"Deterritorialization of Belonging: Between Home and the Unhomely in Miral al-Tahawy's Brooklyn...

Journal of Levantine Studies

Deterritorialization of Belonging: Between Home and the Unhomely in Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights and Salman Natur’s She, the Autumn, and Me

Ariel M. Sheetrit Ben-Gurion University and The Open University of Israel

In this article I argue that Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights (Bruklin Hayts)1 and Salman Natur’s She, the Autumn, and Me (Hiya, ana, wa-l-kharif )2 call into question the very fixedness of the concepts of “homeland” and “diaspora/abroad,” and obscure the distinction between the indigene and the relocated diasporic subject. She, the Autumn, and Me is the most recent novel by Palestinian Israeli writer Salman Natur (b. 1949), a seasoned writer of short stories, novels, and critical writings.3 Brooklyn Heights is the fourth and most recent novel by Egyptian Bedouin Miral al-Tahawy (b. 1968), who stands out as the first Egyptian Bedouin woman to publish modern Arabic prose.4 Through their portrayal of characters who are outcasts or loners, these contemporary novels complicate and deconstruct axioms that imply a reciprocal association between homeland and belonging, on the one hand, and exile/diaspora and foreignness or estrangement on the other. In this study I interrogate these texts’ portrayals of the homeland as it is conceived through shades of belonging and foreignness and how “abroad” is portrayed vis-à-vis an originary homeland, in layered diasporic terms, yet also conflated with home and homeland. I will show how both texts exemplify a paradigm shift from a Self/Other binary to multiple subject positions, dismantling stable Self/Other “time-spaces within and between First and Third Worlds”; in so doing, it “deterritorializes the loci and foci of these dualisms.”5

In both texts “otherness” is manifested by a female protagonist who is portrayed as an antihero. In each novel the protagonist is haunted by feelings of

Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 2013, pp. 71-98

72 Deterr itor ial ization of Belonging

both personal and cultural alienation that are inextricably bound with a constant sense of dislocation and displacement both at home and abroad. On the surface both narratives focus on the protagonist’s everyday life experiences, but through the portrayals of the banal and of everydayness, the intricacies and dynamics of identity, belonging, and dislocation are filtered and revealed. The female characters in both novels must deal with the repercussions of ongoing dislocation and displacement, and their subjectivity is constructed in spaces of rupture and difference.

Natur’s She, the Autumn, and Me is set in an unnamed Galilee village in present-day Israel. It recounts the life story of an eighty-year-old woman named Zinat, known as Kahraman. She has been living by herself for the sixty years since the death of her grandfather, who raised her. Living on her family’s land in an old house unconnected to electricity or water, Zinat is considered mad by those around her. For this reason, and because she is a woman, she lives on the margins of an already marginalized community, that of Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. Not only is she marginalized, in the eyes of the authorities she does not even exist: her birth was never recorded, and she has no papers attesting to her identity or citizenship. The actual and symbolic significance of this is clear: she has no rights, no status, and no voice. It is not only “the Jews” who are responsible for her neglect.6 In fact neither the town’s mayor, who is her first cousin, nor his predecessors have ever taken an interest in her plight or attempted to better her circumstances. The mayor/cousin decides to modernize the village, and to this end he covets Zinat’s centrally-located piece of real estate in order to turn it into a parking lot. Suddenly in the limelight, she resists his offers of relocation, wishing to live her life as she always has. The novel is comprised of two parts: the first is narrated in the third-person voice, and the second part shifts to the first-person voice of Zinat’s poet-friend Jamila.

Al-Tahawy’s first three novels, The Tent (1995), Blue Aubergine (1998), and Gazelle Tracks (2003), navigate between the various worlds traversed by their main characters. Always girls or women who feel out of place, they inhabit the real and the magical, the legendary and the imaginary; worlds of sanity and madness; worlds divided along gender lines; worlds of British expats and those of slaves, servants, and higher-class Bedouin; realms of the healthy and of those with bodily defects; and the overlapping worlds of life and of death. Brooklyn Heights continues Al-Tahawy’s characteristic style of incorporating and traversing multiple perspectives and environments, the female protagonist never quite at home in any of them. In Brooklyn Heights, however, the geographical horizons are expanded by an overseas journey that cuts between memories of her Bedouin village in Egypt’s Nile Delta and

73Journal of Levantine Studies

Brooklyn, New York, where Hind, a woman in her late thirties, has migrated with her preteen son. They live in a tiny apartment and Hind works in Dunkin’ Donuts. She dreams of becoming an accomplished writer, spends time with her immigrant friends, and enjoys long walks through Brooklyn’s colorful neighborhoods, which teem with motley diaspora communities. The text is stream-of-consciousness and impressionistic; the plot is secondary to the protagonist’s ruminations and reminiscences. Hind’s story begins with her arrival in Brooklyn and continues for an unspecified period of time as her son grows and acclimates to his new environment and she, conversely, feels increasingly dislocated and alienated from those around her, from men, from her son, and even from her own body.

My approach is to employ the concepts of “home,” “homeland,” “exile,” and “diaspora” not as stable signifiers but as a way of conceptualizing and interrogating the protagonists’ originary “here” in relation to what is conceived as “there,” which can be real or imagined, near or far, and which elicits an otherness of place. I employ these terms specifically to flesh out the way both texts undermine them as stable referents constructed as two poles of location. The dynamics of the Eastern “here” and the Western “there” are nevertheless the point around which these texts pivot, and the terms mentioned are not emptied of meaning. Through them I problematize how in these texts “the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is divided as it is disorienting.”7 I also examine how these ideas (not necessarily the terms themselves) that connote a binary relationship and established boundaries are reworked to reveal overlapping boundaries (where, for example, homeland transforms into exile, or diaspora reveals feelings of foreignness felt in the home or home country). I employ Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “unhomely,” a paradigmatic and complex colonial and postcolonial condition that resonates “in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical sites.”8 Another term I find useful for articulating the slipperiness of the boundaries between these concepts/locations is Avtar Brah’s “diaspora space,” which conceptualizes the “intersectionality of diaspora, border, and dis/location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural, and psychic processes.”9 This concept brings out the complexities and contradictions within diaspora emplacement and identity formation and formulation rather than containing and delimiting them within predetermined or ironclad coordinates.

Both novels provide original, unconventional articulations of East-West encounter, a seminal theme in modern Arabic literature that can be viewed as a sub-genre of the novel.10 The first such works of fiction tended to feature an


“Eastern” man who travels abroad to Europe.11 Later this expanded to include female sojourners—in texts by both male and female writers—who travel to Europe or, more recently, to America, as in al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights.12 In his extensive study of Arabic fictional representations of the Occident (which predated the writing of these two novels), Rasheed el-Enany emphasizes that Arab perceptions of the West, from the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798) to the present, tend to be characterized by ambivalence, alternating between denouncement and idealization/exoticism, and by a “simultaneous attraction and repulsion towards their object.”13 Against this background, my assertion is that these two novels are innovative in that they redirect their focus from the Western “Other” inward: the West is relegated to the background, no longer the object of a protagonist’s impassioned emotional dilemmas, whether to be condemned or embraced. Both texts embody a crucial paradigm shift in which the boundaries of East and West are blurred and merged—the margins relocating at times to the center, or the center impinging on the periphery—and in which “home” and “homeland” no longer entail a particular, clear-cut Eastern identification vis-à-vis exile in a foreign land. While not all novels that depict the East-West encounter present a facile dichotomy, the ambivalence toward the Western Other/s and its/their objectification tend to feature prominently in novels portraying such encounters. Even women’s portrayals of the cultural encounter that mix issues of gender and “intimate concerns about female emancipation” tend to uphold this. 14

In She, the Autumn, and Me, the West forces its way into the domain of the East: the West is represented both by Israelis and Israeli hegemony and also by local Palestinians who have adopted Western values, not by an actual journey to the geographical west. Instead the landscape surrounding Zinat’s house metamorphoses: it is transformed beyond what would be expected, considering the vicissitudes of time. In fact her homeland, Palestine, disperses and disappears. This underscores an important difference between the novels. In Natur’s She, the Autumn and Me, forceand violence play a central role in the encounter with the West, whereas in al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights that encounter occurs largely by choice. Upon leaving the immediate environment of her house for the first time in sixty years, Zinat discovers that the expanse surrounding her home has been deterritorialized: it is no longer the Palestine of her youth but has become a foreign country, and hence she finds herself in exile in her homeland. This novel therefore provides a divergent perspective on the East-West encounter because the protagonist does not journey to the West— the West encroaches on her. The protagonist, however, is not interested in confronting the Western values besieging her, preferring instead to redirect her


gaze inward to her past, her inner language, her home, and her traditional values and worldview. Moreover, the West is not objectified. The protagonist rejects Western values wholeheartedly and serenely, such that the modern, Western civilization encompassing her must decide how it treats her, not the other way around. These sensibilities embody this novel’s deviation from the corpus of portrayals of East-West encounters.

In al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights the protagonist contemplates Western Others, but only marginally. On the contrary, “typical” white Americans and stereotypical symbols of the West (Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, for example) are mentioned only sporadically, and their mention underlines their marginality. Even though she has journeyed to the West, like so many protagonists in Arabic novels portraying the East-West encounter (and unlike the protagonist in She, the Autumn, and Me), her internal turmoil is not directed toward Americans or American values; rather, it is enmeshed in levels of transnational experience, both her own and that of other migrants. She contemplates her present in light of both her past in Egypt and the other exiled/diasporic subjects that populate her field of vision.

Both novels stage a transnational experience of displacement at the heart of the narrative but diverge in an essential peculiarity: whereas Brooklyn Heights revolves around a story of migration, specifically from an Egyptian village to Brooklyn, New York, in She, the Autumn, and Me, the protagonist is stationary; indeed, she is practically house-bound in her ancient residence. Whereas Brooklyn Heights is predicated on the physical journey of the diasporic subject(s), in She, the Autumn, and Me, the physical environment itself undergoes defamiliarization (to use Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s term), casting the native inhabitant-protagonist in terms of diasporic experience, a quintessentially Palestinian tribulation. Especially considering this divergence, it is worth noting a poetic similarity. Both texts cast the main character in terms that evoke the autumnal. The protagonist of Brooklyn Heights, for example, is portrayed as “a tired, autumnal woman.”15 The protagonist of She, the Autumn, and Me is repeatedly portrayed as living in the autumn of her life and is likened to the fig tree that “has passed through its fall journey.”16 This metaphor actually dramatizes the divergence between the texts. In Brooklyn Heights, Hind’s “autumnal-ness” makes her life an interminable, exhausting journey. It emphasizes her tendency toward movement, whether crossing national boundaries or traversing Brooklyn, sometimes for hours each day, crisscrossing between neighborhoods. In contrast Zinat’s “autumnal-ness” is given an explicit allegorical force in She, the Autumn, and Me: the image metaphorically associates her with a tree in her yard, thereby epitomizing the protagonist’s rootedness and immobility.


Generally speaking it seems correct to refer to each protagonist’s displacement in terms of “exile,” inasmuch as exile is an individual experience of dislocation—as opposed to diaspora, which describes the movement of a people who retain a common socio-cultural consciousness.17 Nevertheless, some theories emanating from diaspora studies are relevant in the context of the displacement described in these novels, particularly Avtar Brah’s concept of “diaspora space.” This concept, as distinct from the concept of “diaspora,” is where

multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed; where the permitted and the prohibited perpetually interrogate; and where the accepted and the transgressive imperceptibly mingle even while these syncretic forms may be disclaimed in the name of purity and tradition. Here, tradition itself is continually invented even as it may be hailed as originating from the mists of time. What is at stake is the infinite experientiality, the myriad processes of cultural fissure and fusion that underwrite contemporary forms of transcultural identities.18

It foregrounds “diaspora” as a construct rather than an objective, essentialist fact, not as a stable immigrant community with clear-cut membership requirements but rather as an intersection wherein multiple subject positions are juxtaposed.

In both novels the “homeland” is not delineated by specific national borders. The spatial terms invoked by both texts are intensely “local,” individual, and personal: one focuses on a house and its immediate surroundings in an unnamed Palestinian Arab village, briefly mentioning an unnamed nearby city, and the other focuses on the ethnic intricacies of Brooklyn and on the landscape of an unnamed Egyptian Bedouin village. These spaces are imbued with personal meaning. As Homi Bhabha writes: “Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries—both actual and conceptual—disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities.”19 They embody the paradox Homi Bhabha propounds in the term “dissemi-nation” in which structures of liminality within the nation break down the polarity of the “self” of the nation versus the “Other” outside the nation. These ambivalent spaces of representation threaten the homogeneous representation of a people: “It becomes a question of the otherness of the people-as-one” wherein difference is turned from the boundary outside to its finitude within.20 Representation of the homeland in both texts is suffused with “otherness,” as both characters feel alienated and marginalized: they are marked as “others” within their native land as compared to other members of the same nation-space. Yet by casting these marginalized voices in opposition to the Israeli Jews or Americans lurking in the background of each novel,


the homeland as a liminal space of the individual nevertheless takes on national significations of “us” versus “them.”

Although each text epitomizes a different experience of exile with regard to movement—one through an actual journey, the other characterized by physical inertia—this study will show that each narrative constructs what theorist Rogers Brubaker would call a “diaspora stance.”21 According to Brubaker, as an “idiom, stance, and claim, diaspora is a way of formulating the identities and loyalties of a population.”22 This formulation informs my textual analysis, which focuses primarily on the emplacement of both protagonists and on the relationship between construction/reconstruction of identity and location/dislocation. Brubaker considers the panoply of conceptualizations of “diaspora” that have emerged in the last twenty-five years, pinpointing ambivalence and a tension in the theoretical literature between “boundary-maintenance” and “boundary-erosion.” On the one hand, he notes an emphasis on what he calls “boundary-maintenance and the preservation of identity,” and on the other, he draws attention to a strong countercurrent that emphasizes “hybridity, fluidity, creolization, and syncretism” that encompasses conceptualizations such as “diaspora space.”23 He cites noted theorist Stuart Hall, whose foundational remarks on the diaspora experience take into account “a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.”24 Articulating these seemingly antithetical directions serves to emphasize the tensions inherent between homeland and hostland, even in two such intrinsically different conceptualizations of exile. These tensions, which manifest exile on a sliding scale rather than as an entrenched position, guide my analysis.

Home as Homeland in Natur ’s She, the Autumn, and Me

Zinat’s home is described as a paradise that is antiquated and decaying inside. As an allegory for the Palestinian homeland, it conveys a split between past and present. Closeness to nature is exemplified by her yard’s ancient trees, its well, and its water pump, and time is determined by the elements.25 In contrast, Zinat’s house exudes an atmosphere of “old” and dark: it contains her grandfather’s possessions, untouched since his death, and her possessions, collecting dust and piling up in the darkness. Very little light filters in. The image of her house obscures the aura of a paradise lost; it is conveyed as decrepit and dilapidated. Although people see her as “primitive” (bā’iyya), she lives according to a precise order, reflecting perhaps what Bhabha calls “an ‘inward’ time of tradition.”26

The mayor’s desire to bulldoze the house is highly symbolic: he in effect annihilates what remains of pre-1948 Palestine by casting the home as “a place of no return.”27


However, associating Zinat with nature and with the land has a paradoxical effect: associating her with the land of Palestine, with paradise lost, also turns her into an Other, exoticizing and even Orientalizing her. This is reinforced by her portrayal through the trope of madness, which situates her in dichotomous opposition to sanity. Her madness is a product of, or a response to, male transgressions: her grandfather’s fabrications, which shelter her from the “truth” of her parents’ deaths by constructing an imaginary world for her, and the brutality of rape, which silences her and seals her madness and thus also her otherness. Her house sets her apart from the rest of the village, containing her in her madness and demarcating the realm of her insanity, the house a metonymic extension or personification of her madness. As Brah points out, the question of home is “intrinsically linked with the way in which processes of inclusion or exclusion operate and are subjectively experienced.”28 In this case, Zinat’s home is the place where she lives out her difference from others, living in the past in her grandfather’s tales. Paradoxically, the house also functions as a shield against the intimidating behavior of the villagers, but it is nevertheless susceptible to the threatening sounds of trespass. The villagers often knock violently on her ancient brass door.29 They taunt her, throwing things at her door or the gates around her yard.30 But they do not infiltrate her territory until Siham, a “friendly” social worker, knocks on her door and Zinat admits her. The mayor sends Siham to investigate how to uproot Zinat and appropriate her house in a “civilized” way that does not involve blatant use of force. I see this as the “unhomely moment”: Zinat’s home territory is invaded, its boundaries permeated, and it takes on political dimensions by intermingling with the world outside. This moment “relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence.”31

It is difficult to pin down the location of homeland in Natur’s She, the Autumn, and Me—it is conflated with exile and is rooted in the fact that the geographical space of the homeland has been transformed into the homeland of another people. As opposed to Brooklyn Heights, in which the land of exile is an ocean away, here exile occurs in the homeland itself. Anthony Giddens’s distinction between “place” and “space” is helpful here: “place” is the physical setting (in this case, the physical territory once known as Palestine), and “space” concerns its significance, which may be related to features not concrete or palpable or to features physically distant from the place.32 The Palestinians in this novel have not been exiled abroad, as many were in 1948, but are “1948 Arabs” who have remained in their ancestral homeland. While the place has remained the same, the space has been radically transformed.33 One can argue that here the place and space of the homeland coincide only in Zinat’s house


and yard, where she has preserved a version of pre-1948 Palestine. How, then, can we relate to the area outside the confines of her home? This is a Palestinian village, one in which the adjective “Palestinian” is a cultural—even national—marker but not the territory of a nation-state. The village was deterritorialized after 1948, and reterritorialized as Israel. Of particular interest is that other than the security guard who threatens Zinat on her outing to a nearby city there are no Israeli Jews in the story. The “Western” capitalist mindset is represented by the village mayor who wants to appropriate Zinat’s property, raze it, and turn it into a parking lot for a modernized town center rife with tourists. There is no geographical west in this text. Rather, the “West” is represented by a modern, Westernized mindset that has overtaken the Arab village, putting financial gain ahead of communal weal. This further illustrates how the place has transformed into a foreign space not only in concrete national terms, by becoming Israel, but also by internalizing new, nonnative (and therefore Western?) ideals. The Arab mayor himself has become the usurper.34 If we view this through the metaphor of rape suggested by the novel, the first rape was committed by the Jewish Israelis who dispossessed the Palestinians of their homeland, and the second rape, sixty years later, is committed by the mayor and his cronies who usurp the last vestiges of the homeland, literally eradicating this last pocket of Palestine.

In many modern Arabic novels, the female body epitomizes the homeland,35 and women are used as a historical metaphor signifying traditionalism, communal identity, and nation, “most commonly represented through the allegory of mother/earth/country.”36 This tendency is not unique to Arabic literature. Nira Yuval-Davis notes a more general tendency in which “(Hetero) women/mothers are . . . often constructed as embodiments of the homeland.”37 The gendered nature of such narratives often revolves around a rape symbolizing the violence of the occupiers and the resulting breakdown of family structures. This insight is particularly relevant to a traumatic, life-changing event in Zinat’s adolescence when she is raped by the school guard, which seems an obvious symbolic rendering of the Nakba. In light of this Zinat’s body can be read as an allegory of Palestine. This equation of Zinat with the homeland is reinforced by her meticulous observance of Palestinian traditions, using only premodern tools and rejecting electricity, and by correlating her with nature and the land. Following through on this, Zinat’s death, linked to the land through the fig tree with which she collides, like the usurpation and destruction of her house, is the final death of the homeland. Viewing Zinat as an allegory of the Palestinian homeland has the effect of implicating present-day Palestinians in “foreignizing” the place that was once Palestine, Westernizing and modernizing it


at the expense of individuals in the community like Zinat or, by extension, at the expense of the homeland itself.

The concept of the Nakba frequently calls to mind the ensuing refugee problem and the generations of Palestinians who have since lived in diaspora.38 Yet the idea of living in exile in one’s homeland is not new to Palestinian literature or thought, and is famously exemplified in Imil Habibi’s The Pessoptimist (1974).39 Like Saʿid in The Pessoptimist, Zinat is caught between two seemingly opposing poles of “native” and “exile.” But in She, the Autumn, and Me, the paradox focuses less on the experience of a Palestinian living in Israel and more on that of Palestinians among fellow Palestinians where they themselves have become usurpers representing Western capitalist values above all else. Here I would like to interpose Brah’s concept of “diaspora space”: it undermines the idea of a clear-cut boundary between “nativeness” and migrants upheld by such theorists as William Safran and James Clifford.40 Clifford, while acknowledging “diasporic complexity” and the idea that most diasporas are “ambivalent, even embattled, over basic features,” nevertheless locates “diasporans” in opposition to “indigenous, and especially autochthonous,” peoples.41 It is important to note that Clifford’s formulation recognizes that, “lines too strictly drawn between ‘original’ inhabitants (who often themselves replaced prior populations) and subsequent immigrants risk ahistoricism.”42 In other words, he nuances this binary opposition, noting its problematic nature. Brah forestalls shortcomings inherent in such a binary through the concept of diaspora space that “defies the search for originary absolutes or genuine and authentic manifestations of a stable, pre-given, unchanging identity; for pristine, pure customs and traditions or unsullied glorious pasts.”43

Regarding Zinat’s rape in allegorical terms as violent, forced deterritorialization, we can argue that for her the trauma of deterritorialization is not followed by reterritorialization, a process undergone by her fellow villagers, at least superficially. Zinat expresses the trauma of her rape by speaking a language unintelligible to others, literally manifesting deterritorialization, when “all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs.”44 Although the villagers live in a diaspora space, the configurations of power distinguish between Zinat’s experience of the diasporic condition and theirs, particularly regarding the mayor who lords his power over Zinat. Furthermore, language is a marker of foreignness in the text: not only is Zinat distanced from the text because she does not narrate, but her foreignness is enhanced by the fact that she often speaks her own idiolect, thereby establishing her cultural difference from those around her, both Arabs and


Jews. Cultural difference emerges from “the borderline moment of translation,” Bhabha suggests.45

Thus, the binaries of homeland-diaspora and native-exile are deconstructed on various levels, illustrating not only the paradox of exile within the homeland but also of exile within the community of fellow exiles. The homeland in this text is what was once Palestine and is now Israel, but Zinat’s house has a special status, preserving Palestine as it once was—not territorially but culturally, through ancient tools, trees, and by her daily habits, and linguistically. As such, it manifests “diaspora space” inhabited not only by those who

have migrated and their descendants, but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. In other words, the concept of diaspora space (as opposed to that of diaspora) includes the entanglement, the intertwining of the genealogies of dispersion with those of “staying put.”46

Here, as I have shown, the genealogies of dispersion are intertwined most intricately: most of the characters are younger than Zinat, thereby calling into question the meaning of “indigenous.” The text not only seems to establish the paradoxical category of native exiles but also distinguishes between indigenes, suggesting that those born prior to 1948 may have different loyalties and different modes of belonging than indigenes born after 1948, in the State of Israel. This is reinforced by the symbolic meaning of the fact that Zinat is never given identity papers that would confirm her status as a naturalized Israeli citizen. Her fellow Palestinians are actually Israeli, and it is not really clear if her story proffers the heterogeneity of the nation-as-one, to recall Bhabha’s terms, or if the Palestinians in the text should be seen as Israeli, as national “Others.” This text does not provide any clear-cut answers to the question. Rather, by unfurling this complexity, the text problematizes the complicated issues of belonging with regard to Palestinians living in Israel, criticizing not only Israel but also Palestinians for their lack of attention to the Others in their midst: women, old people, those whose sanity is questionable but who should be seen as part of a heterogeneous Palestinian nation. Or one could argue that Zinat represents the foreigner who lives within us, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, “the hidden face of our identity.”47 By invoking a pre-1948 homeland still extant in Zinat’s house, the text formulates a paradox regarding the Palestinians’ relation to their past—for if it is a paradise lost, as Zinat’s home is portrayed, then returning to it is unrealistic, even impossible. Yet at the same time, the disregard toward Zinat’s home and all that it signifies can be read as a call to them to look for, to seek out, the fragments of the homeland that are extant in the modern reality. Such fragments might be found in


the “foreigner” (or “native”) within themselves and their surroundings; in actual pieces of land that should be preserved, not disfigured; or in people and ideas that should not be marginalized—or worse, completely ignored.

Homeland as Exi le in Salman Natur ’s She, the Autumn, and Me

Zinat is triply marginalized: she is a Palestinian, a woman, and mad. She becomes displaced when her fellow villagers usurp and destroy her home, driving her out of both home and homeland. Ironically, had she stayed home and not gone to visit the nearby city at the insistence of her friend Jamila, Zinat might have managed to save her little corner of “Palestine” from the covetousness of her fellow Palestinians (as will be explained further on). Then she would not have had to confront the reality of exile within her homeland.

The novel complicates the binary of homeland and exile by means of a tale told to Zinat in her early childhood to explain the death of her parents. Zinat’s grandfather tells her that she is really Princess Kahraman from far-away Chechnya and that someday her parents, the king and queen, will send for her. He does not foresee the effect this legend will have on the young Zinat, whose sobriquet “Kahraman” dislocates her from her own identity. She understands the legend to be true and lives her life “within” this tale, expecting at any moment to be summoned “back” to her native kingdom.

The grandfather’s tale generates another level of exile in the novel. “Actual” homelands, Brian Axel proffers,48 are reinvented from the location of diaspora—they are mythologized, turned into fantasies of identity, place, and past that restore (in Hall’s words) an “imaginary fullness or plentitude” on projected sites of longing that have been reconstructed through nostalgic invention.49 If this is so, then what of a homeland that never existed in the first place? What is the difference—if in fact there is one—between Zinat and a second-generation exile who has never personally experienced the homeland and grows up on the postmemory (Marianne Hirsch’s term) of others, on the chimera of a distant land?50 Zinat is repeatedly displaced, living in continual exiles. She speaks a language intelligible to no one, an idiolect that for her is the language of the other place whence she believes she has come. Zinat’s imagined exile in her actual homeland is significant because it is on account of it that she is deemed mad.

Zinat is considered mad because the legend that defines her identity is unique; if others believed it, it would be “normal,” akin to other fantasies that fashion “sane” identities. This allegorizes and epitomizes the fantastic character of diasporic belonging for those who do not know their homeland firsthand but who nevertheless


self-identify with a “diasporic stance” (Brubaker’s term). In this sense, it should be noted, the narrative is situated vis-à-vis a journey “at the heart of the notion of diaspora,” in Brah’s words.51 In this case, however, the journey is the product of Zinat’s/Zinat’s grandfather’s imagination. It is unclear how aware Zinat is that the story is a prevarication. Although the villagers think she lives within this tale, in fact one of Zinat’s high school teachers had confronted her with its falsity in order to release her from its clutches.

It is on that day, having stayed late at school, that Zinat is raped by the school guard as she tries to leave. When she arrives home she begins to speak in an unfathomable idiolect and becomes increasingly introverted—and no one knows why. Villagers assume she has been possessed by a demon. It turns out that her idiolect is thus not from her imaginary legend-spun homeland, as thought, but is a repercussion of the trauma she endures as a result of the rape, symbolizing the “rape” of her actual homeland, the Nakba.

This trauma is recalled when Jamila takes Zinat on an outing to the city to show her the childhood landscapes she has visited with her grandfather. Jamila is convinced that this will help Zinat work through and overcome her childhood trauma once and for all. The opposite turns out to be true, as during this outing Zinat is traumatized anew. “This is not the city I once knew,” she says in spoken Arabic, which Jamila, the narrator of this section of the text, reiterates in literary Arabic, taking over her voice: “This is not the city she once knew. Over sixty years, everything has changed.”52 This journey implies the crossing of a psychic border, indeed a national border, as this is Zinat’s first contact with the new Israeli reality. She attempts to enter the customs building where her grandfather had worked sixty years earlier, but the guards stop her, as is the case in every public building in Israel, because visitors must present their bags for a security check. She cannot present identification, as she has never possessed the requisite papers, epitomizing her exilic stance. Zinat feels threatened by the armed guards, and with her large body she pushes one of them against a wall. The other guard aims his gun at her. Everything Jamila has built with Zinat unravels in an instant: Zinat screams in her unintelligible language, kicking the guards as she is forced to the ground. The language of trauma infiltrates once again.

Zinat does not recover from this final trauma. The next day she bumps into a fig tree (symbolic of the idyllic Palestinian past and rootedness) while suffering a debilitating stroke. She is hospitalized, and while she is there the mayor and his henchman storm her house, evict Jamila (who has been living there), burn the objects in the house, and prepare to bulldoze the building. This act seals Zinat’s


exilic positioning, and she is symbolically condemned to death. Her home was her shelter from trauma, and she has been thrust into an exile too painful to endure.

Home and the Unhomely in the Homeland in al-Tahawy ’s Brooklyn Heights

In Brooklyn Heights the protagonist is an outsider in her native Egypt, complicating the notion of belonging to a place or a culture and problematizing notions of center or stability of identity, an idea conceptualized by theorists such as Avtar Brah. The ambivalence of place in Brooklyn Heights recalls Rogers Brubaker’s description of the tension between “boundary-maintenance” and “boundary-erosion” in which he blurs the clear-cut distinction between the originary homeland and the new country. This tension is brought out by the narrative structure’s compelling tendency to extensively chronicle Hind’s memories of Egypt, which spring from her present-tense experience in America. The homeland is evoked through the prism of exile and becomes a “homeland” in relation to life abroad. Thus, the homeland takes shape only through the perspective of a foreign country and is formulated as “a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination.”53 In contrast to She, the Autumn, and Me, here exile and homeland are distinguished spatially. Paradoxically, once Hind crosses the vast spatial boundary from homeland to abroad, a temporal boundary also emerges in which the homeland becomes associated with the circumscribed past and exile with the ongoing present.

Brian Axel questions the originary nature of the “place of origin” of diasporic subjects, particularly Sikhs. He states that “rather than conceiving of the homeland as something that creates the diaspora, it may be more productive to consider the diaspora as something that creates the homeland.”54 In Brooklyn Heights, Hind’s recollections of home in Egypt can be read through this lens: place comes alive through her memories only once she is emplaced abroad. Therefore, these memories blur the boundaries between “here” and “there” because they are filtered through Hind’s experience of “here,” engendered by physical and temporal distance. Sociologist Anne Marie Fortier asserts that “memory acts as the key vector through which spatiality is reconfigured. . . . Remembering not only defeats the idea that the homeland is a constant and sole object of longing, but it is also tied to the very (re)construction of the identity of places.”55 In Brooklyn Heights, Egypt is not an empirical place of origin but a place that exists only through memory and in memory. Thus, it is not presented as a binary opposition to Hind’s present-tense exile; instead, it is presented as springing from exile itself. Egypt is continually enframed, indeed, engulfed, by the present place and time, and it takes shape only through memory and only from Hind’s current location. One consequence of this is that, as in She,


the Autumn, and Me, the Egypt described is her personal Egypt—as she remembers it right now. The protagonist formulates her home-within-homeland from within her home-within-exile. Fortier puts it this way: “The act of remembering speaks of an enduring presence and ‘roots’ it within local territory. Speaking of migrant identity formation as a practice of remembering places disturbs fixed notions of spatiality and territory.”56

Hind’s reminiscences articulate not a previous identity or place but rather her evolving exilic identity. They convey the peace of mind she draws from her new location, which allows her to pore over and define her memories of “there.” She

dreams of a house that hugs the street to itself, a house whose insides she can see without having to knock, a house with a wide hospitable courtyard that invites the greetings of passersby, a house across whose open threshold floats the smell of cooking, of washing, and the sweat of strangers. But the gate to her father’s house is high and shut fast. She stands staring at it and it stares back at her.57

Like her mother she dreams of a house other than the one she lives in, and the memories of the house that was are fused with memories of the house she wished for. This timeworn wish is what informs her present identity, as the search for a place in which she feels at home is revealed as the continuation of a desire that took root in her earliest childhood days in Egypt. The novel does not revert merely to anecdotes or passing references to aspects of her previous life. Instead, each of the twelve chapters incorporates a significant digression of at least several pages, sometimes dominating the chapter, and in one instance taking up almost all of chapter eight. Only in chapter ten do the memories chronicled evoke the past experiences of others, not Hind—in this case of other Arabs living in ghurba (loosely translated as “exile”) in Brooklyn. These digressions are woven into the fabric of the text by association: some aspect of Hind’s present life always elicits the memories. For example, the smell of beer reminds her of her father, spurring a flashback to childhood memories of him. In each case the narrative block recounting the past is framed, and instigated, by Hind’s current life in Brooklyn. Reminiscences include her Coptic grandmother, called “The Guest,” her early childhood memories of her parents up until their deaths, her nicknames, her childhood friends, her marriage and divorce, her teachers, her first menstrual period and other experiences of her body, and her childhood dreams. It should be noted that despite this marked preoccupation with memory, the text occasionally states that Hind is plagued by oblivion: “At night she thinks about how she has begun to forget so much . . . and that her keen memory has been damaged . . . oblivion has begun to pursue her like


a scary phantom.”58 The narrative strategy of prolonged reminiscences belies this stated position, actually perching the text uneasily between the extremes of oblivion and an obsession with remembering.

It is crucial to note that one of the text’s major digressions about memories of Hind’s home in Egypt is set off by a brief statement to her son, “Okay, let’s go home,” referring to their apartment in Brooklyn. 59 Thus, the primary “home” connoted by the text is actually Hind’s new abode in Brooklyn, and only by mediating through this home does she arrive at her primordial childhood home. From the distance of “home” in New York, Hind recalls being trapped in her childhood house, her mother’s threats to break her legs if she crossed the threshold, and how she waited to follow in the footsteps of the camel caravans that crossed the threshold and never returned.60 Brooklyn, then, can be seen as that which is waiting on the other side of the threshold, in direct opposition to the inside of her bounded house in Egypt.

A comparison is drawn between “the chaotic house” and her “besieged mother’s body,” creating an association between Hind’s mother and the house.61 As opposed to She, the Autumn, and Me, in which Zinat herself is portrayed as an embodiment of home and homeland, in Brooklyn Heights the home embodies the suffering Hind’s mother undergoes at the hands of Hind’s father, whose indiscriminate patriarchal values she endures and passes on to Hind. The house itself must withstand her father’s abuses: the closed door of the physical house barely manages to contain the “heavy thud of groans and kicks” coming from behind it.62 Hind’s father casts a dark shadow over the playhouse Hind constructs with the sandy earth.

A recollection of Egypt brings out a rich irony: Hind recalls sitting in a car in Egypt “dreaming of faraway places that she had only ever heard of in stories, mysterious cities with brass domes wreathed in milky white clouds.”63 When she was in Egypt, she dreamed of faraway places, and now that she is located in one if these places, ironically, she dreams of Egypt—not through desire but perhaps through renewed understanding. Perhaps only as a foreigner in America does she understand that she has always been a foreigner, a crucial aspect of her identity: her apartment in America “confirms her solitude and verifies her talent for escaping.”64 What she seeks in America is not home per se but other foreigners and a way of living out her otherness.

Home in Egypt is construed as a place of exclusion, of unbelonging, and the basis of her travels abroad. Hind is formulated as a scion of her Coptic grandmother who was an outsider unto death, never accepted into the Bedouin Muslim family into which she married, and significantly was denominated “The Guest.” Only after her death does Hind come to understand that this woman was her grandmother.


This epitomizes the roots of Hind’s otherness, as if it were emanating from a time before her birth and passed on through the ages. Thus, even before migrating Hind is already living in a “diaspora space,” a foreigner in her native environment, constantly plagued by displacement and dislocation. Although a native of Egypt, the homeland she constructs is no more of a home than in her new hostland. Brah undermines the concept of “home” as a fixed location, and casts it rather as both “a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination” and “the lived experience of a locality.”65 It is through these terms that we can understand the seeming contradiction between estrangement and belonging. Hind feels out of place, unable to catch on to the spoken idiom like her son does, yet she simultaneously embraces her new environment and, even as a stranger, identifies with it and feels “at home” within it. In so doing she casts her originary homeland as foreign, as a place in which she does not belong. This East-West encounter breaks down the binary of “here” and “there,” portraying Brooklyn in some ways as an extension of the foreignness that infused her experience of Egypt. The novel aspect of life in America is that she no longer has to run away from this feeling of foreignness but can, ironically, feel at home as a foreigner.

Brooklyn Heights breaks down what Stuart Hall refers to as the “imaginary coherence” that can be imposed on “the experience of dispersal and fragmentation.”66 In this text “otherness” is the rule: Hind feels out of place in her country of origin and similarly out of place in her host country, thus blurring the distinction between the two and constructing her as Other in both. It also undermines the sense that her alienation and feelings of dislocation in her new country stem from her status as an immigrant. Rather, these feelings stem from her continual status as “outsider,” thereby undermining received categories of native belonging and diasporic dislocation.

The terms used to convey the concept of exile in Brooklyn Heights include those derived from the root gh.r.b. (including ghurba, ightirāb and mughtaribūn) which calls to mind “exile,” or distance from the homeland, with muhājir connoting “immigrant” and lāji’an indicating “refugee.”67 Wataִn (homeland) is also used on occasion. It is crucial to note that the text employs the same terms to highlight the alienation experienced by those considered indigenous. For example, the guests at Hind’s father’s soirees in Egypt are designated mughtaribīn and mughtaribāt, referring to Egyptian visitors to her village who were hosted at her father’s house for several weeks at a time.68 The text also highlights the journey Hind’s mother was forced to make from her native village to marry Hind’s father, a story that emphasizes the relational nature of diaspora: one can argue that her mother lived a


diasporic existence, especially if, as Brah claims, “diasporic journeys are essentially about settling down, about putting roots ‘elsewhere.’”69 Hind’s mother is almost completely cut off from her native village and cannot return to visit during the first years of her marriage. There are therefore multiple levels of “homeland” in Brooklyn Heights. The homeland is portrayed as fractured and incorporating multiple displacements. It is a place of affliction, adversity, and alienation.

Home Abroad in Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn Heights transgresses fixed categories of past and present, of here versus there, and of native versus indigenous. It also shifts the concept of exile from focusing on a distinct group, in this case Egyptians, to a broader conceptualization of shared immigrant experience. When focusing on Hind’s current life in Brooklyn, the text tends more toward describing a broader identification with fellow exiles/immigrants, which downplays identification with her particular homeland. The omnipresence of dislocated groups and individuals serves to relocate the margins to the center. Rather than representing the West by negative stereotypical imagery, as is common in Arabic fictional accounts of the East-West encounter, Hind is instead situated among people like herself: immigrants, exiles, people with roots in other continents—an idea which, ironically, is crucial to the American national narrative.

It is actually another Brooklyn-situated Egyptian who most cogently exacerbates Hind’s loneliness and alienation, perhaps underscoring that “all diasporas are differentiated, heterogeneous, contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common ‘we.’”70 Saʿid is an Egyptian Copt whom Hind meets in the library. When he invites her to a Sunday outing, she wants to believe that it is a date, that she might possibly find warmth and intimacy in his company. The purpose of the invitation, however, is to convert her to Christianity, and the outing is a church event. Saʿid takes advantage of their shared “homeland” in order to lure her to this meeting, which ultimately heightens her sense of alienation. The fact that Saʿid is a Copt undermines the myth of a monolithic Egyptian homeland, expanding the portrayal of the homeland to include different religious groups and individuals with different identities. Brooklyn Heights breaks down conceptions of a monolithic East and a monolithic West, portraying Hind’s old and new countries through the lens of heterogeneity and difference.

Hind’s gaze constantly captures other nonnatives, and she perceives her surroundings through the prism of diasporic communities or individual exiles. For example, as she walks down Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, she pinpoints ethnic


restaurants such as Mr. Falafel and Tofu, noting Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts in passing: “When Americans wake up, they run off to Dunkin’ Donuts.”71 Textual descriptions are continually imbued with diasporic significance, thereby creating a diaspora space rather than a clash between two clearly demarcated cultures. This is illustrated when Hind learns to tango: the text conceives of this dance in diasporic terms, a dance that begins “with the first wail unleashed by the prisoners in the slave ships, then its rhythms were picked up by the Spaniards who crossed the seas.”72 Furthermore, it is a dance of longing (hִanīn), but longing as an existential stance, not tied directly to a specific past or place, thereby representing the pathos of diaspora existence without the necessary binary of a specific homeland or hostland.

Though most of the New York characters are fellow foreigners, the text creates a rich irony by making the one persistent representation of an American perspective that of Hind’s young son, who has speedily adapted and adopted language, accent, and ideas, “foreignizing” him in Hind’s eyes. This breaks down any presupposed binary between “an historical cultural identity on the one hand, and the society of relocation on the other.”73 It is her son, and not a native, who represents the locals (can we even say there is such thing as a “native” in Brooklyn other than long-scattered Native American tribes?).

Hind’s perspective/gaze invariably captures “the diasporic” within her surroundings as evoked by people, food, smells, language, and dance. It calls into question the connection between individuals and communities, complicating the notion of belonging to or assimilating into a place or a culture and problematizing notions of center, stability of identity, or even of diaspora identity. Brah articulates the tension between individual and group identity, describing an “interweaving of multiple travelling; a text of many distinctive and, perhaps, even disparate narratives,” and questions the unity of a particular “cluster of migrations” into a particular diaspora community.74 Brooklyn Heights is characterized by two tendencies: deconstruction (of the individual strands within a given diaspora) and, conversely, association (of various diaspora communities equated by their similarities). This ambivalence casts the novel as an expression of the polysemousness of diaspora identity, foregrounding an agglomeration of liminalities that repeatedly belie any attempt to pinpoint “here” versus “there” but nevertheless formulate the text within a distinctive diasporic aesthetic. Stuart Hall puts it thus:

The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity…. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.75


This concept shifts the spotlight from integrated group identities emanating from circumscribed diaspora communities to the dynamics of individuals’ experience of diasporic belonging (or not belonging—that is, difference). It also shifts the focus from bounded groups to a broader sense of diasporic identity in which the individual feels connected to other diasporic subjects bound by a shared experience of dislocation and concomitant experiences of diaspora. Brah stresses that such lateral diasporic connections problematize the binary of minority versus majority in diaspora configurations, positing that “‘minorities’ are positioned in relation not only to ‘majorities’ but also with respect to one another, and vice versa.”76 Such a perspective further undermines the power dynamic between minority and majority, immigrant and host country, and dislocation and emplacement. It is through the refracting prism of multiple intersecting diaspora communities and a broader sense of diaspora identity that I examine Hind’s vision of Brooklyn in this text.

The confluence of individual exiles and diaspora communities is manifested throughout the text. During her first days in Brooklyn, Hind becomes acquainted with a neighborhood called Fort Greene, which is home to “the largest community of blacks in Brooklyn,” and she notes the loud music, the African dress, “the spices, perfumes and smells, and jewelry of the hot, brown continent from which she came.”77 Moreover, on her walks there, she observes dark-skinned women sitting outside, and she listens to their talk—although “she won’t understand a word of what they are saying”—and to their laughter, which is “similar to hers.”78 This description captures the ambivalence of Hind’s diaspora vision: she is attuned to other diasporans to whom she feels both close and distant. In this case they are from the same originary continent (she assumes), and yet not from the same country. They do not speak the same language, but they do share the same “deep laughs” that presumably sets them apart from the “natives.” It is not entirely clear if the text is criticizing Hind here for her stereotyped view of African Americans, automatically exoticizing them and connecting them to an originary Africa when they may be from Haiti or elsewhere in the world. In stereotyping them she is perhaps reversing what she experiences when people see her as “Arab,” not specifically Egyptian: “All Arabs look alike, dear—I can’t tell them apart.”79 People also connect her to “Arabia” as if she had just emerged from the legendary Thousand and One Nights, which is in fact the name of an Arab café Hind frequents in Brooklyn—an example of self-exoticizing.

Furthermore, the communities she observes are not necessarily diasporas or even people in exile. Rather, some are marked by a nonmainstream ethnicity—Latino, Italian, Asian, Vietnamese, Turkish, and Mexican (where the women have thick


black hair like hers).80 In other words, among these communities she feels estranged from the specific language but always finds something with which she identifies, as we saw in the examples of the black women’s laughter and the Mexican women’s hair. Perhaps this shallow, generalized identification proves Hind’s perceptions to be flawed and her identifications illusory. It seems that she is drawn to both their similarity to and difference from her and hence to a “diaspora aesthetic,” to use Hall’s term, that the vivid colors and multiple languages inspire. In this way she exoticizes herself, viewing her homeland from the perspective of hostland, concocting herself as Other to herself and deterritorialized from her own self. Let us keep in mind, however, that the identification and exoticizing are the product of gazing from a distance: “from a distance at least, people seem to reflect her own image back.”81 The distance blurs the finer details of identity and difference.

As part of the tendency of “othering” herself, Hind is drawn to places where other immigrants go. She goes to English lessons at the local library, where she is exposed to people from Mali, Russia, Pakistan, Peru, and Haiti. At these gatherings people tend to speak to each other in broken English, their shared language. This mark of division between them notwithstanding, the text emphasizes their common bond as exilic subjects as they talk about homelands and “exchange the tidbits of information of those in exile (khabarāt al-ightirāb).”82 Along the same lines, Hind’s closest friend, a Russian émigré named Emilia, has been in America for twenty years. When they sit together silently on a park bench, they are like “copies” of each other. This description is not explained in the text and is puzzling given their divergences: Emilia is twenty years older, Russian, and comports herself differently from Hind. This could be understood by regarding their encounter as a nexus of intersecting diasporas, a space they inhabit together: one of the touchstones of Brah’s concept of diaspora space “where several diasporas intersect.”83 Diaspora space, then, needs subjects from multiple diasporas to draw it into existence. At the moment the two women are sitting out on a park bench, they are “copies” of each other: in their overlapping exiles, in their concerns and outlooks, perhaps also in contrast with the Brooklyn “natives” lurking in the background, sitting at Starbucks, jogging along the street, or embracing publicly.

The text mentions the first American presidential victory of Barack Obama, which, one can argue, articulates the text’s diaspora ambivalence. Though this is the fulfillment of the ultimate American dream, and the slogans Obama embodies are so “typically” American—“hope” and “change”—his victory can also be seen as a “diaspora victory,” not least because of his own diaspora past mingling Kenya, Indonesia, and America. The diaspora groups described in the text as celebrating


his victory can also be viewed in this way. The textual focus on this event is an articulation of the blurred boundaries between nativist and diaspora discourses that constitute “diaspora space”: it is hard to tease apart the American from the diasporic subject in this scenario. Similarly, the portraits that catch Hind’s eye in the library are those of famous expats and refugees—namely, Ernest Hemingway and Albert Einstein. In addition the text harkens back to the days before the Brooklyn Bridge was built, when the area was populated by “freed slaves and immigrants (muhājirīn) looking for work.”84 This description arguably encompasses both blacks and whites, implying that today’s “natives” were yesterday’s black slaves or white immigrants.

Another collective the text elicits is that of Arab communities, which receive pride of place among diaspora communities in Brooklyn Heights. The dissimilarity between individual Arabs, and between Hind and other Arabs, is emphasized repeatedly. The unlikeness between Arabs is evinced by the fact that they don’t understand each other’s languages: Arabs from Morocco, Algeria, Sudan, and Yemen “never exchange a word with her in Arabic,” and if she tries to speak to them in Arabic, they say that they only speak colloquial Arabic, and therefore insist on speaking to her in bad English.85 Nevertheless, the text highlights Arab Americans: Hind’s Somali colleague, Fatima; the Kurdish Iraqi ʿAbd al-Karim, a refugee divorced from Jo-Jo, a Mexican immigrant; Narak the Armenian from Baalbek, Lebanon, a doubly displaced diasporic subject who sells chessboards and novelty chess items; and Najib al-Khalili and his nephew Ziyad, both from Nablus. They constantly curse the difficulties of life in exile (al-ghurba). Najib is portrayed as a “classic” diaspora subject, consumed by his life-long yearning to return (al-ʿawda) to Palestine. Their bakery is described as ideal for Ziyad to study different types of Arab immigrants in the diaspora, or mahjar, which he must do for the film he wants to make about Arab immigrants in Brooklyn.86 These comments can be read metatextually as the novel’s articulation of its examination of similarity and difference in diaspora identity.

Above all, Hind’s individuality is articulated by the title of the poetry collection she dreams of writing: “I Am Like No Other.” Yet even this “truth” is cast in incertitude. It is undermined, for example, by the referral to Hind as being a copy of her friend Emilia and, more significantly, when she melds into the character of Lilith in the final chapter. Lilith is the only other Egyptian-cum-exilic subject beside Saʿid the Copt. As a teenage wife-mother, Lilith fled her husband and newborn son in order to live the glamorous life of an artist, a free woman abroad. When Hind encounters Lilith she is old and frail and has lost her memory but has


maintained her elegance. Lilith frequents Najib’s bakery and listens to his stories of his past. The narrative concludes with her death, and in her Hind sees herself. When she encounters pictures of a younger Lilith, she is certain the pictures are of her (Hind)—they even have a scar in the same place. And when Hind happens upon a pile of Lilith’s papers after her death, she says: “I know these papers . . . I wrote every word in them . . . I feel they are my papers and that the handwriting is my handwriting, and I don’t know how this woman put into words everything I wanted to say and write.”87 This doubling evokes a fundamental tension in the text between individuality and identifying with and through others. It is all the more poignant that where one might expect a certain similarity, in her native Egypt, the girls “look nothing like her.”88 Yet, as we have seen, people in the far reaches of New York remind her of herself and reflect her image back to her.

Hind finds reminders of her homeland in the least likely of places—Brooklyn, New York—and feels at home there, yet paradoxically, she feels alien and estranged in her native village. The text subverts the possibility of such binaries as East and West, homeland and hostland, native and foreigner. It locates the roots of Hind’s displacement in America in her originary displacement in her village and shows how her view of her hostland is not drawn in contrast to her homeland but is projected as a continuum, through memories of her homeland.

In conclusion, both Brooklyn Heights and She, the Autumn, and Me are preoccupied with interrogating the intersections between the native and the immigrant, particularly in terms of positionality within geographic and psychic borders. I have shown how both novels take up, challenge, and transgress this binary, foregrounding the tension between the seemingly stable categories of “native” and “immigrant” in order to configure the hybrid, protean nature of identity and belonging—as both are constructed and deconstructed—with regard to geographic location or an imagined national community. Both texts focus upon spaces of rupture and otherness that are located at the margins of society and are often ignored, overlooked, or derided. I read both texts as a turning point in fictionalized representations of the East-West encounter. They embody a paradigm shift grounded in fluid and multiple subject positions that deterritorialize the primacy of the West over the East and undermine the possibility for a facile, dichotomous relationship between them. This is most cogently brought out by the way both texts—despite their differences—breathe multiple, often contradictory significances into the place/s the protagonists call “home.”


Notes

1 Miral al-Tahawy, Bruklin Hayts (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2010). Translations from this text are taken

from Brooklyn Heights, trans. Samah Selim (Cairo: AUC Press, 2011) where indicated. Where no

reference to the English translation is given, the translation is mine.

2 Salman Natur, Hiya, ana, wa-l-kharif [She, the autumn, and me] (Haifa: Dar Raya li-l-Nashr,

2011). This text has not been translated into English; all translations from this text are mine.

3 Born in 1949 in Daliat al-Karmil, where he still lives, Salman Natur is a Palestinian Israeli Druze.

He has published more than twenty-five books in Arabic and one in Hebrew. He is also an

editor, a playwright, and a translator. He is the director of the Emil Tuma Institute for Israeli and

Palestinian Studies in Haifa (since 2002). He was the director of the Israeli-Palestinian Committee

of Artists and Writers against the Occupation (1986–1992) and served on the board of directors

of Adalah—the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel (2000–2006).

4 Writer Miral al-Tahawy was born in 1968 in the eastern Nile Delta in a conservative Bedouin

village. Her first collection of short stories, The Exceptional Steppe Antelope, was published in 1995

and was followed by four novels to date. She has a BA in Arabic literature from Zagazig University

and an MA and PhD from the University of Cairo. She has been living in the United States, where

she has taught at various universities, since 2007. Her latest novel, Brooklyn Heights, won the 2010

Naguib Mahfouz Medal and was nominated for the 2011 Arabic Booker Prize.

5 Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, eds., “Introduction,” in Displacement, Diaspora and

Geographies of Identity (London: Duke University Press, 1996), 5.

6 It is important to underscore that Natur, like some other Palestinian writers, does not demonize

his Jewish characters but condemns all authority figures who abuse their power, Arab and Jew

alike. In this he recalls writers such as Hanna Ibrahim and Tawfiq Fayyad.

7 Homi K. Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and

Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Ann McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota, 1997), 445.

8 Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Locations of Culture,” in The Location of Culture (London:

Routledge, 1994), 13.

9 Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996), 208.

10 The motif of the East-West encounter often centers on a journey, or rihִla, a term that has come

to denote not only actual journeys or records of such journeys (as that of ibn Battuta) but also a

modern subgenre of fiction. For an extensive though not exhaustive list, see Rasheed el-Enany,

Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in Arabic Fiction (Oxford: Routledge,

2006), ix–x. Additional studies on this topic include M. M. Badawi, “The Lamp of Umm Hashim:

The Egyptian Intellectual between East and West,” The Journal of Arabic Literature 1 (1970):

145–161; Issa J. Boullata, “Encounter between East and West: A Theme in Contemporary Arabic

Novels,” The Middle East Journal 30, no. 1 (1976): 49–62; and Michelle Hartman, “A Grave for


New York and New York 80: Formulating an Arab Identity through the Lens of New York,” Studia

Islamica (2011): 223–250.

11 Classic examples include such otherwise diverse works as ‘Usfur min al-sharq [Bird from the east]

(Cairo: Lajnat al-Taʾalif wa-l-Tarjama wa-l-Nashr, 1938), by Tawfiq al-Hakim; Qindil Umm

Hashim [The lamp of Umm Hashim] (Cairo: Misr li-l-Maʿarif, 1944), by Yahya Haqqi; al-Hayy

al-Latini [The Latin Quarter] (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1957), by Suhayl Idris; Mawsim al-hijra

ila al-shamal [Journey of migration to the north] (Beirut: Dar al-ʿAwda, 1969), by al-Tayyib

Salih; and Aswat [Voices] (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Misriyya al-ʿAmma li-l-Kuttab, 1972), by Sulayman

Fayyad. Notable recent works include Amrikanli [The American way] (Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal

al-ʿArabi, 2003), by Sunʿallah Ibrahim; and Shikagu [Chicago] (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2007), by

ʿAla al-Aswani.

12 Such texts include Radwa ʿAshur’s nonfiction al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba Misriyya fi Amrika [The

journey: The days of an Egyptian student in America] (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1983); and notably

Innaha Lundun ya ʿazizati [This is London, my dear] (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2001), by Hanan al-

Shaykh.

13 El-Enany, Arab Representations, 8.

14 Ibid., 185.

15 Al-Tahawy, Bruklin Hayts, 26; Brooklyn Heights, 13.

16 Natur, Hiya, ana, wa-l-kharif, 225.

17 According to the well-articulated distinction between exile and diaspora put forward by Ulrike

M. Vieten, “‘Out of the Blue in Europe’: Cosmopolitan Identity and the Deterritorialization of

Belonging,” Patterns of Prejudice 40, no. 3 (2006): 267.

18 Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 208.

19 Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in

Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 300.

20 Ibid., 301.

21 Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (2005): 12.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 6.

24 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed.

Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 235.


26 Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 213.


28 Ibid.


30 Ibid., 21.


31 Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” 448.

32 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

1990), esp. 1–17.

33 In this sense it is constructive to compare this text to Elia Suleiman’s film Chronicle of a

Disappearance (1996), which manifests the disappearance of the space of Palestine, although the

place is physically extant.

34 Recalling Frantz Fanon’s concept of internalization of the conqueror’s values in Black Skin, White

Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986).

35 There are numerous instances of this: for example, in Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra, trans.

Peter Ford (New York: Doubleday, 1986), the Lebanese civil war is played out on the scarred,

acne-filled face of the female protagonist.

36 Mona Fayad, “Reinscribing Identity: Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Writing,” College

Literature 22, no. 1 (1995): 148.

37 Nira Yuval-Davis, “The National Question: From the Indigenous to the Diasporic,” in The Politics

of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (London: Sage, 2012), 94.

38 As is exemplified in Julie Peteet, “Problematizing a Palestinian Diaspora,” International Journal

of Middle East Studies 39, no. 4 (2007): 627–646. See also May Telmissany, “Displacement and

Memory: Visual Narratives of al-Shatat in Michel Khleifi’s Films,” Comparative Studies of South

Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, no. 1 (2010), 69–84. She focuses on the fetishization of the

homeland through the gaze of the expatriate filmmaker Michel Khleifi.

39 Maher Jarrar, “A Narration of Deterritorialization: Imil Habibi’s The Pessoptimist,” Middle Eastern

Literatures 5, no. 1 (2002), 24.

40 See James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302–338. This approach

is not limited to Clifford, but encompasses many attempts to define diaspora, such as William

Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1, no. 1

(1991): 83–99; and Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2003).

41 Clifford, “Diasporas,” 303, 306, 307.

42 Ibid., 309.


44 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 13.

45 Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 234.


47 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1.

48 Brian Keith Axel, “The Diasporic Imaginary,” Public Culture 14, no. 2 (2002).

49 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 225.


50 Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives, Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 659–687.




54 Axel, “The Diasporic Imaginary,” 426.

55 Anne-Marie Fortier, “Bringing It All (Back) Home,” in Communities across Borders: New

Immigrants and Transnational Cultures, ed. Paul Kennedy and Peter Roudometof (New York:

Routledge, 2002), 113.

56 Ibid.

57 Al-Tahawy, Bruklin Hayts, 38; Brooklyn Heights, 23–24.

58 Al-Tahawy, Bruklin Hayts, 12–13.








66 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 224.

67 “Diaspora” in Arabic can also be rendered by the word shatāt (dispersal), a term not used in

Brooklyn Heights. See also Zahia Salhi, “Introduction: Defining the Arab Diaspora,” in The Arab

Diaspora: Voices of an Anguished Scream, ed. Ian Netton and Zahia Salhi (New York: Routledge,

2006).

68 Al-Tahawy, Bruklin Hayts, 81.





73 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, “Diaspora,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader,

ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 2006), 425.


75 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 235.



78 Ibid.



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