2 - 8 May 2002
Issue No.584
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 May 2002 Issue No.584 |
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Plain talk
I had the pleasure of meeting two American writers currently in Cairo -- Gish Jen, a Chinese-American novelist, and Jay Lee Parini, poet/ novelist, critic and biographer. Both of them are children of migrant parents.
While Afro-American literature is an integral part of the American literary scene, little is known about Asian- American literature. We have come to know about the pre- Harlem Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, new black consciousness in poetry and the names of black poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterliag Brown, Margaret Donner, Sham Bourke and others.
Yet Asian-American literature has received little exposure. Of course visitors to New York must visit Chinatown, but their knowledge of Chinese-Americans is probably restricted to the kinds of novels and films in which the Chinese are always portrayed as stereotypical criminals.
So listening to these two writers voicing their opinions about what one might term non-white literature was a breath of fresh air.
How does one define the boundaries of Asian- American literature? The question is addressed by Shirley Geok-lin Lim in an essay accompanying the two writers' CVs. Scholarly and popular interest in Asian- American literature is of recent vintage. Journals such as Bridge in New York City and Amerasia, published by the University of California in Los Angeles have, though, done sterling work in promoting it. These magazines, according to the writer, "were vital forces in increasing awareness of selected Asian- American writers."
But how do we approach such writing? Some have suggested it be approached solely from the perspective of race, which implies foregrounding the identity position of Americans of Asian descent. Others promote the melting pot paradigm, claiming that Asian-American sensibility is an American phenomenon different from and unrelated to Asian cultural sources.
And now we come to our two visitor writers. Gish Jen's first novel Typical American (1991) follows "a trio of young Chinese immigrants who slowly transform into everything they once criticised as the typical American." The novel was selected as a New York Times notable book of the year. In her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land, Jen continues to explore notions of cultural diversity and ethnic identity.
Jay Lee Parini is a writer with 13 books to his name, apart from poems published in periodicals and dozens of articles and essays dealing with, among others, Seamus Heaney, Blake, Thomas Mann, Theodore Roethke, Emerson and Frost.
He has, he reveals, been addicted to reading writers' biographies for 30 years or so. The art of biography, he says "is an ancient one, preceding the novel by centuries."
In the Middle Ages, he goes on to say, there were the lives of the saints, which were meant to inspire devotion more than entertain the reader. "But literary biography, in English, got underway with a bang in the 19th century with Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, and, of course, Boswell's Life of Johnson," Parini says. "These were both works that raised the genre of literary biography to the level of art."
Being thus introduced to Asian American immigrant literature, I asked myself where was the Arab- American equivalent? True there is Gibran Khalil Gibran, but I would describe him as an Arab writer living in America and writing in English, not an Arab- American writer who became part of the American literary scene.
Arab-Americans are perhaps better represented in the political and academic worlds. Some day, though, I hope they will take their place beside their Afro-American and Asian-American counterparts, and that their experiences of the culture in which they have been brought up will provide the raw material for literary endeavour. Literature, after all, furnishes one of the most important arenas within which differing experiences can be explored, and by being explored understood by others.
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