On Talking Back and Taking Back: Arab American Poetry and the Refusal to Comply

Abstract

The Arab diaspora worldwide is extremely varied and articulated in myriad ramifications, intersections, and stratifications formed and informed by provenance, location, communal and personal experience, as well as overlapping identities and belongings. Racism and exclusionary logics, however, work in the erasure of complexity and through the extremely simple vocabulary – and discourse – of hate speech. The response to Arabophobic and Islamophobic attacks has been a dominating conversation in the Arab diaspora community, especially within the artworld, and perhaps even more strongly in the literary field. Deeply rooted in the constitutive racial politics of the US, the material and discursive assaults on Arabs and Muslims saw a turning point after the September 11^th 2001 attacks, growing into a deluge that has never stopped since, Poets and writers of the Arab diaspora have responded to such waves of hate speech and assaults producing some of the most interesting contemporary works of literature in English and in many other languages. However, the “obligation” to respond, or the “responsibility to educate” the Western audience has also become a terrain for critical reflection, with many authors affirming the wide spectrum of their experience and identity as – one could say – “decolonized” from the task of talking back, thus taking back instead word and speech, and possibly, then, disempowering the hate.

This paper will look specifically at the way the works of written- and spoken-word poets Mohja Kahf, Suheir Hammad, and Safia Elhillo, among others, trace stratified maps of re-significations, inventions, and palimpsests, claiming and re-claiming words and languages through and within community.