Download - Everyday Arabness: The Poethics of Arab Canadian Literature and Culture

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CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2009, pp. 21–44, issn 1532-687x.© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

Everyday ArabnessThe Poethics of Arab Canadian Literature and Film

N o u r i G a n a

Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA

North America is seemingly open terrain. Melting pot and multiculturalism

have been articulated as cultural themes to which anyone can contribute.

But this is theory not practice.

—Marwan Hassan, 2002

Th e everyday is platitude . . . but this banality is also what is most important,

if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived—in

the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps

all coherence, all regularity.

—Maurice Blanchot, 1987

E v e r y d a y A r a b n e s s22 ●

S i g n i f y i n g T e r r o r M a r k s : A r a r a n d t h e M a s k s o f M u l t i c u l t u r a l i s m

On November 4, 2003, less than a month after his release from prison in Syria, Maher Arar1 read a statement in Ottawa. Th e statement starts in a way that I find symptomatic of the signifying burden of being (identifiable as) Arab, and/or Muslim, particularly in the alleged climate of American tragic exceptionality following the airborne attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia on September 11, 2001. Arar com-mences his statement as follows:

I am here today to tell the people of Canada what has happened to me.

Th ere have been many allegations made about me in the media, all of

them by people who refuse to be named or come forward. So before I tell you

who I am and what happened to me, I will tell you who I am not.

I am not a terrorist. I am not a member of al-Qaeda and I do not know any

one who belongs to this group (2003; emphasis added).

Th e emphatic and strenuous repetition of the negative marker “not” in Arar’s declarative sentences is evocative not only of the predicament of precarious transpicuity (i.e., of Arar’s attenuated poetics of disidentification with the alleged terrorist identifications foisted on him), but also, and si-multaneously, of a process of self-identification gone awry, throttled if not underwritten altogether by the hallucinatory insinuations of the negative markers that remain indispensable to its exoneration and legitimation. In other words, the negative marker “not” is here also the marker of an identity-in-negation, a hijacked identity—really, an identity condemned to condemn not only what it has come to connote but also, more subtly and systematically, the very experiential content it would have initially wanted to denote, the very fact of being Arab/Muslim (and also Sunni Muslim if we are to abide by the largely motivated Manichean fanaticisms of our historical moment). Perhaps the psychic devastations of such an ambivalent formula of identification can neither be overstated nor overcome, but the superimposed sociopolitical blackmail of which it is a symptom—namely, the incriminating

N o u r i G a n a ● 23

presumption that all Arabs/Muslims are terrorists or al-Qaeda conscripts

until proven otherwise2—needs to be brought under critical scrutiny, ex-posed, and contested.

In what follows, I shall analyze and theorize the ways in which Arab Ca-nadian aesthetes and littérateurs have grappled with the subtly but largely incriminating discourses about Arabs that have been circulating with vari-able intensities since the first large wave of new Arab immigrants set foot in Canada (in the late 1960s and early 70s), and have gained momentum during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) and in the wake of the Gulf War (1990–1991) until they radically intensified in the aftermath of 9/11. Given that Canada’s immigration policy vis-à-vis incoming and exiting immigrants/permanent residents recently shifted from a multiculturalist purview of selective and calculated openness into a frantic policy of preemption and retrospective deportation in the name of national security, Arab Canadians, I argue, found no viable alternative of voicing their growing discontent but to confront the free-floating and intransigent mainstream discourses of Arab-ness with the individual and lived experiences of everyday Arabs and/or Arab everydayness.

As Marwan Hassan straightforwardly points out in the above epigraph (2002, 160), the multiculturalist agenda of Canada simply falls short of de-livering or acting on the promises spelled out in the Multiculturalism Policy adopted in 1971 and later enforced by the Multiculturalism Act of 1988.3 Initially, the 1910 Immigration Act unabashedly prohibited “immigrants belonging to any race deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada” from landing in the country (Kruger et al. 2004, 73). Consequently, the many thousands of Chinese immigrants who immigrated to Canada as early as 1886 had to pay a head tax and face illegal discrimination until the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act in 1948 and the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1960. Canada’s Immigration Act of 1953 allowed prospective Arab immigrants to be classed with Europeans rather than Asians, and thus per-mitted them to benefit from more liberal rules of sponsorship and relative flexibility in applying for permanent residency (Hayani 1999, 285). By the time Arab immigrants started to pour into the country in large numbers, Canada had passed the Immigration Act of 1967 and abandoned much of


its discriminatory immigration policy (which was initially tailored to attract exclusively European immigrants) in favor of a “nondiscriminatory but selec-tive” scheme that allocates points to independent immigrants on the basis of their “educational attainment, occupational skills and financial sources” (Kruger et al. 2004, 74).

No other factor, however, seemed to prompt the multiculturalist urgencies of Canada than the rise of Québécois movements for sovereignty following the 1960s Révolution tranquille (Quiet Revolution), which profoundly meta-morphosed Québécois society, crystallized its nationalistic consciousness, and sanctioned its cultural and aff ective legitimacy. Th e Quiet Revolution raised questions about the special status of Québec and French Canadians in the Confederation, and resulted in long-term federal-provincial quarrels. In 1965, for instance, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Bicultural-ism noted that “Canada, without being fully conscious of the fact, is passing through the greatest crisis in its history. Th e source of the crisis lies in the Province of Québec.”4

Th e Canadian multiculturalism policy of 1971 and the Canadian Multi-culturalism Act of 1988 must both therefore be understood as political ruses to curtail and contain the provincial separatist insurgency spearheaded by Liberal Party of Québec leader, Jean Lesage, and carried on by the allegedly terrorist activities of Direct Action and the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ).5 For it was against this tumultuous backdrop (i.e., nationalist panic) that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau rushed to reaffirm national unity, argu-ing that it “must be founded on confidence in one’s own individual identity” and that a “vigorous policy of multiculturalism will help create this initial confidence” (Kruger et al. 2004, 75).

While bilingualism is still in force, biculturalism is thus amplified into multiculturalism. Spurred, as it were, by a profound anxiety over national unity, no wonder Canadian multiculturalism was from the outset aggres-sively assimilatory, even though it continued to purport, theoretically speak-ing, to welcome and host ethnoracial diff erences and foster understanding of foreign and indigenous Indian cultures. Th e Québécois believed that the federal policy of multiculturalism was meant to deflect Québec’s legitimate demand for self-determination, but ethnic minorities saw it as a policy of


appeasement (especially for the Québécois), if not of neoorientalist benevo-lence, simultaneously accommodating and undermining the irreducible excesses of ethnoracial diff erentials.6 For instance, on November, 27, 2006, the House of Commons overwhelmingly passed a motion recognizing the Québécois as “a nation within a united Canada,” thus crowning, however awkwardly, the government’s appeasement policy vis-à-vis the country’s runner-up Francophone ethnocultural constellation.7

Furthermore, the recent changes in immigration policy in the wake of 9/11 suggest that even at the level of theory, Canadian state multicultural-ism no longer holds. In its eagerness to demonstrate to the United States that it can play a major role in the global war on terror, Canada has been engaged in what Patrick Grady, economist and former senior official in the Canadian government, notoriously calls in a novel of the same title “Royal Canadian Jihad” (2005). Ironically, “Jihad” has become a traveling concept, exappropriated from Islam in a presumably secular war against those who exappropriated it within Islam. However inaccurate the modus operandi of the term, whose primary meaning (or greater Jihad, al-jihad al-akbar) privileges self-introspection and restraint, the introduction of the new Anti-Terrorism Act in October 2001 and the increased issuing of discretionary se-curity certificates under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) of 2002 have dramatically set Canada on a perverted course of smaller Jihad (al-jihad al-asghar), discredited its multiculturalist pursuit, and revived its formerly discriminatory policies of immigration, except that individuals are now assessed not in terms of their adaptability to the Canadian climate and culture but in terms of their potential deportability.8

Th e new legislations involve measures that “within carefully defined limits, [allow] the arrest and detention of, and imposition of conditions of release on, suspected terrorists to prevent terrorist acts and save lives.”9 Th e conditional clause, “within carefully defined limits,” is as ironic as it is cruel, since it leaves the implied “limits” open and undefined and, as such, becomes de facto a recipe for secret trials and indefinite detention without charges, conviction, or the minimum standards of jurisprudence. Oftentimes, se-curity certificates are signed by a minister to expedite the “removal” (i.e., deportation) of permanent residents or foreign nationals from Canada (i.e.,


not removal to Syria, to Algeria, or to Egypt, as in governmental newspeak), should reasonable grounds of suspicion against them prove reasonable. Ul-timately, these preventive and discretionary measures, and here is the ruse, are codified “within the realm of law” even while they are clearly unruly extensions of sovereign will and of “the domain of jurisdiction for action” (Bell 2006, 70).

What is less obviously ironic, but all the more alarming, is not solely that state multiculturalism has failed to protect ethnic minorities from being the target of unwarranted racist attacks and discriminatory abuse but that it was constructed by many analysts as one of the main root causes of Canada’s national vulnerability and exposure to terrorist attacks and security threats. Fear mongers speak even of an impending Islamic revolution in Canada, similar to the banlieues riots in France.10 When in June, 2006, 17 Canadian Muslims were arrested on charges of plotting terrorist attacks on targets that included the national Parliament, this looming Islamic revolution seemed to have suddenly become a reality. Newspapers like the Globe & Mail, La Presse, and Le Devoir indulged and luxuriated in what the Canadian Islamic Congress aptly calls the “image distortion disorder,” from which Canadian media has not been fully cured after decades of official multiculturalism (Burman 2006, 284). Th e 17 accused were variably—albeit in consistently discriminatory and racist terms—referred to as “homegrown terrorists,” “brown-skinned young men,” or “Canadian-born,” all of which imply that the presumably multiethnic and diverse Canada had never resolved the dichotomous ethnoracial lines around which it continues to variably structure itself—the “Canadians” ( full citizens) and the “Canadian-born variety” (less than citizens).11

If I relate here, however schematically, the masks of Canadian state multiculturalism—and how it was largely devised to manage the traumatic demarcations of the country’s divisive contemporary history—it is only to preface my reflections on the ways in which Arab Canada, multiple and diverse in itself, has imaginatively formulated contestatory narratives of the racist subtext of state multiculturalism and gone on to articulate alternative modalities of sociocultural coexistence. Th ere are several good studies about the history and representations of Arabs and Muslims in Canada, but there is nothing comparable on the ways in which Arab Canadians have formulated


literary and artistic responses to those representations.12 My goal is not to map all the various posts of political organizing, protest and activism or the many loci of sociocultural resistance, but to attend to specific configurations of the otherwise wide-ranging Arab Canadian literary and cultural rearticu-latory orientations and productions.

R e a r t i c u l a t o r y T a c t i c s : B e i n g O s a m a

Th e investment of Arab Canadians in literature, culture, and the arts matches only the general invisibility with which their artistic productions have been received within both the Arab Canadian community and the Canadian multiculturalist mainstream. Perhaps the variable successes that some have achieved quite recently and belatedly—among them novelists Naïm Kattan, Anne-Marie Alonzo, Ann-Marie McDonald, Marwan Hassan, and more recently, Rawi Hage; playwrights Wajdi Mouawad and Ahmed Ghazali; artists Philip Aziz, Jamelie Hassan, and Jayce Salloum; singers Paul Anka, René Angélil, Massari, and Lynda Th alie; and filmmakers Hejer Charf, Ruba Nadda, and Mahmoud Kaabour—should be no surprise if studied against the historical longevity of Arab contributions to Canada’s mutating cultural and artistic scene.13 Th e fact remains, however, that Arab Canadian artistic productions—however long-established, rich, or profuse they might be—did not help Arabs to override their minority status in Canada but became them-selves variably hostage to such a minority status, paradoxically mirroring and warranting their ultimately mutual marginalization. For instance, outraged by the triumphant indiff erence with which stage directors treat his plays, Wajdi Mouawad, the young Québécois playwright of Lebanese descent, had once turned down the prestigious Molières theater award (in honor of the greatest living francophone writer) for his play Littoral (Tideline), a play that had in 2000 earned Mouawad the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s most prestigious literary honor.

I, of course, have no intention here to rehash quite obvious and well-known arguments about the “out-of-print” status of multilingual Arab litera-ture in Canada (and, to a great extent, elsewhere in the Euro-Americas) or of the preexisting hierarchical layers that inaugurate and sustain its continuing


invisibility, nor do I intend to contemplate, for that matter, the hairsplitting relations between ethnic recognition and the political economies of publish-ing, circulation, and curricular development or designation. I, however, want to stress that the post-9/11 upsurge of (market) interest in all things Arab and Muslim should be approached with a measure of educated scepticism. Not infrequently, the dire need of the United States and its allies, including Canada, for expert knowledge about the Arab world prompts no more than intelligence-gathering approaches to the literature and culture of the region and its diasporas.

Such oftentimes unruly and insatiable appetites for politicizing Arab literature and culture has, for instance, cost the promising Lebanese Cana-dian filmmaker Mahmoud Kaabour his permanent residency (which had been pending approval for four years) in Canada after he made his critically acclaimed and award-winning Being Osama—a documentary film about the post-9/11 experiences of six Arab Canadians who happened to share the name “Osama,” but who suddenly found themselves transfixed under its ominously falling shadow. Ironically, even though the film was budgeted off -scale by and aired on the prestigious Canadian Broadcasting Corpora-tion’s documentary series “Th e Passionate Eye,” it has generated rather than deterred the unsolicited curiosities and suspicion of Canadian Security In-telligence Service (CSIS) a year before its production. According to Kaabour, he himself was summoned for an interview by CSIS officials and was made “to answer unfriendly questions about [his] personal political stances vis-à-vis terrorism and the West,” and what is more, “one of the Osamas [in the film] was hassled and interviewed quite a few times about his convictions and his religiosity.”14

Meanwhile, Kaabour had not yet obtained his permanent residency in Canada, for which he applied previously. Th e delays were clearly a bit exag-gerated. When he finally acted on his nostalgia and left Canada to visit his family in Lebanon, after he had waited in vain for the completion of his per-manent residency file, Kaabour was almost immediately sent a letter (just one month after his departure) by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) informing him about the rejection of his file. Hence, the shadow of Osama fell on Mahmoud Kaabour himself, and he ended up experiencing


firsthand the workings of the joint apparatuses of Islamophobia and Ara-bophobia which initially inspired him to make his contestatory documen-tary film. More ironically, Kaabour had previously been issued a five-year multiple-entry visa by the United States. Th is fact would seem to prove that when it comes to Maher Arar and Mahmoud Kaabour, Canada and the United States might have been engaged in a clash of minor narcissisms, to parody Freud’s famous expression, with Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper urging the United States to come clean on the Arar case, and the United States granting a generous visa for a potentially deportable Arab Canadian filmmaker to screen his first documentary about Canadian racism at the Harvard Film Archive.15 Ultimately, however, and should this indeed be the case, one cannot fail to note the ways in which an Arab or a Muslim of some sorts becomes quite easily the battlefield upon which these wars of minor narcissisms are waged.

Despite the success of Being Osama—which achieved national and inter-national recognition as in, among others, the Canadian National Youth Film Festival and the Dubai International Film Festival—the trials of its director, along with one of the Osamas, is indicative of the challenges of and to Arab artists in their interrogation of the lacunae of Canadian state multicultural-ism against the backdrop of everyday Arabness. Th e documentary condenses and stages a poethics of everyday Arabness, which, I think, constitutes one of the fundamental preoccupations of Arab Canadian littérateurs and artists over the last four decades. By a poethics of the everyday, I partly mean to describe a form of mimetic responsibility or poetic practice—a poesis—whose politics/ethics is persistently concerned with the articulation of the experiential present and the contingencies of lived experiences by bringing their mimetic diff erentials into intimate collision with the incessant drone of normative discourse. Th e multilingual (French, English, Arabic) and diverse (novel, short story, poetry, drama, nonfiction, criticism, and more) writings of Naïm Kattan, Saad Elkhadem, Antoine Naaman, Anne-Marie Alonzo, Nadia Ghalem, Mona Latif-Ghattas, Abla Farhoud, Nadine Latif, Wajdi Mouawad, Kamal Rostom, and Marwan Hassan, among many others, are consistently drawn to staging the singular plural lived experiences of displaced Arab sub-jectivities on Canadian soil. For instance, Rostom’s Arabi Takannad (An Arab


Canadianized, 1991) fictionalizes the everyday experiences of Arab Canadian immigrants as they find themselves oscillating chiastically between thresh-olds and shadows—always rehearsing their positions at the threshold of a new culture, but often, and quite unwittingly, find themselves falling under the long shadows of another one whose center lies elsewhere.

Similarly, Marwan Hassan’s novellas Th e Confusion of Stones and Intel-

ligence (1989) are about two Arab Canadians of Lebanese origins in search of a measure of belonging in Canada after having been, directly or indirectly, forced out of Lebanon by the ethnic civil war that shook the country for more than 15 years from 1975 to 1990. By moving back and forth between Lebanon and Canada, the two novellas probe the limits of belonging to both countries at a time when Arabness has become, as a result of a clutter of ideological discourses, a site of irremovable strangeness and “eloquent vulnerability,” to borrow Hassan’s own expression (64). Th e two novellas dramatize the experiences of two Arab Canadians in two diff erent geographical settings, only to express, with compelling poignancy, the piercing sense of dislocation and alienation that permeates Arab Canadian everyday lives. Hassan does not squabble over the philosophical and intellectual privileges of the exilic condition, as many postcolonial critics have gone to argue, but delves into the real, everyday experiences of Arab Canadians as they perennially find themselves caught in identitarian quagmires. Moreover, Hassan is less inter-ested in staging the intellectually stimulating quest for identity than in the material and emotional eff ects of the everyday interruptions of identificatory rehearsals by the impingements of a solid yet disembodied discursive imagi-nary of Arabness.

It is in this inadequate and jarring overlap between the discursive pro-duction and circulation of monolithic identities and the performative actua-tions of composite singularities that I also want to situate the intellectual and critical venture of Being Osama, that is, in a poethical continuum of Arab Canadian literary, artistic, and cultural productions. Being Osama shows with remarkable clarity how the identity of any Arab Canadian individual named Osama has become a scandal, an uninhabitable appellation, which automatically conjures up notions of evil and evil doers. Th e end result is that to be named Osama after 9/11 is not only to become someone else, other


than oneself, but is also to have to produce an account for that someone else, for that other than oneself, and become in the process accountable for that other than oneself and for the imaginary fantasies he inhabits and/or secu-rity threats he embodies. To be named Osama is therefore to be inhibited by the imperative to counter the “terrorizing identification” and to aspire in “throttled ways” (Butler 2004, xix)—and, perhaps, in an “agonized inarticu-lacy” (Banville 2005, 22)—to prove one’s innocence of all predetermined or projected charges, charges that the name Osama by itself, in itself, cannot but bear like a badge of dishonor. Th e name Osama has become in the post-9/11 historical juncture always already incriminating.

Even as the psychic eff ects of being named Osama are then clearly dev-astating, they remain quite irretrievable without a measure of poethical and rearticulatory tactics, given that, as Ann Anlin Cheng rightly points out,

Th e vocabulary of grievance (and its implied logic of comparability and com-

pensation) that constitutes so much of American [and Canadian] political

discourse has ironically deflected attention away from a serious look at the

more immaterial, unquantifiable repository of public and private grief that has

gone into the making of the so-called minority subject and that sustains the

notion of “one nation.” (2001, 6; emphasis added)

Every Euro-American or Arab Canadian individual named Osama must therefore have undergone a measureless name loss of nameless psychosocial damage, but this loss could not and cannot be claimed as a real loss because it is always already preceded by its nonexistence, that is, by the derealization of the name “Osama” itself—its legal depletion from any human content and, simultaneously, its categorical construction as the unequivocal signifying locus of deportability, if not disposability altogether. It is therefore in this sense that we must understand why one of the Osamas (Osama Al-Jundi) in the film wants to sue Bin Laden for having stolen his name and used it in a very bad way, as he claims. One might argue that it is not Osama Bin Laden per se that Osama Al-Jundi ought to sue, but the Osama eff ect, the intractable maze of paranoid discourses that have sanctioned Al-Jundi’s ostracization or Osamization while leaving him with no visible power structure(s) to blame.


What is important to bear in mind, however, is that this intention to sue is in-deed evocative of a rearticulatory tactical shift from being subject to invisible grief, to becoming an agent of melancholic grievance of a poethical edge. Not only do melancholic reclamations and poethical rearticulations of diurnal grievances pinpoint here the invisible psychosocial devastations of “being Osama,” but also, and more importantly, they combine to form the very af-fective ground upon which the Osamas can legally position themselves as plaintiff s with adequate interpretive evidence of psychosocial blackmail, and deliver themselves thusly from being positioned as victims without material evidence.16

Th e danger of Being Osama is not so much that it exposes racism in Canada as it unsettles the sensibilities of variable authorities and audiences who are committed to the denial of their complicity with its perpetuation—not so much that it humanizes the nemesis “Osama” as it runs afoul of the sensibilities of those who are interested in its continuing dehumanization. It is in this context that one can also best appreciate the “poethical wager”

on the everyday that the documentary film orchestrates in a most timely manner.17 Screening the quotidian lives of the individual Osamas discredits the myth of a monolithic Osama and the politics of fear that have largely justified all the governmental measures I discussed above, yet did nothing but hamper the civil liberties of most Canadians (if, of course, it is still the case that to be Canadian is to be practically from somewhere else—whether in practice or, at least, in theory). Th e film portrays a set of eclectic but sub-stantial snapshots of the Osamas as they go about their daily lives, bringing thus the complexities and multiplicities of the everyday to weigh on the com-bustible regularity of the name Osama. Th e “radical everydayness of everyday life acts,” unfolds, in Claire Colebrook’s economized distillation of both Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, “as a disruptive and redemptive force, a way of thinking beyond the closure of constituted powers” (2002, 699).

• Osama Al-Jundi is a Lebanese Canadian who runs the Ali Ibn Abi Talib School in Montreal, whom we see talking about politics, the cold weather in Canada, playing basketball and accepting condolences while mourn-ing the death of his father.


• Osama El-Naggar is an Egyptian Québécois CD dealer, who often resorts to calling himself “Sam,” especially when he worked with Polygram, and whom we see speaking politics, interacting with his clients, and partying with his Québécois friends.

• Osama Al-Sarraf is a Palestinian Canadian musician in a local band and a budding rock-star whom we see playing on stage and speaking to his mother back in Egypt.

• Osama Dorias is an Iraqi Canadian, a religious young man whose family fled the Saddam regime and whom we see playing basketball, praying, and cracking jokes with a political edge.

• Osama Shalabi is a local lute player and composer whom we see decon-structing the name Osama, composing and playing, but not with the other Osamas in the cover picture of the documentary film.

• And, finally, there is Osama El-Demerdash, a computer programmer and local Montréalese activist of Egyptian bourgeois background whose col-leagues tried to get him fired from his job as a computer consultant right after 9/11. In the film, we see him “speaking truth to power,” lampooning the Canadian Court, marching in various demonstrations against police brutality, against the World Trade Organization, and in other demonstra-tions for the rights of refugees and immigrants, whose slogan is “No Bor-

ders, No Nations, Stop the Deportation,” or most commonly in Frenglish, “So, so so! Solidarité! Avec, avec, avec les refugiés.” El-Demerdash complains that 9/11 has given some people a license to hate others “officially,” and that he does not find it funny to be called “Osama Bin Laden.” He is vocal against the hypocrisy of Western governments who—for fear of Islamic movements and in the name democracy and regional stability—make deals with big corporations and corrupt dictatorships that do nothing but victimize their own people and nip in the bud any form of political dissidence or insipient pursuit of democracy.

Th roughout the film, Kaabour wagers on the everyday and craftily renders the most subtly nuanced ingredients of what Osama, ethnicity, Arabness, Islam, and national belonging mean to various individuals, all the while bring-ing under critical scrutiny sweeping cultural generalizations. Capitalizing on


the cultural politics of the everyday might generally expose us to the disquiet-ing contingencies of experience and to the spectres of relativism that haunt cultural discourses of reciprocal alterity. But although I acknowledge that the everyday is a tenuous and precarious wager—and that it cannot transcend the parameters of the given, namely the entanglements between Canada’s state multiculturalism and racism—I do nonetheless think that Being Osama allows for the emergence of what Joan Rettallack calls “a certain poetics of responsibility with the courage of the swerve,” which would weigh on the given (i.e., the sociocultural conscious or subconscious mantra of intelligibility) rather than claim or presume freedom from it (2003, 3). As the above epigraph by Blanchot demonstrates, if the everyday is marked by “escape” “back to existence,” the potential disquiet that the contingent instantiates might be indeed a price willingly paid en route to undoing “every speculative formula-tion, perhaps all coherence, all regularity” generated by the given (1987, 13).

Wagering on the everyday is not inconsequential (as Kaabour’s quarrels with CIC and CSIS officials show), yet it is also productive insofar as it troubles the narcissistic masks of Canadian state multiculturalism.18

By and large, the interest in documenting the everyday is also an inter-est in the quotidian as hermeneutic excess that might prompt an equally poethical critique of the dominant forms of sociocultural intelligibility. Even as it disturbs intelligibility, the everyday must retain a measure of unintel-ligibility to continue deconstructing our frames of reference. Ultimately, it is the continua of transformative thrusts to which it gives rise that alone can redeem the everyday itself from its otherwise perpetual insignificance or “platitude,” as Blanchot would put it (1987, 13). Any treatment of the every-day must distinguish between and come to terms with, on the one hand, its singularity, irrecoverable signatures, and material manifestations or legacies, and on the other, its plurality, mass monotony, and above all, overwhelmingly homogonous insignificance.

R e s i g n i f y i n g P r a c t i c e s : S a b a h : A L o v e S t o r y

While Kaabour’s début documentary, Being Osama, has appealed more to Arab/Muslim Canadian sensibilities than to mainstream Canadian ones,


Ruba Nadda’s début feature film, Sabah: A Love Story, has achieved just the reverse eff ect, appealing more to Canadian sensibilities than to Arab/Muslim ones. Th e diff erence in reception of both works is not totally unexpected since the former delivers a critical slap to the appeasing rhetoric of Cana-dian state multiculturalism, whereas the latter delivers a wakeup call to Arab Canadian Muslims, urging them to shed some of their obsolete traditions and reckon with the horizon, if not imperatives, of their new multicultural milieu. Renowned Lebanese Armenian and Ararat actress Arsinée Khanjian stars in Nadda’s film as Sabah, a 40-year-old Arab Muslim Canadian woman of Syrian origin who dutifully spends most of her adult life keeping the family together and taking care of her ailing but shisha-loving mother, Um Mou-hammed (Setta Keshishian), until she falls in love with English Canadian Stephen (Shawn Doyle) and is forced by her caring but patronizing brother, Majid (Jeff Seymour), into a difficult choice between her pursuit of love and her membership in her family and in the Arab Canadian Muslim community at large. She opted for love, and the family is reluctant at first to accept, but they gradually come around, bringing the drama that ensues and the film itself to a spectacular family reunion and a classical dénouement heureux. Th e point of the film, as I see it, is that the choice with which Sabah was presented is indeed a false one, and that marrying outside the tribe, so to speak, does not have to come at the expense of one’s family, nor does it have to warrant ostracization from one’s community.

Th e film is a blend of a lighthearted family drama and a romantic comedy of interethnic marriage similar in many respects to David & Layla by Jay Jonroy or to the classic My Big Fat Greek Wedding by Joel Zwick. Prompted by a childhood photograph of her father taking her for a swim in the ocean—a photograph that Majid gave her as a gift on her 40th birthday—Sabah stealthily takes up swimming at a local pool in an attempt to recapture lost times. Th ere she meets Stephen, a divorced Christian Canadian—and, as he himself puts it, “struggling carpenter/artist”—and embarks with curiosity and concern on a relationship with him that will ultimately transform her and her family. At face value, the film indulges, perhaps against the grain of its director, in reproducing stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims that range from Arabs soaking their fries with ketchup and Arab women belly-dancing


for salivating men to patriarchal Arab men reiterating the rules of engage-ment for the women of the house: “Arab girls don’t fall in love. Arab girls love who their brothers and their fathers and their uncles tell them they can.”19

It might also be the case that the film’s laudable pursuit of an unlikely love relationship between a Muslim woman and a Christian man comes at the expense of the former’s religion: Sabah continues sporting her hijab but occasionally bends the rules and puts on a bathing suit or drinks wine. Stephen, however, does not make any visible concessions apart from buying Yahiya Emerick’s Th e Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam. Th ere is a lurking doubt that the director’s eagerness to bring these two diff erent individuals together has substantially overridden the narrative logic in and through which they actually do come together: Stephen does not know any-thing about Muslims or Islam, and the ways in which Sabah accommodates that ignorance by making exceptions (i.e., drinking wine and showing her beautiful red hair, all the while teaching him about Arab culture and Islam) imply that she, not him, has been wittingly or unwittingly shamed into conversion—escape or flight—to his cultural norms. Sabah has been very self-conscious about her headscarf and about the prospects of uncovering her hair and kissing Stephen in public, which is what he has been pushing for since their first date. Ultimately, she does both. And she indeed manages to have her first kiss in public. In this sense the film reproduces also the imperative white-ism or the Eurocentric ethos of Canadian society and state multiculturalism. To become a member of this ethos, it might help if you are one already!

Th ese are some of the moderate concerns that some moderate Muslims and Arabs might raise. I am sure the filmmaker had to deal with more radical criticisms that might very likely center on the authenticity of Sabah’s brand of Islamic practice or on the plausibility of Majid’s behavior as an Arab Muslim man and family custodian. One can always respond by pinpointing that each is representative only of their own practice of Islam and Arabness, which by no means purport to be representative of all Muslims and Arabs. Th e problem, however, as noted earlier, is that Arab literary and cultural products have been approached in the wake of 9/11 with overtly or covertly political lenses. In this climate of fear and profiling, it would be foolish for a


filmmaker not to expect a Western or Canadian audience to approach her fictional film as a documentary.

Although fully aware of the dictates of our historical moment, Ruba Nadda had nonetheless deliberately sought to frustrate some of the antici-pated expectations of Western audiences. As she states,

With Sabah, I quite deliberately left out any direct reference to terrorism, 9/11,

the conflict in Palestine and the difficulties that Arab-Canadians face as a

result of these events. I think there is an expectation that an Arab filmmaker

must address these issues head-on, even from those who are sympathetic to

the difficulties that Arabs face in North America. To some extent, the Arab

who must deal with the constant suspicion of being a terrorist has also be-

come a stereotype. I think we need to resist the idea that 9/11 has to define

what it means to be an Arab in North America. Th ere is so much more to it

than that!20

Unlike Being Osama, then, which tackles the issue of terrorism and 9/11 “head-on,” Sabah declines to cave in or follow suit. Th ere is much to admire in Nadda’s stated endeavor, and it does not lack “the courage of the swerve” I spoke about earlier in relation to Being Osama. Whereas Being Osama at-tempts to dismantle head-on—and by wagering on the rearticulatory tactics of the everyday—the publicly held image of Arabs, Sabah dares to recast the nets elsewhere, in the less muddier waters of family and communal ties and the universal pursuit of happiness. Th e film is not empty of stereotypes, but its aim is not only to empty the stereotypes of their combustible content but also to produce new positive images of Arab Muslim Canadians in the hope they might eventually displace the publicly held negative ones. Sabah, then, aims to resignify the Arab Canadian artistic practices that have squarely been reactionary, contestatory, and above all, rearticulatory.

Resignifying representational practices does not mean rendering them less rearticulatory but rather shifting their scope and focus by, for instance, selectively abandoning some stereotypes and infusing others with new im-ages and visions that might weigh on the existing ones. Belly-dancing is one of the stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims that is not abandoned in the film


but rather foregrounded. Yet the ways in which it figures, particularly in rela-tion to Sabah, coincides with her process of individuation and reconciliation with her desire for love after decades of abstinence. To some extent, belly-dancing for Sabah should be placed in league with a circuitry of signifiers such as swimming and dating that have all played on each other to allow her to emerge from the timidity of inexperience and emotional foreclosure to the risks and generative apertures of expression, choice, and responsibility. Satin Rouge by Raja Amari, a young Tunisian filmmaker, explores at some length the transformative powers of belly-dancing in the life of a widowed Tunisian housewife, who had yet to cope with the death of her husband, and who found in the delicate artistry of the oriental dance an emancipating mourning practice. Likewise, Sabah finds equally signifying and enabling potentialities in the practice of belly-dancing, regardless of how automati-cally dull or counterproductive it might seem and remain so for some.

Th e other resignifying purchase of the film is the ways in which it re-fashions the question of foreignness in Arab Canada. It might be ironic to think that, even as Arab Canadians are largely perceived as a minority of foreigners by mainstream multiculturalist Canada, Sabah’s family dares in fact to call Stephen a “foreigner.” Obviously, the question of foreignness al-lows the filmmaker to slice into the chiastic double bind of thresholds and shadows I introduced earlier. Accordingly, Arab Canadians, like other ethnic communities, often find themselves caught in the play of disjunctive tem-poralities, still harkening back to the pulsations of Arab cultural influences whose centers lie elsewhere, even while consciously propelled forward by the surrounding multiculturalist Canadian milieu. Th e challenge is to break out of the entrenched entelechy of ethnic double consciousness and dare into the present, not only into everyday Arabness but also into everyday Canadian-ness. If Stephen is a foreigner in the scope of the former, then Sabah’s family must realize itself as foreign in the scope of the latter; if Sabah’s family is ethnic, then it is incumbent upon Stephen to realize that he is as ethnic. Th is is not, of course, to flatten all diff erences—nor under the presumption that everyone is ethnic, to fortify the racist habitats of state multiculturalism—but rather, to instigate fresh imaginative impulses whereby the economy of ethnicity proff ers the basis for recasting widely the nets of affiliation, of


coexistence, and of solidarity. In no small measure, this is also the poethi-cal wager that, I think, comes across with compelling poignancy toward the laudably affirmative ending of Sabah.

^

a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t

I am grateful to the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for their financial support of my research on Arab Canadian literature and culture. I thank Asha Varadharajan for the encouragement and the fruitful discussions we had about everyday Arabness in the early conceptual stages of this article. I miss the Sleepless Goat Café!

n o t e s

1. Maher Arar is a Canadian telecommunications engineer and entrepreneur who was

born in Syria and immigrated to Canada with his family at age 17. Arar’s nightmare began when he had to cut short his vacation with his family in Tunisia and return to Canada, with a plane change at New York’s JFK Airport. Th ere he experienced firsthand the cruelties of what the United States government calls “extraordinary rendition,” an Orwellian phrase that involves the deportation of suspected security threats to coun-tries outside the United States, presumably countries of origin. Th is practice is very much in keeping with one of the ritual security practices of the Canadian government: the issuing of security certificates for potentially deportable immigrants. Accordingly, Arar was detained and deported (without due process but with the complicity of the RCMP and CSIS, respectively the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) to Syria, where he submitted to brutal interrogations, torture and spent more than ten months in a grave-like cell before he was released without charges in October 2003. On September 18, 2006, Arar was publicly cleared of all terrorism allegations and compensated for the financial damages he incurred; however, the Bush administration had never “come clean” on the Arar case. Two recent films, among others, shed light on the practice of extraordinary rendition and deportation of Arabs by the United States government: Rendition was directed by Gavin Hood (2007), and Th e Visitor by Th omas McCarthy (2008). Rendition in particular bears some strik-ing resemblances to the story of Maher Arar. It exposes and decries the pitfalls of the politics of fear, torture, and other implications of the post-9/11 extraordinary rendition program in the United States. For more on the Arar story, see his personal website, and for more on the secret history of the extraordinary rendition program, see Jane Mayer (2005).


2. I am indebted to Mahmood Mamdani’s similar complaint that “unless proved to be

‘good,’ every Muslim was presumed to be ‘bad’” (2004, 15). Th e “good Arab” or “good Muslim” qualifiers wheeled out at will by politicians and policy makers after 9/11 should therefore be seen more as incriminating than congratulating Arabs and Mus-lims alike.

3. Th e first stipulation of the government’s policy makes it imperative to “recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diver-sity of Canadian society and acknowledges the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage.” For more on Canada’s state multiculturalism, at least in theory, as Marwan Hassan would have it, see the Canadian Multiculturalism Act.

4. See Quiet Revolution (Canadian Encyclopedia Online). 5. See Terrorism (Canadian Encyclopedia Online). 6. See Jack Jedwab’s Questioning Ethnicity. For critiques of the nationalistic (i.e., assimila-

tory and colonial) nature of Canadian multiculturalism, see Sneja Gunew (2004) and Smaro Kamboureli (2000), among others.

7. Th e saga of Québécois nationalism is far from being resolved after the defeat of the two official referendums in 1980 and in 1995. In the latter referendum, the margin was astonishingly small: 50.58 percent voted No and 49.42 percent voted Yes for Québécois nationalism. More recently, the debate over sovereignty for Québec resurfaced when Michael Ignatieff , a former Harvard Professor and currently the Interim Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, observed casually that the French language, history, and culture mark Quebecers as a separate people who should be recognized as a nation under the Constitution. Anticipating the latent designs of Gilles Duceppe, the separatist leader of the Bloc Québécois Party, Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper immediately proposed a preemptive motion that was overwhelmingly adopted by the House of Commons on November 27, 2006. Th e motion has reckoned with Québécois nationalism in the most confusing and equivocal of ways imaginable: “Th at this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada” (House 2006). Given that all nations are condemned (in Jean-Paul Sartre’s sense of the word) to seek freedom of self-determination, this motion might be a clear indicator that a third referendum on sovereignty for Québec is in the making. At any rate, the question of Québécois nationalism is far from being completely settled, especially at a time when the English language and culture continue to assume pride of place in Canada and might one day become hegemonic even in Québec itself.

8. Most individuals against whom discretionary security certificates are issued are Arabs/Muslims. For a critique of the everyday eff ects of this policy on the city of Montréal, for instance, see the melancholy reflections of Jenny Burman (2006).

9. For a more comprehensive look at Canada’s actions against terrorism since 9/11, see Foreign Aff airs and International Trade Department (2007).

10. David Warren, for instance, notes that Canada opened its gates to an influx of immi-grants from every part of the Islamic world. He adds, “Only a tiny number are of the


terrorist disposition, but alas, only a tiny number have to be for Canada to be under a huge terrorist threat” (2005, 13).

11. For a scathing critique of Canada’s double standards vis-à-vis its citizens, see Robert Fisk (2006). Even though such double standards come to the surface only in times of emergency, I think state multiculturalism ought not to exempt the state of exception from the rationale of multiculturalism, however perfectible it remains at the present historical juncture.

12. For a tentative list of books about various historical and sociological aspects of Arab Canada and the Arab Canadian Muslim community, see Baha Abu Laban (1980), Raja G. Khouri (2003), Sylvie Fortin (2000), Tareq Y. Ismael (1985), Zuhair Kashmeri (1991), and Farid E. Ohan and Ibrahim Hayani (1993), among others.

13. According to Zeina Awad (2001), the historical longevity of Arab Canadian artistic con-tributions dates back to late nineteenth and early twentiety centuries when in 1912, for instance, George Farhoud founded Le Rideau Vert Th eater.

14. See Lewis Gropp’s interview with Mahmoud Kaabour (2005). 15. Freud’s original expression is actually “the narcissism of minor diff erences” (1991, 305).

For a wide-ranging historical and contextual reflection on the Maher Arar case, see Ariel Salzmann (2006, 27).

16. For the important diff erences between the victim and the plaintiff , and the agentive measures assumed in the shift from the former to the latter, see Jean-François Lyotard (1988, 8).

17. Even though I came to the neologism “poethics” quite spontaneously, and in the spirit of deconstructive analysis, I found out that it has already been monumentally elaborated in two very dissimilar studies: Richard Weisberg’s Poethics and Other Strategies of Law

and Literature (1992) and Joan Retallack’s Th e Poethical Wager (2003). I am particularly indebted to Retallack’s insightful study for distending and complicating my own inter-ests in the poethics of the everyday in the sense of the dynamic and collapsible horizons of politics and poetics as well as of poesis and ethics.

18. Kaabour makes a compelling argument about the ways in which his documentary film has pointed to the many lacunae of Canadian state multiculturalism, whose credibility has proven too fragile to brook any form of criticism. Th e film is by no means an at-tack on the project of multiculturalism per se, but simply a reminder of its incumbent and continual perfectibility, especially as it tends to converge with licensed forms of (cultural) racism. See Mahmoud Kaabour’s interview with Stefan Christoff , CKUT Radio in Montreal (2005).

19. Majid, Sabah’s domineering brother, is in the film the embodiment of the stereotypi-cal figure of a patriarchal Arab man. However, he turns out to be more complex and multilayered a character than his first introduction in the film may suggest. By the end of the film, the viewer may very well identify with his precipitous vulnerability and his acute sense of responsibility for the family as a whole. Yet, it is tragically ironic for this self-professed custodian of his sister and family not to realize that his wife was cheating on him all along. Clearly, the film wants to suggest that patriarchal control and traditional behaviour is not only wrong but also stupid and gullible.


20. Although Ruba Nadda is definitely justified for her intolerance of routine stereotypes, she might herself have contributed her share in this film, in which she has created new or simply confirmed old stereotypes in the process of avoiding any allusions to allegedly hackneyed Arab and Muslim stereotypes. She capitalizes on the notion of “exception” and sees it as key to being in a multicultural Canadian society and in a city like Toronto, where she herself lives:

“I wanted audiences to see another side of Middle Eastern culture. So I set out to tell a story about cross-cultural love, acceptance and the many challenges immigrant families face when they come to Canada. Th ese struggles are often portrayed as a choice that must be made between preserving cultural tradi-tions and accepting Western values. But it’s actually much more complicated than that. Everyone, regardless of cultural background, has to make judgments every day about how they make their own personal set of values fit with those of the society around them. Most people make exceptions from time to time. Making exceptions is not the same as giving up your culture. It is simply a part of living in a multicultural society like Canada” (Nadda, n.d.).

Of course, this argument about making exceptions might work with certain aspects of multicultural life, but to suggest that drinking wine for a Muslim woman such as Sabah amounts to nothing more than an exception in everyday multicultural societies might be off ensive to some other observant Muslim women, who spare themselves the luxury of the “exception,” not because it is unappealing but because in this case it is an out-right distortion of Muslim identity—a sort of capricious overturning of the codes and indulgence in muharama

–t or sinful doings. What then if the exception becomes, after a

while, the norm in everyday multiculturalism? Would it not eventuate in the surrender of identity? Th ese questions might be raised right away by anyone belonging to the Muslim community in Canada. Th e solution might not reside so much in the practice of exception as in the grammar of proportionality: how to be Muslim and Canadian on a daily basis and how to do so in such a way that practically amounts to nothing more or less than doing what comes naturally.

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f i l m o g r a p h y

Being Osama. 2004. Mahmoud Kaabour and Tim Schwab, directors, 45 min., Diversus Inc., VHS.Rendition. 2007. Gavin Hood, director, 122 min., New Line Cinema, DVD.Sabah: A Love Story. 2006. Ruba Nadda, director, 90 min., Mongrel, DVD.Satin Rouge. 2002. Raja Amari, director, 100 min., ADR Productions, DVD.Th e Visitor. 2008. Th omas McCarthy, director, 103 min., Overture Films, DVD.