Blurring Images: Articulations of Arab–American Crossovers

Abstract

We'll speak their language without either sense of guilt or sense of gratitude. [...] And if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making.1FIRST PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION in 19 6 9, Tay eb Salih' s novel Season of Migration to the North has long been incorporated into the canon of postcolonial literature. Since Edward W. Said's contrapuntal interpretation of this prose narrative as resistant mimetic reciprocation of Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness2 (1899/1902), it has become paradigmatic example of what has been variously termed 'writing back'3 or 'voyage in'.4 Although originally composed in Arabic, the wellknown piece of postcolonial fiction in translation can be interpreted as important intertext for our reading of later Anglophone writing by Arabs.5 However, the contours of the complex discursive sphere were sketched out long before Salih sent Sudanese hero Mustapha Said to London into deadly love-hate relationship of mutual exoticist desire and desperate revenge. What has been regularly overlooked in the recent controversy about the future presence of Muslims in Lower Manhattan is that, already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the area near the World Trade Center Site had become the cultural centre of Arab immigration to the US A.6The year 2011 brought the centennial anniversary of the first publication of very early anglophone novel by native Arabic speaker which allows us to revisit precisely this forgotten immigrant neighbourhood once known as 'Little Syria'. Ameen Fares Rihani's Book ofKhalid is the first anglophone Arab novel ever.7 novel is much more than an auto-fictional piece of Arabic immigrant literature. Presenting itself to the reader as an edited composition of dubious Arabic and French sources in translation, it is about two young Arab men, Khalid and friend Shakib, who immigrate to New York City at the turn of the century. story both ambitiously and ironically confronts issues that still confound the complex relations between Americans and Arabs. When Khalid first enters into liaison with white American bohemian woman, she is drawn to exotic background, and soon his dark eyes and her eyes of blue seem to flow and fuse (49). In the course of an extended tete-a-tete [. . . ] the stranger is made member of the Spiritual Household (49) and she, in an effort to seem Oriental, calls the Dervish, 'My Syrian Rose,' 'My Desert Flower,' 'My Beduin Boy' [...] always closing her message with either strip of Syrian sky or camel load of the narcissus (51). anonymous editor-narrator, however, warns: Ah, but not thus, will the play close (51). Arab-American anti-hero gets into another erotic relationship with female writer, a huntress of male curiosities, orginales (50) who only skims the surface of things (50). After a hectic uprush about pearly breasts, and honey-sources, and musk-scented arbours (52), she withdraws from the foreigner her favour (52), then narratively exhibiting him in the magazine supplement of one of the Sunday newspapers (52). There, the immigrant Khalid is made into stereotypical Orientalist copy, thrown into the cauldron along with the magic herbs. Bubble-bubble (52). following question posed by the narrator anticipates, in many ways, the ambivalence of strategic self-orientalization and omnipotently resistive Occidentalism that is narrativized so powerfully in Tayeb Saleh's literary voyage in: The fire-eating Dervish, how can he now swallow this double-tongued flame of hate and love? (52).Rihani (1876-1940), late-nineteenth-century Lebanese-Maronite immigrant to the US A, was one of the leading anglophone Arab writers of time and founding member of Al-Rabita al-Qalamiya [The Pen League], diasporic literary organization established in 1920 in New York City by the poet and painter Gibran Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) with other writers of Arab descent. …