Between Land and Sea: Literatures in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula

Kareem, Mona; Kareem, Mona

The goal of this panel is to imagine a new map of Southwest Asian literatures and cultures across the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Literary studies of the Arabian Peninsula is a small yet growing field. As recently as 2010, the Saudi writer Abdu Khal could note that literature from the Gulf region has been “virtually ignored by the rest of the Arab world” and, as Gohar and Hambuch (2013) add, by the world in general. This oversight has to do with the multilingual and multiethnic forms of cultural production in a region shaped by both old and new trends of migration of bodies and commodities, hierarchical and exclusionary structures of citizenship, and rapid urbanization. “Between Land and Sea: Literatures in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula” moves away from the nation state as the basis for cultural analysis to examine concepts created through migratory and diasporic encounters and genres modified by the proliferation of new medias and capital flows .

The intermittent space between supposedly discrete languages is explored in Ibrahim Badshah’s study of translation of literatures created in the movement between India and the Arabian Peninsula. The paper focuses on Suhail Abdul Hakeem Al-Wafy’s Arabic translation of Aadujeevitham (Goat Days, 2008) by Malayali novelist Benyamin, demonstrating how the process of translation is complicated by the cultural contact between Kerala and the Arabian Peninsula. Thousands of years of trade relations, which took a new turn with the migration trend known as the “Gulf Boom” in the aftermath of the discovery of oil, shapes and challenges translation into Arabic. Badshah positions translation in the context of large-scale migrations, class struggles, censorship, and translation’s political-activist potential.

Continuing the exploration of genres and forms created in movement across routes of trade and labor, Mohamed Haseeb N examines the musical poetic genre of “Kattu pattu” or “Letter Songs” among the Mappilas, the Muslim community of the southwest coast of Kerala. The lyrics and melodies of Letter Songs embody the collective memory of sacrifices made by immigrants to the Gulf since the 1970s. This popular contemporary musical genre is associated with “Gulf wives,” women whose partners work in the Arabian peninsula. The paper positions the poems in the productive intersection of music, mobility, and gender within the Indian Ocean framework. Using music as a hermeneutics, it conceptualizes Letter Songs as the flip side of the “Kerala Model of Development,” and as a significant site of cultural production of transnational migration.

Anwar Alsaad’s paper also focuses on contemporary poetry production but it moves from the popular and intimate genre of “Letter Songs” to the celebrated site of televised poetry contests, (al-musābaqāt al-shiʻrīyah). The televised contest genre allows Alsaad to pursue a unique mode of inquiry into the making and marketing of of a form of poetry usually associated with premodern oral traditions, as she traces how poets make progressive changes to the structure, content, and performance of the poems in relation to cultural and political identity (tribal or national affiliation) and audience influence (through direct response, data gathered from social media, or the judging committee’s critique). Based on documentation, interviews, and social media, and drawing on reader response theory and speech act theory, this paper offers a novel lens to analyze the making of Arabic poetry in the digital age.

Finally, Hanan Al-Alawi introduces a sophisticated and necessary intervention on the critical concept of “al-aṣlaniyya” or indigeneity in a region long shaped by the dynamics of migration, multilingual encounter, and hierarchical structures of citizenship. In the context of the collapse of Ottoman rule, the 1920 British mandate and American imperial presence, and subsequent arrival of British and American missionaries in the Gulf region, Al-Alawi navigates iterations of indigeneity as a mode of embodied knowledge production beyond the nativist genealogical logic of blood and soil. Reading through Moniro Ravanipour’s novel Ahl-e Gharaq (The Drowned, 1989), she positions indigeneity as a self-reflexive construct which problematizes colonial racial discourse and global capitalism, but that also risks being weaponized as an essentialist orientalist tool that dichotomizes native and colonist, desert and sea, and history and myth.

This panel includes both graduate students and professors based in India, Kuwait, and the US, and working in a variety of fields including translation studies, ethnomusicology, and comparative literature. Each will present for 15 minutes, allowing for 15 minutes of conversation moderated by poet, scholar, and bidun activist Mona Kareem.

654 Between Land and Sea: Literatures in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula: Calls for Papers