Mizna+RAWIFest 2023

With a keynote address from Hala Alyan, join us for a weekend of poetry, dance, and art celebrating SWANA artists and beyond!

RAWI Craft Talk 1: An Exploration of Kinships with the Olive Tree

RAWI is holding a craft series! The first of our talks comes from Layla Feghali of River Rose Re-Membrance and the SWANA ancestral project.

Established in 1993, RAWI is a national organization that provides mentoring, community, and support for Arab American writers and those with roots in the Arabic speaking world and diaspora. We are a non-profit 501(c)(3) literary organization dedicated to supporting and disseminating creative writing and scholarly writing by Arab/SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) Americans and those from the Arabic speaking world–which often means creating space and highlighting voices and people threatened by erasure. We put on readings, panels, workshops, roundtables, conferences, and festivals that emphasize inclusivity.

In text: "Books That Shaped SWANA LIT with R. Benedito Ferrao." In images: a tight headshot of Goan scholar and author  R. Beneditor Ferrao and the book cover featuring a moon and hands with henna tattoos. 

 nears its end, an unexpected death occurs. The elderly character in question was taking a bus ride in Detroit when he breathed his last. This person would go routinely to the airport to see passengers arrive on the flight from Lebanon, his homeland. As I read about the character’s death, I was on a bus myself. I put the book down in my lap and realized that I had been crying. The person, an immigrant, had died alone while trying to catch a glimpse of new arrivals from the old country. I thought of my own father.


Like Fatima Abdullah, the tale’s octogenarian protagonist, I was in Los Angeles as I finished reading the book. Fatima decamps to the west coast from Michigan after divorcing her second husband, Ibrahim. She hopes this act will spare him from having to live out their last years together in what she believes to be a marriage he agreed to only out of a sense of obligation upon the death of Marwan, her first husband and Ibrahim’s friend. Fatima takes up residence in the home of her grandson Amir, whose queerness she initially refuses to acknowledge, leading to many comedic moments. 


Like Fatima, in a place famed for its car culture, I took the bus everywhere in the City of Angels and happened to be on one of the routes the book mentions as I read about the death of the old Lebanese character. The bus route referenced passes a 7-Eleven on Wilshire Boulevard, a place my dad 

. That was in 1969, before the political instability, before the refugee crisis, before a long list of events…


 in 2009, the year of its publication, little did I know that the book would become one I would use in my classes so consistently. The text has been a staple on the syllabus of my course titled Outside In: Transnational Asian American Literature. The premise of the course is this: moving away from the idea of Asian Americans as those solely of immigrant heritage, the class asks students to think about what it might mean to consider such literary subjects as being the product of displacement within and beyond the United States. Concurrently, the course also asks students to dwell upon the involvement of America beyond its own borders.


The class requires that every text we read involves the crossing of a nation-state’s boundary, often of a character who is identifiably Asian or Asian American. Thus, when not viewed as being only immigrant (or descended from immigrants), how might we see the construction of Arab and other Asian (American) characters as also being influenced by transnational histories and events? In other words, what happens when one looks beyond the purview of a single nation or the state to understand identity?

Certainly, the most transnational figure in 

 fame. But where she is the teller of stories in the original text, here, in her appearance in this non-Arab setting, she is the receiver of tales about Fatima’s family. The exchanges between the two women are the framing device for the novel, within which is ensconced several other stories. In this way, Yunis’ novel not only makes 

 an intertext, but also echoes the earlier book’s form of intertwined stories in this 21st century version. In so doing, 

 brings the Asian literary form of a framing narrative with other stories within it to an American setting. Before Disney and before orientalist adaptations of Scheherazade’s tales, the legends themselves originated 

, including Iran and the Arab world, as well as South and East Asia.


An early-twentieth-century immigrant to the United States along with Marwan, Fatima’s time in the new country parallels the durée of her fellow-Lebanese and other Arab communities in America, an immigrant history that is 

. In her mid-80s at the time at which she tells her stories to Scheherazade, Fatima recounts for this legendary figure how she, Marwan, and Ibrahim endeavored to acculturate in an unfamiliar land with an unfamiliar language. After all, Fatima had only known a rural life in a small Lebanese village prior to America. Entwined in her stories are legacies of labor struggles, racism and Islamophobia, and intergenerational conflict.


The stories Fatima relays to Scheherazade include accounts of how Marwan and Ibrahim both worked in the burgeoning industries that marked the rise of capitalism in America, chief among them the 

. Fatima recounts the injuries immigrant men faced in unregulated factories, leading to the 

struggle for unionization and labor rights-protections

 that Marwan and Ibrahim find themselves involved with, too.


Because of the many children Fatima had between her two marriages, the novel is a multigenerational family saga, one that is replete with the expected conflict between immigrant parents and their American-born progeny. However, Yunis weaves into these parent-child tussles a bit of the history of the settings in which these events unfold. One such poignant moment ensues during a family road trip which Ibrahim only agrees to after being nagged by his most malcontent child, Randa, who wants the Abdullahs to do things like other Americans.


Stopping at a restaurant in Georgia on their trip, the Abdullahs are faced with the choice of entering one of two bathrooms – one for whites and the other for “coloreds.” At the restaurant, a white man unable to identify Randa ethnically calls her the prettiest mulatto he has ever seen. The cringe-worthy moment makes Ibrahim vow that the family will never vacation again.


As with the previously mentioned history of labor rights-organizing that impinges upon the lives of the first generation in the novel, the history of segregation and anti-Black racism reveals itself in the existence of the second-generation characters. Subtly, the novel portrays the history of the Abdullahs – internal conflicts and all – as one that cannot be separated from American histories of marginalization, institutionalized as they are by society, capitalism, and the state. Nevertheless, the most overt encounter the family have with such state power is in the discovery that they are being racially and religiously profiled in the contemporary moment of the novel’s setting, a subject I will return to soon.


Although Lebanon seems to recede into the backdrop of the family’s history in the novel as the Abdullah’s children and then their children’s children are born in America, readers are constantly reminded of the home country. Apart from the old character who dies on the bus en route to see the planes arrive from Lebanon, it is Fatima herself who is always thinking of Lebanon. Because of Scheherazade’s visitations, Fatima believes she only has 1001 nights remaining on Earth and thus becomes obsessed with figuring out to which of her descendants she will bequeath her village house upon her death.

While Fatima never returns to the homeland, the most unlikely of characters does. It is Fatima’s white-passing granddaughter Dina Bitar, the Texas-born, part-Palestinian child of Randa’s (who belatedly goes by “Randy” to also appear white). On a foolhardy mission to impress an Arab American college activist she becomes infatuated with, Dina joins the fuckboy at a refugee camp in Lebanon where for the first time she encounters a community of other diasporic Palestinians like (and definitely unlike) herself.


In this, the most evidently transnational moment in the novel, one that my students find elucidative of the course’s themes, the All-American Dina (a cheerleader, no less) comes face-to-face with the effects of state-sponsored violence on people with whom she shares an origin. One of the refugees, a seamstress named Sarah, produces a document to show Dina – it is the deed to the woman’s house in Palestine. Just before an Israeli airstrike occurs and Dina and the others have to evacuate the camp, the Palestinian woman confides that she lives with the hope that, one day, she will return to her own country. This year, after (unbelievably) the one-year anniversary of the genocide of Gazans that began on October 7, 2023, teaching this novel has had profound resonance. It has revealed to my students that persecution against Palestinians is not a recent phenomenon; rather, it continues to divest many of their homeland as the world looks on.


Indeed, the question of where one’s home is is a persistent theme in 

. This is a query the Abdullahs find themselves faced with when it becomes clear that they are being targeted by their own government because they are Arab Muslims in post-9/11 America. This, after four generations of the family have been in the United States, with a fifth-generation-child soon to arrive. State surveillance is the unknown soundtrack to the family’s lives as the crackle of static interferes with telephonic conversations. In fact, this is why their relative – the old person on the bus – dies alone and away from the family. The character’s repeated attempts to reach the family are thwarted by phone taps authorized by the government. It is state-sanctioned Islamophobia and racism that gets in the way of this character being with his kin in his final moments.


 brings together themes of state persecution, familial conflict, transnationalism, and Arab American history, but it also has a strong feminist perspective. Fatima’s house in Lebanon – the one she never sees again – was a gift to her from her mother, one that would allow Fatima to have a place to return to should things go awry in America. This matrilineal offering is in keeping with Scheherazade’s own legacy. As we may recall, the storyteller offered herself up in place of her sister, Dunyazad, who was to marry King Shahryar. The reason Scheherazade wished to replace Dunyazad was because the marriage meant certain death, the king finding little reason to prolong his unions were he to be displeased in the least with his brides. It is Scheherazade’s enchanting storytelling (the basis of 

) that causes Shahryar to fall in love with her, thereby keeping her and other women from being murdered.


While I tell my students that this is proof enough of the power of literature to save lives, the other lesson one learns is that Scheherazade grapples with state power, as represented by the king, through the use of culture (and wins). Arguably, Scheherazade’s story ends with the preservation of heteropatriarchy and not with the demise of the king (or the state). Yet, in demonstrating that stories and their telling preserve heritage while state-sanctioned violence looms, both 

 and its ancient inspiration ask us to consider how even those made marginal hold on to what is most important to them and preserve it by passing it on in the stories they tell for more than a thousand and one nights. 


 was born in Kuwait and has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, N. America, and Oceania. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary and winner of the Jinlan Liu APIA Faculty Research Award. Ferrão’s academic writing appears in 

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication

 among others. His fiction and creative nonfiction can be read in 

. He is also a regular contributor to the journalistic platform 

"This year, after (unbelievably) the one-year anniversary of the genocide of Gazans that began on October 7, 2023, teaching this novel has had profound resonance." 

Stories versus State: A Reflection on Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter

An illustration of poppies with eyes, half turned upward and half turned toward a glow emanating from right side of the frame.



“All the poplars and my ancestor’s solemn orchard

Were, I swear, smiling at me with Arab affection.”



Twelve months after Israel began its annihilation campaign of Palestinians in Gaza, the steadfast, larger-than-life journalist, Bisan Owda, asks the soul question of the year—

who are the caretakers of Palestinian earth?

 As she pans her camera out, she points to the Mediterranean Sea and the palm trees dotting a refugee camp in Khan Younis, where Palestinian children move their bodies along a breezy lilt in their teacher’s voice. The teacher calls, they respond, she calls again—children respond in the long Palestinian breath we call home. The children, like the roving protagonist in Layla ‘Allush’s poem, reflect a childhood quintessence— namely, the freedom to give and receive joy. For a moment, the genocide collapses as they raise their autonomous voices to sing, and the land, momentarily languorous, expands with their song. This phenomenological moment captured by Bisan is also sacramental because it harkens back to a past (and subsequent future) where Palestinian children lived (and will live) in the luxuriance of childhood. 

When these unfiltered images echo and ricochet across the planet, I recognize in them a visual periphery of my reason for being. This past year, I reconstructed memories of my childhood, imagining them to be small, linked gardens or little Edens extending into adulthood, where I could take my fill of love despite the daily brokenness. A few months ago, I saw a photograph of our family home in Gaza, and it was still standing. I ran my eyes over the lone, sunburnt cypress tree, the grapevine, and the terrace decorated with orange-black tulip tiles. Every inch of it is a repository of belonging. What’s a house but an extension of the collective body? What’s a body but an extension of God?

It's human (though privileged) to feel despair, especially when images of massacred babies, children, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, and grandmothers come at us incessantly, especially when we witness entire generations of Palestinian bloodlines being erased, especially when bunker busters rip the earth, killing indiscriminately and causing craters the size of little villages. The violence of colonialism seeks to recalibrate our existence and break our longstanding, centuries-old relationships with places and lands to which we belong. Capitalism tells us that it doesn’t matter who you are as long as you accrue capital. It doesn’t even matter if the property you own is ancestral; the only thing that matters is ownership (often theft) instead of belonging. 

Everywhere we look, we are assaulted by values forced on us by Western necro politics though we see past their perfunctory hypocrisies. Muslim feminist scholar Fatima Mernissi says that Western societies dominate with a narrowly constructed definition of time, which consists of seemingly innocuous evaluations, inventories, and measurements. The colonialist obsession with inventory symbolizes ultimate control—the more you know about a people, the more control you exert over them. Mernissi even refers to this construction of time as an insidious kind of imperialism. For the West, time ushers in ‘progress’, a euphemism for wealth accrual, while simultaneously marching those it colonizes (including the earth) toward death.

As Israel increases its aggression against Lebanon, a displaced Lebanese woman remarks that the Israelis bombing Beirut, “may be masters of the sky, but we are masters of the earth.” When the oppressed remind those drunk with power and avarice where real power resides, a certain continuum of time (and its system of oppression) collapses into the ether.

Even though time dominates, I argue that we are living in a time of preternatural changes. A new paradigm of time can be born because death machines are not sustainable, because there’s an intergenerational shift in thinking about war and genocide, and because youth have a profound disagreement with their elders about the degraded environment. And if we listen to the land reflecting the voices of our children, we’ll know the answer to Bisan’s essential question, w

ho are the caretakers of Palestinian earth?

 Yes, they’re the ones smiling at us with affection.




***

 is a Lebanese writer and visual artist. Her book 

 won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Free Palestine.

The earth is witness both to current events and toward the future/those who honor the earth. I illustrated this idea through the poppies, half turned toward the current and half turned toward a glow emanating from the future/horizon. Was thinking about how these poppies have endured and witnessed so much since antiquity and continue to grow through, and after, and into the future.

A Palestinian American poet on a year of genocide

Mentorship

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Stories versus State: A Reflection on Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter

On the Past, Future, and the Singularity of Belonging