many theorists have commented on
the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s work. As Stacy Alaimo (2000) puts it, A Thousand
concepts such as rhizomes, strata, and assemblages that not only transgress boundaries but
also intrepidly ignore divisions between human life and nonhuman nature.”129 In Puar’s view,
a focus on assemblages has several important analytic benefits: de-privileging the human
body as a discrete organic entity,130 destabilizing the human/nature binary, showing how
multiple forms of matter can be bodies (such as bodies of water, cities, institutions, and so
127
Puar, Jasbir. “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective
Politics.” Transversal, 2011.
128
The term “assemblage” is, as Puar points out, “an awkward translation,” as “the original term in Deleuze and
Guattari's work is not the French word assemblage, but actually “agencement,” a term which means design,
layout, organization, arrangement, and relations--the focus being not on content but on relations, relations of
patterns.”
129
Alaimo, Stacy. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP,
2000, pg. 12.
130
As Puar summarizes Haraway’s work: “the body does not end at the skin. We leave traces of our DNA
everywhere we go, we live with other bodies within us, microbes and bacteria, we are enmeshed in forces,
affects, energies, we are composites of information.” Puar, Jasbir. “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’:
Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective Politics.” Transversal, 2011.
As Karen Barad shows in her theory of performative metaphysics, matter is not a “thing” but a doing. See
131
“Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs, vol. 28, no.3,
2003, pp: 801-31.
76
I agree with Puar that the concept of assemblages can serve as a useful analytical
framework. However, I take my point of departure for reading Arab American women’s
poets’ conceptions of identity from another concept in Deleuze and Guattari’s work:
This concept is important because it enables us to break down binary structures of thought.
Arab American women poets do not identify a distance between “self” and “other”—a binary
that opens up the possibility for discord, enmity, and violence. Instead, the poets render a
disjunctive synthesis that eclipses, or sometimes eliminates, distinctions between self and
other. In the next section, I explore how Arab American women poets do not concentrate on
the embodied subject but rather meditate on relational identity. This type of identity is
important for intersectional analysis to investigate because relational identity has benefits—in
the form of collective social goods—that may be more difficult to discern by adhering to a
Most Arab American women poets articulate relational identity—in addition to Deema
Shehabi, Laila Halaby, and Etel Adnan, examples of relational identity can be found in the
See Mai Al-Nakib’s “Disjunctive Synthesis: Deleuze and Arab Feminism.” Signs: Journal of Women in
132
Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 2, 2013, pp. 459-82. See pg. 463.
77
work of D.H. Melhem, Naomi Shihab Nye, Suheir Hammad, Elmaz Abinader, Mohja Kahf,
Nathalie Handal, Pauline Kaldas, and Hedy Habra.133 In this section, I examine three poets
who develop the strongest examples of relational identity. I distinguish relational identity
from the concept of relational autonomy which has a long history and was perhaps most
famously defined by Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1993). In this book, Gilligan
argues that psychology had systematically ignored women in trying to answer questions about
how humans make ethical judgments. Drawing on the psychoanalyst and sociologist Nancy
Chodorow, Gilligan claims that men make decisions based on individual rights, while women
are concerned with responsibilities to others—a form of ethical judgment that Gilligan argues
Later scholars (Nedelsky 1989, Oshana 1998, Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000) advanced
the concept of relational autonomy, a term that describes self-governing agents who are also
socially constituted and who define value commitments in terms of interpersonal relations and
mutual dependencies. As John Christman (2004) writes, “Relational views of the autonomous
person underscore the social embeddedness of selves.”134 I depart from the term relational
autonomy and use the concept of relational identity because I want to indicate that Arab
American women poets do not place emphasis on the dominant definition of autonomy, which
highlights the self-governing and agential capacities of individuals. As I will analyze in more
detail later, these poets contribute insights to new materialist perspectives which, as Karen
133
See Appendix B for a detailed catalogue of Arab American women poets who articulate relational identity.
134
Christman, John. “Relational Autonomy, Liberal Individualism, and the Social Constitution of Selves.”
Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, vol. 117, no. 1/2, 2004,
pp. 143-64. See pg. 143.
78
Barad states, do not conceptualize agency as “a property of persons or things; rather, agency
using the term “identity,” I intend to signify that I am addressing how my readings of Arab
intersectionality—to show how this poetry vocalizes an implicit critique of identity politics.
identity. After all, individuals who have experienced a historical legacy of exclusion from
social, and economic spheres based largely on liberal feminist conceptualizations of women
moving from an emphasis on the individual subject to relational identity, is there not a danger
accurate to create a binary opposition between the individual and the collective. Moreover, is
it inevitable that shifting the focus from the individual to relationships will have oppressive
consequences for the individual subject? Do the definitions of identity and oppression
As Saba Mahmood writes in her research on the grassroots Islamic women’s piety
movement in Egypt, “the normative political subject of poststructuralist feminist theory often
From an interview with Karen Barad in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin’s New Materialism: Interviews &
135
79
subordination and subversion. In doing so, this scholarship elides dimensions of human action
whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance.”136
Mahmood’s research has important implications for intersectionality. Rather than valorizing
resistance to oppression—what she calls a “rather narrow and parochial way of being human
in the world”137—Mahmood urges analysts to reflect on “other kinds of social and political
precisely this type of social and political project. Specifically, I read in this poetry an implicit
physical, imaginative, and affective processes. Shehabi, born in Kuwait in 1970 to a mother
from Gaza and a father from Jerusalem, came to the United States in 1998 to study at Tufts
University and now resides in California. In this section, I focus on her debut poetry
collection Thirteen Departures from the Moon (2011). In an interview, Shehabi states that
most of her poetry “searches for the interconnectedness between the exiled spaces of my
youth and adulthood. I write poetry to immortalize the dead, to give length and breadth to the
living, and to nurture the spirit.”139 Poetry is ideally suited for meditating on the nature of
136
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton UP,
2005, pg. 14.
Mahmood, as quoted in Nermeen Shaikh’s The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power.
137
80
affective transmission because of the genre’s attention to visceral experiences. As poets filter
these experiences through the domain of the imagination, they scrutinize a wide range of
affective responses.
The term “affect,” from the Latin affectus—which can be translated as “passion” or
Rhetoric.140 In the seventeenth century, Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), which continues to influence
many scholars, defined affect as “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting
is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time the ideas of these
affections.”141 The role of ideas, and the imagination, play a crucial role in Spinoza’s
philosophy. As Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd (1999) observe, Spinoza’s theories exhibit
a “strong orientation towards the collective dimensions of imagination, and the imagination is
based on materiality.”142 The experience of other bodies together with one’s own is the basis
of Spinoza’s account of the affects. Individual bodies, in Spinoza’s view, retain traces of the
changes brought about in them by the impinging of other bodies. Individual selfhood for
relations, is the topic of Deema Shehabi’s poem “At the Dome of the Rock” (2011). In an
interview, Shehabi discusses how she was often moved by her mother’s recollections of her
140
Aristotle organized the affects in terms of “anger and mildness, love and hatred, fear and confidence, shame
and esteem, kindness and unkindness, pity and indignation, envy and emulation.” As quoted in Brennan’s The
Transmision of Affect, pg. 3.
141
Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. New York: Penguin, 1994, pg. 70.
142
Gatens, Moira and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. London: Routledge,
1999, pg. 35-9.
81
girlhood in Gaza. When reflecting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Shehabi said, “It is my
hope that we continue, as people, to hunger for closeness and understanding. Let’s go beyond
the horribly disfiguring headline news and enter an intimate and humane conversation. That
would be the epitome of healing.”143 Her brief, four-sentence-long prose poem, “At the Dome
of the Rock” (2011) indeed creates an intimate and human conversation: a space for the reader
to enter into the experience of the poem by imaginatively engaging with the atmosphere of
Jerusalem.
stone arch and dome—along with the sensory elements of the environment. Her first sentence
describes nature imagery, equating “Jerusalem in the afternoon” with “the bitterness of / two
hundred winter-bare olive trees fallen / in the distance.” Amidst a geopolitical landscape filled
with rancor, Shehabi invites the reader to engage with a woman who is “sitting at the edge of
Shehabi facilitates the reader’s entry into the poem by connecting external and internal
experiences: it is only by sitting beside the stone arch and breathing the “lacquered air” of the
Old City that the reader experiences an internal transformation. Shehabi renders this
transformation as connected to the process of respiration: the Old City’s air “hooks” into
143
Interview with Deema Shehabi by Liz Castellano, http://philipmetres.com/deema. Accessed 31 May 2016.
82
“every crevice of skin,” suggesting that the experience of being in Jerusalem inhabits the
reader’s entire body. Yet Shehabi does not portray the impact of being in the Old City as an
individual experience; rather, she underscores the relationship between the reader and the
woman. In addition to respiration, Shehabi invokes blood: “your blood,” she writes,
addressing the reader, “will unleash with her dreams.” The reader’s blood and the woman’s
dreams are inextricably linked, leading to changes in both the physical environment of
Jerusalem (“the Dome will undulate gold”) and in the woman’s body (“her exhausted / scars
will gleam across her overly kissed forehead.”) It is more than the reader’s attention—in fact,
it is the reader’s blood—that facilitates the unleashing of the woman’s dreams, the undulating
gold on the dome, and the gleaming of the woman’s scars. The reader not only sits beside the
woman, but also uses his or her body to experience—and to facilitate the woman’s own
experience—of her dreams, scars, and memories. To call Shehabi’s poem an articulation of
empathy underestimates the level of involvement she establishes between the reader and the
woman. Shehabi eliminates the distance between the reader and the woman, creating a
relational identity in which the reader’s body serves as source that enables the woman’s
Shehabi emphasizes a relational process in which two people gain control over
negative affects through mutual affective experiences. Her poem traces a trajectory from the
affect of “bitterness” to the dominion of love. At the beginning of the poem, Shehabi
associates Jerusalem with negative affect: “Jerusalem in the afternoon is the bitterness of /
two hundred winter-bare olive trees fallen / in the distance.” This description of the landscape
between the reader and the woman at the mosque. Shehabi invites the reader into the poem,
83
enabling the reader to experience the internal biological processes of the woman, specifically
respiration and circulation. The intimacy of this relational identity facilitates the readers’
perception of changes in both the woman’s body and in the physical environment of the city.
At the end of the poem, Shehabi has the woman ask the reader to come closer, which
creates a deepening of the relationship: “She will ask you to come closer, and when you do, /
she will lift the sea of her arms from the furls / of her chest and say: this is the dim sky I have
/ loved ever since I was a child.” In these lines, Shehabi emphasizes how two people, in
conjunction, can cultivate control over negative affects—in this context, bitterness—through a
which two people cultivate control over affects through mutually experiencing the affect of
love. Shehabi shows that it is only through the reader’s body that the woman can share her
Shehabi’s poem illustrates the formation of what Spinoza calls “common notions,”
which arise when “one body encounters another with which it is compatible and so
experiences joy.”144 Common notions are not only crucial to individual preservation, but also
common notions is the basis for what Spinoza calls “virtuous polities.” Such polities are those
which combine the powers of many harmoniously and so constitute a body politic capable of
functioning as if it were “one mind and one body.”146 Shehabi’s poem confirms Spinoza’s
144
See Spinoza’s Ethics, Part II.
145
Gatens, Moira and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. London: Routledge,
1999, pg. 104.
146
Ibid., pg. 113.
84
belief in the collective dimensions of individual selfhood, the fact that every person is
embedded in wider social wholes in which the powers of bodies are strengthened or impeded.
To be an individual self is to be inserted into economies of affect and imagination which bind
us to others. As Gatens and Lloyd put it, “Imagination is a mimetic process, in which
individuals associate joy or sadness with the images of other individuals, thus awakening
feelings of hate and love towards them…Affects are continuously circulated between
But how, exactly, are affects transmitted between two people? For explanatory
theorists. Teresa Brennan (2004) discusses at length the “transmission of affect,” a term that
accounts for how affects not only arise within individuals but also come from interactions
with other people and the environment. The transmission of affect means that the affects of
one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into
another. Affects therefore have a physiological impact.149 Brennan argues that, throughout the
between bodies became replaced by the conviction that affects emerge from the self. A
physical interpretation of transmission therefore gave way to a psychic one. What we have
147
Ibid., pg. 68.
148
Ibid., pg. 73.
149
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2014, pg. 3.
85
transmission that posit a physical mechanism by which affects move. Brennan proposes,
somewhat controversially, that affects are transmitted by smell, passing through the air from
explanatory mechanism for the complex processes by which affect is transmitted. In this
regard her research parallels many scholars working in the field of affect theory. As
Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard (2010) observe, literary and cultural theory has
shifted from a concern with the social construction of identity categories to an assertion of the
conduit for concepts to travel between the humanities and the sciences.”151 In addition to what
commitment to a starkly physical account of affective transmission has been critiqued for
reinforcing the traditional opposition between the psychological and the physical.152
With these critiques in mind, I depart from a focus on biological and psychological
theory in the study of affect and make a case for the importance of the imagination in
affective transmission. Although it appears that Shehabi’s work aligns with Brennan’s
150
In The Transmission of Affect, Brennan writes, “I suggest smell is critical in how we ‘feel the atmosphere’…It
has been established now that the pheromone odors of the one may change the mood of the other…social
interaction changes our biology,” pg. 9-10.
Papoulias, Constantina and Felicity Callard. “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect.” Body &
151
152
See Susan James’s contribution to “Perspectives on Teresa Brennan's The Transmission of Affect.” Women:
A Cultural Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 2006, pp. 103-17. See pg. 106.
86
emphasis on the physical processes by which affects are transmitted, Shehabi does not
exclusively provide a physical account of affective transmission, but rather demonstrates that
affective transmission occurs through inextricably linked physical and imaginative processes.
affects by focusing on blood, rather than on the sense of smell, as a mechanism for affective
specifically, how affects are physically passed from one body to another, and how affective
physical environment becomes inextricably linked to human flesh and blood, Shehabi depicts
how the biological processes of one person enable cognitive processes of another.
While Shehabi involves the reader in the transmission of affect, Leila Halaby’s poem
“on going to the movies with a Jewish friend 1990” (2012) centers on a speaker—which she
identifies with the first-person singular pronoun of “I”—and this speaker’s experiences with
affective transmission. Leila Halaby, born in Beirut to a Jordanian father and an American
mother, grew up mostly in Arizona, but also lived in Jordan and Italy. Currently, she lives in
Arizona. Her autobiographical collection My Name on His Tongue (2012) explores her
feelings of exile, challenges of navigating two cultures, and struggles to shape her own
creative identity. In this collection, Halaby’s poem, “on going to the movies with a Jewish
friend 1990,” underscores the role of the imagination, and the body, in the transmission of
affect between people. Halaby’s brief poem, which is divided into three stanzas, begins by
articulating the nature of a female speaker’s friendship with an unnamed Jewish man during
87
an outing to a movie theater: “out of the bookstore / into a movie theater / with the enemy at
my side / we were close / as we sat in darkness / our elbows touching / mine and the
enemy’s.” Halaby italicizes the phrase “the enemy” twice to underscore the conventional
glasses / to see which frames / best suited our Semitic features / they were not dissimilar / our
glasses / or our features.” Here, Halaby emphasizes the close connections between the speaker
and her Jewish friend because of their similar features. By trading glasses, Halaby creates a
relationship of reciprocity and empathy—of both literally and figuratively seeing the world
Halaby then highlights the reactions of each party upon seeing through the other’s
glasses: “they’re dusty / he whispered / as I put his frames / around my eyes in the safe
darkness. / I winced / at the blurs on the screen / he turned away/ embarrassed.” In the feeling
of safety created by the darkness of the movie theater, the speaker and her friend are able to
whimsically trade visual experiences: seeing the same film simultaneously through the flawed
vision of the other. The Jewish friend gives a piece of cautionary advice, almost
apologetically, to the speaker, telling her that his glasses are dusty, which further accentuates
the limits to his sight. The speaker’s vision is impeded by wearing his glasses, but she does
In the second stanza, Halaby moves from an American setting—“this smoky pool
hall…the clamor of Springsteen”—to “the Palestinian shore,” where the speaker’s “bare feet /
beat a memory into the earth.” She recalls the “mulberry tree / under which” she “wrote
poetry / for that stolen shore.” Here Halaby takes an explicit position on the conflict, asserting
88
that the Palestinian shore has been “stolen.” She notes that the “poppy-dotted hillside / that
taught” her “soul to breathe” is “unknown” to her “companion,” her Jewish friend. In the third
and final stanza, Halaby asks a series of five hypothetical questions addressed to her Jewish
friend, expressing an urgent need to experience a relationship with him. This relationship is
imagines the speaker’s body engaged with her Jewish friend’s body, to different degrees.
First, Halaby asks: “if I were heated wax / that covered your body / from the peak of your
head / to the tips of your fingers / to the ends of your toes / then sealed / would you scream
my truth?” Halaby presents the speaker’s body eclipsing her Jewish friend’s body, asking if
he would “scream” her truth. This indicates a painful, forced imposition of her body onto her
friend’s body: a parasitic relationship. The second question expands on the first scenario, but
takes a different approach: “what if I melted again / poured myself into your cupped hands /
like raindrops / would you drink me?” Here, Halaby seems to be imagining a more reciprocal
relationship: rather than covering her friend’s body with wax, she imagines her body melting
and poured into her friend’s cupped hands. She asks if her friend would drink her, indicating
that the friend has the freedom to assess his level of engagement, rather than being
overwhelmed and forced to answer the question of whether to scream, as in the first case.
In the third question, Halaby asks, “if my teardrops / filled a riverbed / became an
ocean / would you swim with me?” Here Halaby imagines her body coexisting in a state of
mutuality with her Jewish friend, although it is unclear whether what impact swimming in
tears might have upon the friend. In the fourth question, Halaby returns to a more forceful
approach: “if the kohl from my eyes / traced a line around you / trapping you / would you
accept my heartbeat?” Here, Halaby invokes a trope of stereotypical Arab femininity: kohl-
89
ringed eyes. By reclaiming what is often an image of objectification into a mechanism for
control, Halaby expresses her desire to have her Jewish friend understand and accept her
experiences. Although her discussion of “trapping” her friend may seem to be a type of
parasitic engagement, Halaby asks the friend if he would “accept” her heartbeat, which
indicates reciprocity. In the final question, Halaby articulates mutual imbrications of herself
and her friend: “if I offered you my tongue / to wrap around your own / would you speak my
words?” This question, which has obvious sexual connotations, offers her friend the ability to
speak her words, an action that elides the distinction between self and other.
Halaby, like Spinoza, is focused on how the imagination affects the interactions
between bodies. As Gatens and Lloyd explain, Spinoza interrogates a complex array of
interactions between bodies—some “relate to the impingement of other bodies here and now;
others derive from past collisions and collusions of bodies. Some form the basis of
conflict…human bodies are not born into a single community, but into complex, crisscrossing
structures of reciprocal affinity.”153 Halaby’s poem shows how external affections of the body
are not separate from but, rather, are inextricably linked to the mind. In particular, Halaby
ruminates on how bodily affects emerge from the mind and create a basis for relational
identity. For example, Halaby illuminates external affections when she discusses the speaker’s
is only through the external affections of tears that the speaker communicates her affects to
her Jewish friend. These affects emerge from the position of an Arab speaker who yearns for
153
Gatens, Moira and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. London: Routledge,
1999, pg. 76-7.
90
the “stolen” Palestinian shore, for the “poppy-dotted hillside / that taught [her] soul to
breathe,” which is “unknown to [her] companion,” the Jewish friend. It is only through bodily
affections that the speaker expresses her yearning for the Palestinian shore, a process that
maintaining it—breaks down boundaries between self and other. Through mutual
imbrications, the Jewish friend’s body is affected by an external body (the Arab speaker) and,
through this process, the Arab speaker communicates to the Jewish friend. It is only through
this process of relational identity—by imagining the Jewish friend as a captive audience to her
affective responses—that the speaker of the poem gains control over her negative affects.
Halaby’s work evinces what Teresa Brennan (2004) terms a “dyadic affective transfer” in
which “one party benefits from the other’s energetic attention.”154 In this case, the speaker of
the poem benefits from imagining the Jewish friend’s energetic attention to a variety of
embodied experiences the speaker creates in the poem. While Brennan maintains that appeals
to the imagination cannot explain several well-attested phenomena, including the unconscious
importance of the imagination in theories of affective transmission. Writing from the position
of a subject speaking to what she views as a member of an oppressive group, Halaby provides
insights into the negative affect produced by one who sees oneself as a minority subject who
154
Brennan, Teresa. Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2014, pg. 50.
155
Brennan focuses on the embodied dimensions of affective transmission. For an analysis of the Brennan’s
focus on embodiment, see Susan James’s contribution to “Perspectives on Teresa Brennan's The Transmission of
Affect.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 2006, pp. 103-17. See pg. 106.
91
has been disadvantaged by not having her affective responses considered. Halaby documents
repressed affects that the speaker desires to express through imaginative acts of entanglement
with the other. Halaby does not articulate a desire for aggression, but a yearning for
understanding. Her imaginative responses create avenues for affects that have been repressed
the self and the other. Halaby’s poem, like Shehabi’s, breaks down boundaries between
individual human subjects, depicting how relational identity is formed through affective
transmission. Other poets, such as Etel Adnan, develop additional forms of relational identity.
Adnan’s poetry meditates on entanglements between humans and the environment, a topic to
Relational Identity and the Beyond-Human World: Adnan’s Imaginative, Affective, and
Spiritual Ethics
Adnan’s complex identity seems, at least on the surface, to present an ideal subject for
poetic explorations. Born in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon (at that time under the French Mandate)
to a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, Adnan lived in France before
coming to the United States in 1955 to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at the University
of California-Berkeley and at Harvard.156 In 1972, Adnan returned to Lebanon and lived there
during the civil war, working as a cultural editor for two daily newspapers. After seven years,
Ouyang, Wen-chin. “From Beirut to Beirut: Exile, Wandering and Homecoming in the Narratives of Etel
156
Adnan.” Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist, edited by Lisa Suhair Majaj and
Amal Amireh. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2002, pg. 70.
92
she returned to the United States, where she began to write and publish poetry in both French
and English from her home in California. Adnan’s oeuvre—eighteen books encompassing the
philosophical texts that develop metaphysical perspectives. In this chapter, I analyze poems
from four of Adnan’s collections—There: In the Light of the Darkness of the Self and of the
Other (1997), Seasons (2008), Sea and Fog (2012), and Premonition (2014).
Given Adnan’s transnational background, one might expect her poetry to focus on her
identity, specifically on her intersectional standpoint as a woman of Lebanese descent and her
experiences as a racialized subject in American society. Yet in her twelve books of poetry,
Adnan rarely ponders her own identity. Instead, she interrogates the nature of identity itself,
most prominently in her collections There (1997), Seasons (2008), Sea and Fog (2012), and
Premonition (2014). In these works, Adnan does not explore how individuals are affected by
the intersections of gender, race, and class, among other factors. Rather, Adnan’s poetry
articulates what Rosi Braidotti terms a “post-identitarian” view of the subject; Adnan does not
often ruminate about how individual subjects are impacted by human power structures.
Because Adnan concentrates on factors that unite all human beings, as opposed to analyzing
the differences between them, her poetry has political implications. One of Adnan’s most
nonhuman world.
157
Adnan’s poetry collections include Moonshoots (1966) Five Senses for One Death (1971); The Arab
Apocalypse (1989); The Spring Flowers Own & Manifestations of the Voyage (1990); The Indian Never Had a
Horse (1995); There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other (1997); In/Somnia (2002); In the
Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005); Seasons (2008); Sea and Fog (2012); and Premonition (2014).
Her fiction includes Sitt Marie Rose (1978) and Paris, When It’s Naked (1993). Her nonfiction includes The
Ninth Page: Etel Adnan’s Journalism 1972-74; Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986); Of Cities and Women
(1993); Master of the Eclipse (2009); and On Love and the Cost We Are Not Willing to Pay Today (2011).
93
Adnan engages in metaphysical inquiry, an attempt to present a coherent picture of
reality, including a speculative account of the origin of things and of the place of human
beings within this schema.158 As Adnan writes, “Poetry is metaphysical. We’re searching for
ways to see, to arrest, to tell, in the great passion for the eternal flow.”159 She posits that there
is a force outside of, and greater, than humans—what she terms “the eternal flow”—which
she explores in her poetic visions. Adnan’s metaphysical perspectives notice the mind’s
entanglements with, and ethical responses to, the nonhuman world. Throughout her poetry,
Adnan does not depict the human mind as embodied, but rather as what I describe as
networked, meaning that she explores how the mind is connected to, and affected by,
nonhuman forces. I read in Adnan’s articulation of the networked mind an ethical framework
interactions with the beyond-human world. Second, she represents humans’ affective
responses to the beyond-human world. Third, Adnan illuminates spiritual relationships that
connect human beings to the beyond-human world, which incorporate both imaginative and
affective responses.
specifically in Sea and Fog (2012), Adnan depicts the human mind as enmeshed with the
natural world, and she describes nature as a mind. In her portrayals of the inextricably linked
human mind and the natural world, Adnan associates the mind with the nonhuman,
158
See Stuart Hampshire’s introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics. New York: Penguin, 1994, pg. xv.
159
Sea and Fog, pg. 88
94
specifically with the physical properties of the sea: “what if the mind were a well, deep but
still with a firm base, though not a material limit? There would be water in there, real water,
dark and oily, at turns slimy, that once in a while rebels, overflows; and isn’t that cataclysmic
event what we name ‘sea?’”160 Imagining the mind through a hypothetical scenario, Adnan
describes the human mind as networked with the natural environment in ways that exceed
embodiment. In another account of the networked mind that explores the inextricability of the
human mind from nature, Adnan imbues the human mind with cosmological power—its
“black holes,” she writes, “swallow tumultuous rivers, mountain ranges, galaxies, as well as
toys, trees and memories.”161 In this passage, Adnan reveals the mind in possession of black
holes that interact with the physical geographical features of the world as well as with human
constructs of toys and memories. This process of interacting with the world occurs through
consumption: the mind consumes the world, making it part of the mind’s structural
composition. These renderings are important because they articulate a view of identity that is
relationships between human beings, animals, the environment, and natural processes
(Plumwood 1993, 2002; Braidotti 1994; Oyama 2000; Alaimo 2000, 2010; Barad 2003,
2007). Indeed, the interdependence of human beings and the environment has long been an
important topic for theorists interested in resolving ecological crises. In the era of the
Anthropocene, in which resource depletions, species extinctions, and climate changes are
160
Sea and Fog. Callicoon, New York: Nightboat Books, 2012, pg. 57.
161
Sea and Fog, pg. 88.
95
creating profoundly destructive consequences throughout the world, analytics that attend to
Anthropocene” requires that humans are “transformed by the world in which we find
ourselves—or, to put this in more reciprocal terms, it is about the earth’s future being
Stacy Aliamo develops what she calls a “posthuman environmental ethics that denies to the
‘human’ the sense of separation from the interconnected, mutually constitutive actions of
material reality.”163 Both Aliamo and Gibson-Graham, like Adnan, attend to the complex
world, I read in Adnan’s work an advancement of Val Plumwood’s (1993) critique of Western
construction that not only demarcates separations (for example, between subject/object or
human/nature), but also sets a higher value to one over the other. To solve this problem,
on mutuality and care. She argues that a non-reductive resolution to dualisms requires that we
reconceive ourselves as more animal and embodied, more ‘natural,’ and that we
reconceive nature as more mindlike than in the Cartesian conception. This is a
162
Gibson-Graham, J.K. “An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene.” Antipode, vol. 41, 2009, pp. 320-46. See
pg. 322.
163
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010,
pg. 24.
96
condition for remaking our relations with nature, and beings in nature, on the basis of
recognising them not as things but as creative self-directed originative others.164
reconceiving humans as close to nature—in her 2008 collection Seasons. This volume
explores how “the weather keeps us conscious of our existence.”165 Specifically, Adnan
ponders the experience of being in “snow, melting rain, diffused, drifting, breaking down in
moisture or smoke, diluting into near nothingness that’s the mind’s destination.”166 Adnan
positions human thought on the same level as natural formations and processes: “Drops of
dew on a morning rose have as much being as a stack of accumulated thoughts.”167 She views
the human mind and body as inextricably connected and embedded within the environment.
“Human heartbeats,” she writes, “are borrowed from the sun’s pulse; along the riverbank
some objects, impregnated with our thinking, soar.”168 In these lines, Adnan writes that
human life is “borrowed” from the sun, and that natural objects can become affected by
human thinking. As Susan Oyama (2000) asserts, there are “a stunning array of processes,
entities, and environments—chemical and mechanical, micro- and macroscopic, social and
geological,” that shape and are shaped by social and biological constitution and
164
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993, pg. 124.
165
Seasons, pg. 57.
166
Ibid.
167
Ibid.
168
Seasons, pg. 22.
97
behavior.”169Adnan’s perspectives on the networked mind delineate a relational identity that
is not grounded in human embodiment but rather integrated with natural processes.
For example, in There: In the Light of the Darkness of the Self and of the Other (1997),
Adnan portrays the body in water: “Currents meet in my body while it swims and I become
water, part of water. The ‘you’ is always the ‘I’ so we inhabit each other.”170 Just as the body
fuses with water, the self also fuses with the other. In another passage from There, Adnan
asks, “are you me, a self exploded and scattered, always kept aside, out of it, out of your sight,
your purpose crossing mine; you’re maybe the hidden seed of the earth, and me, the moon.”171
Here Adnan characterizes humans as imbued with the capacity to identify with others, and as
inextricably connected to the environment. For Adnan, human bodily functions come from
natural forces, human thought merges with the environment, and humans are “fused” with the
weather.172
Adnan’s work also echoes Plumwood’s call to “reconceive nature as more mindlike
than in the Cartesian conception.”173 Throughout Seasons, Adnan imagines the networked
mind by representing interactions between the mind and the world. She describes the world as
a “mega-brain,” representing the universe as the highest form of intelligence and the human
Oyama, Susan. Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP,
169
2000, pg. 3.
170
There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other. Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press,
1997, pg. 27.
171
There, pg. 34.
172
Seasons, pg. 55.
173
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993, pg. 124.
98
brain as a microcosm of that larger intelligence. As she writes, “When the world and the mind
face each other, they cancel out. With its electrical system broken down, the body doesn’t
qualify anymore for a name.”174 Here, Adnan posits that the mutual interaction between the
mind and the world “cancels” out both, breaking down the body’s “electrical system,” and, in
the process, erasing the identity of the individual body. Throughout her work, Adnan calls
attention to the instability of the individual subject. In Seasons, she writes, “The whole system
named the ‘I’ is unreliable, unbalanced. When it goes astray it carries with it all the
seasons.”175 The unreliability and unbalanced nature of the individual subject has a tendency
to go “astray” and to become enmeshed with the natural world. Her articulations of relational
identity represent the merging of humans with the environment through energies, natural
humans and the beyond-human world—one of the important topics considered by new
New materialism—a term coined by Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti in the
second half of the 1990s— challenges the Cartesian account of matter as essentially inert and
humans’ labor and cultural practices.176 Instead, new materialists, as Karen Barad writes,
maintain that human beings “are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply
174
Seasons, pg. 9.
175
Seasons, pg. 23.
176
See Samantha Frost’s “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology.” Feminist
Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, edited by H.E. Grasswick. Springer, 2011, pg.
71.
99
located at particular places in the world; rather…we are part of the nature we seek to
understand.”177 Because new materialists do not separate humans from the natural world, they
contemplate “the forces, processes, capacities, and resiliencies” of bodies and organisms,
exploring in particular “how the forces of matter and the processes of organic life contribute
to the play of power or provide elements or modes of resistance to it.”178 In new materialist
accounts, the mind is always already material, matter is necessarily connected to the mind,
and, as Donna Haraway puts it, nature and culture are “naturecultures.”179 The complexity of
New materialism, as defined by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (2012), is a
cultural theory that starts its analysis from how oppositions (between nature and culture,
matter and mind, the human and the inhuman) are produced in action itself. New materialism
has a profound investment in the morphology of change and gives special attention to matter
177
Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward and Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.”
Signs, vol. 28, no. 3, 2003, pp. 801-31. See pg. 828.
178
Ibid., pg. 70.
From an interview with Karen Barad in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin’s New Materialism: Interviews &
179
100
embodied human subject—is a crucial component of posthuman ethics. As Karen Barad puts
it, ethics is
…not about right responses to a radically exteriorized other, but about responsibility
and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming, of which we are a part.
Ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of
which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new
possibilities…Responsibility, then, is a matter of the ability to respond. Listening for
the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not
entirely separate from what we call the self. This way of thinking ontology,
epistemology, and ethics together makes for a world that is always already an ethical
matter.182
Barad’s thinking about ethics is predicated on the ability of human beings to interact with—to
respond to—others who are not separate but entangled with the self. In a similar vein,
Braidotti’s work on post-humanism advances what she calls an “affirmative” politics based on
a vision of life that she terms “zoe-life beyond the ego-bound human.”183 This conception of
world. Post-humanist and new materialist theories provide insights into human-environmental
relationships; however, their emphasis on the inextricability of human beings and the beyond-
human world does not, in itself, explain how humans’ ethical commitments to the beyond-
Indeed, as Bonnie Washick and Elizabeth Wingrove (2015) observe, it is not clear
whether new materialist and post-humanist figurations of the world “offer imaginative,
182
From an interview with Karen Barad in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin’s New Materialism: Interviews &
Cartographies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Italics mine.
183
See Braidotti’s The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, g. 133.
101
affective, or strategic resources for political action.”184 Washick and Wingrove draw our
attention to three issues: that new materialists’ fixation on the mutual constitution of
entangled agencies can make it difficult to identify the “continuities, disabilities, and often
humanist ontology does not “illuminate any particular form of action that corresponds to the
political engagement”;186 and that this ontology “normalizes a vision of life forged through
interdependence” which “occludes the struggle, compromise, and achievement that action-in-
concert entails.”187 Given these concerns, can new materialist and post-humanist ontologies
provide a basis for formulating an ethics that is attentive to systemic power differentials, to
I argue that new materialism and post-humanist ontologies can indeed provide a basis
for an ethics that highlights these issues. In thinking through how Adnan’s poetry articulates a
post-humanist ethical framework, it is important to state at the outset that Adnan’s work does
not directly address the issue of how human power systems create asymmetries that persevere
through time. Rather, her poetry investigates a different aspect of power: how the affective
force of love, as a form of power, moves individuals from an investment in embodied identity
and into a relational identity. This relational identity can provide a basis for ameliorating the
Washick, Bonnie and Elizabeth Wingrove. “Politics that Matter: Thinking about power and justice with the
184
new materialists.” Contemporary Political Theory 14.1 (2015): 63-89. See pg. 76.
185
Ibid., pg. 65.
186
Ibid., pg. 66.
187
Ibid.
102
persistence of human power asymmetries. Adnan’s attention to the affective dimensions of
love addresses Washick and Wingrove’s concerns that post-humanist ontology normalizes
interdependence and occludes the struggles of collective action. Adnan does not occlude
struggles; rather, she presents love itself as a struggle, as a power dynamic that breaks down
the boundaries between self and other. For Adnan, love is a form of action in which the
In There (1997), Adnan asks, “What is love?” Although humans understand love on an
love, Adnan asserts, inhibits abstract contemplation about the nature of love, specifically its
affective resonances. Adnan writes that love “resembles space and time, and like these two
Adnan also ponders a type of interpersonal romantic love in which self contemplates whether
it loves the other “because of this proximity, this obsessive involvement,” or because the other
has “filled the space” of the self for “so long that the self is left with “signs” and “traces” of
the other.189 Adnan explores the nature of relationships grounded in love, emphasizing how
these involvements affect the self physically—through “signs” and traces”—and still lead to a
death of the self. The fusion of self and other through the affective bond of love leads to a
type of death that occurs “many times,” preparing the self for the ultimate experience of
death: “We also did die many times, didn’t we, of love and separation, so that when the end
188
There, pg. 51.
189
Ibid.
103
will come it will be a comfortable, though perverse, homecoming. We did reach the absolute,
didn’t we, for a handful of hours, somewhere in between, in between ‘you’ and ‘I.’”190
In these lines, Adnan portrays the space between self and other as “the absolute.” Love
is a force that causes one to experience the “death” of self because of the desire to fuse with
the other. In her work, the space between self and other is dissolved. She suggests that the
force of love is what moves individuals from embodied identity to relational identity. Adnan
renders love as a force that breaks down the boundaries between self and other. As she writes,
“Love is subversion, you told me, adding that it tortures the body out of its limits.”191 Here
Adnan has the voice of the “other” associate love with a force of subversion that “tortures”
the body; she associates love with violence, asserting that the affective power of love has the
ability to violently wrest the individual body from its limits. The fusion of the self and the
other, through the affective bond of love, leads to the death of the embodied self. An analysis
of the affective response of love is important because it enables us to account for the ways in
which affect is grounded in relationality and illuminates another way of seeing identity: as
considers the nature of affective bonds between the mind and the world. For example, in
Seasons she writes, “The mind is in love with the world.”192 This indicates that there is an
affective dimension that leads the mind to both interact with, and to shape, the world. Adnan’s
190
There, pg. 68.
191
There, pg. 17.
192
Seasons, pg. 65-6.
104
portrayal of the networked mind transcends the embodied subject, exploring the relationship
between the mind and the world. Indeed, her reflections of humans’ affective responses of
love to the beyond-human world are a fundamental component of how she depicts relational
identity as the basis for a post-humanist ethical framework. As Susan Oyama observes, if we
investigate the “interdependence of organism and environment,” then we can elucidate the
ways in which organisms and their environments “can affect each other.”193 Adnan’s poetry
illuminates how the affective power of love is linked to action grounded in struggle and
compromise—a type of politically engaged collective action. Her poetry concentrates on both
the micro-level of two human beings engaged in the struggles entailed because of the
Adnan’s rendering of spirituality provides an ethical foundation for human and beyond-
human interactions. Adnan’s poetry elucidates how spirituality exceeds and transcends
Adnan creates a space for abstract deliberations about spirituality. In her exploration of
identity, Adnan centers on spiritual dimensions, which she alternately refers to as God, the
universe, spirits, and the immaterial. In Seasons, for example, Adnan notices the immaterial
nature of the human mind. As she writes, “The mind doesn’t take off from material objects
but from immateriality.”194 Here Adnan emphasizes how forces that transcend and outlive
human beings shape individual minds. These forces are spiritual in nature: “At the confluence
193
Oyama, Susan. Evolution’s Eye, 2000, pg. 3 (emphasis mine).
194
Seasons, pg. 32.
105
of spirit and matter, or mind and environment, there’s a continuous spark.”195 This
“continuous spark” is what exposes individuals to spiritual dimensions. As Adnan writes, “we
live in many places, experience different telluric spirits. At the end, we’ll live in all these
relationship between the human mind and the immaterial realm. She underscores that the
mind is an intermediary between the material and the spiritual, thereby engaging in a poetic
Adnan stresses the spiritual purposes of human beings, not as individual subjects, but
as entities that enable the governing intelligence of the universe to reflect on itself. In her
poems, the self extends outside of its embodied status, and human beings exist as a medium to
reflect the world to itself: “We are the world reflecting on itself, a medium, exalted,
human lives: “On a deathbed, the human spirit can cover the whole of the universe. It can
meteor. Then Nature swells and expands.”198 Adnan illuminates what she sees as the
connections between the universe and the human spirit. In her poetry, human beings have the
capacity—when they are near death—to encompass the entire universe, and to comprehend
the nature of existence. In a poem reflecting on the nature of human identity, Adnan writes,
195
Seasons, pg. 37.
196
Seasons, pg. 43.
197
Sea and Fog, pg. 101.
198
Seasons, pg. 46.
106
I am no object, no substance, no idea, no thought, but a white energy in the midst of
the night that I am. I am a hole in the fabric of Being. But when you meet me in a café,
or in the street, you give me a name and stop there. Names, numbers, bring you
comfort. The same can be said for addresses, and other such stupidities. But one by
one we shall disappear, make room for others. The universe, yes, will go on. It is
expanding, but in what? In itself. It is the box and the package. We are in it. For ever.
Ever.”199
In this passage, Adnan observes that human beings feel a need to place an identity on others
by resorting to names and numbers. This seeking of identity stems from a desire for comfort.
energy” and as a “hole in the fabric of Being.” Rather than conceptualizing identity as stable,
Adnan’s work does not attend to the identity of the individual, embodied subject, or on
human power structures. Instead, Adnan centers on spirituality, rather than religion—a
capacious perspective that moves the scope of her analysis beyond human power structures.
Her interest in spirituality compels her to notice the macro-level forces that affect all human
inconsequential. In this respect, her poetry accords with Jane Bennett’s (2015) position that
new materialist and post-humanist ontologies indeed formulate a politics, but these ontologies
“tend not to focus energy” on “structural constraints.” However, this does not mean that the
Bennett makes the point that new materialism and post-humanism are inherently
political because they enable us to see “the effects of the bio-assemblages in which we find
199
Premonition, pg. 13-14.
107
ourselves participating, and then to work experimentally—micro- and macro-politically—to
alter or derail the machine so as to minimize its harms and distribute more equally its costs
and benefits.”200 Adnan’s descriptions of spirituality, which consider the interactions between
the material and the immaterial, articulate a basis for building coalitions and solidarity. A lens
that focuses on the spiritual enables us to see connections between all human beings—the
commonalities we share—rather than the differences that emerge from other types of
embodied subject and centers on that subject’s differences from others, which may lead to
“matter and spirit.”201 Adnan does not identify this “spirit” with any distinguishable religious
tradition; there is a universality of “spirit” presented here. Instead, she highlights the process,
or the network, of how this spirit is transmitted from the material world to the mind so that the
spirit can be communicated to human beings. Yet the networked mind is not a neutral,
contemporary theoretical accounts of identity often do not contemplate the spiritual beliefs
held by many people. Numerous theorists have critiqued the relative absence of religion and
little attention within intersectionality as an axis of difference alongside gender, race, class,
200
Bennett, Jane. “Ontology, sensibility, and action.” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 14, no. 1, 2015, pp.
82-7. See pg. 85.
201
Seasons, pg. 61.
108
ability, and nation, among other factors.202 The “post-secular turn” within feminist thought
ponders how the practices and agency of religious women challenges many assumptions of
feminist theory and politics.203 As Jakeet Singh (2015) observes, this literature explores what
looks like a paradox to many feminists: that many women actively choose to comply with,
embrace, uphold, and even spread religious traditions that appear to be conservative,
differences with men, and their strict social roles and duties.
Recent scholarship on religious women’s agency (Bracke 2003, Avishai 2006, Bilge
2010, Burke 2012) confronts and challenges the “false consciousness” thesis of many “second
wave” and modern liberal-secular feminists that claims women who participate in patriarchal
religious traditions are acting against their own objective interests, and are therefore simply
the passive and brainwashed victims, dupes, or doormats of men and their patriarchal
institutions. Under particular scrutiny in this literature is the implicit or explicit orientation in
much of Euro-American feminist theory: a disdain for custom, tradition, and religion, and a
teleological conception of progress tied to secularization and the ultimate demise (or at least
privatization) of religion.204
possible to consider multiple forms of identity and consciousness that entangle human beings
202
Jakeet Singh’s “Religious Agency and the Limits of Intersectionality.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 4, 2015, pp. 657-
74.
203
Ibid., pg. 658.
204
Ibid.
205
Ibid.
109
European political theory in general and feminism in particular because it makes manifest the
notion that agency, or political identity, can actually be conveyed through and supported by
religious piety and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality.”206 Indeed, post-
secular theorists have displaced the definition of the subject from that of the secular,
autonomous individual, thereby opening up the possibility for various forms of non-
unrecognized forms of action by religious women, enabling us to see more diverse forms of
(divine or earthly) forms of life. New materialists have also engaged with the post-secular turn
and the role of spirituality. As Braidotti puts it, conditions for political and ethical agency are
not necessarily oppositional and thus not tied to the present by negation; instead they can be
Conclusion
While not all Arab American women poets articulate relational identity, I have found
that several poets—especially Etel Adnan, Leila Halaby, and Deema Shehabi—portray an
to emphasize the body in pain, suffering, and oppressed by an unjust society. While these
From an interview with Karen Barad in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin’s New Materialism: Interviews &
206
110
issues are important to explore in poetry, what is lost in this identity-based approach is an
examination of commonality, relationality, and unity. By putting these poets into conversation
with contemporary theorizing on identity, as well as with affect theory, I argued that Shehabi
and Halaby develop visions of relational identity. Shehabi’s poem imagines the formation of
what Spinoza terms “common notions,” which are the basis for what he calls “virtuous
polities.” Such polities are those which combine the powers of many harmoniously and so
constitute a body politic capable of functioning as if it were “one mind and one body”208
selfhood, the idea that every person is embedded in wider social wholes in which the powers
affect and imagination which bind us to others. Shehabi’s work demonstrates that affective
In a similar vein, Leila Halaby’s poetry breaks down boundaries between individual
human subjects, delineating how relational identity is formed through affective transmission.
Through mutual imbrications, the Arab speaker communicates to her Jewish friend. It is
through this process of relational identity—by imagining the Jewish friend as a captive
audience to her affective responses—that the speaker of the poem gains control over her
negative affects. Halaby stakes a claim for the importance of the imagination in theories of
affective transmission. Her imaginative responses create avenues for affects that have been
208
Ibid., pg. 113.
111
that connects the self and the other.
In my readings of Etel Adnan, I underscored how her poetry about what I term the
individuals. Her poetry contributes another way of seeing identity: as shaped by factors that
exceed embodiment and establish grounds for relationships. Adnan’s poetry reflects on the
self as subject to larger spiritual forces that are beyond individual control. Her work implicitly
poses the question: Is there not collective social benefit to be found in understanding the self
these poets support the idea that intersectionality as an analytical framework would benefit
from contemplating not only how individual subjects are shaped by structural inequalities, but
112
CHAPTER IV
Childhood Epistemologies:
Introduction
In “Arguments,” which ponders the United States and United Kingdom’s bombings of
Iraq in December 1998, Lisa Suhair Majaj asks her readers to “consider the infinite fragility
single blow.” In these lines, Majaj establishes that the perspective of an infant’s fragility will
serve as the foundation from which she will explore the impact of wars in Iraq. Majaj’s poem
is just one of many poems about children by Arab American women. Although the presence
American literature have not engaged, thus far, in sustained inquiries about poetic
representations of childhood in the context of violence. This chapter explores the significance
The Iraq wars, along with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are frequent topics in Arab
American women’s poetry, and many of these poems explore the nexus of violence and
childhood. Several of these poets ruminate on the boundary between childhood and adulthood
as a liminal space that facilitates insights from child’s perspectives to adult audiences. These
113
poets’ interest in children serves a rhetorical purpose, as poets who discuss highly politicized
audiences if their work centers on children rather than on highly committed activists on either
end of the political spectrum. In this chapter, I seek to understand how Arab American
women’s poetic portrayals of childhood provide insights into the problem of violence, both
intra-regional violence and foreign interventions. The poets I analyze—Lisa Suhair Majaj,
Elmaz Abinader, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Deema Shehabi—write about two major ongoing
conflicts that have wracked the Arab region from the mid-twentieth century until the present:
the Israel-Palestinian conflict and military interventions in Iraq, from the 1998 U.S. and U.K.-
led invasion following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, to the 1991 Gulf War, which
was followed by the 2003 American invasion and its aftermath. These conflicts caused
extreme instability in the Arab region, leading to millions of people in diaspora becoming
refugees. The Arab American Institute reports that the number of Americans who claim an
Arab ancestry has more than doubled since the Census first measured ethnic origins in 1980
and is among the fastest growing Arab diaspora populations in the world.209 Many
Palestinians immigrated to the U.S. after the Six Day War in 1967, and Iraqi citizens came in
See the Arab American Institute Foundation’s 2014 National Demographic Profile, which is based on the
209
U.S. Census Bureau, Office of Immigration Statistics – American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates (2007-
2011) and American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates (2012).
210
According to the 2000 United States Census, there were 72,112 people of Palestinian ancestry living in the
United States, increasing to 85,186 by the 2009-2013 American Community Survey. Estimates of the number of
Iraqi citizens vary—the Arab American Institute estimates that approximately 160,000 Iraqis came to the U.S.
between 1993 and 2013, since the Gulf War of 1991, the Detroit area absorbed over 300,000 Iraqis a year. See
Abraham, Nabeel, et al. Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2000.
114
How do Arab American women poets who have lived in the United States, often for
most of their lives, represent the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq wars? These poets
have come to understand the history of violence in the region through multiple sources such
media. In addition to these sources, these poets create child characters and write from their
perspectives. The creation of child characters serves as a rhetorical strategy to freight empathy
for people in the region. These poets depict childhood as a period in the lifecycle and as an
epistemological space from which to articulate insights into the problem of violence in the
Arab region.
The term “epistemology” refers to the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the
study of knowledge, epistemology seeks to understand the necessary and sufficient conditions
of knowledge—its sources, structure, and limits. In respect to the study of justified belief,
epistemology aims to understand the concept of justification and the degree to which
justification is subjective.211 As Linda Alcoff (1996) puts it, epistemology spells out the
grounds on which we can choose one account of a phenomena over another.212 This chapter
uses the term “epistemology” in a broad sense to understand how Arab American women
poets disseminate knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq wars through
the creation of child characters and viewpoints. Through child characters, these poets produce
knowledge about ethical responses to violence for readers who are geographically distant
from Arab regional violence. As Uma Narayan (1994) argues, “nonanalytic and ‘nonrational’
211
Steup, Matthias. “Epistemology.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta,
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/epistemology.
212
Alcoff, Linda Martín. Real Knowing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1996.
115
forms of discourses, like fiction or poetry, may be better able to convey the complex life
experiences of one group to members of another.”213 While the chapter remains agnostic
about the claim that poetry is better able to convey life experiences than other forms of
discourse, I maintain that poetry is an important source of knowledge about life experiences.
Specifically, I explore how Abinader, Majaj, Nye, and Shehabi create knowledge about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq wars for a primarily American audience; I also make
claims about the significance of this knowledge. Moreover, throughout this chapter, I consider
determinate sociopolitical formation at a specific point in history. Class, race, and gender,
among other factors, necessarily structure the individual’s understanding of reality and hence
inform all knowledge claims.214 Donna Haraway uses the term “embodied vision” to indicate
that knowledge is situated and partial.215 Other feminist scholars, including Nancy Hartsock
and Patricia Hill Collins, have investigated systematic biases toward the interests,
experiences, and forms of subjectivity of the privileged.216 As Uma Narayan writes, when
reflecting on the production of knowledge, it is easier and more likely for the oppressed to
Narayan, Uma. “The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern Feminist.”
213
Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, edited by Alison M. Jaggar & Susan
Bordo. Rutgers UP, 1989, pg. 264.
214
Hawkesworth, Mary E. “Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth.” Signs, vol. 14,
no. 3, 1989, pp. 533-57.
215
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575-599.
216
Sprague, Joey. Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences. Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
See Chapter 2.
116
have critical insights into the conditions of their own oppression than it is for those who live
outside these structures.217 Standpoint theories, then, move beyond a descriptive situated-
knowledge thesis; they contend that there are certain social positions from which it is possible
to develop better understandings. Extending the Marxist view of the proletariat’s epistemic
status, standpoint theorists argue that marginalized social location are epistemically superior
in that they correct falsehoods and reveal previously suppressed truths.218 As Sandra Harding
puts it, “Standpoint theories map how a social and political disadvantage can be turned into an
judged “in the light of its own explicitly stated content, it seems to contradict itself. For if all
truth is indeed to be regarded as socially constructed, rather than as reflecting accurately how
things ‘really are,’ then surely this claim itself—that is, the theory of social constructionism—
must also be viewed merely as a social construct and not merely as an accurate reflection of
how things really are.”220 Detmer points out that someone who has been structured by
Narayan, Uma. “The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern Feminist.”
217
Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and
Susan Bordo. Rutgers UP, 1989.
218
Bowell, T. “Feminist Standpoint Theory.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/fem-
stan.
219
Sandra Harding, editor. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 2004,
pg. 7-8.
220
Detmer, David. Challenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth. Amherst NY: Prometheus
Books, 2003, pg. 38.
117
different combinations of race, class, and gender might have a perspective in which the
possibility of advancing legitimate knowledge claims that transcend the boundaries of class,
race, and gender would be affirmed.221 In a social constructionist framework, where all
knowledge is socially constructed and there is no objective referent, what are the grounds on
which one can claim that one account of knowledge is superior to another? This is not to say
that diverse perspectives are not important. Indeed, the increasingly inclusive trajectory of
contemporary scholarship means that issues are being examined from a greater variety of
perspectives—a vital enterprise that should be continued. Yet, the issue of whether a
perspective has been marginalized is different from the issue of determining the truth or
likely to provoke tensions between social groups who are viewed as epistemically privileged
and those groups who are considered to lack epistemic privilege. If one rejects the concept of
epistemic privilege, however, then how do marginalized voices assert their experiences to
achieve inclusion and equality? How do disadvantaged groups relay their experiences without
provoking antagonism and social conflict? I argue that poetry is a medium that facilitates
nonviolent communication between differently situated social groups. In this chapter, I put
several poems by Arab American women into conversation with feminist standpoint theory
and its critiques. I explore how these poets’ work supports a critique of epistemic privilege
221
Ibid., pg. 47.
222
Ibid., pg. 343.
118
because claims of epistemic privilege make it difficult to communicate across differences,
specifically in the case of Arab poets speaking to American audiences. Instead of appealing to
the notion of epistemic privilege, these poets, through child characters, appeal to the
Throughout this chapter, I analyze how these poets create what I call childhood
these poets do not claim that children’s viewpoints have epistemic privilege, but rather that
their perspectives are important to contemplate. Through children’s perspectives, these poets
Although these poets specifically address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq wars,
their insights also have more general application because they establish ethical parameters for
responding to violence. Through child characters and their vantage points, these poets respond
In the first part of this chapter, I explore how Abinader, Majaj, and Nye develop
childhood epistemologies that facilitate communication between America and the Arab
region. Through the creation of childhood epistemologies, which emerge from domestic
environments, specifically the private space of households, these poets open communication
between Arabs and Americans. The second and final section explores how Nye and Shehabi,
context of the natural environment, by which I signify the phenomena of the physical world
collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the
earth. Specifically, I attend to how Nye and Shehabi’s childhood epistemologies explore the
119
intergenerational trauma resistance, which is based on insights that emerge from the natural
environment.
Elmaz Abinader’s poem, “This House, My Bones” (1999), was written in the
aftermath of two military interventions in Iraq: the Gulf War (1990-91) led by the United
States in response to Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait, and Operation Desert Fox
(1998), a bombing of several Iraqi military installations in response to the country’s continued
flouting of the UN weapons ban and its repeated interference with the inspections.223 Scholars
have estimated that the number deaths of children under the age of five resulting from the
Gulf War and its aftermath—including trade sanctions—was between 400,000 and
500,000.224 In this context, Abinader emphasizes the impact of these military interventions on
the life of an Iraqi child. Abinader creates a child character named Fuad and establishes the
reader’s relationship with Fuad in the domestic space. By using the second-person address,
Abinader situates the reader beside Fuad and begins a rapport between them.
Abinader opens with a directive for readers to “enter the house” and to sit at a table
223
See the entry on “Iraq War.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Iraq-War. Accessed
10 Nov. 2016.
224
Ali, Mohamed, John Blacker, and Gareth Jones. “Annual mortality rates and excess deaths of children under
five in Iraq, 1991-98.” Population Studies: A Journal of Demography, vol. 57, no. 2, 2003, pp. 217-226.
120
covered in a cloth embroidered for “the third child’s birth.” Inside this domestic environment,
as the “youngest boy / Fuad, shows you a drawing,” Abinader puts the reader in the position
of giving affection: “You touch his shoulder, stroke / his hair, he loves to talk to strangers /
show them to his room filled with posters / Of extinct and mythical animals.” What is
important in Abinader’s evocation of childhood is the relationship she establishes between the
child, Fuad, and the reader—a relationship that serves as the basis for an epistemology that
Abinader builds throughout the poem. The imaginative location of the domestic sphere, which
facilitates closeness, enables readers to intimately engage with an Arab child’s perspective.
between readers and the child that would be difficult to achieve in other social locations (for
example, in public spaces) or with people who inhabit other social and epistemological
locations (for example, with adults who hold strong political beliefs). The fact that Fuad is a
child is of crucial importance, not because of his age or because Abinader associates him with
innocence, but because Fuad’s perspective, specifically his love of strangers, establishes an
epistemological location from which readers—who may be geographically distant from Arab
regional violence—can connect to the child and engage emotionally with him. This
After situating the reader beside Fuad and establishing a rapport between them,
Abinader makes an abrupt turn to the political: “You want to linger / In the music of his voice,
afraid his disappearance / Is inscribed on shell cases stockpiling in the Gulf.” Scholars have
long documented the impact of Gulf War military interventions on children, specifically aerial
121
warfare is “high-tech, clean and efficient,” situated in opposition to “woman, the native, the
dispossessed, the abused, the excluded.”225 Abinader identifies Fuad as dispossessed, abused,
and excluded by drawing an implicit connection between his life and the lives of extinct
animals pictured on his bedroom posters. By locating the impact of Gulf War violence in the
domestic space through the reader’s relationship with Fuad, Abinader contrasts the “music” of
Fuad’s voice with a fear of his death by artillery fire. Moreover, by emphasizing the
epistemological vantage point of the child, which emerges from the domestic space, Abinader
Abinader sets the temporal frame just before the beginning of the U.S.-led attack:
“Someone asks, what should we do / while we wait for the bombs, promised / And prepared?
How can we ready ourselves? […] Do we dig / escape tunnels in case our village is invaded? /
Do we send our children across the border / To live in refugee camps?” In these lines,
interventions in the Persian Gulf region—and asks a series of rhetorical questions concerned
with issues of safety, geography, movement, cities, and public spaces. For families living in
villages far from cities and lacking transportation, the only method of protection lies not in
attempting to flee, but rather in hunkering down, even contemplating digging escape tunnels.
Wealthier families with some mode of transportation, and families near cities, might seek
safety by leaving the country, yet this option creates the risk of ending up in refugee camps.
consequences of the Gulf War on children are made more apparent because Abinader has
225
Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology.” Theory, Culture & Society,
vol. 23, no. 7-8, 2006, pg. 201.
122
previously established Fuad’s perspective and created a relationship between him and the
reader. It is only by returning to the home—to the relationships sustained in the private
space—that Abinader can explore ethical response to violence in the Arab region.
Situated in the domestic space, Abinader reflects on the small, specific details of a
home: “the tick on the wall marking / The children’s growth,” “the bare spot on the rug /
Where Jidd put his feet when he read / The Friday paper,” “brass doorknobs, / Enamel trays,
blue glasses made in Egypt, / Journals of poetry, scraps of newspapers, recipes / They meant
to try.” These details aim to help readers to “Enter the heart” and to “Read the walls and all of
its inscriptions, / The love of lovers, of children and spouses.” In the last line, Abinader
depicts the heart as a home: “Hold the heart. Imagine it is yours.” Abinader builds a childhood
epistemology in this poem by creating a relationship between Fuad and the reader—a strategy
of asking an audience outside of the Arab world to contemplate the implications of violence in
their own lives. By engaging with a child in the domestic space, readers from geographically
distant locations can experience a close relationship with people in the Arab region, to see
their commonalities, idiosyncrasies, nuances, and complexities. Abinader’s poem does not
advance a concept of epistemic privilege; rather, she calls for dialogue in the interstices of
interventions in Iraq. Majaj (b. 1960) is a Palestinian American poet and scholar. Born in
Iowa, Majaj was raised in Jordan and educated in Beirut and in the United States. In 2001, she
moved to Nicosia, Cyprus where she currently lives. In her poem, “Arguments”—originally
titled “Arguments Against the Bombing”—Majaj takes as her subject the United States and
United Kingdom’s four-day bombing of Iraq in December 1998. Bill Clinton argued that the
123
bombing was necessary because of Iraq’s failure to comply with United Nations Security
Council resolutions and its interference with United Nations Special Commission inspectors.
The goal of the mission, he stated, was to “attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.”226 Majaj critiques the
bombing by adopting a childhood epistemology. Majaj, like Abinader, addresses her poem to
non-Arab audiences, specifically those in America and in the United Kingdom. Whereas
Abinader develops a specific child character from the Arab region, Majaj concentrates on
connections between Iraqi children and their own children. Throughout the poem, Majaj asks
readers to reflect on the impact of war by displacing the sufferings endured by Arab children
onto readers’ different geographical locations. She writes, “consider: beneath the din of
explosions / no voice can be heard / no cry.” The use of the word “cry” articulates a
connection to the infant at the beginning of the poem. By situating readers in an Iraqi
domestic sphere, Majaj emphasizes that the sound of explosions overpowers the entire aural
Majaj then asks readers to contemplate on the implications of violence in their own
lives and children: “consider your own sky on fire / your name erased / your children’s lives
‘a price worth paying’ / consider the faces you do not see / the eyes you refuse to meet /
‘collateral damage’ / how in these words / the world / cracks open.” In these lines, Majaj
226
Transcript: President Clinton explains Iraq strike. December 16, 1998.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/16/transcripts/clinton.html. Accessed 26 July 2016.
124
lives are viewed as “a price worth paying,” for they are seen by U.S. and U.K. political and
military leaders as “collateral damage.” Frederick Rosén (2016) defines collateral damage as
“the unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be
lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time. Such damage is not unlawful as
long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the
attack.”227 From a military perspective, then, collateral damage is a utilitarian assessment that
how they would feel if the bombings occurred in their own geographical locations,
specifically how they would feel if their children’s lives were considered “a price worth
paying” by political and military leaders. Majaj also asks her audience to focus on Iraqi
children—“the faces you do not see / the eyes you refuse to meet.” Her poem builds
childhood epistemologies by starting with the hidden faces of Iraqi children, whom were not
valued enough to avoid harming in military interventions. The eyes that the American and
U.K. audience for this poem “refuse to meet” are the vantage point from which Majaj builds
her “argument.” The “collateral damage” of the U.S. and U.K.’s invasion of Iraq—far from
“collateral damage” is precisely what perpetuates violence and makes its impact worse.
Children, Majaj argues, must be placed at the center of our consciousness. She does this by
domesticating collateral damage in the space of the U.S. and the U.K. Majaj’s poem does not
claim epistemic privilege for Iraqi children but creates a dialogue between non-Arab
227
Rosén, Frederick. Collateral Damage: A Candid History of a Peculiar Form of Death. London: Hurst, 2016.
125
audiences and Iraqi children so that readers are compelled to ponder the impact of the U.S.
Whereas Majaj and Abinader contemplate childhood in the context of Iraqi violence,
Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “The Small Vases from Hebron” (1998) examines the violence
associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis to an
American mother and a Palestinian refugee father. In “The Small Vases from Hebron,” Nye
develops childhood epistemologies primarily through imagery. She opens the poem with the
image of two vases, which “entrust the small life,” positioned beside children who “open their
gray copybooks.” The image of the vases beside the children emphasizes the purpose of the
domestic sphere: a space in which “small life” is protected. Nye shatters this idyllic domestic
scene with the question, “And what do the headlines say?” In response, she writes, “Nothing
of the small petal / perfectly arranged inside the larger petal.” Here Nye highlights the
space, which is signified by the small petal of the flower arranged inside the larger petal,
which reflects the fetus’ relationship to its mother. Importantly, as Nye points out, the
headlines say “nothing” about this maternal relationship; the domestic space, she observes, is
outside of the purview of what most people consider newsworthy. The implication here is that
the knowledge produced by the domestic childhood epistemologies should be taken seriously
and promoted in public forums, rather than perpetuating stories about ongoing violence. What
would it mean, Nye’s poem implicitly asks, if the headlines discussed “the small petal /
perfectly arranged inside the larger petal?” Nye’s image of flower petals can be read a
metaphor for the protection of children by their parents. Through this image, Nye advocates
for attention to the relationships created and maintained within domestic spaces as important
126
because the caring labor required to maintain domestic relationships provide insights into the
Nye’s poem operates by contrasting the safety of the domestic realm with violence in
the city of Hebron. She builds a childhood epistemology from the image of “boys, praying
when they died,” who “fall out of their skins.” This image is one of destruction, as boys
attacked in war suffer wounds that cause them to “fall out of their skins,” both literally and
figuratively. At the end of the poem, Nye again contrasts an image of domestic safety with the
violence of the city: “the child of Hebron sleeps / with the thud of her brothers falling / and
the long sorrows of the color red.” The narrative voice here adopts the viewpoint of an
unnamed child from Hebron who endures the loss of her brothers. This expansive perspective
moves from the domestic space to the public space—the site of political violence.
Nye establishes childhood epistemologies that emerge from images in the domestic
sphere, juxtaposing the violence of Hebron with a safe domestic sphere. The types of
knowledge produced in domestic spaces are not seen as “newsworthy,” yet this knowledge—
and the practices of care that connect parents to children—is of crucial importance. Moreover,
Nye builds childhood epistemologies based on “the child of Hebron” who “sleeps / with the
thud of her brothers falling / and the long sorrows of the color red.” While the news media
highlights incidents of violence, Nye emphasizes that the media never produces stories about
the domestic sphere because they consider it outside the purview of the news. Yet, the
domestic sphere is precisely the place where insights into ethical responses to violence—and
the prevention of violence—often emerge. Nye begins and ends the poem with images of
children: the children who “open their gray copybooks” and the child of Hebron who sleeps
amidst ongoing violence. The vantage points of children who pay attention to the ongoing
127
practices of daily life underscores children’s ability to remain stable even amidst the presence
of violence. The children do not participate in, nor do they seem to become affected by,
violence; Nye leaves to the reader to contemplate the impact of violence on children. The
poem portrays the stoicism of children who do not become preoccupied with violence, but
rather continue their engagement in life. Nye invokes childhood characters and perspectives in
an appeal the empathy of her American audience. Her poem rests on the assumption that it is
possible for those who do not have direct experience of the Israel-Palestinian conflict to
understand experiences outside of their purview. Nye’s work, along with that of Majaj and
Abinader, develops childhood epistemologies which respond to violence in ways that do not
perpetuate violence. Through the creation of childhood epistemologies, which emerge from
domestic environments, these poets do not claim epistemic privilege but instead open
communication between Arabs and Americans. In the next section, I turn to two poets who
articulate childhood epistemologies in the context of nature and explore the significance of
these epistemologies.
Resistance
Most Arab American women poets who address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
highlight several themes including trauma, exile, diaspora, maternal images of Palestine, the
relationship between Palestine and America, interethnic and interfaith relationships, and
128
images of Palestine as a sexually violated woman.228Although both Shehabi and Nye’s poetry
interethnic and interfaith relationships—Shehabi and Nye are unique for their portrayals of
childhood and nature in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shehabi and Nye
develop childhood perspectives on violence from the vantage point of the natural
environment. In doing so, both poets make important contributions to knowledge about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Deema Shehabi’s “Green Fruit” (2011) discusses the conflict through a Palestinian
female child narrator’s point of view: “There are starving children, and homeless people /
hovering in the polluted air that I hate. / There are malignant cysts / that should disappear
from bodies and skin. / There are soldiers all over, and machine guns, and tear gas.” In these
lines, Shehabi’s child narrator articulates what David Jones Marshall (2013) terms “trauma
people’s lives under occupation, attention to suffering alone, as Marshall states, “presents an
narrator asserts her desire to resist violence: “I don’t want to fall in a grave, / restless beneath
the weight, / a martyr for nothing.” The child’s strategy for resisting violence is to examine
how her identity is inextricably linked to the natural world. Rather than associating nature as a
space free from violence and suffering, Shehabi demonstrates that the child desires to
228
See Appendix C for a detailed catalogue of themes in poems about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Marshall, David Jones. “‘All the Beautiful Things’: Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian
229
Childhood.” Space and Polity, vol. 17, no. 1, 2013, pp. 53-73. See pg. 55.
129
integrate the natural world into Israel and the Palestinian territories. As the child states, “I
want to go on following the moon— / bright, silvery, secure with the light / casting jasmine
into the / bloody streets of Jerusalem, / blossoming every day.” Shehabi emphasizes the
child’s desire to follow the moon as a source of security and as a connection to the natural
environment, which the child desires to incorporate into the city. The blossoming jasmine
nature and to incorporate this beauty into the violent urban environment.
Considerations of beauty, as David Marshall (2013) argues, can play an important role
in creating political subjectivities. Indeed, in his research with children in the Balata refugee
camp near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, Marshall found that Palestinian children
“frequently used the word beauty” as a way of “expressing religious and national imaginaries,
describing and making judgments about everyday people, places, and behaviors, critiquing
social and political and injustice, expressing hope for the future, and as aesthetic rupture to the
dominant perceptual order of trauma and suffering.”230 Shehabi’s narrator, like the children
Marshall interviewed, engages in a search for beauty which serves as aesthetic rupture to
children’s search for beauty differ from Marshall’s—and this difference extends beyond the
Marshall ponders how children resist trauma discourses, and does not include analysis of
children’s parents, Shehabi’s poem creates a child narrator who develops an idea of beauty,
230
Ibid., pg. 61.
130
based on nature, which is inspired by her parents. While trauma discourses often discuss
perspective. Through the child’s relationship with her parents, Shehabi builds a childhood
epistemology which integrates the natural world into the Palestinian territories. As the child
remarks, “my mother when she greets me / with her outstretched arms gives me the moon, /
and she runs through the arching streets of Gaza, / and stops to stare at the white minarets of
the mosques, / planting seeds of green fruit.” These lines reflect the child’s imagination, her
desire to possess the moon, and to see her mother integrating nature into an urban
environment rife with overcrowding, poverty, and violence. The child desires the mother’s
freedom, her ability to inhabit the densely populated urban space of Gaza and transform this
space into a garden. What is surprising is that one might expect Shehabi to associate the
mother with domestic spaces, but this poem connects the mother to the urban environment,
while it is the father who leads the child into the household. As the child writes, her father
includes her in “debates about survival / into gatherings where friends speak of the good past /
into houses that remind me of home / into a sunny shelter where doorsteps / are fragrant and
windows rise to poplars.” In these lines, the child explains how her connection to nature has
been inspired by both of her parents. Images of violence and suffering are nowhere to be
found. Instead, Shehabi’s child narrator concentrates exclusively on her parents’ resistance to
trauma through their integration of nature into the Palestinian territories. The child’s mother
plants seeds of green fruit in Gaza, stopping occasionally to admire the architectural beauty.
The child’s father leads her into domestic gatherings of friends who recollect good memories,
131
Inspired by her parents’ resistance to trauma, the child imitates their connections to the
natural world: “I climb slowly with my moon, my roots, my dome, / remembering my parents,
/ I hike up through the sloping hills and green orchards / and gardens of olive trees smelling of
jasmine / in which little white petals are growing.” The child narrator reiterates her parents’
resistance to trauma by seeking connections to the natural world—the moon, hills, orchards,
and gardens. Shehabi has the child contemplate specific images from nature: olive trees,
jasmine, and small white petals. The child’s interest in colors—specifically green and white—
evokes growth and purity. Shehabi’s illumination of the beauty of her natural surroundings is
significant because there has been destruction of both the built and natural environments by
Throughout the poem, Shehabi uses a first-person voice to emphasize the Palestinian
documenting how the conflict has had a strong negative impact on Palestinians. Yet,
Shehabi’s child narrator does not exclusively notice issues of privilege, and the narrative
voice does not assert epistemic privilege. Shehabi also presents the child’s desire to resist
intergenerational trauma resistance is echoed in the work of Naomi Shihab Nye, who lived in
Ramallah, Palestine, and the Old City in Jerusalem during her high school years. She later
returned to the United States and currently lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Nye frequently discusses her father’s Palestinian heritage and his influence on her life.
In Transfer (2011), Nye comments on how her father, after having lost his Jerusalem home in
1948, traveled back and forth to the West Bank for many years to visit his mother. She
132
emphasizes how her father’s lifelong hope was to see resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
I carry his endless stubborn hope—someday there will be justice for Palestinians and
Israelis living, somehow, together. Fighting is a waste of talent. Fighting is
unproductive. The United States will realize how ridiculous it is to attempt to broker
peace and donate weapons to one side, at the same time. Someday Arabs and Jews will
live as the cousins, or brothers and sisters, they always were and still are.231
The influence of her Palestinian father’s experiences can be seen in Nye’s poetry, in particular
“Jerusalem” (1994). In this poem, Nye opens with a bold declaration: “I’m not interested in /
who suffered the most. / I’m interested in / people getting over it.”232 With this statement, Nye
departs from most Palestinian American poetry, which documents Palestinian suffering.
Nye’s poem does not claim that either side of the conflict has epistemic privilege; rather, she
This poem relates an anecdote about her father as a child, in which she discusses how
a stone hit him on the head and, as a result, hair would not grow on that spot. Nye describes
how this incident led her to think about the nature of suffering:
231
Transfer, pg. 117-18.
232
The poem is from Nye’s collection Red Suitcase (1994). The poem begins with an epigraph of three lines
from Tommy Olofsson: “Let's be the same wound if we must bleed. / Let's fight side by side, even if the enemy /
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
133
At first, it is unclear why the stone hit her father, as Nye does not indicate until the end of the
stanza that it was her father’s friend who threw the stone. Nye pushes back against the
standard narrative of suffering which identifies both the victim and the perpetrator. She
ruminates only on what happened, using the passive construction: a stone hit him, rather than
his friend threw a stone. By using the passive construction, Nye directs the poem toward a
consideration, not of the nature of conflict, but rather of the nature of healing from suffering.
Indeed, Nye emphasizes the “riddle” of her father’s resilience—although he was hurt, he
recovers and is welcomed back home to a pleasurable experience: a bucket of pears. Nye
underscores the fact that the pears “are not crying,” of course an obvious statement, but one
that highlights that there are many ways of responding to suffering, including embracing a
stoic perspective. What is perhaps most important about this stanza is the final three lines:
when her father’s friend reveals that he was aiming, not at her father, but at a bird, her father
began to grow wings. There are at least two different types of interpretation here. One is that,
when hearing his friend’s intended target, Nye’s father starts becoming that target—an
embrace of the other, an eclipsing of the boundaries between self and other, boundaries at are
at the root of acts of violence. The second is that the phrase “growing wings” symbolizes
hope, a hope that was encouraged by the knowledge that his friend was not intending to hurt
him.
In one of the few academic essays on Naomi Shihab Nye’s work, Najmi Samina
(2010) argues that Nye’s “feminist ‘aesthetic of smallness’ counters the ideology that
undergirds mainstream visual and verbal representations of war in the Middle East.” This
134
a countersublime of universal human connectivity for our times.”233 Samina defines Nye’s
aesthetic of smallness as “an artistic emphasis on small-scale objects and material realities,
which include not only the ordinary, unadorned, and everyday, but also the personal and the
bird’s wings, an olive tree. Her interest is also firmly in the personal, specifically the spot on
her father’s head where hair will not grow—the result of an act of violence in his childhood.
In her definition of the aesthetic of smallness, Samina focuses on children, stating that Nye’s
“small-scale stories convey the vastness of war tragedy through the reimagined lives of
individual women, children, and men.”235 Samina comments one of Nye’s poems about the
death of a Palestinian child—“For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza”—stating that the poem “leaves
us with an image of innocence, of life in the moment of being savored.” While this may be
true, Nye’s characterizations of children are more complex than associating children with
innocence. Nye’s construction of her father’s childhood highlights a small incident and small
objects: a stone, a spot on the head, a bucket of pears, a bird, wings. From these small,
knowledge about violence, suffering, and healing that has larger implications.
Nye’s poem stresses that violence is a cognitive puzzle—“a riddle”—that her poem
sets out to solve. In the first stanza, Nye extrapolates a larger perspective from her father’s
childhood incident—a perspective that applies to all human beings. Just as the act of violence
Najmi, Samina. “Naomi Shihab Nye’s Aesthetic of Smallness and the Military Sublime.”
233
MELUS, vol. 35, no. 2, 2010, pp. 151-71. See pg. 151.
234
Ibid., pg. 156.
235
Ibid., pg. 153.
135
in her father’s childhood left him with an injury on his head, each person “carries a tender
spot: / something our lives forgot to give us.” In this space—the space of suffering, often
caused by violence—humans have the choice of how to respond to what they lack. Nye
concentrates on several options: two adults and one child. The first adult, a man, builds a
house and says, ‘I am native now.’” Although the man’s statement is broad enough to
encompass any person who settles into a new place and claims it as his or her own, it is more
likely, given the context, that Nye is discussing an Israeli citizen. The second person, a
woman, “speaks to a tree in place of her son. And olives come.” This woman is likely a
Palestinian who has lost her child and turns to nature, which provides consolation in the form
of new life—not human life, but a sprouting olive tree. Whereas the Israeli man shows a
response to loss by declaring ownership of land, the Palestinian woman, responding to the
The child responds to violence by writing a poem stating why he does not like wars:
“they end up with monuments.” The use of the word “monuments” signifies not just physical
monuments, such as war memorials, but also the permanent impact that war has on human
beings. The child’s response to violence is through art—both poetry and painting—as the
child paints “a bird with wings / wide enough to cover two roofs at once.” The perspective of
the artist, Nye is saying, is similar to the view of a child—they have the ability and position to
investigate both sides of a conflict, at the same time—“covering two roofs at once.” The child
comments on both the Israeli man and the Palestinian woman’s losses. As Nye observes about
the child’s statement, the wings are “wide enough to cover two roofs at once,” meaning that
his dislike for war is a hopeful statement that can unify and provide healing for both the
136
Nye closes the poem by reflecting on her own response to the conflict:
Here Nye connects to the beginning of the poem: to her father’s injury after the stone hit him,
resulting in a place where hair would not grow. Nye turns her consideration from the outside
of the head to the inside: a place where hate cannot grow. Just as in the first stanza, when Nye
articulates a riddle about the “tender spot” on her father’s head, she also muses on another
riddle: Why won’t hate grow? It is because, as Nye states, “Something pokes us as we sleep.”
It is unclear what this “something” is—perhaps Nye signifies dreams, the prick of conscience,
or God as the “poke,” or impetus, humans need to respond to violence without retaliating.
Nye posits the space between the stimulus of violence and the response as a location in which
healing must take place. She also emphasizes that the antidote to hate can be found in the
natural world: in the wind, which knows no boundaries, and in seeds, which germinate into
life. The final line of the poem indicates that it is “late”—meaning that the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict has extended for too long—“but everything comes next.” The use of the conjunction
“but” indicates that although it is late, better things are to come, ending on a note of hope.
Palestinian children, Nye’s work is unique for her interest in the common humanity of Arab
and Jewish children, both deserving—and yet deprived of—peace. For example, Nye’s “Amir
& Anna” (2011) is about two children, an Arab boy, Amir, and a Jewish girl, Anna. Like
Amir, who “can’t sleep” and “dives under his bed,” Anna is “afraid of everything.” Nye
137
further underscores the similarities between these children: “Their names begin with ‘A,’ /
contain the same number of letters. / They live one mile apart. / No one has given them what
they deserve.” After highlighting the similarities between Amir and Anna, Nye expands the
focus outward, making general observations about the landscape: “Around both their houses, /
all the Arab and Jewish houses, / red poppies sleep beneath / dirt and stones.” She looks to the
poppies for answers: “What do they know? / In March green spokes / with fluttering heads /
rise and rise on every side.” Here Nye moves from the human landscape to the natural world,
emphasizing that nature eclipses divisions between Arab and Jewish homes. Her images of
spring emphasize the bloom of the poppies, which is a hopeful perspective—a counterpoint to
the fear-filled children at the beginning of the poem. Ultimately, Nye asserts that there is an
epistemology to the natural world, a unifying force. Nye’s contemplation of nature provides a
counterpoint to the inequalities and strife of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her emphasis on
parallels between the Arab and Jewish child does not make an equivalency argument by
asserting that both Israeli and Palestinians have committed equal amounts of violence. Nor
does she assert that Palestinians have epistemic privilege. Instead, Nye creates child
characters to articulate the possibility for developing resistance to trauma—a process that is
In “All Things Not Considered” (2002)—the title of which is a play on the title of the
NPR show “All Things Considered”—Nye depicts nature as a space beyond the linguistic,
political, religious, and identity barriers that have perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The poem discusses the deaths of several children, both Jewish and Palestinian. Of
beyond right and wrong, where people / come together / to talk.” Nye uses Asel Asleh’s belief
138
in a space where people come together to talk—beyond the categories of right and wrong—as
a framework for how suffering can be translated between Israelis and Palestinians. Nature, for
Nye, is a space in which people who often see themselves as incompatible can translate their
differences to each other. In a 1996 interview in Al Jadid magazine, Nye discusses the
I think people who work on translation projects think that they’re somehow peace
negotiators because the belief is that we’ll never stop killing one another until we
understand and see one another as human beings. I think that’s true. That’s why it is
very important to me to receive responses to poems…from Israeli or Jewish poets;
they’re even more important than responses from Arab poets. When I get responses
from an Israeli Jewish poet saying, “I’m listening, I’m sorry, I don’t like this either,”
that matters to me a lot.236
Palestinian conflict is evident in “All Things Not Considered.” This poem, written in four
sections, begins with an image of a dead child. Nye uses a direct address to her readers: “You
cannot stitch the breath / back into this boy.” The next several lines discuss, in more detail,
the deaths of several children, both Israeli and Palestinians: “a brother and sister” who “were
playing with toys / when their room exploded”; Jewish boys who skipped school and, while
having an adventure, were “killed in the cave”; “Mohammed al-Durra, who huddled against
his father / in the street, terrified. The whole world saw him die”; an unnamed “4 month girl”;
and the aforementioned Asel Asleh. Nye interrupts her reportage of these deaths with an
italicized question: “If this is holy, / could we have some new religions please?” Here, Nye
236
Majaj, Lisa Suhair. “Talking with Poet Naomi Shihab Nye.” Al Jadid Magazine, vol. 2, no. 13, 1996.
http://www.aljadid.com/content/talking-poet-naomi-shihab-nye.
139
points to the perpetration of violence in the name of religion as the basis for the continuing
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In the second section of the poem, Nye reflects on the deaths of these children and
makes a general claim: “Most of us would take our children over land. / We would walk the
fields forever homeless / with our children.” Yet Nye complicates this observation with the
caveat: “This is what we say from a distance / because we can say whatever we want.” In the
third section, Nye transcends discourses of blame, emphasizing the responsibility of all parties
involved for perpetuating the conflict: “No one was right. / Everyone was wrong.” At this
point, she interjects with an italicized section: “What if they’d get together / and say that?”
hint at a possible resolution, yet Nye immediately follows this hypothetical scenario with the
claim, “At a certain point / the flawed narrator wins.” Here, Nye emphasizes the importance
who have the ability to “win” in dialogues about the conflict. Her intention in this stanza is
not, however, to arrive at a “winner” but rather to underscore the culpability on both sides of
the conflict:
In this stanza, Nye focuses on the historical nature of the conflict—that it has been
140
Regardless of individuals’ identity—whether Jewish or Palestinian, rich or poor—everyone
shares in the common experience of being hurt, and some choose to respond to this pain by
In the fourth section, Nye presents a series of seemingly unrelated images: “the curl of
a baby’s graceful ear,” “the calm of a bucket / waiting for water,” “orchards of the old Arab
men / who knew each tree,” Jewish and Arab women / standing quietly together. /
Generations of black.” The images move from the innocent, to the peace of nature, to the sight
Arab men in orchards, to the unity of Jewish and Arab women who share in a common
inheritance: generations of mourning. Nye ends the poem with a rhetorical question: “Are
people the only holy land?” The infallibility of human beings, Nye seems to be saying,
dismisses every person from claims of “holiness.” Nye is not making the case that the
Palestinians and Israeli suffering is equivalent. Rather, she makes the case that it is only by
emphasizing both Jewish and Arab people’s common mistakes, inheritances, pain, and acts of
violence that one can arrive at an understanding of the nature of the conflict.
examining what can be learned from the deaths of a several children, both Jewish and
Palestinian, neither of which have epistemic privilege. In this poem, nature provides a space
in which people who see themselves as irreconcilable can translate their differences to each
other. A resistance to trauma emerges from nature—a space beyond the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Nye’s poem notices how intergenerational trauma resistance does not come from
making an equivalence between the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis. Rather, Nye
emphasizes that part of developing a resistance to trauma requires understanding both Jewish
141
Conclusion
in terms of an affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized and respected as
other”237 LaCapra’s observations about empathy are reflected in the poems analyzed here.
Through the creation of childhood epistemologies, the poets establish affective relationships
between people in the Arab region and an “other”—a primarily American audience.
the Arab region and the U.S. By appealing to American audiences’ imagination and empathy,
these poets rely on the assumption that it is possible for readers to understand experiences
outside of their purview. Poetry provides a space in which experiences of violence and other
complex social dynamics can be communicated across national boundaries in a manner that is
not antagonistic and does not elevate conflict. These poets’ work is unique for showing how
empathy can be developed not only in the social or political world, but also in domestic
spaces and nature. These locations provide opportunities for readers to concentrate on the
complex historical legacies of violence in a manner that eschews hostility and resentment.
While these poets are attuned to issues of privilege, power, and injustice, they frame their
237
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001, pg. 213.
142
CHAPTER V
Introduction
reproduce his homeland in America. The man “waters his vegetables, / precious seeds / flown
from far away, / curled cucumbers, / a special vine from Lebanon, / its silken leaves fit for
stuffing.” Similar images of men’s engagements with nature can be found in the work of
many Arab American women poets. These poets published in the late-twentieth and early-
twenty-first century United States, a time of escalating American interventions in the Arab
region amidst increasing fears about terrorism, particularly after the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks. During this period, American mass media and cultural productions produced
reassurance that racial sensitivity is the norm in U.S. society while simultaneously
perpetuating the dominant perception of Arabs and Muslims as threats to U.S. national
security (Alsultany 2012). In this context, the cultural productions of Arab American women
Yet the work of these poets has additional cultural implications. Many Arab American
women poets represent caring labor, which involves connecting to other people and trying to
143
help them meet their needs, including, but not limited to, the work of caring for children, for
the elderly, for sick people, and teaching.238 In this chapter, I contemplate how several
poets—Elmaz Abinader, Suheir Hammad, Hala Alyan, Hedy Habra, Marian Haddad, and
Naomi Shihab Nye—represent the caring labor of Arab Americans, both men and women, in
nature and domestic environments. I read these poetic accounts of caring labor as a collective
body of knowledge and address the implications this knowledge might have for the body
Since the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first century, people
of Arab descent have migrated to the United States to escape violence including imperial and
neo-imperial interventions and domestic instability.239 The forms of caring labor needed
during, and in the aftermath, of this violence, transforms traditional gender roles—a
transformation that persists even after the scene of violence. Although the field of Arab
American literary studies in general has considered the confluence of violence and gender,240
there has been little attention to these topics specifically in Arab American women’s poetry. A
focus on this body of work is important because these poets explore how caring labor
responds to the transnational and intergenerational effects of violence. Some Arab American
women poets were born in the U.S. and write about their ancestors who left the Arab region in
238
This definition of caring labor comes from the economist Nancy Folbre.
239
Whereas imperialism is typically characterized by conquest and rule, neoimperialism is domination and
sometimes even hegemony over others primarily by way of formally free legal agreements, economic power, and
cultural influence. Neoimperialism is of many designations for the form taken by U.S. political power and
economic domination in the twentieth century, especially during and after World War II. See
“Neoimperialism.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008.
470-472. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Accessed 1 Apr. 2016.
240
See Darraj (2004), Golley (2007), Abdelrazek (2008), and Mehta (2014).
144
the late-nineteenth century during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Others were born in the
Arab region and later migrated to the U.S. amidst intense political instability as nation-states
formed in the aftermath of European colonialism. One of the most striking facts about the
poetry of women who trace their heritage to this region is that images and themes of caring
labor occur very frequently alongside remembrances of war and other forms of violence.
How is caring labor affected by violence in the Arab region, by the attendant
collective social trauma, and by transnational dislocation? For Arab women living in the
United States, the domestic space is a complex environment: not always a source of
oppression, but often a site of autonomy and empowerment although labor is frequently
devalued and unaccounted for in this sphere.241 These poets make philosophical observations
based on the knowledge developed from their ancestral ties, and often their personal
experiences, in the Arab region. These insights, because they concern the domestic sphere—
along with subjectivity, family, and caring labor—may not be immediately perceived as
political, especially since a great deal of Arab American poetry in the first decade of the
superpower and distant from the lived experiences of those in the Arab region, Arabs in
America experience other forms of violence. While many scholars have drawn attention to the
experiences of Arab Americans as racialized subjects in the U.S. (Abraham 2000, Majaj 2000,
Salaita 2007, Jamal and Naber 2008, Gualtieri 2009, Alsultany 2012, Naber 2012, Fadda-
241
Nancy Fraser observes that the structure of modern capitalist economies is characterized by separation
between the productive and the reproductive.
145
Conrey 2014), especially in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Arab
American studies as a field has concentrated less on what Henry Giroux (2005) calls the
“terror” of neoliberalism that has gained ascendancy in the United States, and indeed in a
global context, for the past several decades. Neoliberalism can be succinctly defined as the
belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all social, political, and economic
decisions.242 The Arab American women poets explored here advance a critique of
reflecting on experiences—from both the Arab region and America—in an imaginary space
that is not linked to any specific geographical location, these poets make insights about
kinship and caring labor that can facilitate a more inclusive social landscape. Rather than
denigrating America and valorizing the Arab region, these poets denaturalize neoliberal social
and economic structures and emphasize how caring labor is central to a post-neoliberal social
order.
This chapter, which is divided into five sections, explores how Arab women’s
deterritorialized and archival poetic imaginaries engage with the legacies of imperial and neo-
imperial violence in the Arab region—and its impact on dislocated bodies in America—to
socioeconomic models in the United States. The first section briefly traces the genealogy of
neoliberal economic thought and explores the impact of neoliberalism on gender roles. The
second section explains how Arab American women poets collectively create what I describe
242
Giroux, Henry. “The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics.” College
Literature, vol. 31, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1-19.
146
as deterritorialized and archival poetic imaginaries.243 This section argues that the concept of
poetic imaginaries envision post-neoliberal relationships grounded in caring labor. The third
section analyzes how the poetry of Elmaz Abinader, Suheir Hammad, and Hala Alyan
envisions caring labor as an act of political resistance to imperial violence. The fourth section
attends to how Hedy Habra and Marian Haddad’s renderings of caring labor conceptualize a
post-neoliberal social order. The final section explores how poems by Naomi Shihab Nye and
practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual
private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”244 Neoliberal theory advocates that the
role of the state is to secure private property rights and to guarantee the functioning of
markets. State interventions in markets must be kept to a minimum because, according to this
theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals
243
The concept of deterritorialized and archival poetic imaginaries builds on the work of several theorists,
including Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1980); feminist critiques of Deleuze and Guattari (Braidotti 1994,
Olkowski 1999); frameworks that conceptualize space, fluidity, temporality in a transnational context (Shakir
1997, Sandoval 2000, Shohat 2001, Mohanty 2003); and postcolonial and feminist theorizing on the nature of
archives (Derrida 1995, Jimerson 2009).
244
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
147
(prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state
interventions, particularly in democracies, for their own benefit.245 Many scholars have
critiqued the negative consequences of extending economic rationality to cultural, social, and
political spheres.246 Neoliberal theory, which tends to conceptualize the individual not as a
citizen but as an economic actor, has inspired policies that have drastically cut state-supported
social services and programs.247 This extension of market logic, critics of neoliberalism
contend, has contributed to unparalleled economic inequality and the shifting of power from
the state to multinational corporations and global financial institutions.248 In spite of these
problems, neoliberalism continues to influence political, economic, and social policies in the
United States.
theory, though some theorists perceive neoliberalism as a distinct ideology, descending from,
but not identical to liberalism.249 In classical liberal social contract theory, as Carole Pateman
245
Ibid., pg. 2.
See Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents (2002); Making Globalization Work (2006); Freefall:
246
America, Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (2010); The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided
Society Endangers Our Future (2013); Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development,
and Social Progress (2014); The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (2015);
Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy (2015). See also David M. Kotz’s The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal
Capitalism (2015).
247
See Peters, John. “Neoliberal convergence in North America and Western Europe: Fiscal austerity,
privatization, and public sector reform.” Review of International Political Economy, vol. 19, no. 2, 2012, pp.
208-35.
248
Suzanne Bergeron (2001) observes that women’s interventions to neoliberal structural adjustment politics do
not necessarily make demands on the state, but often involve forms of resistance that spans multiple social
levels, from community organizing, demonstrations, social movements, cross-border organizing, and survival
strategies. See pg. 994.
249
See Dag Einar Thorsen and Amund Lie’s essay, “What is Neoliberalism?”
http://folk.uio.no/daget/What%20is%20Neo-Liberalism%2010-11-06.pdf. Accessed 9 Apr. 2016.
148
(1988, 1989) observes, the public, masculine sphere was conceptualized as opposed to the
private, womanly sphere. Although women were completely excluded from the original social
contract, they were later incorporated into the liberal social order. Classical social contract
theories formed the basis for capitalist production, since the individual—both masculine and
from nature and from social relations.250 Pateman argues that the social contract is both a
sexual contract and a slave contract; therefore, a free social order cannot be a contractual
order.251
Scholars who built on Pateman’s critique of liberal social contract theory argued that
caring labor mostly performed by women in the domestic sphere is the foundation for capital
accumulation (O’Brien 1981, Leghorn and Parker 1981, Delphy 1984, Mies 1986). Because
this labor is devalued and usually unpaid, many have advocated for the economic valuing of
the caring labor mostly performed by women based on the assertion that the affective work of
this labor is exploitative of women (Okin 1989, Fraser 1997, Folbre 2012). Others point out
that social class is also an important factor of analysis, as middle and upper-class women’s
economic privileges give them the ability to pay economically disadvantaged women to
perform caretaking labor, and that middle and upper-class women have an interest in keeping
wages as low as possible to keep the surplus for themselves (hooks 2000).
The reconfiguration of economic gender roles under neoliberal conditions has eroded
250
See Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (Stanford UP, 1988) and The Disorder of Women: Democracy,
Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford UP, 1989). For a succinct overview of Pateman’s ideas, see: Biescker,
Adelheid and Uta von Winterfeld. “Regeneration in limbo: Ecofeminist perspectives on the multiple crisis and
social contract.” Contemporary Perspectives on Ecofeminism, edited by Mary Phillips and Nick Rumens.
London: Routledge, 2016, pg. 76- 94.
251
Ibid., pg. 85-7.
149
the male breadwinner model and women have increasingly entered the formal economic
system. The feminization of labor force, however, has been characterized by a reduction of
contracts.252 Women everywhere have less access to political power and economic resources,
as well as less control over processes that reproduce these systemic inequalities. Women
complete more unpaid labor than men.253 Moreover, in the U.S. context, there is a dearth of
state-supported social services such as funding for maternity and paternal leave or subsidized
reproductive work necessary for the perpetuation of neoliberal capitalist production because
no human production process can occur without the previous productive input of nature or
without prior processes of caring labor. Indeed, empirical studies have established that, in
both rich and poor countries, 30 to 50 percent of economic activity is accounted for by unpaid
household labor.255 Capitalist production therefore is not possible without inputs from the
environment and from caring labor—both of which are externalized from the formal
252
Ibid., pg. 81.
253
See V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan’s Global Gender Issues. Boulder: Westview Press, 1991. See
pages 12, 62, and 80.
254
As Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild note in their introduction to Global Woman: Nannies,
Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (2004), “Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, the United
States does not offer public child care for working mothers, nor does it ensure paid family and medical leave”
(9).
See Ironmonger, D. “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs, and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household
255
Output.” Feminist Economics, vol. 2, no. 3, 1996, pp. 37-64, and Luxton, M. “The UN, Women, and Household
Labour: Measuring and Valuing Unpaid Work.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 20, no. 3, 1997, pp.
431-39.
256
Ibid.
150
in which the market stands above the non-market sphere, and non-market labor requirements
are mostly fulfilled by unpaid women. Because modern economies produce wealth and
growth by systemically exploiting the basic living productivities upon which growth depends,
these economies, with their narrow concept of paid work, have been criticized as
unsustainable.257
have examined how caring labor has been increasingly privatized and outsourced in a
and Hochschild 2004). How have scholars accounted for the Arab region and its diaspora,
particularly those who settled in the United States, in theorizing the role of caring labor in the
context of neoliberalism? Any understanding of Arab American lives must consider the
“nation-states catapult women as subjects into wars, violence, forced migration, and
displacement.”258 Joseph claims that, in the Arab context, “the body, the person, the site, may
not be the most productive points of departure for locating the subject.” Instead, “the larger
networked family and family-like relationships engage in the subject in a continual play of
malleability.”259 Joseph asserts that, when attempting to understand Arab women, it is crucial
257
Ibid., pg. 79.
Joseph, Suad. “Thinking Intentionality: Arab Women’s Subjectivity and Its Discontents.” Journal of Middle
258
East Women’s Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2012, pp. 1-25. See pg. 15.
259
Ibid., pg. 17.
151
to explore webs or networks of relationships.260 Indeed, most Arab women do not
Given the influence of neoliberal thought on economic, political, and social structures
in the U.S., and in a global context, critiquing neoliberalism proposes a daunting challenge.
alternative to neoliberalism but, rather, to notice the “accretion and interaction of small
changes” occurring in already existing, community-based economic practices that fall outside
logics and automatic unfolding that offers no field for intervention.263 Gibson-Graham
specifically highlights how caring labor can serve as a basis for a concept of work that
advances a sustainable post-neoliberal social and economic order. As Adelheid Biescker and
The idea of man and work has to be changed qualitatively if caring activities are
central to a new concept of work. Caring means working in relationships to others and
to nature…It means a caring concern not only for the present but also for the
future…The experiences of every woman and man in all spheres of work are
necessary for the further development of the reproductive processes. This also means
260
Ibid., pg. 13
261
Ibid., pg. 14.
262
Ibid., pg. 196
263
See the introduction to J.K. Gibson-Graham’s A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2006, pg. xi.
152
to surrender the model of the human being as manlike, as egoistic and autonomous.
Sustainable work is based on the concept of self in relationship. 264
The concept of self in relationship is central to the work of the Arab American women poets
explored here. These poets conceptualize the family as an inextricable part of the individual
and portray how subjectivity is bound up with webs of kinship (Joseph 2009, 2012).
in U.S. ethnic studies tends to investigate what David Eng (2010) has termed “neoliberal
racial, sexual, and economic disparities, both national and global, through the language of
individualism, personal merit, responsibility, and choice.”265 Arab American women poets,
however, do not engage in neoliberal multiculturalist discourses and resist what scholars have
critiqued as the “additive” model of intersectionality.266 These poets do not add “Arab” as
another category in a neoliberal multiculturalist framework, nor do they compare the U.S. and
the Arab region. Arab American women poets delineate diverse economic practices among
264
Biescker, Adelheid and Uta von Winterfield. “Regeneration in limbo: Ecofeminist perspectives on the
multiple crisis and social contract.” Contemporary Perspectives on Ecofeminism, edited by Mary Phillips and
Nick Rumens. London: Routledge, 2016, pg. 89
265
See the introduction to The Feeling of Kinship, pg. 8-9.
266
In “Intersectionality as a Buzzword,” Kathy Davis highlights the problems of treating race, class, and gender
as additive rather than integrative.
267
Ibid.
153
deterritorialized and archival poetic imaginaries, which are central to their implicit critiques of
neoliberalism.268
I use the term deterritorialized, following Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1980), to
describe the work of Arab American women poets because their poems are not set in the Arab
region, or in the United States; rather, the poems create conceptual spaces that bring both
regions into dialogue. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “the movement of deterritorialization
can never be grasped in itself, one can only grasp its indices in relation to the territorial
American women’s poetry, where the focus is not on territorial representations of either the
Arab region or America, but rather on the movements between these regions. Deleuze and
enables us to see the historic dimensions of economic practices that have guided caring labor
268
My concept of deterritorialized and archival poetic imaginaries builds on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s
concept of “deterritorialization” from Anti-Oedipus (1972), which can describe any process that decontextualizes
a set of relations, rendering them virtual and preparing them for more distant actualizations.
269
Anti-Oedipus (1972), pg. 316.
154
illuminate heterodox economic practices.
The Arab American women poets I analyze in this chapter expand Carolyn Forché’s
the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience,
rather than a symbolic representation. When we read the poem as witness, we are
marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us.
Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is
marked by encounter with that presence. Witness begets witness. The text we read
becomes a living archive.270
Forché emphasizes that it is not only the written language of poetry that produces an archive,
but also the reader’s experience of reading poetry that produces an archive—an embodied
archive. The poets I analyze here extend Forché’s concept of poetry as an archive by
registering new understandings of archival practice that expand the definition of an archive
sustainable agriculture and cultural practices as archival formations. The Arab American
women poets I evaluate in this chapter create an archive through their poetry that documents
the historical dimensions of caring labor that have guided behavior in non-market domains.
how these poets contribute to what Ariel Salleh (2009) terms “eco-sufficiency,” a discourse
that moves past, or at least modifies, the foundational principles of neoliberalism. As J.K.
Gibson-Graham (2009) argues, the ecological crises of the neoliberal era require opening our
economic thinking and enactments to encompass what Jean-Luc Nancy (2001) has called
270
See Carolyn Forché’s essay “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art.”
155
“being-in-common.”271 Gibson-Graham specifically explores the ethics of interdependence
caring labor articulated in this poetry, and I highlight how these poets produce a body of
formations of caring labor that merge the natural and the human landscapes—a perspective
that does not externalize the environment, but rather integrates the environment into
production processes. These poets also explore how Arabs in diaspora restructure and reshape
labor to meet human needs, not only the needs of capital. Moreover, by unfixing caring labor
from its association with female gender, Arab American women poets portray men in a wide
range of caregiving roles, including in the natural world, and these depictions highlight
imaginaries, the Arab American women poets analyzed here articulate non-market spaces that
Finally, throughout this chapter, I extend Sara Ahmed’s (2004) concept of “affective
economies,” which explores how emotions circulate and are distributed across social and
psychic fields. Ahmed argues that “emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside
positively in the sign or commodity, but it is produced only as an effect of its circulation.”273
271
Gibson-Graham, J.K. “An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene.” Antipode, vol. 41, no. 1, 2009, pp. 320-
46. See pg. 322.
272
Arab American women poets solve what many view as an “essentialist” problem in ecofeminism that
identifies women with nature and promotes what Hardt calls “a celebration of maternal work” that reinforces an
exploitative gendered division of labor.
273
Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text, vol. 22, no. 2, 2004, pp. 117-39. See pg. 120.
156
Whereas Ahmed focuses on pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame, and love, I consider care,
specifically how care is manifested in labor. Arab American women poets contribute
philosophical insights about caring labor. These poets establish the individual as inextricably
linked to the family, not to a specific configuration of family, such as the nuclear family, but
the nuclear family as a site of patriarchal domination. Although Arab and Arab American
scholars have documented patriarchal practices in the Arab region and within the Arab
community residing in the United States,274 Arab American women’s poetry does not
exclusively represent the family as a source of patriarchal oppression. Rather, Arab American
women poets more frequently conceptualize the family as an inextricable part of the
individual and show how subjectivity is connected to kinship (Joseph 2009, 2012). In the next
section, I address how these poets imagine women’s caring labor and interrogate how these
Because caring labor picks up the slack of failed states, it is not surprising that the
Arab American women poets who most frequently engage with the role of caring labor have
274
For example, Nadine Naber’s Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics and Activism (2012) develops what
she terms a “diasporic Arab feminist critique” that focuses on “the power structures of patriarchy and
homophobia that are internal to Arab families and communities, while illustrating that these power structures are
shaped by a range of intersecting histories and power relations” (109).
157
familial ties to the Levantine region, which has experienced significant political upheaval.
Because the Levantine region has historically experienced so many violent conflicts, the
poetry of Levantine-descended women who live in the U.S. exhibits a perspective influenced
by the complex interactions between the religions and cultures of several continents: Europe,
Asia, Africa, and North America. Arab women who trace their heritage to the Levantine
region have survived violence in unique ways, given their experiences in a part of the world
that is strongly affected by religious and ethnic conflicts. In addition, these poets’ experiences
Arabs—provide insight into the complex relationship between the Levantine region and the
United States. 275 Arab American women poets repeatedly demonstrate how caring labor is a
form of resistance to an unjust social order. These poets emphasize that, during an incident of
violence or in the context of war, labor breaks down the boundaries between traditional
Elmaz Abinader makes observations about caring labor performed in the traumatic
aftermath of violence in her 2014 poetry collection This House, My Bones. This work, as she
states, “draws parallels between the changes of the earth through natural means to the changes
in our bodies during unnatural traumas and how that trauma moves through generations.”276
Abinader’s contemplation of nature is consistent with many other Arab American women
poets. As Ismet Bujupaj (2015) argues, in the work of these poets, “nature is neither simply an
275
The Arab American Institute Foundation’s “Quick Facts About Arab Americans” states that most Arab
Americans trace their heritage to Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Iraq. Lebanese Americans constitute a
greater part of the total number of Arab Americans residing in most states, except New Jersey, where Egyptian
Americans are the largest group.
276
www.elmazabinader.com
158
escape from cultural politics nor strictly a battleground for that politics; instead, nature adds a
Bujupaj poses two important questions: “What does nature mean when it appears within the
transcultural flow portrayed in many Arab American writings, and what would an ecocritical
approach to Arab American literature provide?”278 In this section, I take Bujupaj’s questions
as a point of departure in order to consider how Abinader explores the relationship between
warfare—not a specific war but, rather, war in an abstract sense—in which women are
“armed with fists, conscience, rocks, history, and backs like hemp.” This image of women as
“armed” positions them in an active, aggressive role. In the next couplet, Abinader
underscores how warfare motivates women to take specific actions: “Warfare drives us into
an insistent fog, cold and frequent, a churning in the belly— / drives us to link, chain a
curtain, thatch a roof; braid vines into electrical cords.” The experience of warfare propels
women into a specific emotional state, which Abinader describes as “a churning in the belly,”
and this emotion is what “drives” women to protect and repair domestic spaces. Interestingly,
environments through her image of women braiding vines “into electrical cords.” Women’s
capacity for caring labor, as she renders it here, transforms natural materials into electrical
277
Bujupaj, Ismet. “Nature in Arab American Literature: Majaj, Nye, and Kahf.” European Journal of American
Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2015. Bujupaj looks specifically at the work of Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye,
and Mohja Kahf.
278
Ibid.
159
cords that serve the human environment: the domestic space.
how Arab women who have survived wars are driven to reproduce sustainable forms of caring
women’s caring labor to nature, Abinader creates an imaginary space that shows how caring
practice. Indeed, Abinader’s poem reiterates that humans are inextricably linked to nature:
“It’s nothing for women who cradle little ones between curtains of incursion— / we have
birthed more than one dead son, brother, hostage, girl, flower, stone.” Here, Abinader’s image
“birthing” a flower and a stone demonstrates how women’s maternal capacities in the context
of warfare undergo changes that perpetuate the natural landscape. Abinader’s poetic
imaginary documents births and depicts a merging between women’s labor in the human and
natural worlds, yet she does not make an essentialist claim that women are more connected to
violent may seem strange, even paradoxical. However, her descriptions are perfectly
ancestors came to the United States during the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Whereas in
Euro-American liberal social contract theory, the domestic sphere is viewed as a private,
womanly space separate from the masculine public or civil domain which is the province of
political and economic activity, for subjects of the Ottoman Empire the domestic realm was
160
intensely dangerous, unstable, and insecure—and not only because of domestic violence,
which has been well documented in Euro-American feminist scholarship.279 In the Ottoman
context, imperial violence frequently interceded into the household, politicizing this space as
This historical context clarifies why Abinader imagines women’s caring labor in war
as a type of weapon. As she writes, “We are our own weapons: waiting hardens the calves,
teaches us how to move— / phrases are formed and we mouth ancient stories but nothing / as
remarkable as this preservation of life when death lurks.” Caring labor is figured here as a
caring labor during warfare is not noticed: “These days are not remembered, no names are
evoked; our shadows slide / down the wall unnoticed / We are seismic in our keening, this
song, a story, told in whispers, starving / ourselves of breath.” Abinader reflects on the
experience of war for women as a paradox. On the one hand, women are armed with anger,
conscience, history, and strength; they are agents who protect and repair domestic spaces,
preserving life amid death. On the other hand, women are not remembered for their efforts;
they are unnoticed, lurking in the shadows, wailing in grief, telling their stories in whispers,
barely able to speak. Although the experience of warfare develops physical strength in
See Kristin L. Anderson, “Gender, Status, and Domestic Violence: An Integration of Feminist and Family
279
Violence Approaches.” Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 59, no. 3, 1997, pp. 655-69.
280
As Donald Quataert (2000) documents, the Ottoman Empire—one of the greatest, most extensive, and
longest-lasting empires in the history of the world—included most of the territories of the eastern Roman Empire
and portions of the northern Balkans and north Black Sea coast. Turkish nomadic incursions toppled local
administrations and threw the prevailing political and economic order of Anatolia into confusion (18). Under the
child levy system, called the devsirme, recruiting officials went to Christian villages in Anatolia and the Balkans,
as well as to Muslim communities in Bosnia. Male recruits were then taken from their village homes to the
Ottoman capital or other administrative centers where they were provided with educational and religious
training; some became state elites, others entered the Janissary corps infantry (30-1).
161
women, it diminishes their voices. In fact, at the end of the poem, Abinader suggests that it is
women themselves who are responsible for the erasure of their voices—these women, she
documentation of their history; however, Abinader renders women’s caring labor as a type of
archival practice. The women in Abinader’s poem have “birthed more than one dead son,
brother, hostage, girl, flower, stone.” In this context, giving literal and metaphorical birth to
humans and natural objects is a type of archival practice that documents the impact of
violence and perpetuates the memory of those lost in warfare. Abinader underscores how
political violence intercedes into the domestic environment, showing that the domestic sphere
ensure survival. Ultimately, Abinader shows how caring labor that imbricates humans in
nature emerges because of violence. She also documents the legacy of this violence and
explores how women create spaces for survival. Other Arab American poets, however, differ
in their interpretations of caring labor, given their divergent ancestral legacies and
experiences.
Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad, who was born in Jordan in 1973 to
Palestinian refugee parents and who migrated with her family to the United States at the age
of five, writes about caring labor from her position as a woman born to parents dispossessed
from their native land. Her poem “our mothers and their lives of suffer” (1996), articulated
from a collective subject position of Palestinian women, investigates how these women
perceive their mothers’ caring labor. At the beginning of the poem, Hammad establishes a
162
collective Palestinian mother as the subject, setting the poem in a time—presumably before
dispossession—when mothers performed caring labor in the domestic sphere. This collective
Palestinian mother, as she writes, was “raised to fetch slippers and brew tea / kill chickens and
roast lambs / you scrubbed floors raw / on knees bleeding exhaustion / fed babies and watered
plants / you embroidered your dreams / into scarves and veils.” Unlike Abinader, who
collective subject of Palestinian women by ruminating on how these women perceive caring
The collective voice of the poem observes that caring labor has been taught to women
since childhood, and that this labor takes the form of serving men, preparing food, and
cleaning the household—all activities that the collective of Palestinian women’s voices
domestic labor, the collective voice of Palestinian women articulates their mothers’
approaches to surviving the violence they experienced because of the conflict over land:
163
In this passage, Hammad makes use of white space to emphasize acts of violence, from
“execution style” murder to the rape of both land and women. This use of space visually
represents the impact this violence had on mothers by indicating that the experience of trauma
involves the failure of language. Hammad focuses on how Palestinian mothers find strength
through religious practices. Regardless of how dire the situation, or how traumatic the
circumstances, the mothers in this poem give thanks for what they have, despite what they
have lost or endured. In this passage, Hammad conceptualizes caring labor as a behavioral
Whereas the first half of the poem creates a collective subject of mothers, in the
second half, Hammad shifts to a different collective subject: daughters. She writes, “And
when we your / daughters say we are / about more than chickens and tea / you ask who do /
we think we are / we’re no better than you / and you are right.” Here Hammad shows how the
daughters denigrate their mothers’ caring labor, asserting that they “are about more than” the
work of survival. This assessment of their mothers’ caring labor emerges from a neoliberal
evaluation that only attributes value to waged labor. In this paradigm, caring labor is seen as
less valuable than other types of labor, specifically labor that functions in the public sphere.
As the daughters assert, they are about “more than chickens and tea”—they perceive, and
believe in, a hierarchal division of labor which views women’s work of caring labor as less
valuable, and therefore less important, than labor practiced in the marketplace. Yet, as the
poem progresses, Hammad shows how the daughters come to understand the erroneous nature
of this assessment: “we mistake your strength / for acquiescence / cause it’s brown and quiet.”
In these lines, Hammad articulates a collective voice of Palestinian women who progress
toward a politicized analysis of their mothers’ caring labor as a source of strength that ensures
164
survival in both private and public spheres.
At the end of the poem, Hammad meditates on what the daughters take from their
mothers, an influence that is depicted by violent images: “we take your smoldering strength
and / maternal love to throw as / stones at mercenaries / use your patience as shields in the
nights.” The mothers’ qualities—strength, love, and patience—that have been developed
through spiritual and behavioral practice influence the daughters, who use these virtues, at
first in a violent manner. The daughters use their mothers’ strength and love to throw stones at
context. However, the daughters later use their mothers’ patience as a nonviolent, protective
force, as “shields in the nights,” against unnamed struggles. Hammad presents women’s
caring labor as a politicized spiritual practice that facilitates survival. Indeed, as Hammad
writes at the end of the poem, “we your daughters / and our men / honor our mothers / and the
lives they survived.” This poem illuminates how the daughters initially devalue their mothers’
caring labor, yet eventually arrive at an understanding of the value of caring labor as a source
of strength. Caring labor—far from a devalued resource—is now correctly understood as the
Like Hammad, Palestinian American poet Hala Alyan conceptualizes caring labor as
an act of violent resistance to an unjust social order. However, whereas Hammad examines
the legacies of imperial violence, specifically warfare, Alyan centers on the nature of
misogynistic violence as part of the underlying structure of imperialism. Alyan has had a
dispossessed Palestinians living in Kuwait when she was born in 1986, and the family
remained there until the Iraqi invasion in 1990. After that, the family fled to the United States
165
for several years before returning to the Arab region. Alyan has lived in numerous cities in
both the Arab region and in United States; currently she resides in Manhattan. In “Sahar &
Her Sisters” from her collection Atrium (2012)—a two-stanza poem with a mythic tone—
Alyan’s use of the female name “Sahar” gives the poem a geographical ambiguity, as the
name is of Arabic or Persian origin and is also used in Jewish and Indian cultures. The name
Sahar also infuses the poem with religious ambiguity, as the sisters could be from many
religious backgrounds, including Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or Christianity, since the sisters
call each other “Magda, short for Magdalene,” a reference to Mary Magdalene, one of the
Alyan’s poem articulates that gender is inextricably linked to violence; that the
devaluing of female life, considered inferior to men, begins at birth; and that this devaluing is
enacted through both physical and psychic forms of violence, perpetrated by men. Ultimately,
the poem underscores a commonality to women’s oppression across time and space. Alyan’s
poem is set in an abstract, mythical milieu that cannot be linked to any recognizable location
or historical period. In the first stanza, Alyan establishes the misogynistic climate of the
poem: the birth of four sisters who left their mother “gasping, mouth dry. Womb limp / as a
starfish.” The father, angered by the birth of so many daughters, engages in acts of horrific
violence. He sets “fire to the midwife after the / fourth, rammed into his wife bark etched with
holy verses / to free her of the cancer that is girl.” Amidst these violently misogynistic acts—
the second of which uses an unnamed religious text in an attempt to ensure that the mother
bears no more daughters—Alyan depicts how the daughters survive: “Sahar and her sisters
move like snakes through the seasons, cinder- / eyed, dizzy-hearted. They dig lungs in the
soil. Elongated bones, / lunching on goat meat, they grow with the chaos of carnivores.”
166
Alyan connects the sisters with nature, associating their movements with snakes, positioning
them as close to the soil, and likening their growth to carnivores. The daughters survive by
becoming one with nature. In this location, situated in the context of nature, the sisters “call
each / other Magda, short for Magdalene, short for the disaster of fetus.” Here Alyan
references Mary Magdalene, who traveled with Jesus as one of his followers, and was said to
have witnessed his crucifixion and resurrection. In these lines, Alyan associates the sisters
with an early Christian woman, and indicates that they have internalized their father’s
misogyny, viewing their conception and births as a “disaster.” The sister’s response to the
The daughters build a house in nature as a space of safety. As Alyan describes this
process, the sisters “apprentice within gynic hallways. Uterus as asylum to the / things they
learn to erase. What does not wither will grow and / Sahar and her sisters build a hut at the
river’s edge, charge / camel bones for their magic. The women arrive. Feather-spined, / earth-
damned and tired, they come to be emptied. This is what / is meant by mercy.” Alyan’s
midwife who delivered them and who attempted to prevent his wife from bearing any more
girls—grow up to perform abortions. Sahar and her sisters “train / their ovaries like a militia.
Menstruate with the precision / of choir practice.” In these lines, Alyan portrays the sister’s
perception of their female reproductive organs as an “asylum,” and describes the sisters’
menstruation as a trained and regulated military act. This is significant because it shows that
the sisters have reacted to their father’s violence with a form of control of their own making.
While they may not be able to change the misogynistic climate in which they were born, they
can find—even amidst the “asylum” of their female-sexed bodies—a source of unity and
167
strength by regulating their menstruation, and by emptying the wombs of women who do not
wish to bear children. Alyan abstracts the female reproductive organs from their purpose of
conceiving and bearing children, concentrating instead on the acts of abortion, and
While this might appear to be a type of incipient feminism, Alyan emphasizes that the
misogynistic climate of their social location still limits the sisters’ lives, especially when
Alyan reveals the tragic end of the story: “It is foxes, / foxes that come / sniffing / the river’s
edge, foxes / that find / Sahar and her sisters, / ink-haired quartet, / hanging / like
constellations / from the trees.” Alyan intentionally leaves the tragic ending on an ambiguous
tone: is it unclear whether the sisters were murdered, or if they committed suicide. Either
option is possible, and it seems that if they were murdered, the perpetrator may be a man—
possibly their own father, or another man in the village—given the violent policing of gender
by men exhibited earlier in the poem. Alyan’s poetry—set in an abstract, mythical space that
deterritorialized. Her poetry establishes nature as a space in which women develop their
ability to perform caring labor, ensuring the possibility for reproductive autonomy outside the
domain of neoliberal structures. While Alyan’s work—along with Hammad and Abinader’s
poems—highlights women’s caring labor, other Arab American women poets represent men’s
caring labor, and it is to these poets that I turn in the final two sections.
168
Post-Neoliberalism, Caring Labor, and Sustainable Food Production
In this section, I analyze how two Arab American women poets, Hedy Habra and
Mariam Haddad, depict men’s caring labor in ways that imagine possibilities for a post-
neoliberal social order. By noticing men’s caring labor, Habra and Haddad disconnect caring
labor from its association with a female social role. In addition, these poets make visible an
alternative to the nuclear family by representing family as a web of kinship in which multiple
family members provide caring roles. As Suad Joseph (2012) observes, in the Arab region,
caretakers are not exclusively women or mother figures. Rather, Arab families “are highly
diverse and varied systems” consisting of “sets of relationships and dynamics that cannot be
described or defined by monolithic models of gender relations.” Arab American women poets
who attend to men’s caring labor envision spaces that provide alternatives to neoliberalism.
Hedy Habra’s poem, “Narguileh” (2013) complicates the boundaries between male
and female gender roles by depicting a man’s caring labor. Born in Egypt to Lebanese
parents, Habra lived in both countries, but left Lebanon during the civil war. After spending
several months in Greece, and residing for six years in Belgium, she immigrated to the United
States, where she currently lives. In “Narguileh” Habra shows how a man attempts to
restructure the domestic sphere to reflect his homeland, rather than attempting to find a space
in American economic, social, or political life. The man, “trapped in his backyard,” thinks of
memories from Lebanon as he “draws on his pipe…cafes, / backgammon games, dice thrown
over inlaid wood.” Habra’s use of the word “trapped” indicates that the man does not feel free
in his backyard, but rather longs for Lebanon. The pain of coping with dislocation from his
homeland leads him to feel trapped in the domestic space of a garden in the United States. It is
no accident that Habra concentrates on the domestic sphere, rather than on a public space, as
169
Lebanese political and civic arenas have been unstable from the state’s inception.
After the defeat of the Ottomans during World War I, the League of Nations
authorized the French mandate over Greater Syria (1920-1943), which included modern-day
Lebanon. As Suad Joseph (2012) summarizes, in the seven decades after Lebanon’s
independence in 1926, instability has been constant.281 Citizens perceived the Lebanese state
linked to the widespread lack of faith and trust in the state to deliver protection or critical
services.”282 Joseph (2012) develops the concept of “political familism,” which she defines as
activate their needs and demands in relation to the state or polity. Political familism is also
used by the state or state actors to mobilize practical and moral grounds for governance
predicated on a civic myth of kinship and a public discourse that privileges family.
Political familism, as a set of concepts, does not assume an unchanging set of family
relations or family practices. Rather, political familism is based on what Suad Joseph calls the
“kin contract,” which refers to formal and informal understandings that memberships in
families precedes membership in the state, and that families legitimately can claim prior
loyalty of their members (male and female) over and above the state’s claims to loyalty.283 In
281
Joseph discusses several factors of instability including, but not limited to, the 1948 influx of Palestinians into
Lebanon; the 1956 Arab-Israeli war; the 1958 Chamoun Revolt with American military intervention; the 1967
Arab-Israeli war; the 1970 Black September in Jordan; the 1973 Arab-Israeli war; the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil
War; American military intervention in 1982; Israeli aggressions that displaced hundreds of thousands of
Lebanese in 1978 to one million in 2006; and the Israeli occupation (1982-2000).
282
Ibid., pg. 159
283
Ibid., pg. 151-2.
170
Lebanon—as in most states in the Arab region—kin groups are recognized as legitimate
political actors. The family, rather than the individual, is written into the Lebanese
constitution as the basic unit of society, and the economy also relies on the structure and
dynamics of familism. Most businesses are small, family-owned shops, and family is the
ultimate economic safety net for Lebanese. It is important to note that, while the specific
structures or relationships of family in Lebanon vary widely, in the absence of state stability,
the concept of the family as a network of kin has carried the burden of the work of the state.
Habra recalibrates political familism in the U.S. by representing a Lebanese man who
performs caring labor in a domestic space to produce sustainable food for his family.
Specifically, Habra describes the man’s activities as he tends his backyard: “He breeds
canaries / in a shed, feeds them egg / shells, slices of apples. / Each dawn, he hangs cages / on
the trellis / overlooking the swing, / waters his vegetables, / precious seeds / flown from far
away, / curled cucumbers, / a special vine from Lebanon, / its silken leaves fit for stuffing.”
The experience of being in diaspora creates an affective yearning for Lebanon, which inspires
the man to engage in acts of caring labor: he cultivates a garden by attempting to transplant
his homeland into the U.S. Although most caring labor is attributed to women, Habra presents
an image of a man’s caring labor as he relies on gardening to keep the memory of his
homeland alive.
relationship to land. As Akram Khater (2001) has observed, Lebanese men found in the land
171
“the source of their social identity and status.”284 In Habra’s poem, the man’s yearning for his
in the form of produce for his family. Although the man in this poem performs caring labor
that succeeds on a material level, his labor fails on an affective level. Political familism in a
deterritorialized context takes the form of an affective tension between longing for the
homeland and feeling trapped in a U.S. domestic space; this dynamism inspires caring labor,
leading to sustainable outcomes for the family. Habra’s poem implies that this tension could
continue the man’s labor indefinitely; he is not motivated by a wage or by status in the public
As Habra’s poem shows, the use of caring labor as a mechanism for attempting to
resolve trauma can serve as a basis for sustainable practices of care. Poetry, as Mary Phillips
(2016) writes, “offers a means to embrace multiplicity, emotion and corporeal responses to
the worlds in which we live” and “can help us reflect on our organic embeddedness and
materiality and develop a heightened engagement with nature” because “writing enables us to
feel our embodied connections to the natural world and to respond with emotion; to open
ourselves to care.”285 In Habra’s poem, the affective dynamics of trauma provide an impetus
for caring labor that occurs in a deterritorialized space because the man is not located in
landscape of the U.S. Yet the man is not grounded in the U.S., either, because he feels
284
Khater, Akram. Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920.
Berkeley: U of California P, 2001, pg. 13.
285
Ibid.
172
Habra portrays the man’s memory as a type of archive. For instance, as he gardens, the
man recollects playing backgammon and the music of “Feyrous, / Sabah, Om / Kalsoum.” In
diaspora, the man performs his own type of archival practice through gardening. Habra shows
how the man’s imaginary of his homeland, and his attempt to reproduce his homeland, yields
the produce of caring labor. The man’s efforts in transporting the seeds and the special vine
from Lebanon are a type of archival practice that expands the definition of an archive beyond
documents located in an institutional space. The vine of grape leaves, transplanted from
Lebanon to the U.S., serves as an archive of the homeland because it forms the basis of an
Arabic meal—stuffed grape leaves—on American soil, where the man, “thanks the Lord / his
In Habra’s poem, the narguileh (pipe) also serves as a type of archive that evokes the
memory of Lebanon and provides a space for the man to examine his affective relationship
with his homeland. For example, in the last stanza, Habra captures the man’s emotional state
as he gazes at the narguileh: “Carefully kindling coals / with tongs, he watches / arabesques,
swirls emerging / from underwater, imprisoned / in the blown glass, / bursting at the surface, /
deafened words / of a drowned Phoenician sailor.” In this stanza, Habra depicts the narguileh
as a type of archive that the man accesses and interprets in the domestic space of his
the state or an institution and does not contain documents or records; rather it is grounded in
history as perceived through a poetic imaginary based on affect. When Habra writes that the
man feels “trapped” like the “imprisoned” drowned Phoenician sailor, she shows that he
identifies with his Phoenician heritage—a heritage that has been affected by his experience of
deterritorialization. This stanza represents how the man, like the drowned Phoenician sailor,
173
feels a type of death: the distance of his homeland. Throughout “Narguileh,” Habra
caring labor in his garden, Habra de-essentializes the problematic in ecofeminism that
connects women to nature and illuminates how a man copes with diasporic trauma in
Like Habra’s poem, Marian Haddad’s “Keeping the Bear Away” (2004) centers on a
man’s caring labor in a garden. Haddad, born in El Paso to Syrian immigrant parents,
interprets her father’s attempt to reproduce crops from Syria in the United States. The
epigraph announces that the poem will be grounded in the poet’s Christian faith:
Haddad uses the image of a door as both a literal and figurative point of entry into both
Christ’s suffering and her father’s memories of his Syrian homeland as he approaches the end
of his life. She invokes the image of “another door” (the spear wound rather than the crucifix)
to indicate her desire to pursue an oblique path into the memory of Christ’s suffering. Haddad
uses a similarly oblique point of entry into her father’s gardening. In the first stanza, for
example, Haddad refers to “a white door” which “leads to the garden / he planted.” This door
opens to an archive of images: the memory of her father’s labor in the garden where “he
174
planted / fig trees and patches of cherry / tomatoes, mint and herbs / that scented his garden.”
These crops are typical of the Arab region, suggesting that her father’s crops connect him to
his Syrian homeland. At this point, Haddad transitions to another door: “This is / often the
door he used to enter / his house after making his way / about his American field, out / back
behind the kitchen, where / his wife cut the eggplant…” and “stirred the sauces, crushed
garden / tomatoes in her hands, / mixed the potted blend.” In these lines, Haddad explains
how her mother assists her father in establishing “his new kingdom” in the United States. The
poet then mentions a third door “over whose step / his heel sprung back into his new /
kingdom.” This third door shows how the father’s archival practice of planting crops from the
Syrian homeland has implications for sustainable practices of caring labor in America.
Healing from the trauma of displacement is not disempowering; rather, it is based on the
Haddad, when exploring the intergenerational implications of her father’s caring labor,
describes her father as “the one / who has / planted / me.” While mothers are typically
associated with images of fecundity, Haddad characterizes her father as a maternal figure who
has “planted” her. This is important because her rendering humanizes an Arab man and
because Haddad portrays how Arab men have their own unique type of fecundity. Throughout
the poem, she articulates a desire to integrate her life into the natural world as a way of
perpetuating her father’s caring labor. For example, Haddad writes that she desires to “grow /
‘round about / his house / like a fir / tree, scenting / his many baskets / of plums / and apples, /
vineyards / heavy with grapes.” In this poem, Haddad links two types of caring labor:
sustainable agriculture and caring for children. The poet’s desire to integrate her life into the
natural world is both a kinship model of caring labor and a sustainable practice, an example of
175
what Ariel Salleh (2009) terms “eco-sufficiency.”
Salleh argues that eco-sufficiency is necessary for moving past, or at least modifying,
calls for a change in perspective from that of the market and the abstract rational individual to
the perspective of developing sustainable systems that care for the social reproduction of labor
as well as the regeneration of resources.286 Haddad’s poem explores the affective economy of
eco-sufficiency. The father in this poem plants crops from the Arab region, particularly fig
trees and mint, as an attempt to recreate his homeland in the United States. Haddad compares
her father to a fir tree that desires to grow and nurture more crops; the father demonstrates a
desire to establish sustainability in the domestic sphere. The poem shows how the kinship-
based economy of caring labor is intrinsically sustainable: the daughter cares for her sick
father, just as he cared for her. Haddad’s depiction of her father as “the one / who has /
planted / me,” provides a vision of how a man’s caring labor performed for his daughter
“plants” her in both a physical and an emotional sense, giving her a model of sustainable labor
and enabling her to continue that labor. These acts of caring labor occur outside of neoliberal
structures, and Haddad makes visible not just the product but the process of sustainable caring
labor. Ecofeminist philosophers have discussed how caring labor can serve as a basis for a
concept of work that moves to a sustainable post-neoliberal social and economic order. A
post-neoliberal social order requires valuing the common good over private property,
emphasizing cooperation instead of competition, and placing importance on caring for others
286
As summarized by Adelheid Biesker and Uta von Winterfeld in “Regeneration in limbo: Ecofeminist
perspectives on the multiple crisis and social contract.” Contemporary Perspectives on Ecofeminism, edited by
Mary Phillips and Nick Rumens. London: Routledge, 2016, pg. 89.
176
and for nature instead of maximizing one’s self-interested utility.287
Haddad’s poem can also be read as an example of what Michael Hardt (1999) calls
“biopower from below.” Hardt contrasts biopower from below with Foucault’s
power—from patria potestas, the right of the father over the life and death of his children and
servants, and later from the emerging forces of governmentality to create, manage, and
control populations.288 In contrast, biopower from below underscores the labor required for
life.289 Haddad’s portrayal of an Arab man’s caring labor is a manifestation of biopower from
below because the man’s labor emerges from affect, remains grounded in kinship networks,
and provides a model of sustainable labor that gestures toward a post-neoliberal social order.
In the next, and final, section, I turn to post-neoliberal insights in the poetry of Naomi Shihab
Ibis Gómez-Vega (2001, 2010) observes that Naomi Shihab Nye “writes ordinary
poems in an accessible language.”290 Nye’s oeuvre meditates on the impact of war in the
287
Ibid., pg. 90.
288
See Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Volume I, The Will to Knowledge (1976).
289
Ibid., pg. 98
Gómez-Vega, Ibis. “An Essay Review: The Art of Telling Stories in the Poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye.”
290
MELUS, vol. 26, no. 2, 2001, pp. 245-52. See pg. 251.
177
Middle East, creating “a space for the forgotten,” for “people who daily suffer the not-so little
indignities of attempting to live in a world at war.”291 Samina (2010) defines Nye’s “aesthetic
of smallness” as “an artistic emphasis on small-scale objects and material realities, which
include not only the ordinary, unadorned, and everyday, but also the personal and the
particular.”292 Bujupaj (2015) extends Samina’s analysis, arguing that “Nye’s poetry develops
connections between people and their environments.”293 In this section, I consider how Nye’s
aesthetic of attentiveness manifests in a man’s caring labor, and how her attentiveness to this
In “Arabic Coffee” (2002), Nye observes her father’s attempt to reproduce the cultural
practices of his Palestinian heritage in a U.S. domestic space. The poem begins with the
voices of children asking their father to make coffee. Nye complicates the boundaries between
gender roles by emphasizing her father’s nurturing capabilities. She also characterizes the
process of making coffee as a space free from gender conflicts and divisions: “the place where
men and women / break off from one another / was not present in that room.” After he
prepares the coffee—a source of sustenance for the family—the father creates a space in
which the family can share their experiences. In the domestic environment where the family
gathers to drink their coffee, all the family’s “disappointments and dreams” are welcome:
Gómez-Vega, Ibis. “Extreme Realities: Naomi Shihab Nye’s Essays and Poems.” Alif: Journal of
291
Comparative Poetics, vol. 30, 2010, pp. 109-133. See pg. 109.
Najmi, Samina. “Naomi Shihab Nye’s Aesthetic of Smallness and the Military Sublime.”
292
MELUS, vol. 35, no. 2, 2010, pp. 151-71. See pg. 156.
293
Bujupaj, Ismet. “Nature in Arab American Literature: Majaj, Nye, and Kahf.” European Journal of American
Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2015.
178
“none was more important than the others, / and all were guests.” The domestic sphere is a
common theme in Nye’s work, and Nye concentrates on the small details of this environment:
Nye recalls her father’s attempts to recreate Arabic coffee as a social custom in an American
context, yet the poem is not exclusively located in America. Instead, Nye articulates a
deterritorialized space in which caring labor enables the family to process their affective
experiences. This process is a sustainable one—as Nye writes, “There is this, and there is
In this deterritorialized space, the father recreates the ritual of Arabic coffee from his
memory, showing how caretaking labor is a type of archival practice. Nye renders sustainable
practices of caring labor as a performance: the guests are invited to share their experiences on
an affective level in a space that Nye describes as nurturing and sustainable. This space
signals a post-neoliberal form of social organization and cultural practice. Nye’s reflection on
Arabic coffee as a cultural ritual exists outside of market values, and it is primarily concerned
Similar to Nye’s work, Suheir Hammad’s “whole hands” (2005) characterizes a male
figure with an unspecified, but presumably paternal, relationship to the speaker. Hammad
emphasizes caring labor from her position as a woman born to parents dispossessed from their
179
native land. The poem does not take place either in the Arab region or in the United States,
but rather documents deterritorialized flows that document the relationship between these
poem, she ruminates on the man’s hands which “have sheltered and / shaded reflected the /
sun encompassed / the moon whole…his hands around / me been bread fed / me kept me /
alive simple / warm whole.” By highlighting a domestic environment, Hammad makes visible
the father’s acts of critically important care that have ensured the child’s survival.
In addition to articulating how the father meets the child’s physical needs of shelter,
protection, and sustenance, the speaker emphasizes that the man’s hands inspire the child
though an act of artistic production: “his hands inside / me playing piano / with broken chords
poetry, along with that of many other Arab American writers, manifests “within the confines
of domestic Arab American spaces,” where the reproduction of an “Arab homeland occurs
primarily through material fragments, including food, Arab text, photos, music, plants, and
religious icons and scripture.”294 While Hammad’s “whole hands” does indeed, as Fadda-
Conrey writes, take place in a domestic space, Hammad’s invocation of music does not
reproduce the Arab homeland but rather elucidates the affective economy of artistic
Throughout the poem, Hammad depicts the man playing the piano as a form of caring
labor. The man’s caring labor is not cognitive, not visual, not aural, but experienced within
294
Fadda-Conrey, Carol. Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of
Citizenship and Belonging. New York: NYU Press, 2014, pg. 30.
180
the speaker’s body: “his hands cupped / have caught me as / i fell drop by glisten / fingers
coaxing / my arrival whole.” In this image, which evokes birth, the speaker demonstrates how
the man’s caring labor facilitates her sense of being “whole.” The poem does not present the
labor. The affective impact of caring labor makes the speaker feel “whole.” What does
“wholeness” mean in this context? Hammad emphasizes caring labor first, because it is
foundational, and then considers other types of labor performed by the man. The hands that
cared for the speaker also work in an artistic context, as Hammad describes the man playing
the piano, an action that resonates with the speaker and facilitates a sense of wholeness.
Why does Hammad write about music? Artistic production and consumption is a
art? The word itself suggests an affective response: the movement of emotion. This indicates
that emotion has a circulatory component; it moves through embodied subjects in spaces that
can be termed deterritorialized because they are not bounded in time or space but can be
artistic production, circulation, and consumption is as vital to human beings as survival. Art
provides a model of caring and sustainable labor because the production of art both requires
instrument of caring labor—labor that ensures physical and emotional survival through artistic
181
because artists are not motivated solely by the prospect of material gain. A post-neoliberal
social order would likely position the arts as vitally important because artistic production,
while of course having the potential to be motivated by monetary gain, also has non-market
Conclusion
For decades, scholars have documented the increasingly apparent and seemingly
of market values in social and political decisions, the reduction of the state in regulating the
neoliberalism has led to widespread agreement between both opponents and advocates of this
philosophy that communities must adjust to the demands of the global economic system or
“accretion and interaction of small changes.” In this chapter, I attempted to interrupt the
represent small changes, specifically an affective economy of care grounded in social concern
and collectivity.
182
resistance to imperial violence—as an embedding of humans in the environment, developing a
the underlying architecture of imperialism. In “Sahar and Her Sisters” (2012), Alyan
configures the natural environment as a space in which women generate alternative social
structures of caring labor to create the conditions for reproductive autonomy. Hammad’s “our
mothers and their lives of suffer” (2005) articulates the voices of young Palestinian women
who denigrate their mothers’ caring labor—an assessment that emerges from a neoliberal
evaluation of labor that only attributes value to waged labor. Hammad elucidates how
Palestinian women arrive at an analysis of their mothers’ caring labor as a source of strength,
and as a basis for political resistance in the public sphere. The poem ultimately revalues
Habra and Haddad’s poems portray how Arab men who have been dislocated from the
Arab region attempt to resolve their trauma by using caring labor to reproduce the
environment of their homelands. The reliance on caring labor as a mechanism for attempting
to resolve trauma, as this poetry reveals, functions as a sustainable practice. Nye and Hammad
articulate affective economies of artistic production as forms of caring labor. All the poets
establish caring labor as foundational; they detach caring labor from female gender by
depicting men in caregiving roles; they portray nature as a space in which men develop
sustainable structures for caring labor; they provide models for caring labor that do not
externalize but rather integrate the environment; and they identify cultural practices as
183
avenues for caring labor. Moreover, by depicting non-market spaces—domains outside the
multiple family members provide caring roles. All these poetic articulations provide
that already exist in the Arab American community. As these poets’ work reveals, generative
critiques of neoliberalism can emerge from the utterances of poetry, an artistic production that
184
CHAPTER VI
Conclusion
Although several scholars have made important contributions to the field of Arab
American literary studies (Salaita 2007, Feldman 2007, Abdelrazek 2008, Hassan 2011,
Fadda-Conrey 2014), there has not yet been an in-depth study exclusively on Arab American
women poets. This dissertation attempted to provide a first step toward this contribution. I
argued that Arab American women poets are important because they illuminate experiences
Arab American women poets who published full-length collections beginning in the mid-
1960s and continuing to 2016. This period included many significant events including the
rapid integration of the world economy into a globalization paradigm, increasing migrations
of Arabs into Western countries, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the subsequent war
on terror, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the destabilization of Iraq, the Arab Spring
movements, the removal of Gaddafi, and the internecine war in Syria, which began in 2011
Throughout this dissertation, I explored how Arab American women poets represent
the complex dynamics of migrations from the Arab region to the Americas. In their work,
185
these poets provide insights into conflicts in the Arab region, and how those conflicts have led
to political instability, various forms of violence, and migrations of people around the world.
This dissertation analyzed how Arab American women’s poetry reflects on the impact of Arab
regional violence. I concentrated on three predominant forms of political violence that the
poets discuss: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which precipitated Arab migrations from
Greater Syria at the end of the nineteenth century; the establishment of the state of Israel in
1948, which displaced approximately 711,000 Palestinians; and the U.S. wars in Iraq. I also
noticed how the poets address forms of economic violence resulting from the penury that
often accompanies diasporic populations. These poets help us to understand the human costs
chaos but considers how to improve the conditions of life. Although they or their ancestors
experienced or witnessed acts of violence, these poets do not view people who have
experienced violence as victims, but as agents who can contribute insights that benefit both
Arab Americans and a wider collective. These Arab American women poets conceptualize the
writing of poetry as a process that, through engagement with readers, moves in the direction
of healing from violence. Throughout this dissertation, I highlighted how these poets claim
agency because of diasporic displacement, and how they respond to the aftermath of violent
boundaries are not only coercive, but also provide opportunities for contemplation and
insight. Specifically, I contemplated how Arab American women create poetic imaginaries
186
that are responsive to both historical circumstances and to their contemporaneous
sociocultural and political contexts. I commented upon the broader significance of these
articulate a normative vision for the future of Arabs, both in America and in a transnational
context. In my attempt to understand the role of boundaries in this poetry, I dialogued with a
wide range of scholarship that addresses boundaries in the context of women’s diasporic
experiences, identity, trauma and recovery, childhood, neoliberalism, and caring labor.
Boundaries,” I examined three Arab American women poets—Elmaz Abinader, Mohja Kahf,
and Nathalie Handal. Specifically, I investigated how these poets illuminate the phenomenon
of Arab migrations to Western countries. I analyzed the poets at the time of their production
and in the context of their reception. Specifically, I asked how these poets implicitly dialogue
with central ideas of the Mahjar literary tradition for late-twentieth and early twenty-first
century audiences. The first two poets—Abinader and Kahf—develop an approach that I
Western countries, but rather to create the conditions for Arab survival in those countries. In
the second section, I argued that Handal’s poetry about transnational Palestinian exile extends
the philosophical contributions of the central Mahjar writer Ameen Rihani. Specifically, I
addressed how Handal articulates a cultural synthesis approach that attempts to integrate Arab
identities in a Western context, not to Arabize the West, but to maintain the strongest
elements of both cultures. In the final section of this chapter, I drew attention to Handal’s
2012 collection, Poet in Andalucía, to show that Said’s concept of contrapuntal analysis
187
relationships with geographically distant colonies; however, it is also important to analyze
regions such as Andalucía where it is difficult to distinguish between colonizer and colonized
because the region experienced alternating periods of Christian and Muslim control. I argued
that Handal’s stated intention is to reflect on the “possibility of human coexistence” between
Christian and Muslim populations, and her poetry remains hopeful about the possibility of
multiculturalism.
In the subsequent chapters, I turned to the third period of Arab migration, which began
in 1968 when the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 went into effect and increased
migration from the Arab region to the United States. These chapters examined how Arab
American women poets who immigrated to the U.S. during this period address important
social, political, and economic issues in the contemporary United States. In Chapter 2,
Era,” I observed that Arab American women’s poetry does not articulate a unified vision of
the Arab American subject. Some Arab American women poets, in particular Suheir Hammad
and Mohja Kahf, articulate an identity politics by politicizing their social locations. These
poets document socioeconomic inequalities and make calls for redresses to these inequities.
There are compelling reasons to embrace identity politics because it provides a way for
people to claim a history and find a voice. In this chapter, however, I underscored critiques of
identity politics that point out the limits of fixing a location in difference. Rather than
focusing on how individual identity has been shaped by structural power inequalities, the
poets studied in this chapter—Deema Shehabi, Leila Halaby, and Etel Adnan—respond to the
social locations. This conception of identity understands the sense of the individual’s
188
coexistence with other people and the environment. I explored how these poets’ depictions of
identity resonates with feminists and post-humanists who are complicating the boundaries of
Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Deema Shehabi—reimagine the boundaries and roles of the
child. My interest here was not on the boundaries of childhood, per se, but on the creation of
childhood as an epistemological space through which boundaries between America and the
Arab region can be opened for understanding. The poets analyzed in this chapter do not
render childhood as a period in the lifecycle but as an epistemological space from which to
make insights into the problem of Arab regional violence. Through the perspectives of
children, these poets establish specific ethical positions on how to respond appropriately to
acts of violence. These poets overwhelmingly meditate on two primary domains: domestic
spaces and the natural environment, and their work portrays how healing from violence in the
Arab region can occur by integrating insights that emerge from both spaces. Although these
poets specifically address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wars in Iraq, their insights have
more general application because they establish broad ethical parameters for responding to
violence.
Caring Labor, and the Boundaries of Gender Roles,” investigated how Elmaz Abinader,
Suheir Hammad, Hala Alyan, Hedy Habra, Marian Haddad, and Naomi Shihab Nye
reimagine boundaries of gender roles. These poets emphasize the importance of caring labor,
which involves connecting to other people and trying to help them meet their needs. I
189
analyzed how these poets interpret caring labor as a response to violence in the Arab region
and transnational dislocation. I also highlighted how these poets politicize the affective
implications this knowledge might have for the body politic of American society. These poets
emphasize that, during an incident of violence or in the context of war, labor complicates the
boundaries between traditional gender roles, and these changes persist in diaspora. These
poets contemplate how caring labor, in the context of a web of kinship, becomes an act of
political resistance to imperial violence. By unfixing caring labor from its association with
female gender, Arab American women poets present men in a wide range of caregiving roles,
including in the natural world, and these characterizations focus on ecologically sustainable
labor practices. Moreover, Arab American women poets articulate formations of caring labor
that merge the natural and the human landscapes—a perspective that does not externalize the
environment, but rather integrates the environment into production processes. The use of
caring labor as a mechanism for attempting to resolve trauma can serve as a basis for
sustainable economic practices that might facilitate a more inclusive social landscape.
Overall, this dissertation attended to the most predominant themes in Arab American
women’s poetry. I took as a point of departure Steven Salaita’s (2007) proposition that “it is
possible to extract a sociological epistemology from literature without ignoring its aesthetic
aspects of this poetry than on its aesthetics. There are many potential areas for future inquiry
into Arab American women’s poetry, including the aesthetics of language. Etel Adnan, for
295
Salaita, Steven. Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics. New York: Palgrave, 2007, pg. 52.
190
example, is unique for her postmodernist aesthetic that emphasizes fragmentation, rupture,
fluidity, and disassociation. Because these poets live in the interstices between the Arab
region and America, many of them document complex linguistic experiences, mainly the
struggles of negotiating between Arabic and English. In addition to Arabic and English, some
of these poets are also fluent in French and/or Spanish. Moreover, some poets combine
multiple languages within the space of a single poem. A potential area for future analysis is
Another avenue for inquiry is how Arab American women poets create intertextual
dialogues with other poets and poetic traditions. Several of these poets can be read in the
context of the British Romanic poets and the American transcendentalists. Another area for
research could be how these poets exhibit an awareness of poetry as a medium ideally suited
for exploring, negotiating, and attempting to resolve conflicts that emerge from the condition
inquiries on this topic, especially Elmaz Abinader, Nathalie Handal, Mohja Kahf, Suheir
A fourth area of future inquiry might be the relationships between urbanity and nature
in this body of work. Many Arab American women poets who have had direct or ancestral
experiences of diaspora live in, and write about, urban spaces. Perhaps the most prolific poet
on urban themes is D.H. Melhem (1972, 1976), who writes about New York City, a topic also
taken up by Suheir Hammad (1996, 2005) and Hala Alyan (2012). Several poets concentrate
on Arab cities: Hedy Habra (2013) discusses Beirut, Heliopolis, and Cairo; Pauline Kaldas
(2006) also writes about Cairo; Deema Shehabi (2011) considers Jerusalem; Dunya Mikhail
documents the impact of violence on Iraqi cities (2004); and Nathalie Handal (1999, 2005,
191
2012, 2015) discusses urban spaces in several countries: Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
Spain, France, and the United States. More frequently than urban environments, nature figures
Finally, future scholars might ponder the significance of religion in this poetry. It has
been estimated that Arab Americans are Muslim and Christians in roughly equal numbers,
though other faiths (and secular perspectives) are also represented. Some poets, such as Mohja
Kahf, discuss the Islamic faith, while other Arab American women write poems inspired by
the Christian faith, including Marian Haddad, Elmaz Abinader, Hedy Habra, Pauline Kaldas,
and D.H. Melhem. Naomi Shihab Nye and Elmaz Abinader explore interfaith dialogues,
emphasizing the connections between Islam and Christianity rather than differences. Etel
Adnan meditates on spirituality in the abstract, without reference to any recognizable religious
tradition.
This dissertation analyzed Arab American women’s poetry published up until 2016, a
year that marked a significant turning point in international politics, including the “Brexit”
vote to leave the European Union, the elections of populist governments in several Western
countries, and a rise in nationalist sentiments. The migration crisis in Europe has led to
increasing public debates about the enforcement of national boundaries, once seen as
relatively unimportant in a globalized world. There has been an expansion of nationalist views
to be seen for how long this period of discontentment with globalization will continue.
globalization, international migration, and multiculturalism, a period that asserts the values of
national sovereignty, border security, reduced immigration, and unified national cultures. If
192
this is the case, we might expect future Arab American women poets to concentrate on the
estrangement, and frustration. We might expect more Arab American women poets to write
about their status as minority subjects in America, recollecting incidents of discrimination and
In such a political climate, it can be expected that Arabs and Muslims will feel
increasingly unwelcome in Western countries, and perhaps some will return to their
homelands. Others will remain and assert their Arab American and/or Muslim American
identities, aiming for an inclusive American society that values heterogeneity, diversity, and
inclusion. These poets will probably continue to advocate for progressive political alliances
with other minority groups in the U.S. Others might articulate Pan-Arabism—a multi-faith
celebration of ethnic heritage that often excavates shared ancestral or archival memories.
Many poets may discuss feelings of conflict between their heritage in the Arab region
and the homes they have made in the United States. As an attempt to resolve these conflicts,
Arab American women poets might undertake journeys to the Arab region, not with the
intention of permanent resettlement but, rather, with the goal of understanding the language
and culture of their homeland to bring this understanding back to America. Other Arab
American women poets might remain in the U.S. but frequently travel to the Arab region, and
to other locations. Through travel, the condition of alterity might be lived as a foundational
and guiding principle. In this way, some poets might embrace an estrangement from fixed
a lifestyle that becomes both an aesthetic and a politics—a way of understanding the
condition of those who are refugees, migrants, dispossessed, or exiles. In addition to traveling,
193
many of these poets might notice how domestic spaces enable Arab Americans to connect
with their heritage, often through the practice of preparing food from their home countries.
Given the transnational experiences of these poets, some might appeal—as Naomi Shihab
Nye does—to shared humanity vis-à-vis a comparative cultural analytic, a kind of “global
village” approach.
migrations, perhaps in time citizens in America and other Western countries will move toward
a paradigm of global integration and multiculturalism. If this is the case, we can expect Arab
expect to see more poetry that celebrates the transnational community of Arabs and Muslims
194
APPENDICES
195
APPENDIX A
The Arab American women poets analyzed in this dissertation examine dozens of
topics. The twenty-five most common topics include: violence, maternity, love, memory,
nature, death, ancestry, religion, urbanity, Palestine, language, childhood, traveling, history,
exile, and sex. Many Arab American women poets write about their status as minority
might be called ethnic pride (Abinader 1999, 2014; Halaby 2012; Hammad 1996, 2005; Kahf
2003; Kaldas 2006; Melhem 1972; Shehabi 2011). Several poets advocate for a progressive
political alliance with other minority groups in the U.S. (Abinader 1999; Halaby 2012;
Hammad 1996, 2005; Kahf 2003; Shehabi 2011). Others articulate Pan-Arabism—a multi-
faith celebration of ethnic heritage that often excavates shared ancestral or archival memories
(Abinader 1999, 2014; Halaby 2012; Hammad 1996, 2005; Handal 2005; Kahf 2003; Melhem
1972, 1975; Nye 2011). Most of these poets discuss feelings of conflict between their heritage
in the Arab region and the homes they have made in the United States (Habra 2013; Haddad
2004; Halaby 2012; Hammad 2005, 2008; Handal 2004, 2010, 2012; Kahf 2003; Kaldas
As an attempt to resolve these conflicts, several Arab American women poets discuss
196
their homeward journeys to the Arab region, usually not undertaken with the intention of
permanent resettlement but, rather, with the goal of discovering and understanding the
language and culture of the homeland to understand their heritage, enrich the self, and bring
this understanding back to America to humanize Arabs to Americans (Abinader 1999, 2014;
Halaby 2012; Handal 2012; Kahf 2003; Kaldas 2006; Nye 2011). One poet, Palestinian
American Lisa Suhair Majaj, was born in America but moved to Cyprus in 2001 and became
an ex-patriate voice critical of American foreign policy. More commonly, Arab American
women poets remain in the U.S. but frequently travel to the Arab region, to Europe, and to
Central and South America (Abinader 1999; Handal 2012, 2015; Melhem 1976; Nye 1980,
1982, 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2005, 2011). Through travel, the condition of alterity is never
resolved but, rather, lived as a guiding principle. In this way, the poets embrace an
estrangement from fixed conceptions of self, homeland, and country. Perpetual dislocation is
a lifestyle that becomes both an aesthetic and a politics, a way of understanding the condition
many of these poets notice how domestic spaces enable Arab Americans to connect with their
heritage, often through the practice of preparing food from their home countries (Abinader
2014; Alyan 2012; Habra 2013; Hammad 2005; Handal 2005; Kahf 2003; Kaldas 2006;
Because these poets live in the interstices between the Arab region and America, many
between Arabic and English (Abinader 1999, 2014; Adnan 1990, 2008, 2012; Habra 2013;
Halaby 2012; Hammad 1996, 2005, 2008; Handal 1999, 2005, 2010, 2012; Kahf 2003;
Kaldas 2006; Melhem 1972, 1975; Mikhail 2004; Majaj 2001; Nye 1980, 1986, 1998, 1994,
197
2001, 2002, 2011; Shehabi 2011). In addition to Arabic and English, some of these poets are
also fluent in French and/or Spanish, such as Etel Adnan, Hedy Habra, and Nathalie Handal.
Although most Arab American women’s poetry is written in English, sometimes the writers
produce poems in Arabic, French, and Spanish. Additionally, some poets combine multiple
Given the international experiences of these poets, it is not surprising that some
appeal—as Naomi Shihab Nye does—to shared humanity vis-à-vis a comparative cultural
analytic, a kind of “global village” approach. Most of these poets produce affective
imaginaries that attend to how emotions can unify human beings regardless of ethnic or racial
identity. Several poets write in the nexus of several topics: ancestry, maternity, love, and
memory (Adnan 2007; Hammad 2005, 2008; Kahf 2003; Melhem 1975, 1998; Nye 1994;
Shehabi 2011). Often, poets working in this vein create a character—usually an Arab child—
who is used to freight empathy for people in the Arab region (Habra 2013; Kahf 2003; Kaldas
2006; Mikhail 2004; Nye 1980, 1994, 1986, 1998, 2002, 2011; Shehabi 2011). Many Arab
American women poets establish an intertextual dialogue with other poets and poetic
traditions (Abinader 1999, 2014; Adnan 2012; Habra 2013; Haddad 2004; Halaby 2012;
Handal 1999, 2010, 2012; Melhem 1972, 1976, 1998, 2002; Nye 1994, 1986, 1998, 2002,
2005, 2011; Shehabi 2011). Using intertextuality, these poets develop a meta-cognitive
poetics that exhibits an awareness of poetry as a medium ideally suited for exploring,
negotiating, and attempting to resolve conflicts that emerge from the conditions of alterity.
Many of these poets engage in philosophical inquiry on a range of topics, especially Elmaz
Abinader, Etel Adnan, Marian Haddad, Nathalie Handal, Mohja Kahf, Dunya Mikhail, and
Naomi Shihab Nye. Etel Adnan is unique for her postmodernist aesthetic that emphasizes
198
fragmentation, rupture, fluidity, and disassociation.
personally, or whose families, experienced the ongoing conflict, including Naomi Shihab
Nye, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Nathalie Handal, Deema Shehabi, Suheir Hammad, and Hala Alyan.
Many Arab American poets who have had direct or ancestral experiences of diaspora, live in,
and write about, urban spaces. Perhaps the most prolific poet on urban themes is D.H.
Melhem (1972, 1976), who writes about New York City, a topic also taken up by Suheir
Hammad (1996, 2005) and Hala Alyan (2012). Several poets are interested in Arab cities:
Hedy Habra (2013) discusses Beirut, Heliopolis, and Cairo; Pauline Kaldas (2006) writes
about Cairo; Deema Shehabi (2011) considers Jerusalem; Mikhail documents the impact of
violence in Iraqi cities (2004); and Nathalie Handal (1999, 2005, 2012, 2015) represents
urban spaces in several countries: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Spain, France, and the
United States.
nearly all Arab American women, some of whom of whom trace a genealogy to the British
Romanic poets and to the American transcendentalists. Religion is an important topic in this
body of work. It has been estimated that Arab Americans are Muslim and Christians in
roughly equal numbers, though other faiths are also represented. Some poets, such as Mohja
Kahf, discuss the Islamic faith, while other Arab American women write poems inspired by
the Christian faith, including Marian Haddad, Elmaz Abinader, Hedy Habra, Pauline Kaldas,
and D.H. Melhem. Naomi Shihab Nye and Elmaz Abinader meditate on interfaith dialogues,
emphasizing the connections between Islam and Christianity rather than differences. Etel
199
religious tradition.
The single most prominent topic explored by these poets is violence. Arab American
American military interventions in Arab countries, and Arab regional violence, including
internecine wars, domestic instability, foreign interventions, and occupations. All Arab
American women poets investigate how to live with, and heal from, the traumatic experiences
of wars, occupations, exile, and dispossession (Abinader 1999, 2014; Adnan 1989, 1990,
2007, 2012; Alyan 2012; Habra 2013; Haddad 2004; Halaby 2012; Hammad 1996, 2005,
2008; Handal 2005, 2012; Kahf 2003; Kaldas 2006; Melhem 1972, 1975, 1998; Mikhail
2004; Nye 1988, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2005, 2011; Shehabi 2011).
200
APPENDIX B
Arab American women poets who articulate relational identity include D.H. Melhem,
Rest in Love (1975) and “love notes” from Children of the House Afire: More Notes on 94th
Street (1976); Naomi Shihab Nye, “Swimmer, Blessed Sea” from Red Suitcase (1994), “The
Small Vases from Hebron” from Fuel (1998), and “From Earth” from Mint Snowball (2001);
Suheir Hammad, “blood stitched time,” “argela remembrance,” and “we spent the fourth of
july in bed” from Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996),“sister star” and “angels get no maps”
from ZaatarDiva (2005), and Breaking Poems (2008); Elmaz Abinader, “Making it New”
Tear in the Sky,” and “Forehead” from This House, My Bones (2014); Mohja Kahf, “From the
Snowfall” from E-mails From Scheherazad (2003); Nathalie Handal, “Twelve Deaths at
Noon,” “Strangers Inside Me,” and “Amrika” from The Lives of Rain (2005); Dunya Mikhail
“Bag of Bones” and “The Theory of Absence” from The War Works Hard (2005), and “Other
Pronouns” and “Larsa” from The Iraqi Nights (2013); Pauline Kaldas, “From a Distance
Born” from Egyptian Compass (2006); Hedy Habra, “The Bullfrog” and “Raindrops” from
201
Tea in Heliopolis (2013), and “Drop by Drop,” “Unborn,” “Origin,” “A Triptych,” “Walking
Around Bernini’s Apollo & Daphne,” “Lovers, in The Garden of Earthly Delights,” “Inside
202
APPENDIX C
Most Arab American women poets who address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict write
poems that can be categorized into one or more of five common themes: traumatic
Palestine; connections between Palestine and America; interethnic and interfaith relationships;
For poems that consider experiences of Palestinians including exile and diaspora, see:
Elmaz Abinader, “Preparing for Occupation” (1999) and “Ascension” (2014); Marian
Haddad, “For Naomi Shihab Nye” (2004); Leila Halaby, “Refugee” (2001) and “a call to
Irbid” (2012); Suheir Hammad, “children of stone” (1996), “one stop (hebron revisited)”
(1996), “gaza” (1996), “Jabaliya” (1996), “zeitoun” (1996), “Palestinian ‘98” (1996),
“ramallah walk” (2005), “love poem” (2005), “rocks off” (2005), “the gift of memory”
(2005), “mama sweet baklava” (2005), and “Breaking poems” (2008); Nathalie Handal, “The
Neverfield Poem” (1999), “Detained” (2004), “The Conflict” (2004), “Even” (2005),
“Ephratha” (2005), “Haifa, Haifa” (2005), “Bethlehem” (2005), “I Never Made it to Café
Beirut; Nor, I Heard, Did You” (2005), “Jenin” (2005), “Amrika” (2005), “Baladna” (2005),
203
“Blue Hours (2005), “Conversations with a Soldier when no one is Around” (2005), “Orphans
of Night” (2005), “Strangers Inside Me” (2005), “The Hanging Hours” (2005), “The
Uncertainty of Fear” (2005), “Hayat” (2010), “Listen, Tonight” (2010), “The Unnatural
Apologies of Shadows” (2010), and “The Thing about Feathers” (2012); Lisa Suhair Majaj,
“Points of Departure” (2001); D.H. Melhem, “Shebab” (2003) and “For the Palestinian
People” (2003); Naomi Shihab Nye, “Brushing Lives” (1994), “Lunch in Nablus City Park”
(1988), “Blood” (2002), “Footfall” (2002), “Passing the Refugee Camp” (2002), “Praying for
Wind” (2002), “Stone House” (2002), “The Palestinians Have Given Up Parties” (2002), “For
Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15” (2005), “Everything in Our World Did Not Seem to Fit”
(2011), “The Only Democracy in the Middle East” (2011), “Hello, Palestine” (2011),
“Thirsty” (2011), “Tiny Cucumbers” (2011), “War” (2011), “Wavelength” (2011), “Savigny
Platz” (2011), and “Scared, Scarred, Sacred” (2011); and Deema Shehabi, “The Glistening”
(2011), “Lights Across the Dead Sea” (2011), “Blue” (2011), “The Narrative” (2011),
“Qasida of Breath” (2011), “Portrait of Summer in Bossey, 15 Years Since Her Death”
(2011), “Qasida of Breath” (2011), and “The Cemetery at Petit Saconnex” (2011).
A second common theme is maternal images of Palestine. Poems that use maternal
images include: Hala Alyan, “Maktoub” (2012); Leila Halaby, “yesterday” (2012); Suheir
Hammad, “our mothers and their lives of suffer” (1996), “dedication” (1996), “scarlet rain”
(1996), “children of stone” (1996), “rafah” (1996), “the necklace” (1996), “love poem”
(2005), “post Zionism (as it relates to me)” (2005), “mama sweet baklava” (2005), “Gaza
City” (2005), “Twelve Deaths at Noon” (2005), and “War” (2005); Naomi Shihab Nye, “Her
Way” (1986), “How Palestinians Keep Warm” (1994), “All Things Not Considered” (2002),
“Things Don’t Stop” (2002), “Your Weight, at Birth” (2005), and “The Small Vases from
204
Hebron” (2008); Deema Shehabi, “Migrant Earth” (2011), “Requiem for Arrival” (2011),
“Portrait of Summer in Bossey, 15 Years Since Her Death” (2011), “Of Harvest and Flight”
(2011), “The Cemetary at Petit Saconnex” (2011), “The Emptying” (2011), and “Green Fruit”
(2011).
A third common theme is the connections between Palestine and America—see Elmaz
Abinader, “Climb Up and Over” (2014); Hala Alyan, “Palestinian-American” (2012); Leila
Halaby, “freedom fighter” (2012); Suheir Hammad, “taxi” (1996), “argela remembrance”
(1996), “blood stitched time” (1996), “scarlet rain” (1996), “Silence” (2008), and “Breaking
poems” (2008); Nathalie Handal, “Amrika” (2005); Mohja Kahf, “Lateefa” (1990) and
“Jasmine Snowfall” (1998); Naomi Shihab Nye, “Mr. Dajani, Calling from Jericho” (2000),
“Praying for Wind” (2002), “The Many Hats of William Yale” (2002), “Renovation” (2005),
“Your Weight, at Birth” (2005), “At the Block Island Ferry” (2011), “I Hate It, I Love It”
(2011), “Knowing” (2011), “Wavelength” (2011), “We Can’t Lose” (2011), “We Did Not
Have Drinking Water…” (2011), “My Life Before America Had No Toilet Tissue” (2011),
and “Scared, Scarred, Sacred” (2011); Deema Shehabi, “Of Harvest and Flight” (2011), “The
“on going to the movies with a Jewish friend 1990” (2012); Suheir Hammad, “Jerusalem
Sunday” (2005), “mama sweet baklava” (2005), “land” (2005), “angels get no maps” (2005),
“talisman” (2005), “What I Will” (2005), “the gift of memory” (2005), “rocks off,” (2005),
and “post-zionism (as it relates to me)” (2005); Mohja Kahf, “Jasmine Snowfall” (1998) and
“I Never Realized They Had Aspirations Like Ours...” (2005); Naomi Shihab Nye,
“Jerusalem Headlines, 2000” (2002), “The Many Hats of William Yale” (2002), “Your
205
Weight, at Birth” (2005), “For Aziz, Who Loved Jerusalem” (2011), “Savigny Platz” (2011),
and “Wavelength” (2011); Deema Shehabi, “Light in the Orchard” (2011), “At the Dome of
the Rock” (2011), “The Cemetery at Petit Saconnex” (2011), and “Green Fruit” (2011).
Suheir Hammad is the main poet who connects Palestine with sexual violence—see “dead
woman” (1996), “tabla tears” (1996), “of woman torn” (2001), “Breaking poems” (2008), and
“letter to Anthony (critical resistance)” (2005). Nathalie Handal’s “The Warrior” (2005) also
206
BIBLIOGRAPHY
207
Abdelrazek, Amal Talaat. Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated
Identities and Border Crossings. New York: Cambria, 2008.
Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, editors. Arab & Arab American
Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2010.
Abouyoub, Younes. “Middle East” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, edited
by Peter N. Stearns. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
Abraham, Nabeel, et al. Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream. Detroit: Wayne State UP,
2000.
Abraham, Sameer and Nabeel Abraham. Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab-American
Communities. Detroit: Wayne State University, Center for Urban Studies, 1983.
---. Sea and Fog. Callicoon, New York: Nightboat Books, 2012.
---. There: In the Light of the Darkness of the Self and of the Other. Sausalito, CA: The Post-
Apollo Press, 1997.
Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text, vol. 22, no. 2, 2004, pp. 117-39.
Akash, Munir and Khaled Mattawa. Post-Gibran Anthology of New Arab-American Writing.
Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999.
Akasoy, Anna. “Exile and Alienation in the Poetry of the Early Southern Mahjar.”
ArabAmericas: Literary Entanglements of the American Hemisphere and the Arab World,
edited by Ottmar Ette and Friederike Pannewick, Vervuert Verlag, 2006.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 2010.
---. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP,
2000.
Albrecht, Charlotte Karem. “Narrating Arab American History: The Peddling Thesis.” Arab
Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1, 2015, pp. 100-17.
208
Alcoff, Linda Martín. Real Knowing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1996.
Al-Nakib, Mai. “Disjunctive Synthesis: Deleuze and Arab Feminism.” Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 2, 2013, pp. 459-82.
Alsultany, Evelyn. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11.
New York: NYU Press, 2012.
Alsultany, Evelyn and Ella Shohat, editors. Between the Middle East and the Americas: The
Cultural Politics of Diaspora. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan P, 2013.
Anderson, Kristin L. “Gender, Status, and Domestic Violence: An Integration of Feminist and
Family Violence Approaches.” Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 59, no. 3, 1997, pp.
655-69.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute
Books, 1987.
Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric, translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred. New York: Penguin,
1992.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.
Beal, Francis. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” The Black Woman, an anthology,
edited by Toni Cade Bambara. New York: New American Library, 1970.
Bennett, Jane. “Ontology, sensibility, and action.” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 14,
no. 1, 2015, pp. 82-7.
Benson, Kathleen and Philip M. Kayal. A Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in
New York City. New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2002.
209
Bergeron, Suzanne. “Political Economy Discourses of Globalization and Feminist Politics.”
Signs, vol. 26, no. 4, 2001, pp. 983-1006.
Berman, Jacob Rama. American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century
Imaginary. New York: NYU Press, 2012.
---. “In spite of the times: The postsecular turn in feminism.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol.
25, no. 6, 2008, pp. 1–24.
---. “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology.” Theory, Culture &
Society, vol. 23, no. 7-8, 2006.
Buitelaar, Marjo. “‘I Am the Ultimate Challenge’: Accounts of Intersectionality in the Life-
Story of a Well-Known Daughter of Moroccan Migrant Workers in the Netherlands.”
European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2006, pp. 259-76.
Bujupaj, Ismet. “Nature in Arab American Literature: Majaj, Nye, and Kahf.” European
Journal of American Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2015.
210
Burke, Kelsy C. “Women’s Agency in Gender-Traditional Religions: A Review of Four
Approaches.” Sociology Compass, vol. 6, no. 2, 2012, pp. 122-33.
Cainkar, Louise. Coping with Tradition, Change and Alienation: Palestinian Muslim Women
in the US. 1988. Northwestern U, PhD dissertation.
Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. “Toward a Field of
Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013: 785-
810.
Christman, John. “Relational Autonomy, Liberal Individualism, and the Social Constitution of
Selves.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic
Tradition, vol. 117, no. 1/2, 2004, pp. 143-64.
Code, Lorraine. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2006.
Combahee River Collective Statement, Combahee River Collective. Yale American Studies.
https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf,
Accessed 12 Dec. 2017.
Cooke, Miriam. Women and the War Story. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.
Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South. Oxford: Oxford, UP, 1988.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241-99.
Darraj, Susan Muaddi. Scheherazad’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing.
Westport: Praeger, 2004.
211
Davis, Angela. Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage, 1983.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
---. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, 1995,
pp. 9-63.
Detmer, David. Challenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth. Amherst
NY: Prometheus Books, 2003.
Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin, editors. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Duprez, Dominique. “Urban Rioting as an Indicator of Crisis in the Integration Model for
Ethnic Minority Youth in France.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 35, no. 5,
2009, pp. 753-70.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild, editors. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids,
and Sex Workers in the New Economy. London: Macmillan, 2004.
El Hajj, Hind and Sirène Harb. “Travel, Relationality and Privilege in Palestinian American
Poetry.” Mashriq and Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Studies, vol. 3, no.
2, 2016, pp. 62-87.
Elia, Nada. “Islamophobia and the ‘Privileging’ of Arab American Women.” NWSA Journal,
vol. 18, no. 3, 2006, pp. 155-61.
Eng, David. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.
Ette, Ottmar and Friederike Pannewick, editors. ArabAmericas. Literary Entanglements of the
American Hemisphere and the Arab World. Frankfurt: Vervuert Verlag, 2006.
212
---. “Weaving Poetic Autobiographies: Individual and Communal Identities in the Poetry of
Mohja Kahf and Suheir Hammad.” Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through
Writing, edited by Nawar Al-Hassan Golley. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2007.
Folbre, Nancy. For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States. New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 2012.
Forché, Carolyn. “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art.” Poetry
Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69680/reading-the-
living-archives-the-witness-of-literary-art, 2 May 2011. Accessed 12 Dec. 2017.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume I, The Will to Knowledge. New York:
Pantheon, 1978.
Frost, Samantha. “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology.”
Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, edited by H.E.
Grasswick. Springer, 2011.
Gatens, Moira and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present.
London: Routledge, 1999.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. “An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene.” Antipode, vol. 41, 2009,
pp. 320-46.
Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in
America. New York: Morrow, 1985
213
Golley, Nawar Al-Hassan, editor. Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through
Writing. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2007.
Gómez-Vega, Ibis. “An Essay Review: The Art of Telling Stories in the Poetry of Naomi
Shihab Nye.” MELUS, vol. 26, no. 2, 2001, pp. 245-52.
Gualtieri, Sarah M.A. Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian
American Diaspora. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009.
Haddad, Marian. Somewhere Between Mexico and a River Called Home. San Antonio, TX:
Pecan Grove Press, 2004.
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck and Michael J. Balz, “The October Riots in France: A Failed
Immigration Policy or the Empire Strikes Back?” International Migration, vol. 44, no. 2,
2006, pp. 23–34.
Haddad, Yvonne and Adair Lummis. Islamic Values in the United States: A Comparative
Study. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Halaby, Leila. My Name on His Tongue. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2012.
Hamilton, Ian and Jeremy Noel-Tod, editors. “Confessional Poetry.” The Oxford Companion
to Modern Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.
---. Born Palestinian, Born Black. New York: Harlem River Press, 1996.
---. “Our Roots in the Mezze: The Politics of Food and Arab-American Women Poets.”
ArabAmericas. Literary Entanglements of the American Hemisphere and the Arab World,
edited by Ottmar Ette and Friederike Pannewick. Frankfurt: Vervuert Verlag, 2006.
---. The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology. New York: Interlink, 2001
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-599.
Harding, Sandra, editor. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge,
2004.
214
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005
Hassan, Waïl. Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American
and Arab British Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.
Hawkesworth, Mary E. “Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth.”
Signs, vol. 14, no. 3, 1989, pp. 533-57.
Held, David. et al., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1999.
Hendrickson, Jocelyn. “Andalusia.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World. Oxford
UP, 2009.
Heyes, Cressida, “Identity Politics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2016
Edition, edited by Edward N. Zalta,
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/identity-politics. Accessed 1 Dec. 2017.
Hirsch, Marianne and Nancy K. Miller. Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of
Memory. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.
Hoogland, Eric. Crossing the Waters: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants to the United States
Before 1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1987.
hooks, bell. 2000. Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge, 2000.
---. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. All the Women are White, All the
Blacks are Men, but Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, NY:
Feminist Press, 1982.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
215
Ironmonger, D. “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs, and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross
Household Output.” Feminist Economics, vol. 2, no. 3, 1996, pp. 37-64.
Jacobs, Linda K. Strangers in the West: The Syrian Colony of New York City, 1880-1900.
New York: Kalimah Press, 2015.
---. “Playing East: Arabs Perform in Nineteenth Century America.” Mashriq and Mahjar:
Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2014, pp. 79-110.
Jaggar, Alison M. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” The Feminist
Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Jamal, Amaney and Nadine Naber, editors. Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11:
From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2008.
Jarmakani, Amira. Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems,
and Belly Dancers in the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Jimerson, Randall C. Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice. Chicago:
Society of American Archivists, 2009.
Joseph, Suad. “Thinking Intentionality: Arab Women’s Subjectivity and its Discontents.”
Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2012, pp. 1-25.
Kadi, Joanna, editor. Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings By Arab American and Arab
Canadian Feminists. Boston: South End Press, 1994.
Kayal, Phillip and Joseph Kayal. The Syrian-Lebanese in America: A Study in Religious
Assimilation. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1975.
Kayyali, Randa. The Arab Americans. Westport: CT, Greenwood Press, 2006.
Khater, Akram. Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon,
1870-1920. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.
216
Koff, Harlan. “Understanding ‘La Contagion’: Power, Exclusion and Urban Violence in
France and the United States.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 35, no. 5, 2009,
pp. 771-90.
Kotz, David M. The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
2015.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,2001.
Leghorn, Lisa and Katherine Parker. Woman’s Worth: Sexual Economics and the World of
Women. Boston: Routledge, 1981.
Leonard, Karen Isaken. Muslims in the United States: The State of Research. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation, 2003.
“Los musulmanes aumentan en España en 300.000 en cinco años.” El Pais. 10 April 2016,
https://politica.elpais.com/politica/2016/04/10/actualidad/1460313231_421587.html.
Accessed 25 Oct. 2017.
Luxner, Larry and Douglas Engle. “The Arabs of Brazil.” Saudi Aramco World.
September/October 2005,
http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/200505/the.arabs.of.brazil.htm. Accessed 31 Oct. 2016.
Luxton, M. “The UN, Women, and Household Labour: Measuring and Valuing Unpaid
Work.” Women’s Studies International Forum 20.3 (1997): 431-39.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2005.
Majaj, Lisa Suhair. Geographies of Light. Washington, DC: Web Del Sol, 2009.
---. “Arab-American Literature: Origins and Developments.” American Studies Journal, vol.
52, 2008. http://www.asjournal.org/52-2008/arab-american-literature-origins-and-
developments/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2016.
217
---. “Arab Americans and the Meanings of Race.” Postcolonial Theory and the United States:
Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, edited by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt. Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 2000.
---. “New Directions: Arab American Writing at Century's End.” Post-Gibran: Anthology of
New Arab American Writing, edited by Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash. New York:
Syracuse UP, 1999.
---. “Talking with Poet Naomi Shihab Nye.” Al Jadid Magazine, vol. 2, no. 13, 1996,
http://www.aljadid.com/content/talking-poet-naomi-shihab-nye. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.
Majaj, Lisa Suhair, Paula W. Sunderman, and Therese Saliba. Intersections: Gender, Nation,
and Community in Arab Women’s Novels. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2002.
Marshall, David Jones. “‘All the Beautiful Things’: Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of
Palestinian Childhood.” Space and Polity, vol. 17, no. 1, 2013, pp. 53-73.
May, Vivian. “‘Speaking into the Void’? Intersectionality Critiques and Epistemic Backlash.”
Hypatia, vol. 29, no.1, 2014, pp. 94-112.
McCall, Leslie. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs, vol. 30, no. 3, 2005, pp. 1771-
800.
Mehta, Brinda J. Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices Against Violence. New York:
Routledge, 2014.
Melhem, D.H. and Leila Diab, editors. A Different Path: An Anthology of the Radius of Arab
American Writers. Detroit: Ridgeway Press, 2000.
Mies. Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International
Division of Labour. London: Atlantic Highlands, 1986.
Moosnick, Nora Rose. Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and
Audacity. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 2012.
Mucchielli, Laurent. “Autumn 2005: A Review of the Most Important Riot in the History of
French Contemporary Society.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 35, no. 5, 2009,
pp. 731-51.
218
Naber, Nadine. Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics and Activism. New York: NYU
Press, 2012.
Naff, Alixa. Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1985.
Nash, Jennifer. “Re-thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review, vol. 89, 2008, pp. 1-15.
---. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East. New York: Greenwillow Books, 2002.
Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989.
Orfalea, Gregory. The Arab Americans: A History. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press,
2006.
Orfalea, Gregory and Sharif Elmusa, editors. Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American
Poetry. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988.
Oshana, Marina A. L. “Personal Autonomy and Society.” Journal of Social Philosophy, v. 29,
n. 1, 1998, pp. 81-102.
Ouyang, Wen-chin. “From Beirut to Beirut: Exile, Wandering and Homecoming in the
Narratives of Etel Adnan.” Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and
Artist, edited by Lisa Suhair Majaj and Amal Amireh. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland,
2002.
219
Oyama, Susan. Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide. Durham,
N.C.: Duke UP, 2000.
Papke, Renate. Poems at the Edge of Differences: Mothering in New English Poetry by
Women. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2008.
Papoulias, Constantina and Felicity Callad. “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect.”
Body & Society, vol. 16, no. 1, 2010, pp. 29-56.
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work.
Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001.
Pateman, Carole. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory.
Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1989.
Peters, John. “Neoliberal convergence in North America and Western Europe: Fiscal
austerity, privatization, and public sector reform.” Review of International Political Economy,
vol. 19, no. 2, 2012, pp. 208-35.
Pickens, Theri. New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary
United States. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Puar, Jasbir. “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and
Affective Politics.” Transversal, 2011, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811/puar/en. Accessed 14
Dec. 2017.
Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1800-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Read, Jen’nan Ghazal. Culture, Class, and Work Among Arab-American Women. New York:
LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004.
Rihani, Ameen. The Book of Khalid. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1911.
220
Rihbany, Abraham. A Far Journey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914.
Romero, Mary, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Vilma Oritz, editors. Challenging Fronteras:
Structuring Latina and Latino Lives in the U.S.: An Anthology of Readings. New York:
Routledge, 1997.
Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 2002.
Salaita, Steven. Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics. New York:
Palgrave, 2007.
Salleh, Ariel. Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology. London:
Pluto Press, 2009.
Samhan, Helen Hatab. “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab-American
Experience.” Arabs in America: Building New Future, edited by Michael Suleiman.
Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.
Samina, Najmi. “Naomi Shihab Nye's Aesthetic of Smallness and the Military Sublime.”
MELUS, vol. 35, no. 2, 2010, pp. 151-71.
Shaikh, Nermeen. The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power. New York:
Columbia UP, 2007.
Shakir, Evelyn. Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States. Westport,
CT, Praeger, 1997.
Shehabi, Deema. Thirteen Departures from the Moon. Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2011.
Shohat, Ella, editor. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. New
York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001.
221
Singh, Jakeet. “Religious Agency and the Limits of Intersectionality.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 4,
2015, pp. 657-74.
Spike Peterson, V. and Anne Sisson Runyan, editors. Global Gender Issues. Boulder:
Westview Press, 1991.
Sprague, Joey. Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences. Rowman &
Littlefield, 2005.
Staunaes, Dorthe. “Where have all the subjects gone? Bringing together the concepts of
intersectionality and subjectification.” NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender
Research, vol. 11, no. 2, 2003, pp. 101-10.
Stiglitz, Joseph. Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy. New York: W.W. Norton,
2016.
---. The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them. New York:
W.W. Norton, 2015.
---. Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social
Progress. New York: Columbia UP, 2014.
---. The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. New York:
W.W. Norton, 2012.
---. Freefall: America, Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy. New York: W.W.
Norton, 2010.
---. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.
Suleiman, Michael. Arabs in America: Building Toward a New Future. Philadelphia: Temple
UP, 1999.
222
Thorsen, Dag Einar and Amund Lie. “What is Neoliberalism?”
http://folk.uio.no/daget/What%20is%20Neo-Liberalism%2010-11-06.pdf. Accessed 9 Apr.
2016.
Washick, Bonnie and Elizabeth Wingrove. “Politics that Matter: Thinking about power and
justice with the new materialists.” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 14, no. 1, 2015, pp:
63-89.
Wing, A.K. “Brief reflections toward a multiplicative theory and praxis of being.” Berkeley
Women’s Law Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 1990, pp. 181-201.
Younis, Adele and Philip M. Kayal. The Coming of the Arabic-Speaking Peoples to the
United States. Staten Island, NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1995.
Zeinati, Rewa. Interview with Nathalie Handal. Sukoon Magazine, 13 August 2013,
http://www.sukoonmag.com/responsive/interview-with-nathalie-handal/. Accessed 6 Dec.
2016.
223