Khalil:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a watershed demanding we rethink ideas of home, belonging, and exile in Arab/Arab American writing. Writers from the Arab world and diaspora confront these difficult topics and reflect on what it means to be an Arab/Arab American writer, to speak from an oppositional space, and to interrogate the ways that affect their “formal” and stylistic choices. Following in the wake of what Olivia Harrison calls a “discourse of fraternity” that unifies Arabs and Muslims through the use of the figure of Palestine and reconfiguring contemporary Palestinian American women’s writing as locations of creative and political expression, I examine Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home(2008), select stories from Jarrar’s Him Me Muhammad Ali (2016), and Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World (2019). Writing from the United States, these writers emphasize “solidarity” with the Arab world as part of retelling the often neglected narratives of the Palestinian subject. My paper interrogates the myriad ways these works often romanticize the figure of Palestine by engaging in mythmaking and how that affects the positionality of the Palestinian American writer in the North Atlantic. I emphasize the importance of intertextuality in Palestinian American literature and calls for collaborative work between Palestinian American writers and Palestinian writers writing from the Arab world in order to lessen the gap, acknowledge the overlaps, and establish a field of Palestinian American literature that relies on active engagement with the lived Palestinian experience.
Schreier:
In 1986, Anton Shammas published his acclaimed (and only) novel, Arabesques. Writing it in Hebrew allowed Shammas a means of “restorying” Palestinian selfhood, weaving it back into a linguistic landscape that had denied Shammas a voice and a history. A year later, however, Shammas moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he has been living and working ever since. His immigration marked not only the end of his prose writing in Hebrew but also a broader literary silence, as Shammas ceased writing literature altogether (with the exception of two Arabic plays published in 1989 and 1997). Instead, he established himself as a translator and a theorist of translation, by publishing essays on the challenges of translation, bilingualism and untranslatability. Rather than framing Shammas’s late writing as a transition from novelist to theorist/persona, this paper considers how Shammas mobilizes storytelling techniques into his academic writing and public essays. Building on Edward Said’s concept of “late style,” I argue that Shammas’s U.S. essayistic writing possesses a distinctive poetic style, embodying “an increased sense of apartness and exile and anachronism.” Through the triangulation of English-Arabic-Hebrew, and by staging encounters between metafiction, translation, and storytelling, Shammas further develops his earlier efforts at “restorying,” giving stylistic expression to a manifold enmeshment of linguistic, territorial, and temporal exiles.