The Arab American Novel

The work of a novelist often occurs years before a word is written. This work is hidden in the life-kiln itself--spiritually and emotionally heated, life-tossed. Though perhaps not as invisible as America's policy towards the Palestinians, my own life as a novelist has been somewhat ghostly. It is, if nothing else, life-tossed! If it is a given that novelists repeatedly try and fail before they crest the hill, my novel life lies at the very depth, if not trodden rut, of that path. Arab American writers are heir not only to Whitman and Eliot, but also to one of the world's richest poetic traditions. Poetry is the stuff of life in the Arab world; it is unfurled at dinner tables, and at nearly all public gatherings, from funerals, to political rallies, to baptisms. Poetry seems to vibrate in the desert air, a great collector of communal emotion, personal sorrow, and joy. It derives from holy texts (there are, for example, Canaanite authors of some of the Hebrew lyrics in the "Song of Songs," as well as the Psalms). The western novel, on the other hand, did not do well with a people of such spontaneous verbal imagination. The modern novel did not begin to penetrate Arab literary consciousnesses until midway through the twentieth century. There were a few exceptions, and they typically were written by early immigrants to American shores, such as Amin Rihani and Mikhail Naimy, who encountered Melville and Twain, but took little from them. The novel may have presented a daunting challenge to a poetic tradition and disposition which enshrined the image, the metaphor, the outpouring of complicated meter and song-like monorhyme. Yet there was story. An Arab American did not have to go too far for inspiration on that account. He only had to sit and listen to an uncle cough out how he had survived the starvation in Lebanon by hauling a chandelier over the snowy mountain; she only had to listen to her mother's long tale of woe at the hands of the Israeli or Iraqi or Libyan guard; they only needed to open their jug-like ears to a whole tradition of converting everyday life into verbal drama to know that story was very much a part of an Arab's way of finding and making meaning in the world. My own first piece of writing was not a poem or essay, but a story that I wrote at six. It was about the end of the world in which I was bobbing down a biblical flood with my dog Sandy, the both of us secure in a barrel, watching the destruction float by. The first book I ever wrote was not poetry or nonfiction, but a novel called The Seahorse. Perhaps the best thing about it was the title. The Seahorse was set in Alaska on the brink of the approval of the Alaska Pipeline; there is a legal abortion in the snow world on the heels of Roe v. Wade, perhaps the most consequential thing I can say for the book. Three novels followed: Mirage, an attempt to squeeze the entire Middle East conflict down to 1936 Haifa and the courtship and marriage of an Arab and a Jew; A Good Man in Gomorrah, about the life of a Washington bureaucrat in the city of cherry blossoms, long, dead corridors, and rubber gloves for the mail; and The Fiends, which portrays the coming of age of a young man in southern California in the sixties with a gang of outsiders. Strangely enough, it is my first novel with a protagonist who is fully Arab American, and it is also the first one in which I have confidence. I will turn now to those Arab American novelists who have gone beyond my own sordid record of basement manuscripts and have done so with achievement and art. Not satisfied with the traditional Arab butterfly of poetry, they have ridden the dray horse of fiction right into American literature. D. H. Lawrence said the novel is the great book of life, and it is true that life is not tidy and that tidy novels are lifeless. But a novel needs a center of gravity. It needs to cohere even as it leaps; it needs to present a world that is plausible, human, and striving for the light, however pulled to the darkness it may be. …