This paper concerns the Lebanese emigre poet, Wadi` Sa`adeh, whose poetic writings in exile have been a major contribution to the contemporary Arabic Poetry and to the literature of the new Arab Diaspora. This project builds on two previously published articles concerning Wadi` Sa`adeh's poetic output since his immigration to Australia in the late 1980's, concerning four of his earlier collections of poetry. This new work to be presented at MESA will concern his two most recent poetry collections, Ratq al-Hawaa' "Darning the Air," and Tarkiib Aakhar li-hayaat Wadii` Sa`aadah "Another Set up for Wadi` Sa`adeh's Life," in which he writes out whatever recovery he has enjoyed from the literary suicide attempt of the earlier works. The remarkable prose poetry of Wadr' Sa'odah (b. 1948), emanating from the horrors of civil war in Beirut and the experience of emigration, has been first and foremost elegiac, articulating an attempted (but impossible) reconstruction of what has been lost. He constructed the internal geography of alienation and loss arising from exilic remoteness in spacetime and the inescapable emotional burden of memory. Sa'adah's work is both important in its own right, and also as an example of the new Mahjar/Emigration poetry in Arabic. For just as Gibran's emigre. literature had profound influence on contemporary Arabic Literature as a whole, and also spoke to the world at large, so the literature of the current Mahjar/Arabic Diaspora breaks open Arabic literary discourse to new voices of dissent, conscience, and awareness of the depths of human experience, whose audience includes and exceeds the Arab world. The work of this emigre Lebanese poet bespeaks the universality of exile, emerging from an Arab experience, but reaching to the heart of the human condition. This paper will evaluate, and analyze his two most recent collections of poetry, which continue and contrast with the earlier writing. In the paper I will provide a close reading of these two volumes of poetry in the context of Wadi` Sa`adeh's full corpus to date, and in the context of contemporary Arabic Poetry, Arabic Literature related to the Beirut Civil war, and the literature of the recent Arab Diaspora. I will translate sections of the poetry or specific poems, for use in building my argument concerning the trajectory and primary message of the new works in contrast to the sweep toward literary suicide which characterized Sa`adeh's work in exile up to 2006.

A Feminine Nationalist Narrative: Zeina Ghandour's The Honey Zeina Ghandour's The Honey investigates the potential of a Palestinian feminine discourse of national liberation through a strategic reversal of gender roles and a redefinition of family ties and emotions in the context of the dominant Islamist and Nationalist discourses. In this novella that uses the fantasy genre, the protagonist, Ruhiya, plays a masculine role prohibited for Muslim women, as she performs the call to the morning prayer on behalf of her bedridden father, breaching thus an Islamic taboo that considers a woman's voice as 'awra or private. The protagonist's act, however, proves to be agential in reconfiguring Palestinian history, as it dictates a different outcome for her childhood love's mission to blow himself up, who upon hearing her voice retreats from his mission without detonating the explosives. The protagonist, thus, uses her voice and love as means to divert her beloved from carrying out his deadly operation. Traditionally, maternal and family ties have been used to limit women's agency to traditional gender roles and to hinder their movement and travel while allowing men the freedom to venture into the public space including the battlefield. In The Honey, however, it is the male protagonist who is prevented from departing/dying using a feminine sense of communal and national responsibility that materializes only by transcending gender roles. The novel thus reverses patriarchal gender roles and nationalist appropriation of emotions and familial ties in order to configure a feminine alternative to the Palestinian history of oppression, loss, and martyrdom exacerbated by masculine discourses of national resistance that recognize women only as symbols rather than as active agents. In light of the Palestinian traditional leadership's recurrent failure to achieve dignity and freedom to the Palestinian people The Honey's call for more egalitarian roles for both Palestinian men and women becomes indispensable. Moreover, this feminization of the liberation discourse can also be interpreted as an attempt to ward off the possible erasure of women's contribution to national liberation. Ghandour's novella is a poetic exploration of the potential of a more democratic nationalist narrative that includes all Palestinians, men, women and even children as responsible compatriots not restricted by crippling gender roles and patriarchal hold on traditional family ties. In order to examine The Honey's gender and political implications I will use literature on Palestinian women's nationalist participation in occupied Palestine as well as postcolonial theory.

This paper will address the marginal geographic and narrative spaces inhabited by the central characters of Zafzaf's first two novels, "The Woman and the Rose," (1972) and "Sidewalks and Walls" (1974). Both novels present the plight of the intellectual in the postcolonial Moroccan state by depicting the narrator as stuck in liminal zones from which there is no significant contact with the mainstream world. The first novel does this more literally by having the narrator drifting through the Spanish beach resort town of Torremolinos, while the second novel's depiction is figurative: it transforms the coffeehouses and apartments of Moroccan cities into a wasteland of exiles. "The Woman and the Rose" treats the plight of the intellectual as essentially structural: there simply is no meaningful way for the intellectual to engage with the modern state. In "Sidewalks and Walls," this situation is somewhat more tragic, as the narrator is unable, or refuses, to see the opportunities in front of him. The paper will situate Zafzaf's work in the context of postcolonial Arabic-language Moroccan fiction before moving on to close readings of each work. These close readings will be used to derive the thematic concerns of each novel and to demonstrate how each work uses its narrator's blind spot to depict the plight of the intellectual in early 1970s Morocco.

Driving "Back Home" in Response to the Illness of Immigration in IsmaIl Ferroukhi's Le Grand Voyage (2004) In 2004, Moroccan Ismaal Ferroukhi releases Le Grand Voyage, identified by critics as a "road-movie," in which a father decides to fulfill his religious obligation of the hajj. The old man chooses to go to Mecca by car and requests that his son Rada drive him to the Holy Land. During this long trip, which takes the two protagonists across several countries in Europe and the Middle East, the two men confront their various generational, cultural, linguistic and spiritual differences. Using a Derridean approach and French historian Benjamin Stora's work on immigration, I will strive to offer an original reading of the film Le Grand Voyage. I will try to show that the father deconstructs his son's western modes of thinking and French way of life, as well as unties him from his stereotypes, and conscious and unconscious resistance to the Muslim part of his hybrid identity. I claim that the journey is a pretext for the father to "de-Frenchisize" his son Rnda in order to bring him closer to his lost Arab identity. Various scenes in the film show the father molding his son by way of examples and parables. A major scene, which constitutes the focus of my talk, shows the two men bundled up in woolen blankets. I claim that this imagery presents the father and son as Sufi master and disciple. I therefore argue that this film uses a mystical mode of teaching to tackle modern preoccupations of Maghrebi immigrants and their sons, and most importantly the future of their community in France--a country deeply attached to its secularism and republican values, leaving minimal space to religious freedom, linguistic diversity and cultural singularity. Ruda is portrayed as dismissive of the Arabic language, and ignorant of Islamic principles. I argue that this trip is a pedagogical "return home," that of origins. These origins both linguistic and spiritual are explained again to Ruda, a learner on the path to highly symbolic Mecca. Among the several readings one might do of Le Grand Voyage, the film subtly proposes the imparting of a knowledge that the father feels compelled to transmit before his death, which symbolizes the dying generation of migrants in France, who are entrusting their children with the last bits of their identitarian heritage.