Intimate Dislocations: Mapping Transformations in Arabic Literary Texts
Panel 246, 2013 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, October 13 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
With practices of movement as varied as pilgrimage, immigration, exploration, and study abroad serving as significant motifs in the Arabic literary tradition, academic study has focused, and rightfully so, on travel narratives and literatures of exile and diaspora. In particular, the question of how it feels to find oneself in a new place or between spaces concerns thinkers as prominent as Edward Said, who titled his memoirs of a life in transit "Out of Place."
Given the critical conversation already surrounding practices of movement, location, and belonging, we propose in this panel to explore specifically the theme of dislocation in Arabic literature. Dislocation can be characterized by rupture and upheaval, but it can also encompass other processes that have a disorienting or displacing effect on text and language, as when different cultures, languages, or frames of reference come together through movement into novel (and often, productive) intimacies. The papers comprising this panel ask what new intimacies emerge when people, languages, and texts traverse linguistic, spatial, and temporal boundaries, or when the paradigms around which they were once oriented become themselves migratory in the face of social or structural upheaval. Drawing upon a range of Arabic literary texts from medieval times to the present, this panel will offer examples of the dislocations depicted in these texts--whether in the form of geographical upheaval, detachment from a particular hermeneutic mooring, or an act of translation--and seek to illuminate how such changes are manifested for the Arab narrator, the language(s) in which the texts are composed, and the reading communities that coalesce around particular modes of narration. Some questions that we will take up in the course of our examination include: How are communities, languages, and texts refigured through acts of travel, circulation, and contact across culturese How does mobility generate new intimacies and physical and structural changes in and among languages, people, and texts as they move, or as they realign themselves around ever-changing points of referencec How do these processes disturb or challenge existing borders, narratives, and identities, both inside and outside of the literary textx
By attending to these questions in a comparative framework and remaining alert to what literature can teach us about the changes and transformations that constantly remap the world we live in, we hope to point the way toward new readings of Arabic literature suitable for a vigorously global and increasingly interdisciplinary field of study.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Lital Levy
-- Chair
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Dr. Michal Raizen
-- Presenter
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Dr. Rachel Green
-- Presenter
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Dr. Anna Ziajka Stanton
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Katie Logan
-- Presenter
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Martino Lovato
-- Discussant
Presentations
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Dr. Rachel Green
The Islamiyyat genre of literature, a type of neo-romantic retelling the lives of the Rashidun caliphs, has typically been studied within the confines of Egypt of the 1930s, with scholarship on the topic investigating on which side of a supposed Islamic/Secular binary the genre belongs. However, by taking the budding Islamiyaat of 1930s Egypt as a starting point rather than a self-contained system, and by expanding its geographic and temporal frame of reference to include other authors and countries, such as Mahmud Mas’adi of Tunisia, an author twenty-two years Husayn’s junior, the Islamiyyat project is significantly broadened in its scope and its aims. Indeed, a closer, comparative reading of Mas’adi’s Haddatha Abu Hurayra, Qaal and Taha Husayn’s ‘Ala Hamish Al-Sira reveals Husayn’s project as a point of departure for a larger project of Turath whose goals Mas’adi sought to emulate and whose limits he strove to test. Interestingly, the two texts engage the spatial in notably divergent ways. While Husayn’s prose resinscribes spatial categories already present in the Muslim reader’s horizon of expectations, thus reaffirming the reader’s sense of belonging to a geographically well-defined, historical entity, Mas’adi, arguably in response to Husayn, seeks to create a space narrated by the gaze of the Islamic subject, yet simultaneously outside the space of Islamic cultural memory. Thus, a comparative reading of the two literary texts, as well as an examination of the correspondence between Mas’adi and Husayn, reveals the reconfiguration of the sacred geographies of early Islam as a key component of Mas’adi’s challenge to the Islamiyyat genre and of his critique of Husayn -- a critique left tactfully ambiguous until after Husayn’s passing forty years after ‘Ala Hamish Al-Sira was first published.
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Dr. Michal Raizen
In December of 1968, the Lebanese journal al-Tariq released a special issue dedicated to Arabic literature in Israel. Emile Habiby’s Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (The Sextet of the Six Days), a collection of six vignettes set in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, was featured in this issue and garnered significant critical attention throughout the Arab world. Originally published in al-Jadid, the cultural supplement of the Israeli Communist Party Arabic language newspaper, The Sextet went largely un-noticed by Arabic readers in Israel and Palestine until the text made its way back “home” as radio shorts broadcast via Cairo’s sawt al-‘arab. Habiby’s Sudasiyya broaches one of the most enduring and problematic facets of the discourse on Palestinian self-determination, that is, the fraught position of Palestinians citizens of Israel vis-à-vis the notion of a Palestinian state. With the geo-political upheavals of the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli Wars, Palestinian political consciousness became increasingly concentrated in the Diaspora with the activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the largely self-exiled cadre of Palestinian intellectuals. Palestinian citizens of Israel, meanwhile, became increasingly marginalized due to their status as a non-exiled group with cultural and linguistic ties to Israel. The journey of The Sextet across borders and through different mediums (serialized entries in literary journals, radio shorts, and printed editions) highlights the channels through which a text must travel in order to make itself audible within a given political framework. Can we approach The Sextet as a diasporic text? How do we account for the fact that Palestinian readers within Israel did not recognize their own narrative until it made its way back “home” through a cultural circuit characterized by both expressive opportunity and the legitimizing function of certain way stations? In tracing the journey of The Sextet, I will address the concept of a Pan-Levantine “acoustic politics”: the ideological and geo-political frames of reference that dictate which narratives are heard and in what form they must be articulated in order to be heard.
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Dr. Anna Ziajka Stanton
Gayatri Spivak calls translation “the most intimate act of reading,” one which compels the translator to “surrender” to the foreign text and open herself to its words, its silences, and its intricate play of rhetorical meanings. This paper proposes that a language, too, when confronted with other languages foreign to itself, may engage in acts of intimate translational surrender. Drawing upon close readings of two Egyptian novels, "‘Usfur min al-sharq" (1938) by Tawfiq al-Hakim and "Qindil umm hashim" (1944) by Yahya Haqqi, this paper suggests that Arabic fusha performs such an act vis à vis French and English in these texts by serving as the language of dialogue between the Egyptian male narrators and their European female lovers, in scenes that take place in Europe and where it can be assumed that the characters would, in reality, be speaking to each other not in Arabic, but in the European language of the country they are in. Although at moments like these French and English, their foreignness masked in the literary fusha familiar to Egyptian readers of the time, would seem to be surrendering to Arabic, this paper seeks to demonstrate -- through analysis of the grammatical and semantic features of the Arabic deployed in the novels -- that the influence of the European languages persists in destabilizing the language of the texts: in “translating” lines of dialogue from their (always already absent) original French and English versions, Arabic surrenders to, and becomes intimately marked by, these languages’ alien cadences.
From this starting point, other questions arise with fruitful implications for new ways of understanding the modes of Arabic–European cultural exchange at work during the colonial era. At a time in Egypt’s modern history when national identity and language were of paramount importance to intellectuals like al-Hakim and Haqqi, what possibilities for the Arabic language might they have seen in its intimate engagement with the language of the European “other,” and in the illusion of parity between languages that translation offers? Can we detect in the language of the two novels an anxiety that its intimacy with the language of the other may invite its own silencing? How can we move beyond the notion of literature as resistance toward a more nuanced view of how colonial Egyptian literature addressed itself to the colonizer, as Shaden Tageldin has urged we must?
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Katie Logan
In The Self-Made Map, Tom Conley argues that “The self makes itself or is made to look self-like when it appears to be a simultaneous cause and effect of a creation that is both total and local. . . The self becomes autonomous only when it is fixed to an illusion of a geographic truth (often of its own making).” The interdependence Conley highlights between selfhood and space lies at the heart of Miral al-Tahawi’s Brooklyn Heights. The 2010 novel details the immigration experiences of an Egyptian mother and her son in their New York City neighborhood. Al-Tahawi emphasizes the immigrant’s need to establish the kind of “geographic truth” Conley describes, even when this truth is constructed by the immigrant herself. As the protagonist, Hend, walks the streets of Brooklyn, she engages in processes of mapping that situate her among diverse communities. Despite Hend’s insistence upon memorizing and fixing her new place, however, the novel suggests that maps are not comforting, fixed entities. Instead, the cartography of Brooklyn Heights is undermined by the unreliability of its own tools—street signs, landmarks, and especially memory. At the heart of the novel lies an intense anxiety about forgetting that not even the most elaborate of maps can dispel. Dementia haunts the characters of the novel, threatening them with a clinical version of the malady they already suffer. If dementia is a predominant condition at a moment in time when, ironically, maps are so pervasive, our ability to claim that we are lost or on the right track, at home or in a strange place, ill or well becomes immensely complicated. By unsettling these dichotomies through the constant emphasis on forgetting, al-Tahawi explores a more fluid picture of the role of memory and individuals’ relationships to the past and present. The immigration narrative complicates these dichotomies still further; moving away from them helps al-Tahawi to suggest possible responses a new immigrant might have to her homes and communities. Using these texts, and making an argument for a critical discourse that thinks about memory and geography in tandem, my paper explores the potential for new modes of reading space and travel in contemporary Arabic literature.
