In Shady Lewis’s novel, Ways of the Lord (2018), Sherif, a Coptic narrator, is a non-practicing Christian of the Orthodox faith, who finds himself forced to engage in weekly confessional visits with an Orthodox Coptic priest in order to prove that he has no restrictions that should prevent him from marrying his German girlfriend, Esther, in the Orthodox Church. The novel’s opening biblical quote, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge” (Jeremiah 31:29), reflects Sherif’s malaise and crisis of belonging, a result of multi-generational decisions in light of their interactions with and perceptions of the 19th and 20th centuries Western missionaries, the Jews of Egypt and their departure, post-independence secular pan-Arabism, wars with Israel, modernity, and the January of 2011 uprising in Egypt. In this paper, I study the narrator’s implicit criticism of church rituals, rules, and treatment of other Christian denominations, as well as his navigation of belonging and search of identity in a series of blames and justifications of his current relationship with the Coptic Orthodox church. Despite Sherif’s constant struggle during his confessional meetings, there is an “absence of victimhood,” a trait that Lewis admires in his favorite novelists. This absence aims to shed light on the effects of external factors - social history, historical events, and the church-state rapport - on modern Coptic identity and self-perception, as I shall demonstrate. In my analysis, I study Sherif’s struggle with the issues of trust, control, fear, coercion, fate, and repression, and the extent to which Sherif’s crisis echoes the author’s self-identification with Mary Youssef’s “new consciousness wave.” I shall argue that, while Christians are often studied as a persecuted minority in a majority Moslem country, Lewis draws on a more intricate situation where many Copts find themselves at the intersection of control by multi-dominants: the Orthodox church, the populace, the state, and his ancestors’ decisions. Fear of these dominants puts limitations on self-identification with and belonging to a particular group.

Representations of the violent forfeiture of heritage olive groves have become ubiquitous to the Palestinian literary landscape. But Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye is not only interested in the loss of cultivated gardens and agricultural plots; the notion of “wild” and the necessary disruption of cultivation is just as important to diasporic memory in her 2002 collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle. In the poem “They Dropped It,” children irreverently trod through a carefully landscaped zone “beyond the fence” of presumably their school. They carry untitled plants—“yellow bells in their hands” and one boy dragging a “purple vine”—as ritual accessories during their romp over the fence. The speaker relays “They wouldn’t be sorry / pockets reeking jasmine, mud staining shoes… / Who deserved flowers more? / Rich people who never came outside / or children stuck all day in school?”, and a hardworking gardener curses them, while “straightening branches”. An unnamed person picks up a pink blossom left over from their great escape, wraps it in paper and takes it “home across the sea.” The final couplet follows the flower’s remains: “The dried petals lay on a table for months / whispering, Where are we?”. The poem allies childhood with wildness in the familiar rhetorical convention, and yet is quirky in its irreverence toward gardening as landscaping. The exilic shift is also surprising. If these children are Palestinian, what does it mean for them to rupture a cultivated landscape outside the prison-like enclosure of their classroom, and cause the garden’s remains to be taken into exile across the sea? In this paper, I advance current attempts to merge ecocriticism and postcolonial studies by focusing on the ways in which Palestinian poetic ecologies engage cosmopolitanism, deterritoriality, and nonhuman agency through figurations of “wilderness”. More specifically, I show that for Anglophone Palestinian diaspora poets, the conditions of diasporic mobility and transnationalism are intertwined with the condition of ecological degradation because human exile is symbiotic with plant and animal exiles.

Firat Cewerî is a respected Kurdish novelist, short story writer, and a leading publisher, editor and innovator of contemporary Kurdish literature; nonetheless, his 2009 novel Ez ê Yekî Bikujim (Turkish: Birini Öldüreceğim) met with intense criticism, due to its “anti-heroic” portrayal of Diana, an inexperienced female PKK fighter who is captured, raped and forced into prostitution in Diyarbakir by members of the Gendarmerie Intelligence Organization. First on TRT 6, and then in numerous interviews to follow, Cewerî fiercely defended his short novel’s desperate characters, describing them as “the ones [in Turkish-Kurdish society] who have been marginalized and forgotten”. Accordingly, this paper seeks to closely examine the dynamics between the novel’s three protagonists – Diana; Temo, a disillusioned Kurd recently released from the Diyarbakır prison who suffers from headaches, memory loss and an overwhelming desire to kill; and the diaspora Writer, who is visiting the city for a short book tour – and their relationship to the unforgiving environment into which they are thrust. Both this novel and its 2011 sequel Lehî, complicate the role of the Writer who, like Cewerî, wishes to “save” his characters from “the dark prison in which they reside”, but whose action is thwarted by events beyond his control and, one could argue, his own personal flaws and political impotency. Additionally, this paper seeks to situate the two novels’ critique of collective systems of crime and punishment and their unsparing depiction of the very human experiences of disenfranchisement, guilt and despair that have ensued among Kurds in Southeast Turkey (and beyond) within the context of Firat Cewerî’s life work via multiple methodologies: close reading, qualitative analysis of reception discourse, and direct interviews with the author and Turkish translator. Notably, Cewerî’s work includes his translation of “The Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov, “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck – all “psychological thriller” works that highlight their protagonists’ feelings of loneliness and futility in the face of a changing society – into Kurmanji, a language marginalized since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and banned from the public sphere in Turkey for decades. Due to Firat Ceweri’s role as a mediator between languages and literary forms, I will argue that his novels Birini Öldüreceğim and Lehî, deserve translation into English (and many other languages) and inclusion in international discourse on contemporary world literature because they speak succinctly and effectively to the Kurdish condition of peripherality.

Arab American writing very frequently ironically focuses on itself—conspicuously so. Literary texts by Arab American authors—Susan Abulhawa, Randa Jarrar, Diana Abu-Jaber, Etaf Rum, Mohja Khaf, Laila Halaby, Hala Alyan, and others—characteristically represent writing, writers, and literature, often making explicit appeal to Arab and Arab American literary traditions. (Sometimes this is particularly, and comically, explicit, as when a character in Khaf’s novel comes across “The Collected Poems of Mohja Khaf Vol. 17.”) In this paper I argue that this self-referentiality shows how the dominance of an ethnic history paradigm in Arab American studies has restricted the disciplinary and methodological possibilities for Arab American literary study. As an identity term, “Arab American” is a catachresis (i.e., following Spivak), and its history warns against grounding Arab American studies in the inevitably naturalizing concept of ethnicity. “Arab American” often operates as a geographical metonym, referring to immigrants and their descendants from what we now call the “greater” Middle East (itself a relatively recent concept), but which in common usage includes plenty of non-Arab ethnic groups. This referential problem has roots in US immigration policy, which often grouped migrants from the Ottoman Empire together regardless of ethnicity, language, religion, or specific place of origin, and it is exacerbated by the neocolonial elision of Arab, Middle Easterner, and Muslim in an in/visible monolith often with little determinate content other than politically and racially reified anti-Americanism. But by the 1960s, catalyzed by the ethnic revival, incited by the occupation of Palestine, and galvanized by increasing US involvement in the Middle East and growing Arab and Muslim social marginalization at home, “Arab American” was developing into a strategy of pan-ethnic group self-consciousness. An Arab American literary study that imagines itself simply as the representational deputy of ethnic history will be unable to pursue a critical institutional analysis of this emergence. Rather than belonging primarily to the history of a [nationalized] ethnic subject—Arab immigration or Diaspora, for example—Arab American literature can be approached as a particular regime of writing that obeys its own logic and has its own history. While Arab American literary study certainly organizes its knowledge practices around an ethnically legible subject, it is less genetically dependent on its self-evidence than it offers ironic analytical perspective on that subject’s normalization. Arab American literature’s frequent self-referentiality offers literary studies a powerful criticism of the disciplinary powers of ethnic ideology.

On December 19, 1989, the state-owned, Amman-based daily Ad-Dustour printed three obituaries for Ghalib Halasa, a Jordan-born author and activist exiled in 1956, who had died in Damascus the previous day. The first, published by the Halasa tribe, expressed grief over the loss of their kin. The second commemorated Halasa as a Fatah member and an icon of leftist politics. The third and lengthiest notice invited the citizens of the nation to congregate at the Syrian border that day to welcome the body of Jordan’s “distinguished son.” In distinctive ways, each obituary hailed the body of Halasa, who was returning to Jordanian soil for the first time in over 30 years. This paper examines the discursive practices surrounding the exile, death, and repatriation of two Jordan-born authors—Ghalib Halasa (d. 1989) and Amjad Nasser (d. 2019)—to argue that “dead-body politics,” using Katherine Verdery’s phrase, relates not only to corporal remains but also the body of texts through which the meaning of a death is negotiated. It is through texts such as obituary notices, social media posts, journalistic articles, and literary retrospectives that multiple and often competing readings of an author’s life emerge, both at the moment of death and in perpetuity. The cases of Nasser and Halasa, whose literary remains are also open for interpretation, serve to highlight the textual, interpretive, and rhetorical practices through which actors—authors, intellectuals, government officials, and others—strive to harness the symbolic capital of a deceased cultural figure. Drawing on obituaries, journalistic articles, and social media posts, in addition to ethnographic interviews and observation at the Ceremony of Honor for Amjad Nasser in 2019, this paper proposes an analytic that foregrounds the interplay between the corporeality and textuality of the body to better understand the political stakes of repatriation, burial, and memorialization. Specifically, the analysis highlights how varied actors utilize metaphor, narratively construct space-time (i.e., chronotopes), and ascribe authorial intention to project political meanings onto the body. Like the material practices of transporting and burying, these rhetorical strategies capitalize upon the symbolic potential of the body to reconfigure understandings of space-time and reproduce boundaries of political communities. However, it is important to underscore that unlike transport and burial, which occur during discrete episodes of time, the discursive and textual negotiations over what a death means can extend into the future, well after the corporeal body is interred.

The dominant feminist scholarly lens disregards the link between dispossession, embodiment, and language in the literature of stateless women in the Arab Gulf. This paper problematizes the concept of national belonging by exploring the link between language and women’s dispossessed bodies. The Kuwaiti-born stateless writer and translator Mona Kareem approaches the condition of dispossession differently in her trilingual poetry collection Femme Ghosts (2019). She troubles the signification of dispossession by underscoring the relationship between body and language. While other stateless writers in Kuwait tend to focus on subjectivities that have been erased by nationalist discourse, Kareem demonstrates that the literal and figurative representations of dispossession can unwittingly consolidate the violent rhetoric of the nation-state. This paper examines the issue of linguistic belonging invented in national discourse. It argues that Kareem’s poetics and translation practices write women’s bodies into modes of existence beyond the parameters of nationalism. It thus confirms that the idea of a self-designated nation based on linguistic monolingualism is fictional. By employing feminist, postcolonial, and translation theory, this paper complicates the relationship between body and language in Kareem’s multilingual literature. It emphasizes the embodied knowledge stemming from dispossession by dismantling the binds of nationalist language. The paper thus traces a shift away from normative narratives of dispossession and belonging by engaging with the scholarship of Abdelfattah Kilito, Fatima Sadiqi, Sara Ahmed, and Édouard Glissant, among others.