Edward Said's out of Place: Criticism, Polemic, and Arab American Identity

Aboul-Ela, Hosam, MELUS

A crucial issue in understanding Arab American identity is how it might be differentiated historically from other ethnic or "hyphenated" American identities as well as mainstream European American identities. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the invasion of Iraq, and the increased propensity by the United States government to link the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories with the "War on Terror," aspects of this issue have crystallized around questions of United States foreign policy. These recent developments have clarified what both my personal experience and my reading in Arab American culture have led me to believe for some time: that a dissident relationship to United States foreign policy in the Middle East is foundational to the experience of many Arab Americans and to a potential sense of Arab American community. Indeed, this dissent from American foreign policy has played the role for Arab Americans that a long history of concrete and codified legal discrimination has played for African Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and Native Americans. Unique histories created a sense of separateness that was an important foundation for a communal identity.

This article uses the work of Edward Said, both his critical writing and especially his memoir Out of Place, as the proving ground for its claim that a dissident relationship to United States foreign policy is a large component of Arab American identities. Out of Place is particularly emphasized because it is arguably Said's most writerly work. It is the most likely of his books to appear on a syllabus dealing with fictional representations of American immigrant experience. Yet it reflects certain unique characteristics of Arab American experience better than some of the more obvious candidates for inclusion on this hypothetical syllabus. Such a positioning of Said's work contrasts with an alternative view of Arab American culture that sees it as music, poetry, fiction, and

other fine writing infused with ethnic color, treating Arab American experience as a set of specific anthropological details related to cuisine, courtship, religion, language, and various social practices. This second, more widely held conception (which Edward Said's work fits into with difficulty, if at all) emphasizes a set of details that distinguish Arab American life from that of all other Americans. Yet, it also underscores a basic form or structure holding these details together that parallels all other ethnic American groups and places Arab Americans into a vague American melting pot.

The post-September 11 moment in Arab American history has seen an acceleration of interest in this second, more mainstream, "multicultural" idea of Arabs in the United States. In the past five years, Arab Americans have been included in the cast of Def Poetry Jam and featured at comedy clubs. Several anthologies of poems or stories and even a few novels have appeared by writers of Arab descent; while the vast majority of this work has held to a high artistic standard that suggests Arab American diversity, its packaging has usually been opportunistic and openly ethnic. (1) A good example of the recent discourse around Arab American arts is a series of articles that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. The first of the four articles, written by Jonathan Curiel and titled "The Voices of Arab Culture: Arts from Ancient, Diverse World Stir Interest in the West," includes the following passage:

      Arabs are united by an ancestral language (Arabic) and an
   ancestral homeland (the Arabian Peninsula) that gave birth to
   a Semitic people who've changed the course of human history.
   The footprints of those changes can be seen in Arabic culture.
   Even more than politics and military issues, culture is a gateway
   to understanding a world of distant capitals and disparate
   religions.

      Although Islam is one of several faiths that Arabs practice,
   many Arabs are secular, so it's not surprising that--citing the
   works of just one author--Naguib Mahfouz has populated his books
   with characters who are areligious [sic] or critical of religion.
   Egypt's greatest writer, Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature
   in 1988, saying when he won the award, "I am happy for myself and
   for Arab literature. I hope this is the first step for future
   generations." It was. Especially in the United States, a new wave
   of Arab writers has since established residence in publishing and
   academic circles.

This article leaps from Naguib Mahfouz to writers in America, casting aside effortlessly scores of poets, artists, novelists, and intellectuals living in the Middle East. It closes by quoting favorably a promotion for a concert: "There has never been a better time to be Arabic." The article ran on April 14, 2003, approximately two years after nearly 5000 Arabs and Muslims had been detained on suspicion of collusion with terrorism inside the United States, one year after the West Bank was re-occupied by the Israeli army, and only six days after the fall of Baghdad. Certainly, this could only have been the best time to be an Arab in a world radically cut off from a swirling set of political realities, a world in which the details of ethnic identity are sufficient to brush aside human suffering throughout the Middle East. In overlooking this rather blatant irony, the article leaves us with a categorization of Arab American culture that is severed from political realities, choosing to emphasize instead the ancient character of apolitical and "areligious" arts that prominently feature baklava, shish-kebab, and belly dancing, and that can take their unproblematic place within the tapestry of America's multiethnic scene.

It does make sense to separate Edward Said from this commonplace understanding of Arab American culture. Said first made a name for himself writing innovative but relatively specialized literary theory for largely academic audiences; later he achieved even wider renown as an outspoken and simultaneously polemical and cogent advocate for Palestinian rights. There was no one else to speak with such force about this cause in the United States when Said began writing and speaking about the Palestinian problem, and this work did not make him popular. So neither his literary theory nor his polemical writing made him very consumable, and since they both lacked Arab ethnic color, they must be distinguished from the vision of Arab American identity imagined by the San Francisco Chronicle (see Curiel).

Yet Said can be connected directly with foundational aspects of Arab American identity, once it is …

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Publication information: Article title: Edward Said's out of Place: Criticism, Polemic, and Arab American Identity. Contributors: Aboul-Ela, Hosam - Author. Journal title: MELUS. Volume: 31. Issue: 4 Publication date: Winter 2006. Page number: 15+. © 2007 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States. COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group.

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