The Not-So-Quiet Arab Americans
Hayan Charara has done a great service by assembling this anthology, which features Arab American poets of widely divergent backgrounds. This ensures a rich and complex collection that seems to justifiably revel in its diversity and the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of voices, memories, images, emotions and ideas to which it gives voice.
Charara’s opening essay offers a rigorously analytical explanation of the motivation for the anthology and how it has been assembled by the editor. He is concerned not with trying to reduce the Arab American experience to a particular unity and common form, but instead to explore all that is intimate and personal within it—as well as including and acknowledging when the personal and the collective meet, interact, unify, or collide confrontationally.
Many of the poets have only one parent with an Arab background; some have families who have lived in the United States for generations. Hybridity, movement, and a multiplicity of identities are common to many of the authors included in this anthology.
Khalled Mattawa, who was born in Libya, writes playfully and sensually of his first fantasies of American life, and how these were inspired by the models, scooters, tents, televisions, and mattresses of a Sears Catalog he somehow acquired in Benghazi. David Williams, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, offers a meticulously sensitive account of interaction, misunderstanding, communication, miscommunication, disorientation, and acceptance in his prose poem ‘Almost One’, about being Arab at airport security.
Charara brings a refreshing openness to the task of assembling an anthology. For example, he has included the voice of a Jewish American poet, Jack Marshall, whose background as a Syrian-Iraqi Jew adds a distinctive minority voice to the anthology.
The styles of the poets are varied as is their topics. Some seem anchored principally in contemporary American landscapes and experiences, others have their poetry and their emotions anchored in distant Middle Eastern lands. Some poems are poems of memory and longing, where cities like Damascus and Beirut evoke childhood scenes and pasts. This is made ever more palpable as a result of their physical, chronological and cultural distance, when contemplated from an American city like Detroit—a city at once far from the Arab world but central to the Arab American experience.
Some authors are recalling—and sometimes still living—the trauma of war and displacement, refugee life; lives torn asunder, lives renewed. In his poem, ‘Beirut Survivors Anonymous’, Hans H. Mroue gives a particularly eloquent expression to these experiences.
Many of the poems are not necessarily directly related to being Arab American, they are simply universal reflections on the human experience, irreducible to and transcendent of ethnicity and language, birthplace, nation, and culture. One in particular is that of the Palestinian American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, entitled ‘Famous’.
The quality of the poems in the anthology varies. There are a few extraordinary ones and many finely wrought ones. There are also many poems that are more prosaic and less immediately compelling. It seems as though the latter were included in this anthology not necessarily because the poems are particularly revealing or accomplished, but because they represent the work of an emerging Arab American poet, or simply contribute to the compilation as a whole because they offer a unique voice and perspective.
Hedy Habra, a poet of Lebanese descent who was born in Egypt has a particularly powerful poem entitled ‘Even the Sun Has its Dark Side’, in which an adult explores her childhood memories—thinking about her mother and recollecting a past of move from the Arab world to the United States and the emotional displacement that results. Another of her poems, ‘Milkweed’, is beautiful in its imagery. Habra, who now lives in Michigan, imagines the landscape before it was known as Michigan and then remembers Lebanon: “. . . the green figs/we grew in the mountains/of Baabdat/figs picked, children climbing forbidden/fences.”
In ‘Dying with the Wrong Name’, Sam Hamod writes evocatively and poignantly about the loss of Arab identity through the process of immigration to the United States and the way in which his poem seeks to reclaim some of the identity that was lost when his father’s name (and that of other family members) was ‘Americanized.’ It is at once a poem particular to the Arab American experience and entirely universal—Americans of many ethnic backgrounds went through (and still go through) this process. But it is also a poem about transmitting Arab identity, about the next generation reclaiming Arabic and reconnecting with their Arab heritage, a poem of celebration as much as one reflecting on seasons of change and the losses that form part of that change even as they yield to new growth and preservation.
Noam Schimmel
The Majalla