Borderland Arab-American Consciousness in Selected Works by Mohja Kahf and Laila Halaby

Abstract

The genre of Arab-American literature, especially novels, has experienced an authentic boom in the last decade, which opens up a wide field of questions concerning the aesthetics and politics of Arab-American literature in a post 9/11 U.S. context. That is why, Arab-American novelists tend to employ literary strategies to resist stereotypes and misconceptions about their Arab communities in American popular culture. Thus, this study examines the representation of diasporic identity and consciousness of Arab-American women living in the borderland, those who are torn in-between two identities. They are both inside and out, they dwell upon the hyphen that acts as a form of resistance to all the racism, discrimination, fragmentation and negative stereotyping before and after the terrorist events of 9/11. Additionally, they face various forms of displacement on notions of identity, consciousness, home, and belonging. The study argues that the events of 9/11 constitute the heterogeneity, difference, and plurality of Arab-American experience and identity. Undoubtedly, Arab racialization prior to and after 9/11 has come to permeate Arab-American consciousness, as a unique condition of psychic fragmentation. Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in The Tangerine Scarf (2006) and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) highlight the ways in which Arab diasporic subjects counter the sense of ‘Otherness’ and multiple forms of exclusion that grounds their estrangement in the diaspora. These works illustrate that Arab diasporic individuals and communities reconstitute themselves as the in-between/third space subjects, who maintain multiple attachments that bind their Arab homeland to new places of settlement, and in doing so, create new forms of homeland. Further, Mohja Kahf and Laila Halaby examine Arab-American women protagonists’ struggle to find a space for themselves within their families and their communities in order to