Shapeshifting Subjects by Zaytoun Kelli D.;

Author:Zaytoun, Kelli D.; [Kelli D. Zaytoun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2022-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Arab American Women Writers and Post-oppositionality

An exploration of Arab American women's writing, with attention to expressions of post-oppositionality, reveals the practical, politically progressive implications of identifying and promoting nagualan consciousness. This section takes up Keating's three “Bridge” lessons as groundwork for establishing coalition and strengthens those lessons by linking them with Arab American women's writing as examples. Keating honors the authors of This Bridge Called My Back by theorizing three ways in which “radical visions for transformation,” can be built (Transformation Now! 38). Those lessons are (1) “making connections through differences,” (2) “positing radical interrelatedness,” and (3) “listening with raw openness” (38).

Commenting on lesson 1, Keating describes Latina/x and Black writers like Mirtha Quintanales, Andrea Canaan, Audre Lorde, Rosario Morales, and Anzaldúa as those whose work not only attends to difference but also “refines difference in potentially transformative ways” (Transformation Now! 38). These writers “expose (often to themselves as well as to their readers) their own previously hidden fears [of those who are different from themselves] and desires—fears and desires that have seemed so different, so shameful, that they must be entirely hidden” and go on to reveal “a type of intellectual humility by acknowledging the limitations in her knowledge”; they then take a risky step of “reaching across this gap to make connection,” finding commonalities but not sameness in the experiences of women of colors from varying backgrounds (39).

Acknowledging and transforming difference into common ground are frequent themes in Arab American women's writings, as well. For example, Abdelrazek demonstrates that Mohja Kahf's poetry “[o]ffers a notion of Arab Muslim women's difference not as static or definitive but, rather, as an opportunity for dialogue and conversation” (92). Abdelrazek points out that the Muslim American speaker in Kahf's poem “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears” uses the opportunity of a conflict between her grandmother and “white Sears matrons” to “see beyond the rigid barriers put up by human ignorance,” realizing that “despite their differences, all people share a common humanity” (92). The speaker's grandmother is preparing her feet for prayer by washing them in the sink of the store's bathroom, which the “Middle West[ern]” others find appalling and unclean (Kahf 27). As the only person in the scenario who speaks the languages (Arabic and English) of each of the two conflicting parties, the speaker is called on to translate the angry words that the women are leveling at each other (Abdelrazek 92). The speaker reflects on the situation:

My grandmother knows one culture—the right one,

As do these matrons of the Middle West. (Kahf 27)

The speaker recognizes, as she is situated “between the door and the mirror” and can see “multiple angles,” that her grandmother and the others are “decent and goodhearted women” (27), so instead of translating the angry words she does the following: “I smile at the Midwestern women as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them and shrug at my grandmother as if they had just apologized through me” (28).

Abdelrazek

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