Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities ...

Brah’s theorization of border and borderlands provides important insights, particularly in that she invokes the concept of border as metaphor for psychological, sexual, cultural, class, and racialized boundaries, all of which represent arbitrary constructions. Using Brah’s work on border theory (and others such as that of Gloria Anzaldua, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari), I address the issue of border crossing in various works by Arab American writers, calling attention to the geographical and/or psychic territories demarcated and focusing on the displacement and dislocation of identities. In particular, chapter 3 discusses Laila Halaby’s novel West of the Jordan, which focuses on the different experiences of displacement of four Arab and Arab American women. The chapter explores whether one can ever choose to become Arab or American if one has a hyphenated identity. It emphasizes how the novel’s Arab and Arab American women characters, whether living in Palestine or in America, assert that their individual identities are inconceivable outside their location and its gendered, cultural, racial, and political context.

The experience of exile, which almost all the works we look at here will touch upon, relates closely to these notions of border crossing and diaspora. Exile may be forced (being forced to leave one’s homeland due to colonization or fear of political persecution) as in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003); voluntary (willingly choosing to live a diasporic existence in search of literary, political or economic freedom, and prosperity) as in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage (1999) and Mohja Kahf’s E-mails from Scheherazad (2003); or both as in Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan (2001).