Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities ...

Arabs are people coming from countries that speak the Arabic language and countries whose population practices Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, although Islam remains the dominant religion in most of the Arab countries. Uniquely, Arab Americans, of all the immigrant groups in America, do not all come from one country, nor do they all practice one religion. While Italian Americans trace their roots to Italy, for example, Arab Americans come to America from a wide array of countries. Arab Americans trace their ancestry to the Arab world that extends from the Persian Gulf, west across northern Africa, to the Atlantic Ocean. The Arab world includes some but not all of the countries called the Middle East, which encompasses countries like Iran, Israel, and Turkey, which are not part of the Arab world.

Exile and Border Crossings

The Arab American women writers presented in this book, whether first-, second-, or third-generation immigrants, represent a relatively small minority in the United States, but they all live and write about different diasporic experiences in the U.S. Hence, it becomes necessary to discuss the meaning/s of the term “diaspora” as a theoretical concept, arguing that it offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins. As Avitar Brah notes, diaspora derives from the Greek—dia (through) and speirein (to scatter). Therefore, the word embodies a notion of a center, a locus, and a home from which dispersion occurs. I use a concept of diaspora here that implies an embeddedness in a relational way of positioning one group against another—a notion that problematizes the dichotomy of self/other or minority/majority. Brah calls this theory of diaspora a “mutli-axial understanding of power” (622), a view that highlights the ways in which a group constituted as a minority by one definition may be construed as a majority by another. In other words, we see minorities not only in relation to the majority but also in relation to one another, and vice versa. Hence, any fixing of a group at a point along a singular axis becomes questionable. Inscribed within this idea of diaspora, the notion of border, as I address it, becomes a political construct. Of utmost significance to this study of the different works by Arab and Arab American writers and artists, Brah’s definition defines borders as