Abstract
The aesthetics of poetry offer a critical means of identifying and tracing circuits of exchange and influence that traverse spatial and ideological boundaries. In particular, Muslim American poetry as it has evolved functions in ways that enhance the transnational experience and, as I demonstrate in this essay, reflects a critical negotiation and bridging of geographical, national, historical and cultural divides. A better understanding of the transnational poetics of Muslim American poetry, using the framework offered by Jahan Ramazani in A Transnational Poetics, serves to broaden the scope and significance of Muslim American literature as a subgenre. After addressing the need to study Muslim American literature, this essay highlights how Muslim American poets specifically function as passeurs between cultures and histories, across spatial and temporal divides. Sanjay Subrahmanyam illustrates the role of stranger and alien, go-between or passeur in Three Ways to Be Alien; while his work focuses on the form of narrative, his theoretical conception of historical agency is nonetheless applicable to the poetic form. I will be applying Subrahmanyam’s examination of the tensions between history (macro) and biography (micro) as well as the function of transcultural go-betweens alongside Ramazani’s transnational poetics to my analysis of Muslim American poetry. Further, I explore how this poetry functions as a bridge – between the lyric self or subject and various social and political cultural formations – operating within a framework of micro- and macro-histories.
I specifically explore these transnational and transcultural mediations within the poetry of two Muslim American poets, Kashmiri American Agha Shahid Ali and Syrian American Mohja Kahf, paying some attention to the interplay of echoes and differences in the works of the two poets as they engage with Muslim cultures, histories and societies. By bringing together Kahf and Ali in this discussion, I also hope to illustrate via scholarship the necessary border crossings and inherent transnationalism that are characteristic of Muslim American poetry. As I examine the collective selfhood that is narrated by Kahf and Ali, I delve deeper into the broader influence of Muslim civilization and culture that we find in these works. Beyond their ability to draw on relevant themes of exile and alienation, Kahf and Ali’s poetic personae ultimately serve as recorders of the transnational circuits that color and define their cultural memories and affective histories.
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