Arab Diasporic Writing Figurations of Space and Identity

Abstract

The panel entitled “Arab Diasporic Writing: Figurations of Space and
Identity” was held on Friday, February 27, at the 2004 Twentieth Century
Literature conference at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. Organized by Carol Fadda-Conrey, the panel featured presentations by Professor Syrine
Hout and Lisa A. Weiss on two Arab diasporic writers, Rabih Alameddine
and Leïla Sebbar, respectively.
Syrine Hout, an associate professor of English at the American
University of Beirut, presented a paper entitled “Lebanon ‘Revisited’:
Memory, Self, and Other in Rabih Alameddine’s The Perv.” Singling out
Alameddine as an example of Anglophone novelists of the Lebanese diaspora,
Hout’s presentation handled complex themes of memory, nostalgia,
the homeland, and relationships that generate binding ties in her analysis of
the short stories featured in The Perv. Published in July 1999, this is
Alameddine’s second work of fiction. Comprising eight short stories, The
Perv presents in-depth portrayals of characters in various states of exile and
displacement, both mental and physical, cultural and psychological.
In her analysis, Hout presented the cogent case that Alamaddine shows,
by way of his characters, all of whom have been affected by the Lebanese
civil war, how homesickness is more of a “sickness of home,” manifested by
what Hout defines as “critical memory of the immediate past of the civil
war.” The presentation’s overriding argument, systematically upheld by
Hout, shows how the notion of “being at home,” as represented in this work,
“is not about belonging to a piece of land but about having a peace of mind
which can be enjoyed anywhere.” In her reading of the first story, “The
Perv,” and the subsequent stories, Hout arrived at an interesting conclusion:
Sammy, the title story’s main character, is actually the creator of the other
characters in the collection to such an extent that he and Alameddine become
one and the same person. Hout’s analysis of “being at home” in The Perv as
being engendered “by an emotional reality [more] than a spatial one” brings
to the forefront significant concerns in the study of diasporic literature.
Such thematic concerns were also addressed and probed by Lisa Weiss
in her presentation entitled “‘Arab’ Paris: Reinterpreting the City-Center
through the Writings of Leïla Sebbar.” Weiss, a Ph.D. candidate in French
and Francophone literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
lived in Paris during 2003, teaching at the UC Paris Study Center and
researching “Beur” cultural production. She identifies “Beur” as a “colloquial
identification-term from the 1980s used for second- and third-generation
French citizens born in France to North African immigrant parents.” ...