Arab-American Poetry as Minor Fady Joudah (bio) To say "Arab-American poetry," to enter representation and nomenclature, is to risk, in the process of affirmation, narrowness and exclusion. Categorization as a form of recognition aids further marginalization and also invites conformity from within that marginalization as it seeks to shed the periphery off. This paradox of subjugation and generosity is a dialectic of power. The institution of poetry is democratically inclusive of the newcomer who is not really new, but by necessity of admission and admittance as such, is deemed nascent. Of course, this isn't unique to Arab-American poetry. Historical precedents, remote and recent, abound. The conflict of interest that faces the poetry establishment when confronting or "evaluating" Arab-American poetry is not dissimilar to the travails that poetries of women and blacks underwent and, to a lesser extent today, still undergo ("to a lesser extent" because a process of appropriation and repossession, while not complete, has become quite advanced; a reterritorialization against which any marginalized poetry must struggle). Typically, then, Arab-American poetry is currently assigned the role and voice that most nascent minority poetries are assigned: the political, the dissident who's also witness to tragedy; a tragedy, paradoxically, not unlinked to imperial American hegemony, in this particular case. From this conflict of interest, then, both on the part of the poet and the evaluator of that poetry, follows the designation of victim. How and what kinds of poetry do victims write, and to what degree is the victim self-made and American made? While not total, the larger American cultural and political trickle-down effect into the world of poetry is neither miniscule nor imaginary. Other relics in the mind concerning the newcomer are also added to the mix: notions of exoticism and mysticism, for example. Details may vary from one parvenue to another, but each is perceived to possess her own Dionysian or Zarathustrian brand that she is expected to fulfill or deliver. The point of reference of that delivery remains American or Eurocentric: the exotic or mystic in Arab-American poetry is set against the backdrop of surrealism or symbolism, things "tried and true" within Western aesthetics, if not outdated; or a Gibran, a Rumi, and FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859-1889), etc. as they relate to Orientalist notions of the Arab and Arab American (and Muslim).The contemporary Arab American is, reductively, a dichotomy: sagacious, gracious victim of empire and other petty tyrannies, or refusenik and conscientious objector: subject and spirit. As it relates to the poet, the Arab American is antagonistic when his or her poetics disturb the miasmatic boundaries of what is accepted as political (and spiritual) discourse in American poetry's sense of self and other, according to a center of power whose boundaries are predictably vague and whose inflexibility is most palpable and visible when encountering its own sense of "tradition" vis-à-vis the other. This vagueness is both alibi and pretext to celebrate the human agency as well as its control. The complex history of European decadence and world wars, to which American culture sees itself as distant cousin, a non-heir, contrary to reality, is a big factor. The political and spiritual in Arab-American poetry are seen from the self-referential (mythic and national) scope of American history that is a remnant or a metamorphosis of European empire. The details of current American cultural hegemony differ, but (or because) the devil is in the details. A "new" poetry within an established "greater" poetry draws out the sap of tradition and authenticity, the two-in-one [End Page 10] catalysts that often hinder a culture's capacity to truly other itself. The Arab-American poet exists (or is placed) on a spectral chart whose opposite terminal ends are hard politics and soft spirituality (and the case is no different for Arab poets in translation). The middle class of this entrapment are the poets of witness and of imitative representative identity politics, of re-Oedipalization. Intimate embrace of these poets by the reterritorializing center depends on how much wisdom and grace they inject into their poetry, how much simultaneous recognition...
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May 1, 2020
Jean Lemay + 2
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