Arab Mothers, American Sons: Women in Arab-American Autobiographies

Abstract

Strong and spirited mother figures (far removed from the stereotypical Arab woman) people the autobiographies of second-generation Arab-American men, just as they did the life stories of first generation writers like Salom Rizhk and Abraham Rihbany.1 In both early and late autobiographies, these female portraits serve as rhetorical vehicles for challenging Western assumptions about the Arab world while, at the same time, placing the author and his values. For the author to speak of his mother becomes an efficient way to define himself, its logic summed up in the traditional Arab belief that as a child nurses, it ingests its character from its mother. Furthermore, since each writer sees his mother (or grandmother) as the embodiment of his ethnic heritage, his read of her character is crucial as he sets about the archetypal American task of negotiating between the claims of two cultures, ethnic and mainstream. Both generations of writers must take on this difficult task. But the second-generation Arab-American writer finds himself in this situation through no act or decision of his own. He is not the one who embarked on an epic journey across the seas; he is not the heroic agent of change, merely its by-product. Born in America, the second-generation writer is born also to an ethnic tradition that he can respond to in several ways-he can deny it, he can resent it, or he can glory in it. Each of these responses is illustrated in the autobiographical writings of three Arab-American authors-Vance Bourjaily, William Peter Blatty,