8 - 14 March 2001
Issue No.524
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 March 2001 Issue No.524 |
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Postcolonial hybrids
Alif 20: The Hybrid Literary Text: Arab Creative Authors Writing in Foreign Languages, The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, 2000
The 20th issue of the scholarly journal, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, entitled "The Hybrid Literary Text: Arab Creative Authors Writing in Foreign Languages" goes beyond its title, giving more than it promises. As the title indicates, the journal is dedicated to the question of "hybridity" with particular focus on Arab writings in languages other than Arabic. As a result of this interest, the volume brings to the reader's attention a sometimes marginalised category of writers who have been rarely esteemed in the cultural contexts of the languages in which they have written and have also in the main been ignored in histories of Arab literature. While the volume rightly attempts to retrieve the voices of these cultural mediators, the articles in it do not merely supply a survey of such hybrid products. Instead, they together make a crucial theoretical intervention, at once keeping abreast of current western cultural theory and problematising its givens.
Ahdaf Soueif
This is a massive volume, running to over 500 pages and including 22 scholarly articles analysing the work of writers who have historically been ignored on the basis of their very hybridity, or their lack of cultural and linguistic purity. It reveals the role that these cultural hybrids play in today's cultural politics, at once popularising Arab culture to non-Arab readers and giving expression to the hardship of alienation in foreign cultures. While maintaining a focus on the Arab World and on Arab writers, the volume takes readers on a literary tour of English, French, Dutch, German and Hebrew literatures, examining the ways in which Arab writers have contributed to them. It examines novels, plays, poetry, cinematic production and autobiography, at once voicing the views of critics and making room, through interviews and memoirs, for the voices of the writers themselves. Containing articles in both Arabic and English, with a touch of French, the multilingual text caters for readers from across the cultural divide, in effect being a hybrid in its own right. Abstracts of all the articles are, however, included in both languages, thus making the volume accessible to all.
The main interest of the issue is postcolonial studies, and it sets out to discuss the now popular cultural theory of hybridity in a Middle Eastern (Arab) context. The proliferation of hybridity theory in cultural studies dates back to the 1980s with the translation into English and French of the work of the Russian linguist and critic M Bakhtin, who drew attention to the power of linguistic hybridity both to unmask the language of authority and to fuse another voice with it. To Bakhtin, hybridity was a "dialogic" structure, which, within one utterance, could undo authority and make room for the less powerful idiom. It was a structure comprising sameness as well as difference, and therefore it was one that kept up a "dialogic" relation with authority. More recently, the Anglo-American critic Homi Bhabha has linked hybridity to his own area of interest, postcolonial studies, and it is this linking that the current issue of Alif pursues.
By disseminating hybrid texts of Arab affiliation among readers of both English and Arabic, the current volume helps to graft these onto both cultures while undermining the authority of the western languages employed and thus dismantling hierarchies of value and substituting a dialogue of sameness and difference. At once focusing on shared Arab culture and acknowledging the diversity of Arab experience, the volume supplies readings of texts by different Arab nationals. Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, and Syria are all represented. Prominent and central to the issue, however, stands the work of Palestinian writers. The volume supplies readings of Yasmine Zahran's novel A Beggar at Damascus Gate, which explores the identity of a Palestinian heroine through the eyes of an English hero; of the poetry of Hanan Ashrawi and Sharif Elmusa, which employ diverse but complimentary strategies to address the Palestinian crisis; and of Karim Alrawi's play Promised Land, which, as Mahmoud El-Lozy points out, unmasks the Israeli occupation as both a strategy for the dispossession of the Palestinians and for the erasure of their identity.
Perhaps the most challenging literature to touch upon the Palestinian (Arab)/Israeli question is that by the Palestinian-Israeli writer Anton Shammas, who writes in Hebrew. His controversial novel, Arabesques, which disturbs the divide between the two sides of the struggle as well as the very concept of the Zionist state, receives attention here, Muhammad Siddiq supplying a comprehensive survey of the critical reception of the novel in both East and West together with an analysis of the politics of readership in both cultures. He also reflects on the effectiveness of Shammas's attempts to address the on-going Palestinian struggle, his article being complimented by an interview with Shammas, which includes the writer's own analysis of the text and its reception.
While Shammas's work proves the effectiveness of linguistic "transgression" in disturbing fixed categories, other articles discuss the hardships of being culturally hybrid. Andrea Flores, for example, reveals how the Algerian Francophone writer Assia Djebar sees her own hybrid identity as signifying a linguistic and historic schism, being the separation between her Berber language and history, on the one hand, and her present idiom and identity on the other. From her present hybrid position the writer reflects on the loss of cultural purity, thus at once using hybridity as subject matter and pointing out her captivity within it. Soraya Antonius strikes a similar note, showing how Arab nationals educated in English and French schools during the colonial period later found themselves to be "misfits" in their own culture. She charts the cultural and physical journeys that some of these writers undertook, pointing out that many of them emigrated and followed in the footsteps of their acquired culture. Those who stayed behind, she claims, could sometimes become mimics, translating their native culture into an acquired foreign idiom, but not being at home in either native or foreign idioms. She thus adds the category of mimicry to the problem of linguistic captivity raised by Djebar.
In another article, Anne Armitage problematises hybridity theory through an examination of the reception of Maghreb Francophone writers in their home countries. Although hybrids, she argues that they are writing in a world that still regards the West as being the cultural centre, thus creating a vacancy in the production of literature in their native language and market. Themselves the product of a French colonial education, they still pay service to the ex-colonisers. Marlous Willemsen similarly problematises hybridity, this time in the context of Dutch authors of Arab descent. In her article, she reveals how these writers, once acknowledged as Dutch, are now being re-categorised as "Dutch writers of non-Dutch descent" in a move designed to emphasise multiculturalism and plurality. However, the writers themselves sometimes resent this new definition, insisting on their earlier definition as "Dutch" writers. This manipulation of the writer's identity is a warning against the uncritical application of theories otherwise designed to counter the politics of exclusion.
Other articles discuss the possibility of theory supplying solutions to the problems that it raises. In Amin Malak's reading of novelist Ahdaf Soueif's work, for example, as well as in an interview with her conducted by Samia Mehrez, some of the pitfalls of hybridity are addressed. Soueif's use of a "pidgin" language, it is argued, together with her meshing of cultures, sets a model for a textual hybridity that challenges the history of "purity". In another essay, Abdelwahab Meddeb explores the mediaeval roots of East/West cultural hybridity through a reading of Ibn 'Arabi and Dante, re-reading cultures that have always embraced opposites and hence historicising hybridity, analysing earlier models, and posing it as an ever shifting, on-going process. Mahmoud Qassim's reading of the French cinematic production of Mehdi Charef, which represents the Arab community in France, similarly reveals how the hybridisation of French cinema is opening up new venues for the inclusion of minority groups.
Parallel to the theoretical and critical discussions, the volume also includes memoirs of various hybrid cultural figures. Etel Adnan takes readers on a geo-cultural tour among Arab, Greek, French and American spaces, languages and cultures, for example, proving by doing so that a harmonious identity can be constructed out of diversity. Meanwhile, Nadia Gindi's personal narrative around Edward Said's "Memoir" complements the autobiographer's voice by supplying snapshots of the same childhood scenes from different angles.
Reviewed by Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim
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