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Master’s Theses and Projects College of Graduate Studies

5-2015

Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, Naomi Nye's

Habibi, and Shaw Dallal's Scattered Like Seeds: A
Critical Insight into the Dialectic of Past and
Present in Contemporary Arab American
Literature
Yassir Al Soud

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Recommended Citation
Al Soud, Yassir. (2015). Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, Naomi Nye's Habibi, and Shaw Dallal's Scattered Like Seeds: A Critical
Insight into the Dialectic of Past and Present in Contemporary Arab American Literature. In BSU Master’s Theses and Projects. Item 12.
Available at http://vc.bridgew.edu/theses/12
Copyright © 2015 Yassir Al Soud

This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.
Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, Naomi Nye’s Habibi, and Shaw Dallal’s
Scattered Like Seeds: A Critical Insight into the Dialectic of Past and Present in
Contemporary Arab American Literature

By

Yassir Sabri Al Suod

 Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, Naomi Nye’s Habibi, and Shaw Dallal’s
Scattered Like Seeds: A Critical Insight into the Dialectic of Past and Present in
Contemporary Arab American Literature

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree
Master of Arts in English

By

Yassir Sabri Al Suod

Tafila Technical University
Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature, 2011
Mu’tah University
Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics, 2013

May 2015
Bridgewater State University

Content and Style Approved By:

_______________________________________ ________________

Dr. Jadwiga S. Smith, Chair of Thesis Committee Date

_______________________________________ ________________

Dr. Kathleen Vejvoda, Committee Member Date

_______________________________________ ________________

Dr. Benjamin Carson, Committee Member Date

 Acknowledgement

My deepest gratitude goes to my advisor Dr. Jadwiga Smith. My appreciation to her is beyond

any language can express as she is the greatest and most knowledgeable professor I have ever known.

She is now and always will be an inspiring role model whom I will always admire. Dr. Smith’s clever

insights, criticism, support, encouragement, and wit have shaped my thesis as well as part of my

mentality and character. I am greatly indebted to her generosity, genuine efforts, kindness,

consideration, and understanding, which have made this thesis both possible and enjoyable.

I’m also indebted to everybody at Bridgewater State University and in particular my thesis

committee members: Dr. Kathleen Vejvoda and Dr. Benjamin Carson for their great help, constructive

input, and reviews that significantly contributed to the successful accomplishment of my thesis. My

thanks also go to all my professors and colleagues in the English department at Bridgewater State

University, Mu’tah University, and Tafila Technical University.

I thank my family for their indescribable encouragement and support during the two years in

the United States. My endless thanks go most especially to my parents for their emotional support,

warmth, encouragement, and raising me to feel proud to be a Muslim Arab man.

 Dedication

I dedicate my thesis to my father, mother, siblings, whose role in my life is beyond words, and to the

loving memory of my grandmother who would have rejoiced greatly over my accomplishment.
 Table of Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Chapter One: Old Home and New Home 15

3. Chapter Two: Old Family and New Family 29

4. Chapter Three: War: Dialectics of Memory and Peace 46

5. Chapter Four: Negotiating Nostalgia and Identity 71

6. Works Cited 83
 Al Suod 1

Introduction

The last two decades have witnessed a breathtakingly rapid development of Arab American

literature: there is a burgeoning number of literary texts published in different genres, including

nonfiction. As a result, Arab American fiction now holds a significant position in mainstream

American culture. Numerous courses are nowadays being taught on Arab American fiction, history,

and culture across the United States, and an increasing number of Arab American writers are

publishing their writings in mainstream literary journals. On the other hand, library and internet

websites are still short of critical essays and books on Arab American literature; there is a crucial need

for more high-quality literary criticism. Arab American literature requires a broader theoretical and

critical background despite the fact that Arabs and Arab Americans face an obstinate bias against

them, which portrays them as a dangerous and unwelcome entity in the United States. The changing

geopolitical landscapes in the Arab World arising out of different crises have resulted in a grossly

negative conceptualization of Arab Americans in the United States.

In the thesis, I’m primarily concerned with critically discussing and tackling specific topics

related to the larger fabric of Arab American literature. Contemporary Arab American writers are

relentlessly trying to convey a new message to the West and the East that life is changing rapidly, and

the radical thoughts about the relationship between the West and the East call for reexamination. This

message of hope is not a case of easy optimism, though. Here I examine three recent Arab American

novels: Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010), Naomi Nye’s Habibi*(1999), and Shaw Dallal’s

Scattered Like Seeds (1999). Despite the cultural and regional differences among these three authors,

all of them explore the consequences of cultural, ideological, racial, economic, and political

boundaries among the different generations. At the same time, the authors convey a sense of trust that

the reader can grasp the cultural background with some degree of understanding and acceptance. The

thesis, furthermore, attempts to explore the ways in which the three authors stand up for the message

of building a sense of transnationalism and of crossing ideological, racial, psychological, economic,

________________________________________
* Habibi is an Arabic word of endearment that is equivalent to the English phrase “my darling”.
 Al Suod 2

and political boundaries among the different generations of Arab Americans: they call for a world in

which heterogeneity and difference are welcome and endured, destabilizing the old perspectives on the

construction of cultural identities.

There are almost three generations of Arab Americans in the United States, who have vastly

different experiences of integration into American society. Accordingly, first-generation Arab

Americans are those who compulsively immigrated to the USA from different Arab-speaking places

and found home there as a result of the 1948 war. The largest wave of Palestinians to America began

after the 1967 war and continues until today, setting up and running a politically-sensitive

humanitarian campaign of conveying Palestinians’ pitilessly veiled cries to the world. The reasons for

immigration during this era could be lucidly attributed to the economic and political pressures exerted

upon the Palestinians living through the political conflict with Israel. The first-generation Arab

Americans have faced many challenges and obstacles, substantially growing out of their indispensable

difficulties with the language, customs and traditions, as they advance toward identifying with and

fitting in American society, which has subsequently caused an unbridgeable nonconformist gap among

those people. Consequently, they have used their mother tongue, Arabic, in their homes and solely

relied on English for business and outside communication purposes; and, moreover, they have tended

to cook their own traditional foods in their homes. Despite all such impediments and barriers, a

significant number of Palestinians joined American universities in order to achieve their dream of

education, money, house, family, and stability. This generation was keener on retaining their original

traditions and cultures, while other subsequent generations tended to be more Americanized.

These three authors all address issues of Arab American conceptions of home, family,

nostalgia, identity, displacement, memory, and cultural prejudice. The thesis foregrounds such issues

in order to showcase that the tense relationship between the West and the East carries many challenges

preventing the crossing of cultural boundaries. As a result, different characters in two novels –

Abulhawa and Nye – suffer from feelings of nostalgia, displacement, and various kinds of alienfation
 Al Suod 3

and distancing. In his essay “From Nostalgia to Critique: An Overview of Arab American Literature,”

Tanyss Ludescher provides a brief survey of the history of Arab American literature based on the three

phases of Arab American immigration, arguing that Arab Americans encountered numerous

challenges and impediments on their road to assimilating into American culture. Ludescher mentions

Chalala’s observation that the early phase of writing was nostalgic. However, this doesn’t entail that

the other phases of writing are not nostalgic because writers of other generations, including the writers

of the selected novels, write about their early years in their homelands with a sense of nostalgia

reminiscent of various stories during those unforgettable years.

Arab American writers have distinct stories about their past. Thus, most Arab-American

writers, especially those born in their homelands like Suzan Abulhawa, are completely caught up in

the nostalgia of homeland memories and refuse to understand the essence of the multiethnic nature of

the United States, preferring to remain homesick. Most, if not all, Arab American writers, including

the selected authors, address similar issues. In their essay “Cultural Determinants in the Treatment of

Arab Americans: A Primer for Mainstream Therapists,” Nobles and Sciarra discuss the differences

between the traditions and values of Arab culture and those of the United States, and how such

differences cause troubles and dichotomy. Moreover, Nobles and Sciarra throw light upon the effects

of demeaning stereotyping and discrimination against Arab Americans.

In order for the reader to understand why Arab Americans experience cultural discomfort with

life in America, a clearer distinction should be made between Arab culture and American culture so

that the reader can properly trace the source of Arab Americans’ cultural discomfort. Arab Americans

feel proud of their cultural heritage as well as its contribution to literature, medicine, and other fields.

At the same time, they struggle to maintain their cultural roots, even though they try to become

familiar with American culture. In his study Arab and American Cultures, George N. Atiyeh argues

that understanding any culture requires the study of religion and language because they are “the two

basic components of any culture” (126). Although not all Arabs are Muslim, the influence of Islam
 Al Suod 4

cannot be underestimated because it regulates the everyday life and is the primary source on which

many Arab cultures are based. Islam significantly influences Arab society because “the realms of God

and Caesar are neither divided nor delineated in it as they are in Christianity” (129). The values and

traditions of Arab culture are substantially different from those of American culture. Thus, Arab

American children, for instance, are punished for certain behaviors that do not meet social

expectations. However, Arab American children also grow up among many loving and nurturing

caregivers, not only their parents but other family members. The strong religious influence on Arab

culture establishes in the child’s mind a close association between sin and punishment, which would

make the child think twice before doing anything wrong. Arab Americans are sensitive to their

religious feelings when exposed to American culture. It is worth mentioning that Arab American

Muslims are more deeply affected by cultural traditions and values, which are associated with Islamic

teachings, than are Arab American Christians.

I’ve found that much of criticism related to contemporary Arab American literature is

concerned with the writing in the shadow of Edward Said. Edward Said has studied the issue of

Orientalism and how this discourse has been played out in the west in order to dehumanize the East. In

his book Orientalism, published in 1978, Said argues that the notion of Orientalism helps and supports

the Western imperialist powers. Said’s theory hinges upon the binary opposition between the East and

the West. He asserts that the East is constituted by a set of political, economic, and ideological

practices by the Western subject, and such a distinction marks the East as a knowledge object from

which the Western subject formulates his identity. He concentrates on the Orientalism of major

colonial powers: France, Britain, and later the United States of America. Said describes the

relationship between the Occident and the Orient as a mere relationship of power and domination:

Orientalism is a sort of a western style calculatedly created to dominate, restructure, and have

authority over the East. The Orientalist always represents the West as superior to the East so the

westerner comes up against the East as an American first and as an individual second. Moreover, he
 Al Suod 5

argues that it is the rhetoric of hegemony that provides Orientalism with strength and stability, and

brings about his calling “us” and “those” marking out the western subject from the non-western one.

Said’s book reveals that Orientalism has helped the West to control the Orient and criticizes the

imbalanced relationship between the West and the East.

I mention Edward Said and his views and ideas about the relationship between the East and the

West because, as mentioned before, most critical discussions of Arab American literature follow in the

footsteps of Said and his post-colonialist perspective in Orientalism. However, one may ask oneself

about what kind of contribution this thesis would provide, or, more specifically, why the second

section of the third chapter of the thesis is centered on defending and advocating Edward Said’s

theoretical perspectives. The answer is that the direction of the third chapter is different as the three

Arab American authors’ propositions largely run counter to Edward Said’s ideas and theories. In other

words, it gives examples from these three novels, unraveling and uncovering the contradiction

between these contemporary Arab American authors’ views and those of Edward Said and other critics

as well. I, moreover, give credit to other American and Arab American critics, such as Jack Shaheen,

Douglas Little, and Roland Stockton, who are involved in deciphering the nature of the relationship

between the East and the West in order to lend more credence to the analysis.

Therefore, when trying to understand these Arab American authors’ lives, culture, identity,

family, home, and other related issues, the reader has to examine how Abulhawa, Nye, and Dallal

handle themes of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and hybridity, which are variably used to describe

groups of people of color or people of all cultures regardless of race. Thus, this thesis is primarily

based on a combination of cultural and post-colonial analysis. Cultural analysis is very significant for

it is based on the interconnection between a text and its society, whereas post-colonialism, along with

hybridity and multiculturalism, helps us understand the background and voices of ethnic writers.

The term postcolonial has emerged as a label for the study of colonialism, postcolonialism, and,

more broadly, political and cultural relationships between the powerful and powerless nations and
 Al Suod 6

people (Parker 272). Moore-Gibert, Stanton, and Maley argue that “Postcolonial critics often have a

stake in postcolonialism as a political process in the context of specific national struggles. One may

think here of Said and Palestine, Fanon and Algeria” (4). The analysis of postcolonial people and

societies can be traced to the sense that colonialism is the only historical account of these societies

(Loomba 20). Postcolonial theory invokes discussion about experience of different kinds: suppression,

slavery, immigration, difference, resistance, gender, race, place and responses to the influential master

discourse of imperial Europe (Ashcroft & Griffiths 2). Homi Bhabha posits that “there is always

ambivalence at the site of colonial dominance. When two cultures commingle, the nature and the

characteristics of the newly created culture change each of the cultures” (Guerin et al 205). Bhabha

refers to this “dynamic, interactive, and tension-packed process” as “hybridity” (206). Bhabha says,

“hybridization is a discursive, enunciatory, cultural, subjective process having to do with the struggle

around authority, authorization, deauthorization, and the revision of authority. It’s a social process. It’s

not about persons of diverse cultural tastes and fashions. As a result, a feeling of unhomeliness

develops” (207). It’s worth mentioning that hybridity “denotes a wide register of multiple identity,

cross-over, pick-’n’-mix, boundary-crossing experiences and styles, matching a world of growing

migration and diaspora lives, intensive intercultural communication, everyday multiculturalism and

erosion of boundaries” (Pieterse 221).

Oswald and Smolen in Multicultural Literature and Response state that America is a

multicultural nation, including Native Americans, African Americans, Arab Americans, Asians,

Europeans, and Latinos. An extended response to the needs of all people has resulted in broader

realization that literature plays a crucial role in “the development of understanding across cultures”

(1). Contemporary multicultural literature is concerned with exploring “the inclusion of any beliefs

and values identified in traditional and nonfictional literature,” examining “contemporary

characterization and conflicts,” and analyzing “the themes and look for threads that cross the

literature” (4). American multicultural literature has become an independent genre. This literature has
 Al Suod 7

emerged from the writer’s real experience that reflects the nature of the life of an ethnic group that

lives in the United States in general, with all its various ethnic origins. Loomba and other critics focus

on the idea that multicultural literature develops the knowledge not only of the reader’s culture, but

also of other cultures. Therefore, these critics and others give authenticity to the fact that multicultural

literature has substantially grown to be an important trend in American literature.

Within the past few decades, ethnic literature that is concerned with the Middle East has

noticeably become a distinct part of minority literatures in the United States. Arab American writers,

including the contemporary ones, have made significant contributions to ethnic literature in the Middle

East. Their writings often represent a longtime clash between two dissonant cultures vehemently

impacting their perception and take on literature and identity. Intuitively, Arab American writers are

quite aware of the detriment of vehement negative stereotypes mushrooming all over America which

portray Arabs as deadly terrorists, whilst rendering their women as alien to American culture and life.

The attention that has been given to works by Arab American women echoes an increasing interest in

women’s desire to resist the deeply held misconception as well as the Orientalist discourse that Arab

women are oppressed and deprived of any rights; thus, Arab American women’s writings are in many

cases directed specifically against such misconceptions.

Early and contemporary Arab American writers sometimes use their writings as a tool to resist

the totalitarian and tyrannical regimes in the Arab world. In addition, they use their writings in order to

express their hyphenated and transnational identities, doubleness, socio-cultural discomfort, and

ambivalent conception of home. Arab American writers are totally concerned with their homelands

and identities that are critically manifested in their writings. I would argue that since the 1967 war,

most Arab American writers have focused on the preservation of their native cultures and identities

while simultaneously adapting to the new cultural environment. They have also practiced different

political and social activities as Arab citizens living in America not as purely Americans, which has

helped them gain recognition of an Arab ethnic group and entity in America. Abulhawa, Nye, and
 Al Suod 8

Dallal, as Arab American writers, have been affected by what is going on in Palestine, which is clearly

exhibited in their writings about the Arab world in general and Palestine in particular. These writings,

along with those by Arab American writers, unflaggingly attempt to build bridges between the various

cultures, especially the Western and Arab cultures.

Following the intense aftermath of 9/11, Louise Cainkar in her book Homeland Insecurity

(2009) observes that Arab Americans, even U.S.-born Arabs, were portrayed as alien to America.

Moreover, she chronicles the consequential implications and effects of 9/11 on Arab Americans; she

argues that while anti-Muslim suspicions did exist in America before the 9/11 attacks, 9/11

dramatically created a fertile environment in which hostility and misunderstanding toward Muslim

Arab Americans could increase, and their political and social exclusion could be justified by the

government and supported by Americans. She also maintains that post-9/11 polls found “a majority of

Americans in favor of profiling Arabs, including American citizens, and subjecting them to special

security checks before boarding planes” (70); as a result, Arabs and Muslims were de-Americanized in

gendered ways: American state agencies stereotype men as deadly transitional terrorists and women as

alien to American values and norm. In addition, she contends that the rhetoric of power shaped the

behavior of daily life on every level, helping to dehumanizing individuals and groups and thereby

depriving them of human rights.

In American Ethnic Literatures: Native American, African American, Chicago/Latino, and

Asian American Writers and their Background, Peck fails to mention Arab American literature as one

of the major multicultural literatures in America. Noticeably, he has overlooked one of the main

streams of ethnic American literatures. By not mentioning Arab American as one of the many ethnic

groups which emigrated from their war-torn homelands to America, he undoubtedly forgets a major

component of the vast and diverse body of American literature. Through Michael Daher’s review of

Kadi’s book Food for our Grandmothers’ Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists,

he mentions that the book addresses the incongruous dimensions of what it means to be an “Arab
 Al Suod 9

American” or “Arab Canadian” woman. All female authors in this book aspire to embrace their

forgotten or ignored Arab heritage. Their essays are a form of fighting to establish their political and

cultural ideas as well as to rectify all kinds of prejudice and racism that have affected their daily lives,

for Arab or Arab American women are portrayed as unenlightened, subjugated, speechless, and

stripped of agency.

Castle in his book The Literary Theory Handbook argues that transnationalism has emerged

into the foreground as a new field that embraces “nearly every academic discipline in the humanities

and social sciences and takes in as well business, economics, finance, political science, international

relations, and diplomacy. The general premise of transnationalism is that the nation-state and the

ideology of nationalism no longer adequately explain social, cultural, and geographic realities” (254).

Thus, literature on transnationalism is directed by the premise that the lives of migrants and stateless

people are no longer constructed within the nation-state, but rather beyond the national boundaries.

The transnational subject conceives borders as invitations not as constraints in order to cross over to

discover the new temporalities and spaces that such crossings open up. Based on the transnational

perspective, postcolonial nations “enter into relations and form alliances across a vast, increasingly

interconnected and technologically complex global environment, which tests the limits and resilience

of the idea of the nation and of nationalism” (257). Theories of transnationalism foreground “a new

transient internationalism of migrants, refugees, exiles, émigrés, and stateless people like the

Palestinians and the Kurds” (258). Transnational people aim at both elaborating and erasing borders

(259). Each migrant can be perceived as a subject of transnationalism who gets involved in different

transnational practices and activities, but it doesn’t mean that the entire life of the migrant is chiefly

characterized by transnationalism.

In his book Contemporary Arab-American Literature, Carol Fadda-Conrey argues that Arab

Americans’ transnational connections to their homelands and past can play a crucial role in

challenging any exclusionary types of US citizenship: “through Arab-American writers’ and artists’
 Al Suod 10

strategic reconfigurations of the binary logics … Arab-Americans’ connections to the Arab world

cease to be the ostracizing factor that prohibit them from asserting US belonging” (3). I agree with

Fadda-Conrey in his argument, showing that the new generation of Arab Americans in the three novels

assert themselves within a US framework while, at the same time, variably maintaining transnational

connections to their original homelands.

Arab American characters in the three novels examined here plainly voice assorted issues of

displacement, cultural prejudice, cultural discomfort, transitional connections, assimilation, and

nostalgia, all of which are explained in depth in each chapter of the thesis. Each chapter focuses on a

separate issue related to the larger context of Arab American literature.

Chapter One, “Old Home and New Home,” examines the living difficulties the characters in

the three novels face in their new country, America or Palestine, where culture, traditions, and values

are totally different. It also narrates how Palestinians are compulsorily removed from their country and

forced to immigrate to the United States. Furthermore, it sheds light on how it’s difficult for

Palestinian immigrants to assimilate totally to their new culture. This chapter, moreover, sets out to

discuss the unstable concept of home, and how contemporary Arab Americans approach it;

transnational entities and networks have their own taste and perception of home. In addition, this

chapter discusses the outcomes as commensurate corollaries to the challenges that the characters face

in their new homelands, America and Palestine, and how they cope with them in order to build a new

future, bringing in the fact that it’s evident that the ongoing interaction between conditions in the new

home and the old home have shaped the new identity of the Arab American characters in the three

novels.

Suleiman in his book Arabs in America: Building a new future argues that there were different

manners in which Arab immigrants understood their new position in the United States; the first wave

immigrants believed that they were living temporarily, with the intention of going back to their

homelands, so they didn’t belong to American society, while the second and third generation are more
 Al Suod 11

open and acceptable to American society. It’s natural for Arab Americans to fight and struggle in their

new homes in order to comprehend and unify their hyphenated identities. Although some Arab

Americans try to fully assimilate the American life and culture, but their homelands, specifically

Palestine, remain the axial source of inspiration. This argument is true of Arab Americans who were

born in their homelands and then immigrated to the United States, yet those born or raised in America

don’t have the same shared feeling toward their homes or their parents’ native homes.

Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Shaw Dallal’s Scattered Like Seeds present two

Palestinian characters, namely Amal and Thafer respectively, who are trapped in the past of their life

in Palestine, and work to make sure they have a life free of conflict in America by downplaying

revolutionary attitudes and assimilating into American life. These characters experience the sense of

twoness; the conflict sparks when they can’t be pure American or pure Arab. In their new homeland,

they are torn between two cultures and they feel how they can’t fully assimilate into either any of these

cultures. They experience the feeling of in-betweenness throughout their time in America. On the

other hand, the characters that were born in America such as Liyana in Naomi Nye’s Habibi and the

Thafer’s children in Dallal’s novel, detect an attachment to Palestine, as they have a distinct picture of

Palestine from their fathers’ talk about their homeland, but this picture becomes more obvious when

they pay Palestine a visit. The children and Liyana don’t feel that they not purely American, even

though they were born in America and have never visited Palestine before. When they visit Palestine,

their new homeland, they start suffering from the loss of their identity, so they can never be sure to

which culture, Arab or American, they do belong. All the characters in the new home, Palestine or

America, are not very different from each other as they have the same feeling of multiculturalism.

Chapter Two, “New Family and Old Family,” examines the difficulties involved in the

characters’ adjustment to the new life in the new family. Also, it highlights the differences in the

customs, values, life style, and language in the new family compared to the old family. Despite the

regional and cultural difference among Liyana in Nye’s Habibi and Amal and Thafer in Abulhawa’s
 Al Suod 12

Mornings in Jenin and Dallal’s Scattered Like Seeds respectively, all of them suffer from difficulties

involved in their new adjustment to the Arab or American side of their identity, which means the

assimilation of a new family and its language and customs. All the characters in these novels attempt

to fit in the culture and mindset of the new family members, changing the new strange family

atmosphere into one that they can accept or live in. Furthermore, this chapter sheds light on identifying

family values that are prevalent in the Arab world and their development over time which provide an

important context for a deeper understanding of Arab American patterns.

In the chapter “Family Values and Traditions” from the book Biopsychosocial Perspectives on

Arab Americans, Nassar-McMillan, Ajrouch, and Hakim-Larson address many issues related to the

values and traditions prevalent in the Arab family which significantly influence the Arab American

family in America. They argue that parent-child relationships are exceptionally important to well-

being across the course of the life. The identity of a child is very much affected by the parent-child

relationship, and this influence continues up until adulthood. In addition, they argue that the values

about marriage and love in the Arab world are totally different from the west; the approval of the

extended family is more important than romantic love and is still the basis on which the marriage

decision is made. Moreover, although Arab-Americans, including writers, are proud of their cultural

and religious identities, some of their literary works address issues that are deemed taboo in Arab and

Arab American culture, such as homosexuality.

This chapter highlights all these differences between the Arab family and Arab American

family, and how the old family plays a vital role in partially shaping the new Arab American family.

For instance, Poppy Abboud, Liyana’s father in Nye’s Habibi, firmly insists on drinking tea with mint

and on using olive oil rather than butter: this reflects the strong influence of his old Arab family. Also,

all Liyana’s relatives in the new family in Palestine reject her friendship with Omer, a Jewish friend,

as they regard it a forbidden relationship. Any intimate friendship or sexual relationship outside of

marriage is strictly forbidden in the Arab world. The same case applies to Amal in Abulhawa’s
 Al Suod 13

Mornings in Jenin when she dates with men and drink beer and alcohol, all of which is taboo in the

Arab Muslim families. In addition, the three novels deal with the different values, sometimes slight,

between the old and new families.

Chapter Three , “War: Dialectics of Memory and Peace” initially presents how the life is before

the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 over Palestine, and how happy and safe the Palestinians were in their

houses and farms before the Israeli occupation. It also points out that these characters are forced, for

different purposes and goals, to emigrate to the US during the war, and they come back when the war

is temporarily over. The chapter is principally concerned with unpacking the concept of memory that

is attached to the different Arab American characters, and putting on view the diverse kinds of

memory the characters have undergone; moreover, the chapter displays the impossibility of bringing

peace to Palestine and having Palestinians and Israelis live with each other. The chapter proves that

although the war is now temporarily over, it is impossible for the Palestinians and Israelis to live

peacefully with each other, especially after the latest brutal Israeli attacks on Gaza Strip in Palestine,

despite Abulhawa, Nye, and Dall’s attempts to say that it’s possible for the Palestinians and Israelis to

live in harmony with each other. This chapter also discusses how these three Arab American authors,

along other Arab American writers, use their writings to resist the United States policy because it

wages war against Palestine and other Arab homelands. They also address the issue of removal of

Palestine that Israel has been working for since its victory over the Arab armies, and how the situation

has worsened in Palestine since the 1967 war.

Chapter Four, “Negotiating Nostalgia and Identity,” attempts to pinpoint how nostalgia is

tackled in the three novels, and how nostalgia helps in shaping and mapping the continuity of identity.

Due to the continuous occupation of Palestine, two major characters in two novels out of three cannot

rid themselves of their homesickness as nostalgia keeps inscribing and molding their identity.

Immigrants always pass their nostalgia to their children and grandchildren. They live in their own

dreams and try to transfer these dreams to them. Most Arab American writings are nostalgic because
 Al Suod 14

they write about their early years in their homelands with a sense of nostalgic reminiscence of

different stories during those memorable years. Arab American writers have distinct stories about their

past, but this doesn’t mean that they remain homesick and never accept America. On the contrary,

many contemporary Arab Americans who are tinged with nostalgia strive to assimilate into the

American culture, without, of course, losing or forgetting their original identity, in order to reflect the

true picture of what is going on in Palestine, and to uncover the fake mask of the real brutal Israel.

Chapter Four points out that even though Arab Americans are attached to their original

homelands, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they all distance themselves from the fact that the United

States is a home of strangers and wanderers. On the other hand, any attempt from them to go back to

their homelands, because of a feeling of nostalgia, is chiefly considered as a sort of failure of

assimilation. Orfalea in his book The Arab Americans: A History argues that Arab Americans should

recognize that the problem of their ethnic identity is necessarily the problem of American identity.

Abulhawa’s and Nye’s novels can be regarded as nostalgic because they narrate a strong attachment to

the native homeland and past, whilst Dallal’s Scattered Like Seeds can be considered as post-nostalgic.
 Al Suod 15

Chapter One: Old Home and New Home

Contemporary Arab American literature is situated in a larger debate about the role and

usefulness of addressing the issue of old home and new home, and how this issue should be critically

studied in light of a broader theoretical and critical background. This issue of old home and new home

should be focused on in relation to three major areas: (1) the difference in approaching the concept of

old home and new home – based in the Middle East – for Arab Americans who were born in the Arab

world and those born in America; (2) the varying degree of advocating the message of building a sense

of transnationalism and of crossing ideological, racial, and political boundaries; (3) the degree of

cultural acceptance of the new home, whether in America or in the Arab world. The political

instability in the contemporary Middle East is responsible for the continuity of the migration for the

people in the region, thus making the topic of the old home and the new home central to the Arab

experience.

Al-Ali and Koser in New Approaches to Migration contest that traditional approaches have

failed to characterize international immigrants as humans belonging to the established norm, whilst

transnational approaches portray them not as outsiders, but, instead, as “representatives of a globalized

world” (3). With the life developing scientifically and technologically, the majority of immigrants

have become able to develop and map multiple identities and localities where they belong neither to

the original home nor to the adopted one; their familial ties and connections have rapidly changed

from being local into being global, which plainly puts forward that transnationalism destabilizes the

rigid concept and meaning of home and place: immigrants are progressively developing trans-local

conceptions of home (3). They have realized that the concept of home is not static but rather dynamic;

and, thus, the concept and meaning of home is prone to political, social, cultural, and economic

changes (6). Nikos Papastergiadis is his book Dialogues in Diaspora argues that home can be

perceived as encompassing both a physical place and a metaphorical space: “The ideal home is not just
 Al Suod 16

a house which offers shelter …. Apart from this physical protection and market value, a home is a

place where personal and social meaning are grounded” (2).

Writing about Arab Americans as being caught in a double bind – they are living a life that is

luxurious yet, to varying degrees, psychologically uncomfortable in their new home – has provoked a

controversy over their right to write about the problems of homelessness and placelessness. The

concern, for many, is that the old home plays a pivotal role in the formation and shape of the new life

in the new home, yet they unanimously agree that this effect can be slightly undercut by building a

strong sense of mental and psychological connectedness to the new home. The three novels addressing

the stories of the old home are targeted at the Western audience who clearly holds a little positive

knowledge of Palestine and the Eastern world, the old home. These stories of the old home teach that

Palestinians are culturally rich rather than backward, peaceful rather than hostile, and hospitable rather

than vengeful.

The characters in the three novels face various living difficulties in their new home because

their language, culture, traditions, and values are entirely different. Suzan Abulhawa’s Mornings in

Jenin presents the protagonist, Amal, who undergoes and faces different living difficulties in her new

host home in America. Amal’s family in Palestine is forcibly removed from their village by the newly

formed state of Israel in 1948, and obliged to live in canvas tents in the Jenin refugee camp. Amal

receives a scholarship to do her BA at an American university, Temple University in Philadelphia, yet

she encounters many living difficulties there. She finds problems with her skin color, language, Arabic

name, and foreign accent, resulting in her being initially unadjusted to the new home: “Feelings of

inadequacy marked my first months in America. I foundered in that open-ended world, trying to fit in.

But my foreignness showed in my brown skin and accent. Statelessness clung to me like bad perfume

and the airplane hijackings of the seventies trailed my Arabic surname” (169).

The English language poses a problem to Amal because of its rhetorical differences from Arabic:

“Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere ‘thank you’ an insufficient expression that
 Al Suod 17

makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful” (170). Amal finds great differences between the new

home and the old home on her first night in the United States, which unconsciously reminds her of her

old home:

What I recall most vividly of my first night in the United States … I stretched my

limbs in a large, soft sea of white linen and down soaking up the fatigue from my jet-

lagged body … As if to brace myself with context in that big bed, I reached to the

past, moving my hand over the mangled skin of my belly … I was starting a new life.

But like the scar beneath my hand, the past was still with me. (171)

As a new comer to America, Amal tries to preserve the cultural and religious values of her old home

during her first stages of life there, and the reader can see this pretty obviously in her panicked

response to Elana Rivers’s question about her sexual life: ‘“Have you ever had sex?’ she asked

unctuously. I froze. I had never even kissed a boy” (172). She spends the first whole year studying

diligently, gaining a very strong academic foundation at her university. Likewise, Amal refuses to

wear a bikini, “It took me days to find a suitable swimming suit. A bikini was out of question” (178).

Afterwards, the conflict between the two cultures promptly erupts into sight when Amal boldly

endeavors to dampen all her senses to the world, getting herself artificially locked into the American

lifestyle with neither her past nor a vision for the future. She commences recognizing herself as an

Arab-Western hybrid, feeling herself all of the time as an abnormal person: “I metamorphosed into an

unclassified Arab-Western hybrid, unrooted and unknown” (173). By distancing herself from the

cultural and religious traditions and doctrine, Amal thinks that she pushes herself to gain social

recognition in the United States, practicing everything forbidden and inaccessible in Palestine as well

as enjoying a claimed copious possibility of choices that would foster her personality and identity.

However, as Amal’s travel narrative in Mornings in Jenin reveals, the experience of crossing

borders between here (old home) and there (new home) creates a new sense of place. Expelled and

forced to leave a homeland, people live on border zones where they neither belong to the new home
 Al Suod 18

nor to the old one. Jill Bystydzienski contends that “those who cross cultures often do not see

themselves as “belonging” to specific groups but rather as residing in “in-between” or “third spaces”

from which they develop new hybrid identities and establish innovation sites of collaboration and

contestation” (10). Amal’s “third space” leads her to attain new yet challenging avenues of knowledge

and understanding of her new identity in America. Hence, Amal, rather than feeling rooted in one

fixed space, Palestine, moves between the new and old homes, inhabiting a third place, one located in

between both the old and new homes. Therefore, Amal forces herself to develop multiple allegiances

to places in order for her not to be only confined to one fixed geographical place. Such competing

allegiances unveil the fact that Amal aspires to change and mobilize her own perception of the

meaning of home: she attempts to replace it with a more fluid, flexible and updated version of

identification. She, thus, wants to challenge the essentialized norms of her identity and reconfigure her

hybrid, transnational, and cross-cultural identity that would go through different changes and

transformations: she wants to live in a space of her own construction and formulation. Amal’s

relationship to home is synonymous with the relationship to her past, which is both tragic and

nostalgic. However, her dual or multiple conception of home and identity results in Amal being

ruptured and disoriented. As a result, later on, it becomes obvious that her native cultural and religious

mechanisms continue to regulate and discipline her life in the United States, for her past is renewed

and, thus, interprets her present and future, as her identity construction is largely influenced by her

memories of the past.

In New Approaches to Migration, Koser and Nadje argue that “over a period of time, the taken-

for-granted knowledge linked to a specific home – physical or cultural – might prove inadequate” (89).

Unsurprisingly, the old home grows alien, unusual, and odd in Amal’s eyes. Amal recalls the poverty,

Israeli oppressive policy against Palestinians, and lack of security, all of which strip her old home of

any sort of warmth and comfort. Moreover, Amal’s case resonates with Bhabha’s notion of

“unhomeliness” that exists once people cross different cultures. By crossing two conflicting cultures,
 Al Suod 19

Amal encounters “newness” that creates a sense of displacement to her, making her feel that she

belongs neither to the culture of the new home nor to the culture of her old home. On the other hand,

Amal’s being driven into the culture and values of the new home and burial of the old home past is a

temporal state of unconsciousness caused by her liking for getting assimilated into the American

culture without recognition of the essence of this culture or even creating a balance between her two

inconsistent cultures. This state accelerates her feelings of guilt because she does internally realize that

what she is doing is a gross betrayal of the cultural and religious teachings of her old home, which

would earn her repudiation in Palestine. Despite all her efforts to get entirely immersed in the new

home and forget the old home, her attempts end in failure:

I felt a sweet nostalgia and longing for old friends … Palestine would just rise up from

my bones into the center of my new life, unannounced. In class, at a bar, strolling

through the city. Without warning, the weeping willows of Rittenhouse Square would

turn into Jenin’s fig trees reaching down to offer me their fruit. It was a persistent pull,

living in the cells of my body, calling me to myself. Then it would slouch back into

latency. (175)

Thus, Abulhawa realizes the vital role of the past of the old home in reshaping and remapping the

identity of ethnic people in the United States. She maintains that ethnic people should not discard

relations with the culture of their old home in order to make themselves markedly visible in the new

culture they have adopted. Instead, they have to assess their relation with the new culture and make

expectations against reality. Indeed, Amal feels stressed not only from the clash of cultures she

confronts in the United States but also from the turbulent conditions of her old home in Palestine. It

appears that Amal dearly loves her old home, yet she starts to feel strange and alien to her country and

identity. However, she is physically rather than mentally exiled from herself, her old home, and her

culture and religion. Through her memories of Palestine, its landscape, her friends, and her family,

Amal can connect the past with the present and the future. Through these memories that emerge in full
 Al Suod 20

force, Amal realizes that she has not actually forgot her past at all: that past with all its positive or

negative effects has been all the time inside her.

Yousef’s call to Amal recovers the minutest details that have shaped her identity, and that she

has worked hard to forget and get rid of; she is again caught up with nostalgia for her family and her

old home: “Amal. I cried at the sound of my Arabic name. The telephone was an inadequate

connection to transmit the warm longing and surprise as we tried to speak through sobs and static”

(180). Being unable to get over her strong feeling of nostalgia, Amal decides to go back to Beirut

where her brother and his wife are living in a refugee camp after the Palestinian Liberation

Organization (PLO) was expelled from Jordan. Amal fails to recognize her ethnicity and understand it.

This issue of nostalgia is discussed in greater depth in Chapter Four. Consequently, Amal lives on the

nostalgic longing and dream for return to her native homeland and, thus, fails to break down rigid,

essentialized concepts of home.

Noami Shehab Nye’s Habibi presents two types of diasporic characters: Liyana, a second-

generation Arab American, and Dr. Kamal Abboud, her father, whom his family calls Poppy, a first-

generation Arab American. Nye considers her father as a symbol of her Arab legacy and roots. She

talks about her father’s homesickness for his old home, Palestine, through dreaming of the fig tree as

manifested in her poem “My father and the Fig Tree” which painfully reminds him of his old home

(Gomez-Vega 112). For Nye, it’s utterly advantageous to have a multicultural background, and so it is

for Liyana who is Nye’s alter ego in the novel.

Habibi’s main character is an unenthusiastic girl, Liyana, who is at her wits end about leaving

her life and friends in the United States and heading to Palestine, her new home; she is afraid she will

not fit in the life in the Middle East because she is moving away to a land she knows little about: “She

hadn’t smiled back yet. Her eyes were fixed on the floral wreath hanging over the cash register and her

mouth tried to shape the words, “May be it’s a bad idea,” but nothing came out. She felt the same way

she did after the car accident on an icy road. Leave the country?” (2). Liyana, then, feels caught
 Al Suod 21

between two incompatible cultures that emerge when her father decides to go back to his homeland,

Palestine. She defines herself in terms of hybridity and feels confused about her identity:

Lately Poppy kept bringing up Arab women and it made Liyana mad. “I’m not a

woman or a full Arab, either one! I am just a half-half, woman–girl, Arab-American; a

mixed breed like those wild characters that ride up on ponies in the cowboy movies

Rafik likes to watch. The half breeds are always villains or rescuers, never anybody

normal in between. (20)

Therefore, Liyana suffers from hybridity when she goes to her new home as she oscillates between her

native culture and the host culture. She lives in-between, between her American half and Arab half,

which undoubtedly signals an unbridgeable gap between Eastern and Western cultures. This cultural

in-betweenness creates a cultural discomfort for Liyana and her brother much more than her father,

Poppy, causing her to be torn between her fondness for her old home and acceptance of the new home.

Moreover, the novel shows how Liyana undergoes cultural, often psychological, difficulties as

she tries to adjust to the new home and its language, culture, customs, and values. The reader can

notice such problems as Liyana attempts to express her feelings toward her new home, Palestine:

Liyana wished Uncle Zaki, Poppy’s older brother, had not asked “for her hand for his

son. She felt awkward around her relatives, as if they had more in mind for her than

she could ever have imagined… When she went to bed that night, she pressed her face

into the puffy cotton pillow. It smelled very different from the pillow in their St. Louis

house, which smelled more like fresh air, like a good loose breeze. This pillow

smelled like long lonely years full of bleach. (60-62)

However, Liyana and her family are entirely accepted in their new home by the members of the

community. Her feeling of being torn between these two identities is expressed when Liyana talks

about her father after their return to Palestine: “Sometimes she heard her father say, 'we are American’

to his relatives. Americans? Even Poppy, who was always an Arab before?” (124). When they move
 Al Suod 22

from the United States to Palestine, Liyana feels the abruptness of the change, but she realizes that her

father even after returning home still suffers from the feeling of in betweeness. Now she discovers that

her father feels exactly as she does. Liyana feels culturally uncomfortable with her new home, because

Palestinians have their own traditions, customs, and daily life. One of the things that poses a serious

problem to Liyana is her friendship with Omer (a Jewish friend). Her mother tells her that this

relationship is totally forbidden in Palestine:

It is a very conservative country. Haven't you noticed? Remember the shorts?

Remember this story about someone getting in trouble because he talked to a woman

in the street? People have supposedly even been killed! For little indiscretions! I

realize you are not a villager and you don't have to live by their old fashioned codes.

Just remember your father won't like it. (160)

Liyana’s friendship with Omer reminds the reader of Liyana’s being kissed by Jackson, showcasing

how grossly different this culture is from that of America. As generally known, for Arab Muslims and

Christians, based on religious and cultural constraints, sexual or any sort of intimate relationships are

only confined to marriage between a husband and his wife. Sayed Jaffar in Why Only Islam remarks

that the Western World, however, “believes in freeing and respecting sexual desires and involvements

through lifting of traditional moral restraints” (385). Thus, her undesirable relationship with Omer is

inconsistent with the moral fabric of Arab society. Yet, Liyana’s forbidden relationship with Jackson

or other American men can be understood because she has grown up in America not in the Arab

world; being grown up in America means that one has more freedom without being restricted to a set

of cultural or religious norms. Arabs tend to administer more physical punishment than do Westerners

because children are taught to behave in a certain way in order to maintain an acceptable social and

religious image. Thus, Liyana finds it pretty difficult to live in her new home. Thus, the reader can see

her asking her father:

 Al Suod 23

“Will we ever goes home (she means the United States)?” She asked poppy after an

evening walk up to the small grocery to smell the air and buy new wooden clothespins

and a box of loose tea. Poppy was whistling, so she figured it was a good moment to

ask something like that. He paused.” I would hope,” he said” that you felt comfortable

here”. “Oh I do” she said. “I feel more comfortable every day…sometimes I get

incredibly homesick for…” (244)

Liyana is unable to conform to the conservative rules set by her new home as she wants to behave

according to the values, beliefs and principles she claims to hold.

Transnationalism, which is a movement across two nations and the politics of identity and

home rising out of such movements, becomes an essential manifestation of the diaspora in this novel.

Nye presents a form of transnationalism that dwells in nostalgia as promulgated by other early Arab

American writers; Nye’s Habibi retains a strong transnational viewpoint that paradoxically enhances

homesickness, yet, in the same breath, it problematizes modes and forms of national belonging,

whether by being nostalgically rooted in the native Palestinian identity or assimilated into the

American culture and life. Poppy’s movement across multiple geographical places, including Palestine

and New York, renders the borders between Palestine and the United States highly accessible, fluid,

and permeable, making the notions of national citizenship and belonging flexible and unrestricted.

Unlike some hyphenated characters in contemporary Arab American literature, whose double identity

remains emotional and psychological rather than physical, Poppy moves between his Palestinian and

American identities by frequently traveling between Palestine and the United States.

Although Poppy seems to be concerned with investing in cultural and social recognition in the

United States by virtue of his long residence there, he puts his efforts into advancing his status in

Palestine, which grows out of his potential project of permanent return to Palestine. A deeper level of

unease takes place around the feeling of instability in Poppy’s life driven by his unceasing movements

between the United States and Palestine, which, in addition to the positives, bear unpleasant outcomes.
 Al Suod 24

His transnational links have deepened his attachment and strengthened his loyalty to Palestine.

Moreover, such transnational networks and links don’t mitigate his aggregated sense of rupture,

negatively acting on any attempts to maintain a vigorous relationship between the old and new homes;

Poppy’s transnational experience doesn’t give him stability and security.

Shaw Dallal’s Scattered Like Seeds is about Thafer and his family who are reflective of the

imperial and brutal acts done to the Palestinian people by Israel. The novel highlights the conflict and

bitter experiences that Thafer undergoes in the new home in America, especially American support of

Israel, resulting in his intense feeling of discontent with America. This novel is not chiefly concerned

with Arab American ethnicity; rather, it’s written to convey to the audience, particularly the American

Audience, Arab thought, life, culture as well as what happened in Palestine in particular. However, the

direction of this novel is almost non-Oriental and, thus, adds something noteworthy to the

understanding of the United States from an ethnic perspective.

The novel narrates Thafer’s life as an Arab emigrant in the United States. He has four children

and is married to an American wife, Mary Pat, who dies later in the novel. Though Thafer appears to

move within a circle of nostalgic growth, this development proves superficial as he has undergone

substantial changes; Thafer doesn’t remain the same person who left his old home for the United

States. During his stay in America, Thafer goes through a mental and psychological rebirth. Such a

mental and psychological rebirth does prove solid, because he has become adjusted and assimilated to

the new culture and environment. However, he believes he is intermittently driven by the power of the

past of his old home to go back there for a short period of time in order to help the Palestinian people.

Thafer, returning to his new old home, is taken aback by the fact that he can’t find a proper room for

himself in his totally new old world to which he has come back, which results in having more issues

distilled into his personal conflicts; he becomes a divided soul, cornered in the ambiguities of history.

Despite this psychologically strife, he initially seems hesitant to go back to the United States and leave

his native homeland behind. Later on in the novel, Palestine turns out be infused into the figure of Dr.
 Al Suod 25

Suhaila, an Egyptian fellow working at OAPEC in Kuwait, thus equipping it with metaphorical

presence in the novel.

Thafer is ill at ease with himself, if not contradictory to some extent, because he can’t decide

which home to choose to live in, finding himself torn between them; it’s emblematic of how the

diaspora has transfigured him. In the United States, he is able to situate himself within the ethnic

American society, as he does understand the core spirit of multiethnicity in America; he prefers to

remain less homesick, not looking eagerly for the day when he is back in Palestine. Therefore, once

Thafer returns to his second old home, the Arab countries, he is faced with autocracy, the big gap

between the sluggish, decadent rich and those who live in abject poverty, the refusal to admit errors,

etc., ending up with more personal conflicts. In other words, he significantly succeeds to become

Americanized as he does recognize the essence of American civilization which is very unique in the

world. In addition, he is unable to take his American dress off and put his Palestinian dress on in order

to become a real Palestinian like his father, since he is fully saturated with American values, order,

thought, and lifestyle. It seems that Thafer has almost tried to forget his Arab roots and been

brainwashed even though he was closely following the war’s progress in Palestine, and this is clearly

evident once he tells Dr. Suhaila that he is largely astonished by the civilized manner the Arab oil

ministers have maintained during the conference:

I’m surprised by the civilized manner in which they conduct themselves … I’m

brainwashed. On television, in the movies, in the literature, in the newspapers, and

even in their schools and colleges the people of the United States are taught to see

Arabs as either camel herders and pearl fishermen or high-living billionaire sheikhs.

To them, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and even Saudi Arabia are

remote and backward lands. (147)

Thafer has willingly accepted to have America sway his own perception of the Arab world. Moreover,

he has found himself incapable of accepting corruption, autocracy, and socioeconomic status; he
 Al Suod 26

comes up with ideas with no real support and acceptance. Unexpectedly speaking, Thafer’s old home,

Palestine or Kuwait, has become his new home, and the United States has become his old home.

Thafer’s character in this novel is unique in the sense that he has tended to be Americanized

and forget all values and traditions associated with his old home although he is a first-generation Arab

American. First-generation Arab Americans tend to be keener on retaining their original traditions and

cultures than subsequent generations, which tend to be more Americanized. Thafer is an exception to

this general view of first-generation Arab Americans. Thus, Thafer in Dallal’s Scattered Like Seeds is

completely different from Poppy in Nye’s Habibi and Amal in Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, as they

are all first-generation Arab Americans.

Thafer’s four children, Colleen (his stepdaughter), Kathleen, Sean, and Andrew, have markedly

varying degrees of attachment to their old home and new home. These children have been brought up

without any emphasis on their Arab background. They initially know little about their dead

grandfather’s status among the Palestinian people, or about their still living grandmother, Jihan, as

well as the living conditions of Palestinians. In order for Thafer to assure a quiet and comfortable life

for himself and his family, he downplays revolutionary attitudes and fully assimilates into American

life and culture. However, the children detect a kind of attachment to the old home, Palestine, yet they

don’t have the appropriate channel through which they can articulate their feelings. This is particularly

evident in the way the children recoil with discomfort as a social studies teacher makes a negative

comment about Arabs; they sometimes personalize and internalize the Orientalist images they are

subjected to:

“I told my social studies teacher about that,” says Kathleen. She is Jewish and always

tells us that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. ‘There’s a reason why

they didn’t let your father in, Kathleen,’” Kathleen says, mimicking the way her

teacher spoke. “There must be a reason. Israel is a democracy.’ I got so mad, Dad, I

almost told her off, but I didn’t. (271)

 Al Suod 27

No wonder that Thafer’s children struggle in their new home in order to understand and unify their

scattered identities. Their struggle in the old home is also symbolic of Palestinian Americans; their

role signposts how the diaspora has also changed Arab Americans. Moreover, their role contextualizes

key matters in current Arab America. It’s not startling that Andrew and Colleen, both young and in

university, ask their father to go back to the United States: “‘Dad,” says Andrew, “Colleen and I have

been wondering if the two of us can go home as soon as we return to Kuwait” (287). In contrast,

Kathleen and Sean, still teenagers, seek to stay with their father in Kuwait or wherever he is:

“Kathleen and Sean want to stay in Kuwait a little longer” (287). Thafer’s children, including Thafer

himself, have a wide range of commitment to the United States, which mirrors the heterogeneity of

Arab Americans in America. Unlike Colleen and Andrew, Kathleen and Sean look to expand their

residence in Palestine and stay more in tune with the life in Kuwait because they have not fully

absorbed the life in the United States in order to consider it an indispensable space. Accordingly,

Thafer can be classified into Colleen and Andrew’s group of Arab Americans more than that of Sean

and Kathleen.

Sean and Kathleen are more attached to their old home than Thafer himself, and they undergo

experiences from feeling guilty at having avoided the poverty the Palestinian languish in under the

Israeli occupation of their land to revolutionary impulses, because such abject poverty is present in

their lives. The children’s actions imply the cultural schism between Palestinian Americans and those

who were born in America. While Thafer attempts mentally and psychologically to repatriate himself

to his original homeland and root, his children only know New York as their home.

Thafer inversely revisits the rigid concept and meaning of home, challenging its standard

characteristics of rootedness, comfort, warmth, and security. Because he doesn’t maintain

transnational networks and activities between Palestine or Kuwait and the United States, Thafer is not

able to construct a cultural and social personhood that embraces boundaries and the ability to function

within the two worlds. Thafer dramatically transcends the model of many Arab Americans who stick
 Al Suod 28

to their native homelands and live on their nostalgic dreams to return to their origins. In order for

Thafer to disengage himself from the meaning and concept of home as he moves to the United States,

he brings this concept of home with him and becomes more involved in deciphering the code of its

powerful grip on his life, especially after his marriage to Mary Patt. Unlike Poppy, Thafer is totally

preoccupied with investing in and gaining social recognition in the United States, and, thus, he doesn’t

make any effort to enhance his status in Palestine, for he aims at living forever in America and doesn’t

plan to go back at all. Thafer’s avoidance of building transnational links with his native home and of

establishing a stable, coherent, and secure definition of home finally doesn’t help him to better

understand his multiple homes and identities; subsequently, he fails miserably in identifying with and

feeling a connection to his native home and people.

 Al Suod 29

Chapter Two: Old Family and New Family

Family lies at the core of society in the Arab world and is also doomed as the backbone of

Islam. Islam speaks highly of the importance of family and considers all Muslims as brothers and

sisters belonging to the same nation. Within this nation, families are given prominence as units. Men

are given specific responsibilities toward their children and wives, wives are given duties regarding

how to treat their children and husbands, and children are instructed to honor their parents. Both men

and women are supposed to help each other in order to maintain and bolster the family unit in

accordance with the conventional codes of family and honor and are held responsible for the raising of

children. Family in the Arab world is perceived as patriarchal, for females are “taught to respect and

defer to their fathers, brothers, grandparents, and, at times, male cousins” (Joseph 195). In spite of all

cultural, economical, and social changes, the extended family still remains prevalent and crucial.

Marriage in the Arab world is another story because it’s governed by Islamic regulations; although

Islam is not the only religion practiced in the Arab world, it dominates it. The family is the keystone of

Arab American culture as well, despite some differences from one country to another as far as the

degree of its supremacy. Living in America drastically changes this emphasis on family structure and

values.

In America, large families are viewed as an economic burden that it’s not easy to bear, and

people tend toward nuclear families; however, Arab Americans exhibit a strong attachment to their

extended families; they have a communal and collective nature. Apart from generalization, there are

two different kinds of Arab American families: the militant Arab American family and the liberal Arab

American family. All the Arab American families in the three Arab American novels belong to the

second type – liberal Arab American families – which manifests the bitter conflict between the old

family and the new family. Arab American men and women interact easily with customers, clients,

workers and others who are not Arab, but at home, the relations between the family members reflects

the noteworthy effects of the Middle East (Kayyali 68).

 Al Suod 30

Therefore, this issue of old family and new family should be focused on in relation to three key

areas: (1) identifying family values that are predominant in the Arab world and their development over

time, which constitutes an essential context for a better understanding of Arab American patterns; (2)

the kind of conflict in the adjustment to the new life in the new family; and (3) the difference in the

customs, values, lifestyle, and language in the new family compared to the old family.

The discussion of cultural hybridity is considered apt to the different issues represented in the

three novels, as the main characters are examples of individuals with backgrounds whose identities are

formed and influenced by the multicultural American society in which they dwell. Cultural hybridity

is not restricted to the physical features of human beings such as the shape and color of eyes, skin,

hair, but rather goes beyond these attributes. Hybridity implies reconfiguration and redefinition of

identity and culture. In this regard, Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture states that “hybridity is

the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity. It displays the necessary deformation and

displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination” (159). It’s worth noticing that the

commingling of cultural practices within a multicultural society causes this reconfiguration,

remapping, and redefinition of identity.

The characters in the three novels face numerous living difficulties involved in their adjustment

to the new life in the old home because the customs, values, lifestyle, and language in the new family

are totally different compared to the old family. Despite the cultural and regional differences among

Amal in Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, Liyana and Thafer in Nye’s Habibi and Dallal’s Scattered

Like Seeds, all of them suffer from difficulties in their attempts to adjust to the Arab or American side

of their identity. Unlike all other chapters, this chapter dedicates the largest part to and begins with

Nye’s Habibi as it provides ample and plausible insights into the issue of old family and new family.

Nye in Habibi presents a protagonist, Liyana, a second-generation Arab American, who is going

through a conflict with two families with two different cultures marking her own identity. The conflict

between the old family and the new family draws a portrait of the relationship between both the
 Al Suod 31

Western and Eastern cultures and the big gap between them. Nye is fully aware of the ambivalent

situation second-generation children face and is careful to make her characters, including Poppy, voice

their confirmations and confusions.

The conflicts in Nye’s Habibi are harsh, personalized, and refreshingly sophisticated, which

means that they are less Oriental and wider in scope. After creating a strong attachment to the past,

Nye sets some circumstances that enable the characters, especially Liyana, to actively react to them

with regards to the new and old families. After certain arguments, the characters showcase their actual

identity. In making Liyana accompany her family to Palestine, Nye establishes a sense of physical

reality for the past. Liyana feels the clash of the dissimilar American and Palestinian cultures before

she sets foot in Palestine once she packs her shorts in preparation to travel to Palestine; her father,

Poppy, promptly asks her not to pack them because Palestinians, including his family, don’t wear them

there, yet she agonizingly replies to him that this is not true as she has “seen pictures of Jerusalem and

some people are definitely wearing shorts,” but Poppy, for being defensive of the cultural principles

set there, replies to her, “they are tourists. Maybe they’re pilgrims. We are going to be spending time

in older places where shorts won’t be appropriate. Believe me, Arab women don’t wear shorts” (19).

Liyana already realizes that descent into the holy land is accompanied with clashes and differences.

This is the first incident for Liyana to undergo hybridity experience even before she meets her new

family. As a result, this issue of cultural belonging comes to the fore which drives Liyana to get mad

and tells her father: “I’m not a woman or a full Arab, either one! I’m just a half-half, woman-girl,

Arab-American” (20). Liyana starts early her struggle between belonging to a certain cultural identity

and dissociating from it to fulfill the requirements of fitting in the new family. Hybridity is a concept

devised by Homi Bhabha, who maintains that hybridity is the synthesis of two incompatible cultural

identities that gives rise to the formation of a third, transcendent identity. Thus, Liyana’s being torn by

the conflict between the old family and the new family makes her feel most of the time like an

abnormal person: she lives in a confused state of mind as she yearns to have an identity evenly situated
 Al Suod 32

within her two cultures. The new family insists that Liyana adhere to their cultural values and

traditions so that she can successfully live her new life in Palestine. Moreover, the cultural space is to

be understood in terms of the hyphen connecting her identity as an American and an Arab. Liyana’s

words divulge abysmal conflict between the West and the East; it demonstrates that Liyana, a

multicultural character, is unable to determine which culture or family she has to belong to. Most

importantly, the ghost of the new family in the Middle East for the second generation is sometimes a

source of curse, homelessness, and suppression. Liyana initially doesn’t and is unwilling to conform to

the conventions imposed by the new family and society.

The first difference, though not a conflict yet, Liyana observes once she arrives in Jerusalem is

how her new family acts in a non-American way as they come to welcome her family: “a huge crowd

of relatives burst into the room, bustling, hugging, pinching cheeks, and jabbering loudly” (40). For

Liyana, her new relatives are not like those she has met before. Therefore, she keeps comparing the

behaviors of the two families:

In the United States their family (except for Peachy Helen, who always acted cozy)

held back from them politely as if they might have a cold. Uncle Leo had never

hugged Liyana yet. He shook her hand like an insurance man. Aunt Margaret spoke

formally to children, about general subjects. Are you enjoying the summer? Do you

have nice friends? … Liyana was being kissed by so many people whose exact

identity was unknown to her. (40-42)

The level of affection and excitement Liyana observes in her new family dramatically different from

that exhibited by her American relatives reflects how close-knit the Middle Eastern families ties are,

and Arab families in particular. This moment reveals the density of interconnections among people

within a family. This kind of “enthusiastic welcome” greatly pleases Liyana because she comes to

know that they “landed in the proper hemisphere” (42). By the same token, Liyana keeps noticing the

traditional dresses the Palestinian men and women wear and curiously wondering how they put them
 Al Suod 33

on. Moreover, Liyana likes the women’s curiosity when they touch her earlobes as she doesn’t wear

gold earrings. Liyana, Rafik and their mother stand very close to Poppy in order to translate Arabic

and keep them posted on what the Palestinians relatives are saying. What astonishes Liyana much

more is the coming of other people from outside the family: “The grocer showed up, and the

postmaster, and the principal of the village school, and the neighbor, Abu Mahmoud, who grew

famous green beans, and all of their wives and babies and teenagers and cats” (54). Consequently, the

reader needs to rethink the concept of family in the Arab world, because, through this observation, the

reader comes to realize that this concept of family is by far broader than that of the United States;

rather, the family in the Arab world doesn’t only comprise its members and relatives, but it also

includes some people surrounding it, forming a new sort of family extended to the other members of

the community.

The first conflict arises between Liyana and her new family when her uncle Zaki, Poppy’s elder

brother, asks for her hand for his son. Liyana feels furious and upset because jumping into marriage

without knowing enough about uncle Zaki’s son is a serious decision not made in the United States

and, thus, goes against all her expectations; she cynically realizes that marriage in the Arab world is an

unproblematic undertaking. This proposal sets up Poppy’s first collision with his old family’s outdated

customs: “We don’t embrace such archaic customs, and furthermore, does she look ready to be

married? She is fourteen years old” (60). In the Arab world, some families, regardless of religion –

Islam or Christianity – tend to marry their sons and daughters from within the same extended family

and set a prohibition to marry outside it. But this tradition of marriage is in decline nowadays, with no

one forced to marry only from within the same family. On a similar occasion, Poppy rejects one of the

tradition that anyone returning from America should buy every female relative a bolt of cloth for

making a new dress:

She thought I was going to park the car and come back and pick out a huge piece of

red velvet for her. But instead I drove around the block and came straight home… The
 Al Suod 34

old customs have to be changed somehow? Little by little. I told her I thought it was a

stupid custom while we were sitting here – but she was relentless. So –as easily as she

appeared in our house, I disappeared. She’ll get over it. (82)

Poppy can no longer abide by such old-fashioned traditions, and he is now confronting his old family,

rebelling against all old habits, and deciding to bring things back to proper order. Eventually, Poppy’s

strong feeling of being relieved upon his return to Palestine abates as he confronts the inevitable

realities there

Liyana feels upset at the huge number of her relatives in the new family, because she is used to

the nuclear families in the United States; and her new relatives keep staring at her as if she is “an

exotic animal in a zoo,” resulting in an intense feeling of being awkward around her relatives, as she

thinks that they have “more in mind for her than she could ever have dreamed” (60). Therefore, she is

over-joyed when her uncles and aunts depart to another village to attend a wedding ceremony: “Liyana

liked having fewer people around” (90). Liyana interprets the behavior of her new extended family as

pressure to behave like them and comply with their culture

When an Arab boy gets mercilessly beaten up by a girl’s brothers after they catch them off

guard kissing each other, Liyana’s personal conflicts with her new family soar. Such conflicts are as

complex as the challenges of resolving them are problematic:

She wished she had not heard that an Arab boy who was found kissing a girl in the

alley behind her house got beaten up by the girl’s brothers. What was wrong with

kissing? Everybody else kissed constantly over here –but on both cheeks, not on the

mouth. Had people reverted to the Stone Age just because everything in Jerusalem

was made of Stone? (61)

Liyana can’t help understanding the new culture and customs she is being exposed to, as she measures

America’s customs by Palestine’s. Public kissing, especially the romantic one – the one on the mouth

– is forbidden and not allowed in Palestine; Arabs are very strict about such kissing. In this regard,
 Al Suod 35

Randa Kayyali in her book The Arab Americans remarks that “parents threaten their children who

engage in taboo behaviors with jeopardizing their reputations and so limiting their prospects of finding

a spouse” (74). This quotation clearly interprets the reason why the girl’s brothers ruthlessly beat up

the boy; rather, the brothers are blinded by the traditional conviction of their family’s honor and

preoccupied by the fear of losing such honor.

When Liyana combs her long hair out on the front balcony of their house, her father, Poppy,

instantly warns her not to be public about it and not to make a display lest one of his family members

or relatives should see her; this confrontation fairly drives Liyana to hate her new family and the entire

community. She longs for her life in America: “If I were at home on a beach I could run up and down

the sand with just a bathing suit on and no one would even notice me. I could wear my short shorts

that I didn’t bring and hold a boy’s hand in the street without causing an earthquake. I could comb my

wet hair in public for a hundred dumb years” (125). Liyana draws a grim picture of her experience,

one loaded with the reality of feeling lost from her old home and horribly dropped into a new family in

a new different home. She paints a dim picture of the new family – a cold and conservative family

rather than a glittering image of a family filled with reasonable freedom. Thus, Liyana in Palestine

experiences frustration, dispersion, and a split vision which results in her being torn between the two

homes and families. What raises attention is the behavior of Rafik, Liyana’s brother, who declares that

he does want to live in Palestine forever: “‘Do you like it here?’ she asked Rafik. To her greatest

surprise, he answered, ‘Yes.’ He hoped they would stay here forever” (99). Liyana is unable to find a

place for herself in the new family and community, and she is a typical representation of American-

born Arab Americans trapped in the same existential hell. What she later comes to realize is that by

surrendering the rest of her days to a new strong friendship she can find stability and acceptance,

which would help diminish her escalating homesickness.

Liyana’s new family, including her father, rejects her friendship with Omer, a Jewish friend,

and looks upon it as a sort of unquestionably forbidden relationship. Her mother, moreover, out of fear
 Al Suod 36

of dire consequences for non-compliance, gets pointedly shocked and dismayed, warning her of this

terribly illicit relationship:

Liyana could see right then she had rounded the bend were conversations with her

parents were no longer going to be as easy as they once were … Liyana! This is his

[Poppy’s] country. It is a very conservative country. People have supposedly even

been killed! For little indiscretions! I realize you are not a villager and don’t have to

live by their old-fashioned codes. Just remember your father won’t like it if he knows

about it. (160-161)

Once again, for Arabs in general, social and religious values determine when friendship is good and

when it is bad. Nobles and Sciarra quotes Najjar’s words about the cultural differences regarding

women: “I know that the women’s movement in this country (United States) has yet a long way to go,

but compared to the restrictions on women my society has, this culture is liberating” (6). Here, the

reader can find that this relationship is conceived as the turning point for Liyana to challenge the

customs and traditions of the new family. Liyana’s strong attachment to the United States and her past

coupled with her vision of challenging and improving the conventional Palestinian-Israeli relationship,

are motivations behind her choice to resort to keeping hold of her relationship with Omer. At first,

Liyana agrees to put up with the family’s rules, but it later on proves to be a tentative agreement

before she ultimately finds light. Therefore, she starts firing arrows of criticism toward her father,

Poppy, without hesitation, reminding him of his Jewish neighbors and friends: “Remember when you

told us how you had Jewish neighbors and friends when you were going up here? Remember how we

had plenty of Jewish friends back in the United States” (171). In order to justify to herself and to

others this unwanted relationship, Liyana announces that she is American not Arab: “I am an

American … people should be able to get over their differences but this time, but they just stay mad”

(165). Liyana finds the environment unhealthy for her to develop her personality, practice her life, and

find a place for herself in the new home and family. Furthermore, her clinging to her American
 Al Suod 37

identity and despising the Palestinian one adds to her cultural alienation and substantiates her

otherness in the new home and family.

Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin forces the reader to take a fresh look of one of the

defining political and psychological conflicts of our time. As far as the conflict between the old family

and the new family is concerned, Amal goes through two stages in America with regard to the new

family: (1) the challenge to keep up her old family’s traditions and values; and (2) the impact of the

traumatic past and conflict in Palestine on her relationship with her new family, namely her daughter

Sarah. Compared to Nye’s Habibi, this novel doesn’t contain ample evidence on the conflict between

the old family and the new family, because it’s a politically loaded novel presenting the reality of the

conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.

This issue emerges when Amal travels to America to study at Temple University in

Philadelphia after she is granted a scholarship. Her foreignness and accent become a barrier as she

flounders in the United States, trying to fit in, but The first problem that Amal encounters in her new

temporary family is her inability to culturally understand Lisa’s father who lives with his girlfriend

and comes to visit his family occasionally, feeling that it is “an odd arrangement” (170). The first

observation that slips into Amal’s mind is the comparison between the house of her new temporary

family and that of her old family:

At the door, my eyes widened to take in the enormity of their home, the likes of which

I had never imagined. Money flaked off the air of its oversized, immaculate rooms,

and I could barely comprehend that Lisa and her mother lived alone, with part-time

domestic help, in that expanse…. I stretched my limbs in a large, soft sea of white

linen and down soaking up the fatigue from my jet-lagged body. (171)

As a poor Palestinian, she doesn’t have the capacity to absorb this sudden change and cope with

unexpected cultural surprises as she has endured very lamentable material circumstances back in

Palestine. Therefore, she avails of the past in order to get a grip on herself and feel secure: “as if to
 Al Suod 38

brace myself with context in that big bed, I reached to the past, moving my hand over the mangled

skin of my belly. Snuggled in luxury on the threshold of a world that brimmed with as much promise

as uncertainty, I was starting a new life. But like the scar beneath my hand, the past was still with me”

(171). Entering into a spiral of the new world and family serves as a real war against the old world

and the old family as everything is utterly different and requires new adjustments and considerations.

After Amal moves into the dorm with the help of Lisa, a new web of friends is made; Amal’s

friends would somewhat serve as her new family in America. The closest friend to Amal is Kelly who

helps her and makes conversation with her, too. The first conflict arises when Elana Rivers, a

wisecracker with a massive bosom, frequently refers to her as “ay-rab” or as “the rag head” (172).

Abulhawa introduces Elana Rivers as a portrayal of the ugly face of racist oppression against ethnic

people in the United States. How Rivers conceives Amal’s hijab “veil” resonates with Trinh Minh-

ha’s notion of racial discrimination. With regard to veiling, she says:

If the act of unveiling has a liberating potential, so does the act of veiling. It all

depends on the context in which such an act is carried out or,…on how and where

women see dominance. Difference should be defined neither by the dominant sex nor

by the dominant culture. So when women decide to lift the veil, one can say that they

do so in defiance of their men’s oppressive right to their bodies. But when they decide

to keep or put on the veil they once took off, they might do so to reappropriate their

space or claim a new difference in defiance of genderless, hegemonic, centered

standardization. (196)

Minh-ha argues for respecting the difference that would be utilized as a tool of resistance and help

promote a better understanding of identity, thus rejecting any monolithic or homogenous identity and

body as well.

In order to add insult to injury, Amal’s amusement is drained away as Elana comes toward her

and asks her, “Have you ever had sex?” (172). Taken by surprise, Amal feels dismayed and keeps her
 Al Suod 39

lips sealed as she has never had sex before or even kissed a boy. Amal is fully aware that she has

fallen into the trap of deeply rooted psychological and biased ideological stereotyping; such

stereotypes are, as Bhabha maintains in The Location of Culture, “fixed and static constructions of the

other as the subject of colonial discourse” (70). A year passes in America, with Amal running circles

around all her colleagues at the university. Influenced by her friends and life in America, Amal starts

to feel diminished, out of place, and impatient for change. In the absence of people from her old family

to get ahold of, a feeling of inadequacy marks her life after the first year in California; she decides to

belong to America at any expense and to step on the past and her family’s honor regardless of her

psychological conflict:

But every house has its demons. I metamorphosed into unclassified Arab-Western

hybrid, unrooted and unknown. I drank alcohol and dated several men – acts that

would have earned me repudiation in Jenin. I spun in cultural vicissitude, wandering

in and out of the American ethos until I lost my way. I fell in love with Americans and

even felt that love reciprocated. I lived in the present, keeping the past hidden away. I

didn’t write to Huda, not to Muna or the Colombian Sisters. (174)

These words are illustrative of the hybridity that Amal is suffering from; she is torn between two

cultures and she feels that she can’t assimilate any of them, living all the time in between. Bhabha

asserts that “persons who have lived in more than one culture or who straddle two or more cultures are

‘hybrids’ who create ‘counter-narratives’ that both invoke and erase cultural boundaries (cited in

Bystydzienski 50).‫ ‏‬Amal lives in an obvious state of hybridity, for she evokes social, religious, and

cultural boundaries between her and her new home and family, yet at other times she purposely erases

them. However, she starts to lose the very bases of her personality. To top it off, Amal suffers from

distortion which is symptomatic of hybridity; she fails to connect herself with her cultural values and

heritage as she has premeditatedly dislocated herself from her native roots. Thus, Amal doesn’t

succeed in maintaining a sustainable and solid balance between the two cultures of the old family and
 Al Suod 40

her new adopted one, making the gap between the two cultures more inevitable and unavoidable. Amal

suffers from the coldness of uprootedness, disorientation, and estrangement in her new adopted home

and family, an extreme state of instability provoked by her being cut off from her native home and

family.

During the second phase of Amal’s stay in America after she gives birth to her daughter Sarah,

a new episode of conflict with her daughter and community unfolds. Tears slide down Amal’s cheeks

as she turns into a woman of walls, with no emotions, after the death of her husband, Majid, in

Palestine. She nourishes her daughter’s body for the sake of duty, and she holds her “emotions in a

tight fist and hard jaw” (230). Her defense pricks anyone who dares to come near her, including her

daughter Sarah, though she secretly relishes her scent while she is sleeping at night. It’s obvious that

the Palestinian cause plays a vital role in negatively influencing the behavior of the individual at the

family level and at the community level. At the family level, this nuclear family has lost one of its

members, Majid, who has been killed by the Israelis, which causes the mother, Amal, stunned by the

death of her husband, to sink into a deep depression in which she lacks any sense of motherhood. The

absence of the father from Amal’s family, or any Arab family, is emblematic of the loss of protected,

safe, and sheltered home. Amal’s family, profoundly affected by the war that took her husband away,

now houses hunger, emotionlessness, and insecurity rather than safety and warmth. The devastating

impacts of war have considerably changed her approach to family and home in the United States.

At the community level, Amal scorns at the materialistic preoccupations of the people around

her as utterly unimportant. She becomes desperate and helpless as she is dragged into a world and

family devoid of her past and any viable source and motif:

I was a woman of few words and no friends. I was Amy. A name drained of meaning.

Amal, long or short vowel, emptied of hope. Only practical language could pass the

lump in my throat, formed there from love that meanders in the soot of a story that
 Al Suod 41

almost was. My life savored of ash and I lived with the perpetual silence of a song that

has no voice. In my bitterness and fear, I felt as alone as loneliness dares to be. (245)

Now, Amal doesn’t confront or challenge her old family’s customs and culture in America, yet she

goes through a different curve, namely the impact of what happens to her old family on her behavior

and approaches to life in the United States.

Unlike Nye’s Habibi that presents Poppy with the goal of preserving the old heritage, Shaw

Dallal in Scattered Like Seeds, through Thafer’s character, has come into the fact that being American

violates the very essence of rootedness and heritage imposed by the old family. The novel draws the

reader to the conclusion that the United States is the promised land of diverse people from different

ethnic groups, all with a broad spectrum of dreams, ambitions and conflicts. Dallal destabilizes the

trope of ethnic people as being intrinsically, nostalgically attached to their ethnic past. He suggests

that conflicts and problems should not be tackled by a nostalgic yearning for the past, which ultimately

prevents the nostalgic from placing their ethnicity within a larger context and relating it to other

ethnicities within American society. The style Dallal uses to deconstruct the ethnic past is fraught with

gloominess, coming out with different fresh perspectives; however, it definitely makes up a very

profound and sophisticated subject for ethnic representation. Thus, Thafer’s assimilation of his wife’s

culture and lifestyle can be seen as a kind of ‘destabilizing hybridity,’ a notion devised by Pieterse F.

Beyer, that “blurs the canon, reverses the current, subverts the centre” (277). Thafer shows no sign of

hybridity, for he has erased the cultural and religious boundaries and barriers that separate him from

his new family and home, thus distancing himself from the centre.

Thafer encounters formidable challenges with his old family and relatives displaced across

different Arab countries. When Thafer’s plane lands in Beirut, Lebanon, he smells psychological

warfare unrelentingly approaching him once some relatives of his old family drive him to a poverty-

stricken camp in Beirut. He starts to feel a weird sensation sending a chill over his body, and his heart

also starts to beat hard out of fear and discomfiture:

 Al Suod 42

Thafer feels strange driving through the wide, clean streets of Beirut with the two

Palestinian brothers… Suddenly, he is uneasy. There is an abrupt change as they enter

a rubble-strewn street. Decaying, crumbling buildings appear. Some are charred… He

is appalled as they enter the refugee camp. He looks at the shacks of the Palestinian

refugees, at the people, the elderly men and women, the children, the cars, and the

animals in the narrow, dirty streets. The smell is sickening… Now Thafer’s unease is

mixed with fear. He gazes at the young Palestinians and tries to assess them. (45-46)

Thafer holds a sort of discomfort with himself as he feels acutely that he seems insensitive, yet he is

both terrified and captivated by the Palestinians living in the camp. Thafer recognizes that those

Palestinians identify him as an American not as an Arab or even as a Palestinian, which suggests why

they direct ruthless arrows of criticism toward him and toward American support of Israel. Moreover,

what adds to this psychological warfare is his being deeply saddened by the view of the decaying

houses and pitiful living conditions Palestinian families must endure, robustly reproaching himself as

he has lived in a wealthy suburb in New York and never worked to help his family and people in

Palestine.

Thafer feels down when Hani Amri, one of his relatives, tells him about his father, Ayoub

Allam, a famed leader of the Palestinian 1936-1939 rebellion, and his brothers: “Your father, Thafer,

was a great man. He devoted his life to defending the homeland. He was a military genius, one of the

best of his generation… Your brothers, Kamal and Rassem, and I did our share in 1948, Thafer. Now

you and Adnan must carry the torch” (51-52). Thafer feels uncomfortable and gets terrified by the idea

of joining the armed struggle to free his homeland; and his relatives accuse him of becoming terrified

at the idea because he has lived away from Palestine for a long time. However, Thafer doesn’t only

reject this idea because of fear, but because he doesn’t “believe that armed struggle is the answer”

(53). Thafer believes in a peaceful solution other than fighting and wars that breed more violence, but

he is charged with proposing American solutions to the Palestinian cause.

 Al Suod 43

The conflict reaches its climax when Adnan Amri, Thafer’s relative, with a scornful smile, tells

Thafer that he will never settle in the Middle East because he is attached to the United States much

more than Palestine and the Middle East. Thafer, however, answers him, saying, “I’m attached to both,

to the land of my birth and of my ancestors, and to the United States, the Land where my children

were born” (55). What Thafer means by these words is that his adaption to the new home in the United

States represents neither a refusal of the old home and family with their culture and customs nor an all-

inclusive acceptance of all aspects of life in the new adopted home. Nevertheless, Adnan harshly

replies with touching yet appalling words that reflect both his need for Thafer and his wrath against

him: “If all Palestinian youth were to do what you did, then Palestine would lose its best-educated

people at a time when it needs them most. There are thousands like you in the United States. It doesn’t

need you. We don’t have anyone like you, and we need you” (55). Adnan’s expressive words signify

the fact that Palestine needs its youth more than the United States does, and that Thafer should serve

Palestine and its people. They also signal the agonizing feelings that Adnan has as a war refugee.

Thafer’s family and relatives are unable or don’t want to understand that Thafer has gone through

substantial changes in the United States and he is no longer the same person who left his home twenty

years ago. His wife, Mary Pat, lends him a hand to experience a new psychological and mental rebirth:

“she tamed and refined me” (56). His family and relatives insist that he should take after his father,

taking up arms and fighting Israel.

Thafer spends all of his time with his family and relatives answering their political questions

about America’s foreign policy, attitude, support, the role of the Zionist lobby in the USA, and his

perspective on the future of the Palestinian cause. He tries his best to avoid saying “anything arrogant

or cocky” (11) and not to appear condescending, since his family and relatives are a bitter people.

Thafer’s brother, Kamal, who is living in Jordan, gets mad at Thafer and is getting critical of his

passion and attachment to the United States, because Thafer refuses to help him and the Palestinians to
 Al Suod 44

launch a nuclear program in Palestine to introduce it into the conflict with Israel; Thafer’s brother

considers it as an issue of survival because Israel has introduced it with the help of the United States:

The mere thoughts of taking part in something so potentially devastating gives me the

shivers. I just can’t do it. Please forgive me. And I promise on Ayoub Allam’s grave

that I’ll always do my best to help our people return to the homeland. I’ll always be a

Palestinian, proud of my roots and of my heritage, but I don’t want to be involved in

violence, I want to think of alternatives to violence and destruction and war. (138)

It’s natural to for Arab Americans to become the target of criticism by their old family and relatives

once they pay the Middle East a visit. Neither Thafer’s self nor his native homeland remains static;

they incessantly change and shift, and this change spells out the need for a solution utterly different

from holding guns: the sitting at the dialogue table to come up with a solution satisfying all conflicting

parties and putting an end to the escalating violence.

Thafer’s four children compare the way they are welcomed by the members of their new family

in Palestine and by their old family relatives. They are warmly welcomed, with men kissing and

embracing the male children as well as only shaking hands with the female children. Kathleen

remembers that her grandmother, her mother’s mother, has neither hugged nor kissed them, and how

cold her maternal uncle was when he shakes her hand as if he had been a visitor. In Palestine, Thafer’s

children are astonished by the kindness, generosity, and goodness of their new family members. They,

however, feel nervous and uncomfortable because of the countless political questions raised by their

new relatives, which creates a growing feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty about how to respond to

them: “After dinner, the relatives are more relaxed, but Thafer is uneasy. This is the time my relatives

ask their political questions… I’m sure they won’t embarrass me or my children. Without warning the

question comes… Thafer is horrified. He looks at his stepdaughter [Colleen] and can see the anxiety

on her flushed, fair face” (273). In general, the children start to love their new family, feel for them,
 Al Suod 45

and sow hatred toward their American government for its indifference to what is happening to the

people in Palestine.
 Al Suod 46

Chapter Three: War: Dialectics of Memory and Peace

As a result of the ills and heartrending ramifications brought by the Arab-Israeli wars, the Arab

American characters in the three novels were stung by their fire which has variably affected their life

and attitudes. So, in this chapter I’m critically and elaborately exploring two major war-related areas:

(1) unpacking the concept of memory attached to the Arab American characters and showcasing the

various kinds of memory they have processed and undergone; and (2) displaying chances of bringing

peace to Palestine so that Palestinians and Israelis can live in harmony and foster respect for other

people and cultures, and whether or not the three Arab American authors go hand in hand with Edward

Said, Roland Stockton, Jack Shaheen, and Douglas Little.

The first full-scale war between Arabs and Israelis was in 1948, in which all the Arab countries

adjacent to Israel participated; in addition, what was known as the Army of the Arab Rescue and

thousands of other volunteers from Muslim countries participated in it. As for Israel, forces of

different Jewish organizations participated in the war after they had been founded and supported

during the British occupation of Palestine before the declaration of the establishment of the State of

Israel in May 1948. The direct result of this war was the defeat of the Arabs preceded and followed by

the displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland and their new status as refugees in other

Arab countries. In 1948, more than half of the Palestinians were expelled from their towns and

villages, largely by “a deliberate Israeli policy of ‘transfer’ and ethnic cleansing” (Masalha 73).The

1967 war is the war that broke out among Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria on June 5, 1967; this war

resulted in Israel’s occupation of Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Golan, and it’s considered

the third war within the Arab-Israeli conflict. Consequently, tens of thousands of civilians, living in

the cities of the Suez Canal in Egypt and Quneitra governate in Syria, were displaced; and, similarly,

tens of thousands of Palestinians residing in the West Bank were violently dislocated within and

beyond the borders of Palestine, including wiping entire villages off the map and opening the door of

settlement in East Jerusalem and the West Bank to Judaize the land.
 Al Suod 47

The major characters in the three novels are sorely plagued with the memory of the

dramatically bloody scenes that happened and are still happening in Palestine in the wake of the

ominous Arab-Israeli War of 1948, recurrently drawing collective comparisons of Palestine before and

after the war. The characters are forced, due to multifarious circumstances, to immigrate to the United

States during the war, and they go back to Palestine when the war is temporarily over; they are caught

up with the memory of the past with its easy and difficult times. The three authors do condemn the

policy of the United States against Palestinians, as it is the one that supports Israel to launch war

against Palestine and other Arab countries. In her novel Mornings in Jenin, Suzan Abulhawa describes

how the Palestinians were happy and pleased in their houses and farms and how secure they were

before the Israeli occupation of Palestine and its aftermath, setting forth the situation before the war

and the fatal consequences brought about after that war. The first section of this chapter is devoted to

interpreting and exploring the concept of memory and whether its impact as it’s actually conceived

continues to influence the Arab American characters despite their long stay in the United States.

Before the Arab-Israeli war begins, Amal’s family and grandparents lives in “a small village

east of Haifa” that lives “quietly on figs and olives, open frontiers and sunshine” (3). Every

November, the harvest week brings renewed vigor to the people there to the extent that they feel it in

their bones, lucidly bearing out the happiness and stability they enjoy at that time under their free will.

Women help men during the harvest season by hoisting a basket of olives, urns, and belongings on

their heads and proceeding down the hills. To maximize their harvest-related cheerfulness, some men

“leaned into the breeze, blew softly into the mouthpiece of” their nyes, and “felt the music emerge

from the tiny holes beneath” their fingertips (6). All things considered, Palestinians were safe and

peaceful in their houses and farms, but their safety dissipates after the Israeli 1948 occupation of their

land. Once the war erupts in 1948, anxiety knots in Palestinians’ chests, in their hearts, and makes

their “head spin” and “legs weaken,” leading to their houses and lands being occupied and having the

new Jewish immigrants housed in the buildings and houses vacated by Palestinians who were violently
 Al Suod 48

driven from their country and homes (21). The author minutely touches on the historical account of the

Nakba that is memorialized as the catastrophic uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians

from their country, the supreme injustice that demands Palestinians’ right of return to their homes and

lands.

There are two different kinds of memory associated with the life of the Palestinian immigrant

after the war: autobiographical memory and traumatic memory. Abulhawa’s protagonist, Amal, falls

under the power of traumatic memory that ceaselessly haunts all her life in the United States. Amal

grapples with memories of trauma back in Palestine and is haunted by the ghosts of killing in cold

blood, rotting corpses, and injustice. Most psychologists concur that traumatic memories are not stored

in people’s minds as exact copies or reproductions of the past; rather, they are an alterable

reproduction of the past which is influenced by present-day elements and the prevailing details of the

past. While this argument can’t be applied to the case of Amal after the death of her husband, it could

be typical of Thafer’s case in Scattered Like Seeds. The theorist Daniel Schacter in his book Searching

for Memory contends that traumatic memory is “frequently more accurate than memory for ordinary

events,” adding that vivid traumatic memory recollections are, “characterized by intense and absorbing

visual imagery” (205-216). According to the current frustrating events and changes, Amal retrieves the

most psychologically destructive, emotionally baleful aspects of her everlasting trauma.

Having arrived in the United States to pursue her BA and MA at Temple University in

Philadelphia, everything Amal meets unswervingly forces her to retrieve the traumatic memory of her

native past. All Amal’s efforts to start a life in America devoid of her past with its devastating memory

ends in failure, because the past is “still with me [her]” (174). Amal is readily susceptible to being

incited into prodding herself to look into the abyss that separates her from the people surrounding her.

One such moment is when she remembers an overflowing sewer in Jenin refugee camp:

During the sewage incident that gave our college house its nickname, the commotion

provoked memories of Jenin, where the open sewers sometimes overflowed and we
 Al Suod 49

would scramble, gathering old clothes and towels to plug the joints of our dwellings.

Vile as the experience and subsequent cleanup were, Huda and I could not contain our

excitement and anticipation at being allowed to sleep on the roof to escape the foul

odor… We were naively full of dreams and hope then, blessedly unware that we were

the world’s rubbish, left to tread in its own misery and excrement. (174)

Amal is left with memory flashes of her horrifically disturbing and disgusting experience in Jenin

camp. After the 1967 war, the Israelis expel Amal and her family their home and force them to live in

a canvas tent in the Jenin refugee camp, which stands as a continuing reminder of their displacement

and ongoing refusal to forfeit the right of return to the former lands and homes. The recollection of

such traumatic experiences affects people in striking ways. Kai Erikson interprets the effect of trauma

on the status of memory:

Traumatized people often scan the surrounding world anxiously for signs of danger,

breaking into explosive rages and reacting with a start to ordinary sights and sounds,

but at the same time, all that nervous activity takes place against a numbed gray

background of depression, feelings of helplessness … Above all, trauma involves a

continual reliving of some wounding experience in daydreams and nightmares,

flashbacks and hallucinations, and in a compulsive seeking out of similar

circumstances. (184)

Amal cannot control these harrowing flashes of memory, which spoil her new life in the United States

even as they blur her native past and present.

During the second phase of Amal’s stay in America, and especially after the death of her

husband, Majid, who is killed by Israeli soldiers, she firmly abstains from most of life’s pleasures and

starts to lose contact with life itself. Amal narrates what Israel did to the PLO when it was striking

back against it in Beirut on the pretext that its aim was self-defense:
 Al Suod 50

Bombs and more bodies to receive them. I prayed and called the Red Cross… The

results were 17,500 civilians killed, 40,000 wounded, 400,000 homeless, and 10,000

without shelter. Prostrate, Lebanon lay devastated and raped, with no infrastructure

for food or water. Israel claimed it had been forced to invade for peace. “We are here

for peace. This is a peacekeeping mission.” (219)

This evocation of the war and its apocalyptic consequences is utterly conductive to fathoming the fact

that Amal lives in a terrible fright, trying to relate what happened to her husband to the tragedy of

thousands of Palestinians inside and outside Palestine. Amal has become so riveted on her war

experiences that it’s difficult for her to recollect any other times in her life; it’s a natural yet negative

reaction to the dilemma connected with traumatic memory. Her dreams and hopes get shrunk into

scenes of blood, shelling, and everything that is unconnected to normal human existence. Amal’s scars

of war would not heal because they have lurked into and lodged in her subconscious mind. The

negative impacts of the war haunting Amal are of long-term duration and so intense that Amal is no

longer able to cope with her surroundings, making her both psychologically and behaviorally unstable:

“I was a word drained of any meaning”; “My life savored of ash and I lived with the perpetual silence

of a song that has no voice” (178,245). The problem lies in the fact that Amal doesn’t look for any

way possible to regain her sense of well-being, and she is justly held responsible for brewing some

aspects of this trouble: she is not going the extra mile to heal at least partially from this traumatic

memory in order to rear her daughter in a somewhat healthy atmosphere.

To top it off, the most traumatic experience for Amal emerges when she receives the news of

the atrocious killing of her brother’s wife, Fatima, and her children at the hands of Israeli soldiers:

‘“They ripped my Fatima’s belly with a knife! … They killed my babies!’ His sobs shook the ground

beneath my fear and I thought the force of his grief would tear the sun to pieces. He hurled objects

within his reach … He cried with no measure of control, gripped in a seizure of pain… I imagined

myself screaming at Philadelphians, who went about their daily American lives” (228). This
 Al Suod 51

unbearable incident seems to have subconsciously killed Amal because she has grown as emotionless

and lifeless as a stone. Much to her close friend’s chagrin, she doesn’t show any passion or affection

toward her daughter who unstintingly comes to her dripping with caring and loving need. Amal

doesn’t bring up any of the disturbing moments from her own past or even present to talk over with

any of her friends; she has no drive to touch base with friends in the quest of finding a solution to her

trauma.

Amal’s traumatic memory has put her in a state of extreme insecurity and confusion, and, thus,

she is unable to reconstruct a sound identity, for memory holds an overwhelming grip on reconfiguring

one’s self and identity. Amal’s past situations shape the present, and so does the present for the future,

since how she perceives the past affects and impacts both her present and future; she is powerless and

helpless to take control of the self as she constructs it through the traumatic memory, thereby bringing

about her being unable to recreate the cultural power within the place she is currently living in.

Therefore, she is implicitly locked within the fence of the intelligibly excruciating past; her memory is

only besieged by the traumatic past and it, subsequently, shapes Amal’s troubled future. Fatima’s face

and Palestine come knocking at Amal’s vision in order to search for “a decent grave, for an honest

reckoning of what had happened to them” (230). Not only are Palestine and Fatima hovering over

Amal, but “thoughts of Mama, Baba, and Yousef, and a deluge of longing for Majid’s touch” are also

building up an “oppressive weight” (230-31) crumbling over her heart like the concrete of her building

that had once crushed her husband, Majid, in his sleep. Amal fully explains her totalizing state of

internal strife:

The only way to stop the emotional storm from gathering was to splash cold water

over me. Literally, I needed physical coldness to mute it all. Otherwise, I’d have gone

mad, I’m sure of it. But the storm was always there, latent, lurking in the vast clench

of my iron jaw. So I stopped reading or watching the news and I feared touching Sara,
 Al Suod 52

lest I infect her with my destiny. Lest she warm my heart and unthaw the wrath and

the ghosts and madness I feared lived inside me. (231)

Amal pricks anyone, including her daughter, who dares to come near her. However, she loves her

daughter as much as she fears her own fury at the outside world. Amal holds her breath as she moves

through a path of silence: she lives in a prison of her own making so as to keep the world away from

her. Amal has given in to her destiny without finding a conduit to make sense of the past and survive

in the present and future: she keeps her version of the past silenced and does not make use of it.

Amal’s self-recollection of her traumatic memories becomes an act of spiritual and mental suicide, not

allowing any sort of linkage to the present or to the future. If Amal had linked the past to the present

and integrated the agonizing past into a manageable and viable source of strength, she would have

understood the past with clearer vision and with the urge for its maintenance in the present.

Unlike Amal in Mornings in Jenin, Liyana, a protagonist in Nye’s Habibi, has never suffered

from any traumatic experience in her life because she is an American born of a Palestinian father and

American mother. The Palestinian trauma is transferred to her by her father, who has experienced and

witnessed it directly in Palestine; and Liyana displays some sympathy with the Palestinian cause, yet

she is not affected directly or indirectly by her father’s slight post-traumatic symptoms: She does not

experience any kind of historical or cultural symptoms of trauma that are cross-generationally

transmitted from historical and cultural losses. Thus, Liyana shares the collective memory with her

father and other Palestinians, but she does lack the national identity, the sense of belonging to the

Palestinian and Arab nation.

Liyana’s experience falls within the category of autobiographical memory that incontestably

manifests after she goes to Palestine with her family. Bluck, Alea, Habermas, and Rubin argue in their

article “A Tale of Three Functions: The Self-Reported Uses of Autobiographical Memory” that

autobiographical memory serves three functions: directive, self, and social functions, each relatively

clear cut in the case of Liyana in Nye’s Habibi. The directive function is used to have the past direct
 Al Suod 53

the present and future behaviors and thoughts, solve problems, and reinterpret “previous events in light

of new information” so as to “understand what causes them” in the hope of positively directing “their

present and future” (108-109). The self function is of value and importance since it serves the

development and “continuity of the self” (93) over the time by experiencing the past. The social

function is essential in “developing, maintaining, and nurturing social bonds” which facilitate social

interaction and provide “material for conversation” (94). Moreover, the social function of

autobiographical memory has two main undertakings: “learning about another’s life in order to form a

new relationship and maintaining warmth (e.g. empathy) and social bonding in existing relationships”

(110).

It is not my intention here to explore and apply all of these functions to Nye’s Habibi; rather, I

examine the most indispensable narrative events related to Liyana’s autobiographical memory both

before and after arriving in Jerusalem, Palestine. The recollection of personal life experiences plays a

pivotal role in reconsidering the overall underlying sense of identity and culture linked to shaping the

selfhood of any person traveling outside his/her country. Liyana intermittently resorts to her past

memory in order to account for the totally different condition of the new country, family, and

environment she is currently dwelling in, occasionally remembering “Lonnie and Kelly and Barbara,

her friends,” her family’s home in New York, her grandparents and uncles, and her life in general (21).

Liyana starts remembering her teachers back home who had been nice to her when they knew

that she was heading to Jerusalem: “Why don’t you tell us about where you are going?” and they also

told her that they all “know about Jerusalem –it’s a big part of religious history and constantly in the

news” (27). Liyana intuitively retrieves this event first from her autobiographical memory in order to

feel more secure that she is leaving the US for a historical place located in the Middle East; Liyana

loves her teachers and, thus, trusts their points of view, creating a sort of mental comfort for herself.

She recalls some events of her past, such as a letter she wrote for one of her teachers telling him about

her father and Palestine and holding off her father’s decision to go back to Palestine with his family.
 Al Suod 54

She remembers that her father wants Liyana, Rafik, and her mother to know his relatives in addition to

his unruly desire to be in his old home as he thinks that it is turning into a better country after the

Arabs and Israelis shook hands again: “Only recently he [Poppy] grew hopeful about Jerusalem and

his country again. Things started changing for the better. Palestinians had public voices again. Of

course they never stopped having private voices” (31). Liyana in these words endeavors, by means of

her autobiographical memory, to find a role for herself in Palestine, a role that is well elaborated and

elucidated in the second section of this chapter – the chances of achieving peace – for she has not

arrived in Jerusalem yet.

As mentioned before in the previous chapters, the huge difference between Liyana’s old and

new homes and families drives her to make a critical comparison between them, so Liyana draws upon

her autobiographical memory to remember the past behaviors and thoughts in the pursuit of culturally

accommodating the real-time situation in which she finds herself, and this is crystal clear when Liyana

remembers how her uncle Leo “shook her hand like an insurance man” and how “Aunt Margaret

spoke formally to children about general topics” compared to the current situation she is startlingly

being exposed to when a bustling group of uncles and aunts hug and squeeze her “so tightly that

Liyana lost her breath” (40-41).

Liyana keeps on wondering how she is a mere blur going by in Jerusalem’s streets, intuitively

having recourse to her past memory to realize that she is in a place where no one but her family knows

her; the narrator relates that Liyana recalls her home in St. Louis where the man at the grocery store

remembers the day when a very young Liyana pokes “a ripe peach too hard” with her finger going

inside it, and how “the neighborhood ladies buying vegetables” laugh after she loudly screams. Since

then, the grocer would say to Liyana when she comes into the store, “Be careful with my plums! Don’t

get too close to my melons!” (84). Remembering is not always invoked to help in healing and

providing comfort, but Liyana wants to express her discomfort by relating one of her past experiences.

In his chapter in David Rubin’s Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory, Martin
 Al Suod 55

A. Conway argues that “the adequacy of autobiographical knowledge presumably depends on its

ability to support and promote continuity and development of the self” (88). Thus, Liyana, forlornly

recalling this autobiographical memory of the past, internally holds an impulse to cognize the new life

with its corollary yet required adjustments and the urge for crafting an identity harmonious with the

life in Palestine; she needs such an experience to compare and also to incorporate it into her sense of

self.

Recalling autobiographical memory sometimes helps develop more positive notions of the

future. In this regard, Liyana remembers her father’s Jewish friend who likes “Arabic hareesa, a

delicious cream-of-wheat cake with an almond balanced in the center, outside on a plate” and brings

“slices of date rolls” to her father, adding that both of them, “liked everyone’s else dessert better than

their own” (28). Liyana is well acquainted with relating her autobiographical memories, arranging

them, and providing an evaluation for her retrieving them as being important socially and personally.

When talking to her Jewish friend Omer, Liyana also remembers one day back in America when some

ladies come knocking at their door to tell them about Jesus Christ, and how her father hastily marches

into “his bedroom, tied on along gray cloak that had belonged to his father, and a checkered Kaffiyeh,

the head-dress that he never really wore, and leapt out of the bedroom into their startled gaze” and tells

them, “but first, may I tell you about Muhammad?”’ (178). This simultaneous remembrance

demonstrates how parental behaviors and attitudes affect their children’s, such as Liyana’s,

autobiographical memories, providing them with a great deal of information about certain events and

situations. Liyana’s standpoint on the future of relations between Palestinians and Israelis is

thoroughly explicated in the next section of the chapter.

Dallal Shaw’s protagonist, Thafer, in Scattered Like Seeds adds up to another example of an

immigrant stung by traumatic memory after the terribly destructive war between Arabs and Jews. A

little bit like Amal in Mornings in Jenin, Thafer has undergone a difficult, complex, and hair-raising

time as a child during the Israeli occupation of his land, which has somewhat affected his life later in
 Al Suod 56

the United States. However, Thafer is totally different from Amal in his own process of getting healed

from the trauma: Thafer has partially recovered from his painful memory with the help of his

American wife, whereas Amal has locked herself behind her traumatic memory. One could offer many

examples demonstrating the difficulties Thafer experiences in Palestine, but my goal is to focus on the

way he heals from the trauma while in the United States.

At the beginning of the novel, Thafer is mentally shattered as a result of the Arab-Israeli War of

1967; although Thafer has fully assimilated into American culture, he is drawn back into the world of

his family and people when a war between Arabs and Israelis erupts again. Worried about the way the

war is progressing in Palestine, Thafer’s tension and trepidation are alleviated mainly by his American

wife, Mary Pat, and by his children too. Mary Pat tells her children one of the stories that Thafer told

her before about how the Israeli soldiers viciously pounded at the outer door of his family’s Jerusalem

house to arrest his father: “His mother went to the outer door while he [Thafer] tugged at her skirt and

left his younger sister crying. Her hands began to shake as she unlocked the outer door and faced four

British troopers. Your name? Jihan Allam, his mother said, not looking at the trooper and pressing

Thafer to her side. Is Ayoub Allam in? No, he is not …” (3). Mary Pat tempers Thafer’s outrage at the

U.S. support of Israel and is the source of healing from his traumatic memory; as soon as Thafer gets

worried and troubled, he is used to throwing “himself into her arms” (9) to feel more comfortable and

secure. Thafer has heals quickly from his traumatic memory for two major reasons: (1) he narrates his

traumatic life events to his wife, Mary Pat; and (2) his distinct memories of the past demonstrate that

he has experienced that past differently.

Narrating one’s traumatic memory to other people, especially those close to one’s heart, boils

down a long way toward healing from such a racking memory staying afloat over the affected person.

In Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women’s Fiction, Deborah

M. Horvitz maintains that “since narrative is inextricably entwined with memory and the process of

remembering, the greater one’s ability to ‘make story’ out of trauma, the more likely s/he is to regain
 Al Suod 57

control of her or his life after that trauma” (6). By elucidation not limitation, the following

conversation puzzles out the narrativizing method Thafer makes use of to recover from the trauma:

“Is something else bothering you, Thafer?” “When I went to visit my dying father in

1959, Mary Pat, he begged me to return. I had no desire to go back, and I stayed only

ten days after his death. I didn’t belong anymore. My mother pleaded, my brothers

pleaded, our relatives and friends pleaded, but I just couldn’t. That was eight years

ago. I don’t know what it is, Mary Pat. Maybe it’s the war… My family left Jerusalem

in 1948. My mother was the one who wanted the family to leave … My mother

blames herself and is determined never to leave Palestine, even if it means her life.”

(11-12)

By recounting the story of his distressing life events to Mary Pat, Thafer extinguishes the fire of the

trauma kindled by the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, including such horrors as the Palestinians being shot

in cold blood, tortured, raped, and driven Palestinians out of their lands. Narrating this past traumatic

memory to Mary Pat noticeably helps Thafer to construct his identity, for narrative contributes to the

construction of identity. Thafer, thus, finds the totalizing healing power of relating his already silenced

memory to Mary Pat a curative treatment for his troubled psyche, lending him a hand to flip a new

chapter of life in the United States and resisting the overwhelming impact of his past upon him.

Though it’s not ideal that Thafer actually dismisses from his mind the traumatic past, he has

come to realize that narrating his traumatic experience is the only way available to heal so that he can

integrate with American culture and life. In their chapter in Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of

Autobiography, Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendale assert that “survivors who often have been

silent because they feared retaliation or increased humiliation, and who have been carrying around the

burden of a hidden agony for months, years, and even decades, report the experience of speaking out

as transformative as well as a sheer relief” (200). Unlike Amal in Mornings In Jenin who is helpless,

hopeless, and unable to take any action against her traumatic memory making her experience more
 Al Suod 58

painful and petrifying, Thafer’s voicing his trauma aids him in better understanding himself and

reconstructing a new sense of self aligned with the developments and changes of his new environment;

he no longer looks upon himself as a trauma-struck and affected person, but rather he has turned into a

mentally sound person with slight and transient trauma haunting him from time to time based on what

happens in Palestine.

Unlike Amal who has spent most of her life in Palestine and experienced all kinds of grossly

traumatic events, Thafer undergoes such harrowing events when he is only a child before he is sent to

Kuwait in order not to get enlisted in the Jordanian army to fight Israel:

It was all his mother’s idea to go to Kuwait. He had been sitting in his room in their

Tulkarm and had overheard his parents’ conversation. My dear, his distraught mother

said to his elderly father, we have to get Thafer out before there is more fighting.

Where would we send him? To Kuwait. My nephew Khalid works in Kuwait. Let’s do

it before any more fighting breaks out and before the Jordanians take him into their

army. Dear, we lost a son. Kamal is still in the Syrian army in the north. Rassem is in

the Iraqi army a few miles from here. We certainly don’t want Thafer to be taken by

the Jordanians. (57)

Thafer has not seen hundreds of corpses lying together after they had been machine-gunned or knifed

to death; he has not experienced how Israelis set up checkpoints preventing the exit of Palestinian

refugees. Thafer’s memories of the past are not so traumatic that they impose any limitations to his

thinking or personal behaviors and rebirth; his dreams have not passed out of sight like those of Amal,

her brother, his wife, and his children. Thafer has not fully experienced the Palestinian cause with all

its tragic aspects because of his short direct contact with it; all he knows about it is via TV, radio, and

newspaper, yet, in the same breath, his fleeting suffering from his harsh childhood, albeit rather short,

remain stuck with him, especially after the death of his wife, Mary Pat. He finds in his late wife his

need for tenderness, warmth, and life itself, so the reader can see that, after her death, Thafer abruptly
 Al Suod 59

opts for going back to Palestine because he has lost the person who stood by him all the time helping

him to forget his painful past and hit the ground running for a better future in the United States.

Arab American literature is more or less influenced by the writings of Edward Said. Neo-

Orientalism of modern Arab Americans, influenced by Said’s Orientalism, holds that “otherizing” the

East deprives it of its independent voice and identity. Neo-Orientalism, however, is different from

Orientalism in terms of stressing the power of economic conditions and the possibility of the

introduction of democracy into the Middle East. Therefore, Neo-Orientalism depicts Arabs as

transnational deadly terrorists as well as underdeveloped nations. Despite such a writing environment,

a number of Arab American writers have grappled with Neo-Orientalism and tried to present the true

face of Arabs and Arab Americans through their writings that pinpoint the very reason behind the wars

and turmoil in the Middle East in a non-prejudiced way, thereby building bridges between the East

culture and the West culture. The writings of Suzan Abulhawa, Noami Nye, and Shaw Dallal are

examples of engagement with Neo-Orientalism and Orientalism in a discursive way; their novels

reexamine the basic prejudices of these discourses.

The relationship between the East and the West is studied as a mere relationship of power and

dominance; the East has been Orientalized by the West. In this context, Edward Said confirms that the

West has separated and dichotomized two entities into the West and the East. There is a dilemma of

representation vis-à-vis the discourse of West-East difference. In the editorial of his book, Edward

Said quotes Karl Marx’s argument in The Eighteenth Brumaire, “They can’t represent themselves;

they must be represented” (293). This quotation represents a general premise that runs through Said’s

study, which examines many Orientalist writings from the eighteenth century forward, including

works by Lord Cromer, Balfour, Flaubert, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, etc. Said decodes the association

of Western imperial power and domination with the discourse of Orientalism since the eighteenth

century. He asserts that orientalism is the representation of the East through the imperial lenses of the

West serving the goals and territorial ambitions of Western colonial powers; it’s the imperialistic
 Al Suod 60

misrepresentation of the conquered East by the West, as seen through the Western eyes not as the

people of the East see themselves: “Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined

starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with

the Orient –dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by

teaching it, settling it, ruling over it” (3)

In this section of the chapter dedicated to briefly discussing the attitude of the Arab American

characters toward the relationship between the East and the West as well as the chance of achieving

peace between Israelis and Palestinians, I am primarily presenting the way each character in each

novel approaches this sensitive relationship accompanied with some comments and criticism. Susan

Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin unravels a message hidden in the folds of this novel that the

relationship between religions and cultures is possible regardless of religion, culture, and race

boundaries. The reader perceives this message through the close friendship between Hasan and his

childhood Jewish friend, Ari Perlstein, the son of a German professor who escaped from the Nazis.

Their friendship begins when Ari, holding a large red tomato, moves towards Hasan, who sits reading

a book of Arabic poems; Ari pulls out a pocketknife and cuts it, “keeping half and offering the rest to

Hasan”. Abulhawa asserts that the friendship between Hasan and Ari is born “in the shadow of

Nazism in Europe and in the growing divide between Arab and Jew at home.” Even after decades that

divide them after the war, Hasan recounts to Amal, his youngest child, the story of his friendship with

Ari, plaintively telling her that “he was like a brother” (9).

In spite of the conflict between Arabs and Jews, the representation of the strong friendship

between Hasan and Ari is intended to convey a message that Palestine was the home of tolerance and

coexistence of religions, and that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and hostility is not based on religion.

Hasan and Ari spend hours together “teaching each other the words in Arabic, German and English.”

Ari begins to wear “traditional Arab garb on weekends,” and their friendship extends to comprise their

families:
 Al Suod 61

Mrs. Perlstein loved Hasan and was grateful for his friendship with her son, and

Basima received Ari with similar motherly enthusiasm. Although they never met face-

to-face, the two women came to know one another through their sons and each would

send the other’s boy loaded with food and special treats, a ritual that Hasan and Ari

grudgingly endured. (10)

Abulhawa purposefully inserts Hasan’s and Air’s mothers into the context of their friendship because

she wants to pinpoint that it’s not only the innocence of the two boys, their poetic solitude among

books, and their disinterest in politics that keep their friendship fortified and sustained, but also the

supreme human relationship is intrinsic to shaking off any discrimination predicated upon religion,

race, or culture. Emile Bustani in Doubts and Dynamite: the Middle East affirms, “Palestine –in

which, be it said, Arabs and Jews were living side by side in absolute amity– had unquestionably been

an Arab country for ages past” (13). This human relationship is exquisitely manifested when Hasan

receives “superior tutoring from Mrs. Perlstein, who sent her eager young student home every week

loaded with books, lessons, and homework” (11). Hasan continues his mentorship with Mrs. Perlstein

until he graduates with Ari in 1943; Mrs. Perlstein’s tutoring Hassan proves the fact that she loves him

as if he were her son, which indicates that Jews and Palestinians, in many cases, were living together

lovingly and peacefully.

However, such exemplary love and compassion do not actually give the Jews the right to

occupy Palestinian territories, drive them from their land, kill them, and deprive them of their right of

return to Palestine: this is typically Abulhawa’s repeated argument about the Arab-Jewish conflict

over Palestine. Abulhawa, through the character of Amal, articulates that Palestine, or the Middle East

in general, has become an area of exploitation and colonialization. The Israelis are the West here, and

they Orientalize the Palestinians as the Other. Israel’s ruthless treatment of Palestinians is Orientalist

in nature, and, as a result, Amal partakes in the resistance movements as a human rights defender in

the pursuit of hopefully casting off the chains of colonial oppression, which later costs Amal her life.
 Al Suod 62

It might be argued that Amal immerses herself in the past and in what is happening in Palestine in an

attempt not to be brainwashed by the Orientalist discourses that have molded the attitudes toward

Arabs and Arab Americans in the United States. Abulhawa’s recounting of the history of the

Palestinian conflict reflects an unbridled desire, as an Arab American novelist and intellectual, to

imbue the nation with a common meaning and a more accurate, realistic, and representative reckoning

of its collective history. Abulhawa’s counter-Orientalist narrative unmasks the ways in which Israeli’s

political discourses and history draw upon Orientalist-saturated historical writings, thereby

categorically rejecting all such Orientalist discourses and structures. Amal’s travel narrative refutes

fixed Western Neo-Orientalist and Orientalist discourses that stereotype and naturalize Eastern women

as passive, speechless, submissive, sexual objects, backward, and deprived of agency.

In Naomi Nye’s Habibi, the author attempts to cross boundaries between divergent cultures,

believing that Palestinians and Israelis can live in harmony with each other if they sit seriously at the

dialogue table to come up with a solution satisfying both parties. As Liyana’s airplane flies over the

Mediterranean, she mocks at the name of the country she is heading to – that of Palestine or Israel –

whispering to Rafik, “Too bad the country namers couldn’t have made some awful combo word from

the beginning, like Is-Pal or Pal-Is, to make everybody happy” (37). Another clear example emerges

when Liyana tells an Armenian priest that she is willing to learn about Armenian literature; the Priest

accepts and tells her that she would be the only (outsider), a word that makes Poppy recoil, saying,

“Let’s believe together in a world where no one is inside or outside” (78). It’s evident that Nye is sure

that all people can live peacefully with each other, and she does take umbrage at the fact that the

Palestinians and Israelis hate each other. Accordingly, Michael Suleiman in Arabs in America:

Building a new future argues that Nye seeks to make us think about the various ethnicities who suffer

from discrimination due to their religion, culture, race or color.

Liyana seizes the opportunity of being in Palestine to dismiss the discourses of West-East

difference; she derisively brushes off the induction of purported West-East difference as being
 Al Suod 63

dichotomous, feigned, and symptomatic of a fabricated dichotomy. Nye in her novel shoots for

deconstructing the geographical, racial, political, cultural, and religious divides that were created in

order to designate the West as being superior to the East; Nye calls for a shared ideology of

compassion, understanding, and justice, rejecting any kind of inequity and defamation (Yousef 970).

Liyana’s discontent at the strained relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is aggravated when

she befriends a Jewish man, Omer. Being taken aback by the objection of her new family, including

her father, to her relationship with Omer on the basis of his being Jewish and Israeli, Liyana

commences waging a ruthless war against her family and society; one of her fiery reactions, as

mentioned in chapter two, is when Liyana reminds her father of his Jewish neighbors: “Remember

when you told us how you had Jewish neighbors and friends when you were going up here?

Remember how we had plenty of Jewish friends back in the United States” (171). Liyana denounces

all dissonant voices calling for segregation, unflaggingly sparing no effort to bring people together

under one peace-bound banner.

Though Nye in this novel diligently attempts to improve the fateful status in the Middle East,

the Arab world, and ameliorate its tense relationship with the Western World, the East and the West

behave in the same way as articulated by Edward Said in Orientalism, confirming the Orientalist

discourses and serving the goals of colonial powers:

This fighting is senseless, don’t you think? People should be able to get over their

differences by this time, but they just stay mad. They have their old reasons or they

find new ones. I mean, I understand it mostly from the Arab side because my father’s

family lost their house and their money in the bank and lots of their community when

my father was a boy and the Palestinians were suffering so much, just kicked around

until recently as if they were second-class human beings you know they couldn’t even

show their own flag or have hardly any normal human rights like the Jews did till
 Al Suod 64

recently… I know the Jewish people suffered so much themselves, but don’t you think

it should have made them more sensitive to the sufferings of others too? (165-166)

Liyana vocalizes the above heartfelt words to disclose what she is afraid of: she is afraid of the bitter

truth that such an indiscriminate conflict over the land would give rise to breeding more blood as well

as constant and gratuitous acts of violence and counter violence. So, she looks for bringing peace to

Palestine, an imagined country that embraces both conflicting parties regardless of their race, religion,

and culture. Correspondingly, Omer shares the same hope for a bright future of peace and harmony

within the same land: “It’s a bad history without a doubt. Nothing to be proud of” (166). Both of them

call for peace and solidarity with genuine efforts aiming at achieving this desired peace; they seem to

believe in the unjustifiability of violence under any circumstances and in the potential of having the

dispute settled and reconciled between Palestinians and Israelis, between Arabs and Jews.

Even though Liyana believes in the possibility of peace, she suspects the readiness and

truthfulness of both parties to successfully achieve this uneasy equation. Thus, she is afraid that she is

the only one who believes in and strives for peace, and that the fate of peace is doomed to failure:

That night Liyana dreamed of a cake that fell off its plate into the sea and floated

away from her. She reached wildly with both her arms, standing knee-deep in the pull

of powerful waves. And it was Omer she was calling to. ‘Save it! Can you reach it?’

but he was swimming too far out. Then she was shouting and waving, ‘I’m sorry! I

wanted to share it with you!’ but he could not hear her. He was swimming the other

direction. And the cake was drowning (189).

After strenuous efforts made toward convincing Liyana’s family of her friendship with Omer, she

finally succeeds in persuading them to invite Omer for dinner one day. Liyana’s grandmother, “Sitti”,

receives Omer warmly, and Omer, in turn, takes her hands in his and thanks her; Sitti finally welcomes

Omer’s friendship with Liyana and warns him of the difficulties and obstacles that would impede their
 Al Suod 65

relationship: “You will need to be brave. There are hard words waiting in people’s mouths to be

spoken. There are walls. You can’t break them. Just find doors in them” (270).

Edward Said adopts a view that is utterly opposed to that of Nye and Abulhawa. Said believes

that Arab people, or the East in general, are depicted as subjects that are unable to manage themselves

and choose the best for themselves, so the colonial powers speak on their behalf. He asserts that the

Western system of knowledge and representation functions in order to construct the Eastern World. In

line with this hegemonic operation, Orientalism, which works for the benefit of the West, constructs

the East as being inferior to the West and the West as being superior to all others outside the Western

subject. According to the Orientalist discourse, the Occident, the West, is capable of having a

relationship with the East that is based on the superiority of the West. In so doing, the Eastern world is

destructively depicted as sensual, irrational, exotic, and static; subsequently by this predominant

operation the West constructs itself as rational, known, and ethical. Moreover, Said maintains that

colonialism and Orientalism hold on, significantly unchanged, and create the uneasy relationship

between the Eastern and the Western worlds. Said emphasizes that the Orientalist knowledge of the

East significantly falls short because it doesn’t result from compassion, understanding, vigilant study

and analysis for their own interests. Rather, “it is a campaign of self-affirmation” (2). Nevertheless,

it’s likely that Liyana’s and Omer’s love relationship would succeed, because they would be able to

understand each other. Omer in this relationship can’t apply the norms of the Orientalist discourse in

the sense that the Oriental is an object that can be evaluated, conceptualized, and unable to manage

and think freely, for Liyana belongs to the Western world much more than the Eastern one. Nye’s

Habibi tries to present a different picture of the dialectical relationship between the East and the West,

a relationship in which the borders, regardless of the source of conflict, can be feasibly crossed.

In spite of Nye’s genuine efforts, through Liyana, to break into the norms of the peace process

available in the Middle East and, thus, hold corporations to this process and justice, Said’s theoretical

views of the impossibility of peace in Palestine are still prevailing and reflective of the true reality of
 Al Suod 66

the relationship between the East and the West. Liyana’s, Poppy’s, and even her Sitti’s visions of the

possibility of peace in Palestine could be understood to some extent due to several reasons and factors.

Firstly, Liyana, Poppy, and his family have not been exposed to displacement, violence, and loss

caused by this conflict, and, therefore, they have not suffered from the variety of stressful and harmful

situations other Palestinians are daily experiencing, including “imprisonment, beatings, collective

punishment, house demolitions, land confiscation and clearing for military purposes, targeted

assassinations, and constant social and economic pressure” (Chatty 219). Hence, it’s clear that Poppy

changes his attitude toward peace when he decidedly holds a gun to fight Israeli soldiers after they

shoot Khalid, a little boy, which undoubtedly means that the sought-after peace between Palestinians

and Israelis is almost impossible. Secondly, Poppy and his family are Christians not Muslims, and

their initial objection to Liyana’s friendship with Omer stems from cultural constraints not from

religious ones; it’s religiously prohibited for Muslims to have such a friendship. The escalating

development of the relationship between the Liyana and Omer and their being positioned as an

exemplary model for crossing borders and building a future for Palestine where peace, justice,

security, and amity prevail in the land, could actually reason for optimism; but Liyana, Poppy, and his

mother don’t represent the overwhelming majority of Palestinians, and, likewise, Omer doesn’t stand

in for the Jewish or Israelis. It’s truly a noble call for peace, but it’s impossible now to be applied on

the ground. Thirdly, Israel violently treats Palestinians on the basis of power, and it’s far stronger now

than yesterday because of the weakness of all Arab armies; the Israeli discourse of power is allegedly

perceived as a dynamic necessity for them, not to mention that this rhetoric of power neglects all the

calls for establishing peace with Palestinians. This way of approach to rule is consistent with Edward

Said’s views in Orientalism and his other works.

Thafer in Dallal’s Scattered Like Seeds believes in peace as the only way to resolve the conflict

between Palestinians and Israelis, as a coexistence between them, sanguinely calling for the

establishment of a one-state or two-state solution that makes it possible for both parties to live with
 Al Suod 67

each other or next to each other in peace, amity, and security. Yet, his small hope for peace is

confronted by Adnan Amri, a Palestinian living in a Beirut refugee camp, who tells him that the way

Israel poisons the atmosphere vis-à-vis peace with Palestinians hinders the possibility of achieving or

even negotiating peace: “Israel is not scared of the PLO as a military force. It is scared of a PLO that

wants peace and that advocates the political and civil rights of our people. Israel wants all Palestinians,

including you, Thafer, to disappear from the face of the earth. We have no other alternative. We need

to defend our existence” (48). This is the first face-to-face confrontation between Thafer, who believes

in peaceful solutions to the Palestinian cause, with a Palestinian refugee, Adnan, who insists on the

military solution and accuses Thafer of being petrified at the idea of joining the armed struggle against

Israel: “I suppose that after one lives away from the homeland as long as you have, one becomes

terrified at the idea” and Thafer replies, “It isn’t living away from the homeland, Adnan; it’s that I

personally don’t believe that armed struggle is the answer” (53). Thafer is in favor of a peaceful

solution in Palestine involving the parties concerned, but the majority of Palestinians and Israelis don’t

support such a solution, since they don’t trust each other.

When the Jewish teacher of social studies repeatedly tells her students that Israel is “the only

democracy in the Middle East” (271) and justifies the brutal act Israeli soldiers commit against

Kathleen’s father, she undeniably draws on Orientalist discourses because it is the most deceptive and

powerful tool for asserting that the victimizer and imperialist has a heroic and moral cause to defend.

Their claimed cause centers on their colonial project to civilize the savage and the barbaric.

Inopportunely, the victim seems to be silenced forever. In this regard, in his book American

Orientalism: The United States and Middle East since 1945, Douglas Little reaffirms that the

established degrading stereotypes of Arabs are defined and constructed by colonial powers to justify

their imperial acts as they claim that their mission is to establish the Western civilization in order to

rescue uneducated and backward Arabs (17). Furthermore, Thafer’s shocking comment on the

civilized manner the Arab oil ministers have maintained during a conference is another justifying
 Al Suod 68

example: “I’m brainwashed. On television, in the movies, in the literature, in the newspapers, and even

in their schools and colleges the people of the United States are taught to see Arabs as either camel

herders and pearl fishermen” (147). The East and the West are erroneously portrayed as alien to each

other by many fanatics, as if the East were residing in the barren seclusion of the desert’s hellish sand

dunes. The Western media continues to reproduce the Orientalist stereotypes that Said exposes; its role

vindicates Said’s views of the relationship between the East and the West because it portrays the

massive and complex Middle East in this negatively narrow way that misrepresents the humanity and

diversity of hundreds of millions of people who live like others living in the Western World, thereby

adding insult to injury and making the relationship between the East and the West worse. In this

respect, in his chapter, “Ethnic Archetypes and the Arab Image,” in Ernest McCarus’s book The

Development of Arab-American Identity, Roland Stockton displays the negative impacts of

stereotyping that “take people out of history and deny them the right to change across time.” He brings

to light a great deal of negative representations and misconceptions about Arabs in the media, saying

that “images of Arab cannot be in isolation but are primarily derivative, rooted in a core hostile

archetypes that our culture applies to those with whom it clashes” (20).

In the same way, in his article “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People,” Jack

Shaheen surveys the different demeaning stereotypes glued to Arabs that remain predominant

throughout the history of American cinema, inferring that he finds these stereotypes in “more than 900

films, the vast majority of which portray Arabs by distorting at every turn what most Arab men,

women, and children are really like.” He finds that moviemakers have overstuffed the marketplace

with a wide range of Arab villains, collectively degrading Arabs in every movie a person can watch.

Furthermore, he confirms that Hollywood naturalizes, legitimizes, and frames stereotypes in viewers’

mind that Arabs are “brute murderers, sleazy rapists, religious fanatics, oil-rich dimwits, and abusers

of women,” thus demeaning Arabs as an ethnic and racial group (172). Such debasing and reinforced

stereotypes destructively affect the domestic and foreign policy of the United States and other
 Al Suod 69

powerful countries, making the chances of bridging the gaps between the East and West out of the

question. Such offensive stereotypes and representations reveal the continuing prominence of the

Orientalist discourse, which is built on conceiving of Arabs as sources of terror and hostility.

Thafer receives degrading treatment from Israeli soldiers as he crosses the Jordanian borders to

see his mother in Jerusalem; he is delayed for hours in line while other Europeans and Americans in

the other line enter within minutes, and then an Israeli soldier asks Thafer to take his jacket and shoes

off. It doesn’t stop at this point, the soldier orders him to take off all of his clothes: “Go in the next

room, and take off all your clothes. Clear? … At long last, the Israeli returns with a flashlight. “Turn

around,” says the angry voice. Thafer turns around nervously. The Israeli points the light at Thafer’s

private parts for what seems an eternity” (132-133). After being denied entry into the West Bank and

treated insultingly, Thafer seems to initially insist on his opinion that the peaceful solution is the only

and best one: “today’s events haven’t changed my mind” (138). Later in the novel, the reader can

notice that Thafer, as a result of this very humiliating occasion, gradually starts to repatriate himself to

his old family and people, with his father frequently coming to him in his dreams asking him to hold

his gun and join the armed struggle:

He dreams that he sees an Israeli Jew laying wreaths on the graves of his father, his

brother, his brother’s wife, and their two children. He walks to the Israeli and tells him

that these are Palestinian graves, that he knows for sure they are the graves of his

father, his brother, and his brother’s family. Yes, I know, the Israeli replies, but we

stole their home and farm… Your brother and his family were murdered by us, but

Ayoub Allam isn’t dead. Where is he? He’s right here in your house. Thafer walks to

the living room, and there is his father wearing his military uniform and holding a

white robe and a white headcloth. Thafer, my son, he says, I’m going to retire and

take off this uniform. I’m going to give you the uniform to wear. Wear it, Thafer, he
 Al Suod 70

says, wear it. Do it now! Right now. At first Thafer hesitates, then he puts his father’s

uniform on while his father watches him. (250-251)

Thafer’s heart is now full of agony and there is no longer space for peace and tranquility even though

he doesn’t hold a gun or even a knife as he absolutely rejects getting involved in any armed struggle;

however, this dream might be argued to be predictive of Thafer’s yet-to-emerge transformation into a

cynic rather than a believer in peace treading on all previous beliefs about the possibility of the

existence of peaceful solutions. This change reflects the bitter reality in Palestine and the impossibility

of coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis.

 Al Suod 71

Chapter Four: Negotiating Nostalgia and Identity

Many Arab-American writers, including the contemporary ones, are preoccupied with either the

loss of their homelands and/or the different turbulent upheavals ensuing from critical crises their

native worlds have faced. Early Arab-American generations put efforts into negotiating the schism

between the Arab and American sides of self and identity, decidedly revealing that they are disinclined

to fully assimilate into American culture; such collective orientation for not belonging is ignited by

nostalgia, as they feel nostalgic for their original cultural identity, the past that still proceeds to

colonize their present, the times they lived through, and for home as well. Therefore, nostalgia plays a

pivotal role in shaping their literary narratives and, hence, they are almost embroiled in their clear

desires and their own senses of what should construct and constitute the present and future concept of

self and identity. Other subsequent generations start to speak into a new space that is formulated with a

new outlook that sets aside any nostalgic longing for the past, challenging the essentialized codes and

norms of nationalism and racialization. Nevertheless, some literary works written by contemporary

Arab Americans still dwell in the past and are garnished by nostalgic aspects of the gone past; two

novels out of three selected for this thesis illuminate the argument that some Arab American writers of

the new generation are still indulging in nourishing the nostalgic past and attempting to incorporate it

into their lives.

There are some common features plainly shared by nostalgia and identity; both are involved in

deciphering the code of the past and its overwhelming grip on directing the present and future. In

addition, both are subject to change at any time and anywhere according to individual, group, or

driving stimuli. Thus, Turner observes that there is a “continuous reciprocal interaction and functional

interdependence between the psychological processes of individuals and their activity, relations and

products” and such interdependence is devised by nostalgic recollections of the past (qtd. in Brown

and Humphreys 154). In this context, this chapter sheds light on how nostalgia is tackled in each novel

as well as how nostalgia can help in facilitating the coherence and stability of identity.
 Al Suod 72

The three Arab American novels tackle the issue of nostalgia within varying criteria and

standards; Suzan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin presents a character with a resurging underlying

sense of homesickness; Noami Nye’s Habibi raises and underscores this issue, and Shaw Dallal’s

Scattered Like Seeds lays the ground work for what is termed “post-nostalgia.” In order for me to

avoid falling into the trap of repetition, I tackle the issue of identity, by and large, from a nostalgia-

specific angle and perspective, let alone some extracts are cited again to lend credence to following

interpretation and analysis, presumably setting in motion a different trend of rendering the politics of

identity into a somehow new negotiating avenue in Arab American literature in general and the three

novels in particular.

Susan Abulhawa in Mornings in Jenin decidedly addresses the issue of nostalgia and identity in

a way slightly different from the two other novels, especially Dallal’s Scattered Like Seeds.

Abulhawa’s protagonist, Amal, undergoes a resurging feeling of nostalgia during her first residence in

the United States; those four years of habitation are described from the cultural and spiritual

standpoint as disorientation-years, and from the standpoint of literary academics as years of

knowledge and broadening understanding. Explication and interpretation are merely glued to Amal’s

first residence in America for it provides in some way ample evidence and is thus compatible with the

ideas infused in the novel to be posited within the context of the wider intercultural matrix of the novel

that intensively impacts the politics of nostalgia and identity in this novel.

Amal’s first days in Philadelphia are marked by her attempts to discover the new world and

embark on the new experience of building a new integrated identity, triggering all possible senses of

nostalgia for the old home and family:

The scent of the city seeped into the car. Street vendor cheese-steak hoagies, greasy

fries, diesel truck fumes, and car exhaust gave my nostrils a full-bodied welcome. It

smelled like the irretrievable loss of white Madonna lilies growing in the limesinks of
 Al Suod 73

Palestine, the bereavement of my country’s camphires, which would burst forth each

spring into fragrant flames of white and yellow clusters, delicate and fiery. (170)

Amal is thrown into her taken-for-granted feeling that she is authentically unable to adapt to the new

host country without retaining her own traditions and culture within the this multifaceted society.

Therefore, the first whole year is merely characterized by Amal’s nostalgic allegiance to the culture

and religion of her old home; it’s a kind of pride in and love for a culture that she feels without

necessarily having it incorporated into her daily behavior. Amal is burdened by the loss of her native

homeland; she is no longer living in Palestine, which means that the place and time is not current now,

giving an insight into the often common dilemma that its reality is unable to alleviate its stingingly

nostalgic reminiscence; her nostalgia is evocated by those immediate stimuli that unescapably yield in

recollecting the memory of her old home. Amal’s nostalgic behavior in the first year demonstrates that

she has not completely assimilated the American culture; rather, the American culture looks exotic and

unaccommodating for her despite her bold desire to belong: “I found no commonality with the men

and women … I felt diminished, out of place, and eager to belong” (172).

The reader is forced to observe that Amal’s submissiveness to the dominant or hegemonic

American culture leads to imposing a new identity on her as she belongs to a subordinate and

subservient ethnic group, which due to the sought-after social status she is not capable of contesting

such an ascription and is driven to consciously or unconsciously disclose the characteristics that

visibly underpin the new identity assigned to her; and, thus, this indubitably accounts for why she

stamps down her nostalgia, tuning her old world out: “I deliberately avoided political discussions,

didn’t write to the people who loved me, and let myself be known as “Amy”’ (178). Amal complies

with such prescribed instructions in order to remap and reconstruct an identity which can give her

status within American society.

Nostalgia is different from memory: memory is perceived as the means by which the nostalgic

reminiscences are derived. Amal’s memory keeps inscribing a very nostalgic sense of her gone past:
 Al Suod 74

“But like the scar beneath my hand, the past was still with me” (171). Speaking of the past, nostalgia

should not be tackled as lodging in the past; rather that positive recalls vis-à-vis negative ones,

enhance and map current and future experiences. After the first year, Amal becomes an active member

of the American culture and grows an interest in learning about and practicing the different aspects of

it:

I drank alcohol and dated several men – acts that would have earned me repudiation in

Jenin. I spun in cultural vicissitude, wandering in and out of the American ethos until I

lost my way. I fell in love with Americans and even felt that love reciprocated. I lived

in the present, keeping the past hidden away. I didn’t write to Huda, nor to Muna or

the Colombian Sisters. Nor to Ammo Darweesh, Lamya, Khalto Bahiya, or Haj

Salem. But sometimes the blink of my eye was a twitch of contrition that brought me

face-to-face with the past. (173-174)

Under such behavioral circumstances, Amal’s deviation from the natural route, steered by her culture

and religion, turns out to have been engrossed by the super-oppressed nostalgic longing for her past

which encompasses her family and friends. It might be said that Amal’s eye-blinking or rather

recollection of the past is created unconsciously or consciously in order for her to repatriate herself

into a typical Palestinian much attached to the cause and heritage, or to defend against her present-day

experience, all of which is caused by her overwhelming feelings of uneasiness and disloyalty. In

consequence, Amal has a strong nostalgic drive to take stock of herself as the first step for deep self-

searching in order to get rid of deformity that has imbued her sense of self and identity, thus blurring

boundaries related to both of them. In this regard, Amal is characterized by her identity ambivalence:

she has an unruly desire to belong to the American culture and atmosphere, but, in the same breath,

she renders herself as a traitor to her homeland and family as she feels “a sense of shame that I [Amal]

betrayed my family – or worse, myself” (174); Amal has discursively opened up an identity space in
 Al Suod 75

the United States in order to have it completely inhabited, but her intention is not fulfilled, thus

creating an identity problem as it revolves around a circle of emptiness and disorientation.

Amal’s endeavors to take arms against her harsh nostalgia through artificial remapping,

reshaping, and reconfiguring identity, end in failure. One of the clear-cut instances throwing light

upon the role of family in igniting the fire of nostalgia in an immigrant is when Amal remembers her

family: “Walking downtown once, I thought I saw my mother … I paused, starring at my mother’s

daughter. Dalia, Um Yousef, had bequeathed to me the constitution that could not breathe while

holding hands with the past. She could isolate each present moment while existing in an eternal past. I

thought at that moment that no other soul could understand me as she might” (174). Moreover, during

Amal’s living with her housemates in Philadelphia who are used to calling their parents, she remains

“unperturbed” accompanied by “a sweet nostalgia and longing for old friends.” She is so homesick for

her homeland that “Palestine would rise up from my bones into the center of my new life,

unannounced” (175).

Amal fails to become an ethnic Arab American in the United States because she doesn’t

fathom the essence of getting her two conflicting cultures properly balanced. She can be acutely

selective and discriminate between what is important and what is not; and a wise and sharp person

never comes close to absorbing all of the aspects of the new culture that could be utterly antithetic to

the original one. Thus, this kind of imbalance has implications for how we conceive of nostalgia at all

levels. Despite her long years of stay in the United States, Amal describes herself as “Amal without

the hope” (178). In this regard, the neurologist Philippe Pinel describes the extremely nostalgic person

as “a sad, melancholy appearance, a bemused, … an indifference toward anything; … an obstinate

silence …” (qtd. in Lowenthal 10). Accordingly, Amal represents a failure of assimilation in America

without any tangible success in her homeland, Palestine. Amal is neither positive nor negative about

the new life in the United States; however, she consciously and unconsciously tilts more toward

hidden nostalgia for the past although she tries to empty herself of the past, sabotaging her process of
 Al Suod 76

integration into American society and life. Receiving a call from her brother, Yousef, Amal’s

oppressed nostalgia bursts out restlessly compelling her to go back to her old family and world:

Another year passed. Whatever you feel … I kept it all in. Until one day when the

telephone range at five A.M. Half-sleeping I picked the receiver. “Hello.” “Aloo,”

answered an accented voice. “Amal?” “Away,” I said, suspecting his identity and fully

awake now. He chuckled, a sound I could recognize anywhere, it was the muffled

laughter that first escaped from the right side of Yousef’s mouth, then stretched a

smile across his handsome face… “Finally, little sister! We’ve been trying for months

to find you.” Someone took the phone. “Amal! Habibti, darling! We found you.” It

was Fatima. Amal. I cried at the sound of my Arabic name. (179-180)

Her hidden and oppressed nostalgia awakens in spite of her deliberate efforts to bury it in America so

that she would be transformed into a woman of one-sided identity, the identity of the dominant society

that would embrace and grant her some privileges that are denied to Palestinian people; however,

developing a one-sided identity on the rubble of the original and deeply rooted one makes life

destructive for her, just as it would be for someone who exaggerates his/her national, religious, and

cultural identity to such an extent that it’s detrimental to himself/herself and others as well.

Naomi Nye in Habibi presents Poppy as an example of a Palestinian immigrant plagued with

nostalgia for his homeland in spite of his continuous movements between the US and Palestine;

Liyana, Poppy’s daughter, narrates how her father stays homesick for Palestine and his family over

there. Poppy’s nostalgia also represents the failure of ethnic assimilation in the United States, for he

remains attached to his native land with unrelenting loyalty: ‘“You know,” Poopy said, “I never

planned to be an immigrant forever. I never thought I’d become a citizen. I planned to return home

after medical school. I didn’t know”’ (3). This is the typical case of most first-generation Arab

Americans who sentimentally and strongly cling to their homelands, and their unwavering fidelity to

native customs and culture renders a portion of the large-scale failure of rationally perceiving and
 Al Suod 77

judging the American experience among many first-generation Arab immigrants. The narrator

explains that Poppy used to tell his family from time to time that they would go to Palestine one day:

“Leave the country? Of course it was a rumor Liyana had been hearing all her life. Someday her

family would leave the United States, the country where her mother and brother had been born in, and

moved overseas to the mixed-up country her father had been born in. It was only fair. He wanted to

show it to them” (3). Poppy’s surface intention conveyed to his family is that he wants them to know

both sides of their history and become fully rounded human beings; however, the truth is that he is no

longer able to grapple with his nostalgia, since it’s the due time for finally going back to his native

homeland after a series of delays. Liyana mentions that her father insists on drinking tea with mint and

Arabic coffee as well as using olive oil rather than butter, all of which triggers insights into the role of

food both in stirring up Poppy’s nostalgic feelings and keeping him in constant touch with his

homeland. Food can be seen as a means of resisting American culture, and thereby rejecting

mainstream monolithic American identity. In this regard, Priscilla S. Wathington candidly comments

on the role of food as a tool of resistance for some Arab Americans: “Food surfaces once more in the

narratives, not making existential proclamations but resisting—slowly, pragmatically, even at times

invisibly—a dominant monolithic white North American culture” (62).

The critical question is how Poppy feels nostalgic for Palestine and wants to go back even

though Palestine is not a peaceful place and war torn. Someone would reply and say that the answer is

pretty simple, because Poppy is longing for his family, the place where he was born …etc. I would say

that what has been posited is right, but we need to further understand how Poppy as an immigrant

perceives and remembers Palestine: is the real picture of Palestine in Poppy’s mind complete and

authentic or fragmented? Unlike Amal in Mornings in Jenin, I posit that the picture and reality of

Palestine is fragmented and distorted in Poppy’s mind. Greenberg and Koole in Handbook of

Experimental Psychology mention that Fred Davies in his book Yearning for Yesterday terms nostalgia

as “a positively toned evocation of a lived past” and adds that “the nostalgic … experience … is
 Al Suod 78

infused with imputations of past beauty, pleasure, joy, satisfaction, goodness, happiness, love …

Nostalgic feeling is almost never infused with those sentiments we commonly think as negative – for

example, unhappiness, frustration, despair, hate, shame, abuse” (204). Hence, the fragmented reality of

Palestine is consciously created in Poppy’s mind so that he can identify with his past in order to fight

against the current experience – that is the dominant American culture and identity. Since Poppy’s

identity is vulnerable to threats and is at risk, he seeks refuge in nostalgia for an unreal imagined

homeland. As mentioned above, Poppy tells his family that he has never thought to become an US

citizen, which justifies why he takes refuge in nostalgia to stand against any dangers or forces

threatening his native identity.

As Poppy solely retrieves the positive recollections of his past, such positive recalls are

directly posted to his current consciousness; and his indulging in recalling the unreal imagined aspects

without the presence of negative recollections brings about the positive aspects overshadowing the

negative ones and, thus, resulting in an inauthentic past. In other words, it could be seen that Poppy

operates on the selectiveness of nostalgia that leads him to be living in a world of make-believe called

self-deception. The origin of this self-deception lies in his psyche as he thinks that by doing so he can

protect and bolster his native identity, but such a thought proves destructive for his life when he goes

back to Palestine. Therefore, when Poppy arrives in Palestine, he unnervingly starts to recognize that

the absented negative aspects of his nostalgia are being reflected and materialized in front of him,

pushing him to retreat and reconsider his custom-fitted recollections: “Sometimes she [Liyana] heard

her father say, 'we are American’ to his relatives. Americans? Even Poppy, who was always an Arab

before?” (124); hence, his pronouncing that he is American not Arab is conclusive evidence for what I

have already posited.

Before Liyana befriends Omer, the Jewish friend, she reaches a somehow dead end in her

attempt to get involved in the new culture and environment as a result of her different perception of

life, obligations, and duties. Liyana’s nostalgia is patently aroused by her monologue as her father
 Al Suod 79

warns her not to be public while she is combing her hair out on the balcony: “If I were at home on a

beach I could run up and down the sand with just a bathing suit on and no one would even notice me. I

could wear my short shorts that I didn’t bring and hold a boy’s hand in the street without causing an

earthquake. I could comb my wet hair in public for a hundred dumb years” (125). Liyana’s recourse to

nostalgia emanates from her pressing quest and clamoring for the American social and cultural values

and the traditional codes of life as she denounces those of Arab life which are not easily obtainable

and accessible. Her nostalgia being a means by which she can cast her memory back to the pleasant

past in America is also a vehicle to start setting expectations and standards for the new life, something

that may be necessary to propel mental and psychological growth. Liyana is not worried about her

identity at all, for she looks for identifying with the new home and family and is well acquainted with

the importance of multi-identification; she is fully aware that identity is not static but rather dynamic,

and that it is recreated and reshaped by immediate social and cultural forces and factors; therefore, she

resorts to nostalgia once she feels that her deeply rooted identity is unacceptable and unwelcome, but

she doesn’t do this in order to reject the new identity looming on the horizon; rather she is lucidly

unable to counterbalance between the two as she is both eager to maintain her original identity and to

fit in the new one but within the boundaries pertaining and relevant to her American identity: how to

harmonize the American values of open freedom, independence, and others with the restrictive rules

set in Palestine; it’s a perplexing equation.

Shaw Dallal in Scattered Like Seeds presents Thafer’s character who is totally different from

Amal, Poppy, and Liyana in the other two novels in terms of his handling of the issue of nostalgia: he

enters into the “post-nostalgia stage.” Unlike Poppy, Thafer recognizes and confesses that the past is

not splendid and superb as Poppy and other Arab Americans attempt to convince themselves. Thafer

takes life and the integration process in the United State seriously to such an extent that he no longer

gets hold of his family; he has determined to move beyond nostalgia in order to embrace his ethnicity

in America. In other words, Thafer challenges any kind of nostalgia so that he can move on with
 Al Suod 80

ethnicity. In The Arab Americans, Randa Kayyali argues that “Arab Americans have adapted to life in

the United States by integrating Arab cultures and customs with the prevailing U.S. norms and trends”

(68). Thafer has adopted the American life without retaining any of his past traditions, smashing and

treading on anything related to his native past; Thafer is aware that he is must assimilate in order to get

rid of any sense of distancing and strangeness. Through this representation of Thafer, Shaw Dallal

follows in the footsteps of other contemporary Arab American writers who “increasingly seek to

challenge established cultural and racial boundaries in their articulation of Arab-American identity,

and to assert their identity on their own terms” (Majaj 330).

Thafer looks at and approaches the different aspects of Palestinians’ life from the western

angle and perspective, which apparently articulates the fact that he has turned into a person emptied of

any sense and feeling shared with his native land and people:

The clear sky and the blue Mediterranean remind him of an earlier time, long

forgotten. It’s an odd sensation that sends a chill over his body … Thafer feels strange

driving through the wide, clean streets of Beirut with the two Palestinian brothers.

Tourists and visitors with their camera fill the streets, but Thafer feels far removed

from the scene. Suddenly, he is uneasy. … Now Thafer’s unease is mixed with fear.

He gazes at the young Palestinian and tries to asses him. His youthful face seems

agreeable and harmless. He is uncomfortable with himself. He feels badly about

seeming insensitive, yet he is frightened and fascinated by that young Palestinian,

Adnan. (44-47)

This quotation elucidates how far Thafer has gone away in his ignoring and bypassing his past and

people to the point that he feels appalled when he gets closer and closer to meeting them face to face.

In essence, this dreadful feeling reflects the reality that he has extinguished nostalgia and any feeling

reminding him of his past, because nostalgia keeps people attached to and connected with their past.

This way of dealing with the past proves to be destructive rather than constructive, for Thafer has
 Al Suod 81

erased all memories of his past and reprogrammed himself into an American man with no past. Even

though Thafer’s dealing with nostalgia could be considered as a step towards ethnic identification, this

step is encircled by exaggeration and denial of native identity and seeking after American monolithic

identity, instead. Unlike Poppy who holds a sort of a temporarily cohesive shared identity, Thafer

doesn’t exhibit such shared identity at all, since the native identity characteristics have been replaced

by the new American ones.

Thafer assumes the role of a western foreigner who has never undergone the Palestinians’ pain

or heard about their plight, and he is thus unable to understand them and, in turn, to convince them of

his perspective: “These people are very angry, he finally tells himself as he tries to get some rest.

They’re bitter and suspicious; they have lost everything, and I mustn’t go around trying to teach them

how to be rational and good” (50). This comment alone expounds that he has never felt any kind of

nostalgia for his home and family, but the contradiction in the novel, I suppose, is that Thafer keeps up

to date with the latest news about the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 over Palestine, and, at the same time,

he knows nothing about Palestine and how people live there. In addition, he decides to go back to

Palestine after the death of his wife, Mary Pat, artificially pretending that he is nostalgic for his native

land and people, but his actions and behaviors prove the opposite. Moreover, Thafer doesn’t know

anything about his family as he has not been updated and posted about the news of his family

members: “May be your brother Kamal has told you, Thafer,” says Adnan as he drives Thafer back to

Beirut airport, “that I’m officer in the military section of the PLO” “No, he has not.” “Is my bother

Kamal connected with the PLO?”’ (53); and Thafer is also surprised when Adnan tells him that his

brother, Hani, is “a schoolteacher” (55).

For further proving what has been posited above concerning Thafer’s embodiment of the role

assumed and anticipated from a westerner, nostalgia in this Arab American novel is shifted into a new

space that I term as “nostalgia role-shifting.” Even though Thafer starts to feel sympathetic, like

anyone else in his place, to the Palestinian people, he expresses his discomfort and indignation over
 Al Suod 82

the corruption, idiots, autocracy, feudalism, and poverty; thus, as things rapidly go downhill, he is

willy-nilly forced into feeling nostalgic for the United States, publicly declaring that he is American

and can’t “pledge allegiance to a flag other than the U.S. flag” (284). He starts drawing internal

collective comparisons between life in the United States and life in the Arab world, finding out that he

is entirely attached to the United States. He starts to long for peace of mind in America, since he is

frightened by the ideas other have suggested to him: he doesn’t want to get “involved in the nuclear

madness of the Middle East” and is unwilling and afraid to join the armed struggle against Israel

(191). Despite the obsessive love he holds for Suhaila, he prefers America over her as he is unable to

live in a country other than the United States: “Do I dare tell her, he asks himself, that I want to go

back to the United States?” (190).

 Al Suod 83

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