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Teaching Diaspora Literature
Muslim American Literature as an Emerging Field
By Mohja Kahf
Is there such a thing as
Muslim American literature (MAL)? I argue that there is:
It begins with the Muslims of the Black Arts Movement
(1965–75).
The Autobiography of Malcolm X is one
of its iconic texts; it includes American Sufi writing,
secular ethnic novels, writing by immigrant and
second-generation Muslims, and religious American Muslim
literature.
Many of the works I would
put into this category can and do also get read in other
categories, such as African American, Arab American, and
South Asian literature, “Third World” women’s writing,
diasporic Muslim literature in English, and so forth.
While the place of these
works in other categories cannot be denied, something is
gained in reading them together as part of an American
Muslim cultural landscape. Like Jewish American
literature by the 1930s, Muslim American literature is
in a formative stage. It will be interesting to see how
it develops (and who will be its Philip Roth!)
I suggest the following
typology of MAL only as a foothold, a means of bringing
a tentative order to the many texts, one that should be
challenged, and maybe ultimately dropped altogether.
My first grouping, the
“Prophets of Dissent,” suggests that Muslim works in the
Black Arts Movement (BAM) are the first set of writings
in American literature to voice a cultural position
identifiable as Muslim. Contemporary Muslim writing that
takes the achievements of the
BAM as an important
literary influence also belongs here, and is
characterized similarly by its “outsider”status, moral
critique of mainstream American values, and often
prophetic, visionary tone.
In contrast, the writers of
what I call “the Multi-Ethnic Multitudes” tend to enjoy
“insider” status in American letters, often entering
through MFA programs and the literary establishment,
getting published through trade and university book
industries, garnering reviews in the mainstream press.
They do not share an overall aesthetic but are
individual writers of various ethnicities and a wide
range of secularisms and spiritualities, and indeed I
question my placing them all in one group, and do so
temporarily only for the sake of convenience.
On the other hand, my third
group, the “New American Transcendentalists,” appears to
cohere, in aesthetic terms, as writers who share a broad
Sufi cultural foundation undergirding their literary
work. Their writings often show familiarity with the
Sufi poets of several classical Muslim literatures
(e.g., in Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu), as well as with
American Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century,
and that which tends toward the spiritual and the
ecstatic in modern American poetry.
Finally, the “New Pilgrims”
is my term for a loose grouping of writers for whom
Islam is not merely a mode of dissent, cultural
background, or spiritual foundation for their writing,
but its aim and explicit topic. Of the four groups, the
New Pilgrims are the ones who write in an overtly
religious mode and motivation, like Ann Bradstreet,
Cotton Mather, and the
Puritans of early American history. This does not
prevent them from being capable of producing great
literature, any more than it prevented the great Puritan
writers.
Here is an example of just
a few writers in each category, by no means a
comprehensive list:
Prophets of Dissent
From the
Black Arts Movement:
Marvin X, whose Fly
to Allah (1969) is possibly the first book of poems
published in English by a Muslim American author.
Sonia Sanchez, whose
A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974) is the
work of her Muslim period.
Amiri Baraka, whose
A Black Mass (2002)
[1966] renders the Nation of Islam’s Yacoub
genesis theology into drama. As with Sanchez, the author
was Muslim only briefly but the influence of the Islamic
period stretches over a significant part of his overall
production.
Later
Prophets of Dissent include:
Calligraphy of Thought,
the Bay area poetry venue for young “Generation M”
Muslim American spoken word artists who today continue
in the visionary and dissenting mode of the BAM.
Suheir Hammad,
Palestinian New Yorker, diva of Def Poetry Jam (on
Broadway and HBO), whose tribute to June Jordan in her
first book of poetry,
Born Palestinian, Born Black
(1996), establishes her line of descent from the BAM, at
least as one (major) influence on
her work.
El Hajj Malik El Shabazz
(Malcolm X) is an iconic figure for this mode of
Muslim American writing and, indeed, for many writers in
all four categories.
Multi-Ethnic Multitudes
Kashmiri American poet
Agha Shahid Ali, an influential figure in the
mainstream American poetry scene, with a literary prize
named after him at the University of Utah, brought the
ghazal into fashion in English so that it is now taught
among other forms in MFA programs.
Naomi Shihab Nye,
Palestinian American, likewise a “crossover” poet whose
work enjoys prominence in American letters, takes on
Muslim content in a significant amount of her work.
Sam Hamod, an Arab
midwesterner who was publishing poetry in journals at
the same time as Marvin X.
Nahid
Rachlin’s fiction
has been published since well before the recent wave of
literature by others who, like her, are Iranian
immigrants.
Mustafa Mutabaruka,
an African American Muslim, debut novel Seed
(2002).
Samina Ali,
midwesterner of Indian parentage, debut novel
Madras
on Rainy Days (2004), was featured on the June 2004
cover of Poets & Writers.
Khaled Hosseini,
debut novel
The Kite Runner (2003).
Michael Muhammad Knight,
a Muslim of New York Irish Catholic background, whose
punk rock novel
The Taqwacores
(2004) delves
deeply into Muslim identity issues.
There are a number of
journals where Muslim American literature of various
ethnicities can be found today, among them
Chowrangi,
a Pakistani American magazine out of New Jersey, and
Mizna, an Arab American poetry magazine out of
Minneapolis.
New
American Transcendentalists
Daniel (Abd al-Hayy)
Moore is an excellent example of this mode of
Muslim American writing. California-born, he published
as a Beat poet in the early sixties, became a Sufi
Muslim, renounced poetry for a decade, then renounced
his renouncement and began publishing again,
prolifically and with a rare talent. His
Ramadan
Sonnets (City Lights, 1986) is a marriage of content
and form that exemplifies the “Muslim/American”
simultaneity of Muslim American art.
The Rumi phenomenon:
apparently the most read poet in America is a Muslim. He
merits mention for that, although technically I am not
including literature in translation. Then again, why
not? As with so many other of my limits, this is
arbitrary and only awaits someone to
make a case against it.
Journals publishing
poetry in this mode include
The American Muslim,
Sufi, Qalbi, and others.
New American Pilgrims
Pamela Taylor writes
Muslim American science fiction.
Iman Yusuf
writes “Islamic romance.” This group of writers is not
limited to genre writers, however.
Dasham Brookins
writes and performs poetry and maintains a website,
MuslimPoet.com,
where poets such as Samantha Sanchez post.
Umm
Zakiyya (pseud.) has written a novel,
If I Should
Speak (2001), about a young Muslim American and her
roommates in college.
Writers in this group also
come from many ethnicities but, unlike those in my
second category, come together around a more or less
coherent, more or less conservative Muslim identity.
Websites tend to ban
erotica and blasphemy, for example.
The Islamic
Writers Alliance, a group formed by Muslim American
women, has just put out its first anthology. Major
published authors have yet to emerge in this grouping,
but there is no reason to think they will not eventually
do so.
My criteria for Muslim
American literature are a flexible combination of
three factors: Muslim authorship. Including this factor,
however vague or tenuous, prevents widening the scope to
the point of meaninglessness, rather than simply
including any work about Muslims by an author with no
biographical connection to the slightest sliver of
Muslim identity (such as
Robert Ferrigno
with his recent
dystopian novel about a fanatical Muslim takeover of
America). It is a cultural, not religious, notion of
Muslim that is relevant. A “lapsed Muslim” author, as
one poet on my roster called himself, is still a Muslim
author for my purposes. I am not interested in levels of
commitment or practice, but in literary Muslimness.
Language
and aesthetic of the writing.
In a few cases, there is a
deliberate espousal of an aesthetic that has Islamic
roots, such as the Afrocentric Islamic aesthetic of the
Muslim authors in the Black Arts Movement.
Relevance
of themes or content.
If the Muslim identity of
the author is vague or not explicitly professed, which
is often the case with authors in the “Multi-Ethnic
Multitudes,” but the content itself is relevant to
Muslim American experience, I take that as a signal that
the text is choosing to enter the conversation of Muslim
American literature and ought to be included.
In defining boundaries for
research that could become impossibly diffuse, I choose
to look mainly at fiction and poetry, with autobiography
and memoir writings selectively included. I have not
included writings in languages other than English,
although there are Muslims in America who write in
Arabic, Urdu, and other languages. I have looked at the
twentieth century onward, and there is archival digging
to be done in earlier periods: the Spanish colonial era
may yield Muslim writing, and we already know that some
enslaved Muslims in the nineteenth century have left
narratives. More research is needed. If one expands the
field from “literature” to “Muslim American culture,”
one can also include Motown, rap, and hip-hop lyrics by
Muslim artists, screenplays such as the Muslim American
classic The Message by the late Syrian American producer
Mustapha Aqqad, books written for children, sermons,
essays, and other genres.
There are pleasures and
patterns that emerge from reading this profusion of
disparate texts under the rubric of Muslim American
cultural narrative. It is time! I hope, as this field
emerges, that others will do work in areas I have left
aside in this brief initial exploration.
Mohja Kahf (Comparative Literature, University of
Arkansas) is the author of
Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From
Termagant to Odalisque
(1999),
E-mails from Scheherazad
(poetry, 2003),
and
The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (novel, 2006).
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On Being Muslim in America (Interview)
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 27 February 2010
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