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50books_pocHi! This is my first post; my goal for my reading is *not* to make all of the books I read by people of color this year by/about Arab-Americans. It would be an easy out, since I'm writing my dissertation about the Arab community in New York, so I'm going to try my best to make it more diverse than that.
1. The Hakawati - Rabih Alameddine
One of the blurbs on the back cover of this book is by Amy Tan; she praises Alameddine and says, "One day soon everyone will be able to pronounce his name." That's the sense of humor of the whole work--that there are deeply, deeply funny things in the most sensitive and beautiful moments. This is a book where you realize, seven hundred pages in, that the major features of one of its central plot lines has been used to set up, of all things, a Heather Has Two Mommies joke, set in medieval Baghdad. It's a book where there are rainbow colored imps named after the major prophets of the Bible, who turn into extremely gay parrots and bother the royal classes in the interest of demonry everywhere. It's a book of prostitutes who find their husbands at shrines and then go on to conquer cities, basically for fun. And it's a book about Osama al-Kharrat, successful architecht, flying back to Beirut from his home in Los Angeles to visit his father as he is dying, the story of his grandfather, a hakawati (storyteller), and of his childhood. It is all of these things, and I cannot tell you which one of these is most important, because it is sometimes all of them on a single page.
Alameddine is one of my favorite novelists because he pulls off tremendous technical feats in his writing. I the Divine, for instance, is a novel told entirely in first chapters, as the character attempts to figure out how to tell the story of her life. The Hakawati is very long, and tells...I think seven or eight nested stories, some of them "true" (the story of the narrator and his family), some of them "mythical," but each of them speaking to each other. Each story is told in one to three page increments, and intermixed. It's a beautifully written novel; his language is poetic and gorgeous, he captures moments of emotional extremity perfectly. He is also hilarious, repeatedly, and the book is full of dirty jokes and subtle puns. It's also full of unrepentantly gay characters (mostly men), who are not reviled and rejected, but incorporated into their societies. Why, openly gay characters in a mythic novel set in the Middle East in the Middle Ages? Say it ain't so!
The downside to reading it is that it is, I am not kidding, a million bajillion pages long. I got it from the library in November, and I finished it in March. Granted, I've got a baby and a dissertation, so I'm not the fastest reader in the world at the moment, but it's a bear to get through. If you want a faster read, get I the Divine, or even Kool-Aids (which is about both the Lebanese civil war and AIDS, for a depressing-topic win). But it's worth it, and because it's so fractured it wears well if read in small bits.
And I, with my very-non-native-speaker tongue, pronounce his name (ربيع علم الدين) roughly like "rab-EEh al-LAM ed-deen." (Does that help any?)
2. The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - Steven Salaita
I knew Salaita, an English professor at Virginia Tech, from his academic work, especially Anti-Arab Racism in the USA, which is quite good, and which I'd recommend to folks interested in the topic. I literally picked this book off the shelves at the library because I was in the Arab-American section anyway and it has a pretty cover, which you can see here. It's a collection of essays, many of them connecting back to his two major fields of research, Native American studies and Arab/American relations. Several of the essays really stood out for me. "Open-mindedness on Independence Day" is brilliant at a page-and-a-half long; it takes a line from Thomas Friedman and shows, deftly, how it works in the service of anti-Muslim prejudice. "The zealots of clandestine faith" is a critique of modern books about atheism, particularly calling them out for their white-liberal desire not to know how spirituality and religion function in the cultures of non-white folks around the world. "The perils and profits of doing comparative work" is an excellent examination of when one can compare the experiences of different groups, or link them together to a common name (like 'indigenous'). My favorite essay, though, is "I was called up to commit genocide," which is a brilliant speaking-back to Christian Zionists, who use Christian Palestinians (Salaita is an Orthodox Palestinian) as an object lesson to push their own vision of the state of Israel, one which would violently and forcibly cleanse all Palestinians in the service of the Rapture. It's a fabulous attempt to both claim an identity while still wanting to talk in terms of general principles, to refuse to have one's identity usurped by others and used for projects you don't support.
While I liked the book, and read it very quickly (less than a day, and that was with only reading it on the subway), I did find that his arguments sometimes lacked texture and detail; I'm not certain if I would agree with him after reading the book if he and I didn't already fundamentally agree on the discourse around Arabs and Muslims in the US, the general poverty of most of the political movements that call themselves "liberal," and how one should approach intellectual questions. But, well, we do, so I had a good time reading it, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in Arab/American relations.
1. The Hakawati - Rabih Alameddine
One of the blurbs on the back cover of this book is by Amy Tan; she praises Alameddine and says, "One day soon everyone will be able to pronounce his name." That's the sense of humor of the whole work--that there are deeply, deeply funny things in the most sensitive and beautiful moments. This is a book where you realize, seven hundred pages in, that the major features of one of its central plot lines has been used to set up, of all things, a Heather Has Two Mommies joke, set in medieval Baghdad. It's a book where there are rainbow colored imps named after the major prophets of the Bible, who turn into extremely gay parrots and bother the royal classes in the interest of demonry everywhere. It's a book of prostitutes who find their husbands at shrines and then go on to conquer cities, basically for fun. And it's a book about Osama al-Kharrat, successful architecht, flying back to Beirut from his home in Los Angeles to visit his father as he is dying, the story of his grandfather, a hakawati (storyteller), and of his childhood. It is all of these things, and I cannot tell you which one of these is most important, because it is sometimes all of them on a single page.
Alameddine is one of my favorite novelists because he pulls off tremendous technical feats in his writing. I the Divine, for instance, is a novel told entirely in first chapters, as the character attempts to figure out how to tell the story of her life. The Hakawati is very long, and tells...I think seven or eight nested stories, some of them "true" (the story of the narrator and his family), some of them "mythical," but each of them speaking to each other. Each story is told in one to three page increments, and intermixed. It's a beautifully written novel; his language is poetic and gorgeous, he captures moments of emotional extremity perfectly. He is also hilarious, repeatedly, and the book is full of dirty jokes and subtle puns. It's also full of unrepentantly gay characters (mostly men), who are not reviled and rejected, but incorporated into their societies. Why, openly gay characters in a mythic novel set in the Middle East in the Middle Ages? Say it ain't so!
The downside to reading it is that it is, I am not kidding, a million bajillion pages long. I got it from the library in November, and I finished it in March. Granted, I've got a baby and a dissertation, so I'm not the fastest reader in the world at the moment, but it's a bear to get through. If you want a faster read, get I the Divine, or even Kool-Aids (which is about both the Lebanese civil war and AIDS, for a depressing-topic win). But it's worth it, and because it's so fractured it wears well if read in small bits.
And I, with my very-non-native-speaker tongue, pronounce his name (ربيع علم الدين) roughly like "rab-EEh al-LAM ed-deen." (Does that help any?)
2. The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - Steven Salaita
I knew Salaita, an English professor at Virginia Tech, from his academic work, especially Anti-Arab Racism in the USA, which is quite good, and which I'd recommend to folks interested in the topic. I literally picked this book off the shelves at the library because I was in the Arab-American section anyway and it has a pretty cover, which you can see here. It's a collection of essays, many of them connecting back to his two major fields of research, Native American studies and Arab/American relations. Several of the essays really stood out for me. "Open-mindedness on Independence Day" is brilliant at a page-and-a-half long; it takes a line from Thomas Friedman and shows, deftly, how it works in the service of anti-Muslim prejudice. "The zealots of clandestine faith" is a critique of modern books about atheism, particularly calling them out for their white-liberal desire not to know how spirituality and religion function in the cultures of non-white folks around the world. "The perils and profits of doing comparative work" is an excellent examination of when one can compare the experiences of different groups, or link them together to a common name (like 'indigenous'). My favorite essay, though, is "I was called up to commit genocide," which is a brilliant speaking-back to Christian Zionists, who use Christian Palestinians (Salaita is an Orthodox Palestinian) as an object lesson to push their own vision of the state of Israel, one which would violently and forcibly cleanse all Palestinians in the service of the Rapture. It's a fabulous attempt to both claim an identity while still wanting to talk in terms of general principles, to refuse to have one's identity usurped by others and used for projects you don't support.
While I liked the book, and read it very quickly (less than a day, and that was with only reading it on the subway), I did find that his arguments sometimes lacked texture and detail; I'm not certain if I would agree with him after reading the book if he and I didn't already fundamentally agree on the discourse around Arabs and Muslims in the US, the general poverty of most of the political movements that call themselves "liberal," and how one should approach intellectual questions. But, well, we do, so I had a good time reading it, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in Arab/American relations.
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