Politics of the Exotic in Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent

Abstract

This essay focuses on Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent and argues that through the interweaving of the mythical and the culinary that only initially seem to partake in the discourse of the exotic, the novel ultimately calls into question that discourse by narrating into it the experiences of loss and displacement that structure the lived reality of the Middle Eastern diaspora in America today.

Keywords::

• Middle East
• exoticism
• food
• Hollywood
• diaspora

Notes

Notes

¹ “Writing while Arab” is, in fact, the title of the 2008 PMLA special issue devoted to Arab American writing. Also, the terms “Middle Eastern” and “Arab” are used interchangeably throughout the essay as general designations of cultural difference especially in Western/metropolitan contexts.

² See also Sarah Brouillette's excellent study Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), where, like Huggan, she focuses on the field of postcolonial literature and the material conditions of its production, distribution, and reception and investigates the merits and limits of strategic exoticism as deployed by various postcolonial writers.

³ For a discussion of filmic Orientalism (particularly in The Sheik) in relation to Western consumer culture during the 1910s and 1920s, see Hansen (1986) and Studlar (1997).

⁴ My reading of Salahadin's final adventure here is slightly different from Nyman's, who argues that “[b]y reversing fixed roles and relationships, and introducing hybridized narratives of identity and film history, the novel reconstructs cultural memory and politicizes histories of representation” (194). Instead, I suggest that Abu-Jaber's critical engagement with Orientalist representations in Hollywood films is meant primarily to expose the ways in which a persistent Western desire for exotic otherness has largely informed such representations.

⁵ One of the ultimate byproducts of the multifaceted and inverted Kristevan processes of abjection (eating, birthing, separating, vomiting, rejecting, and so on) is, of course, language by which and in which “the body of the undesirable alter ego” is symbolically subjected to the laws of regulated speech (Gunew, “Introduction” 152). For further discussions of cultural cannibalism and exoticism, see also Célestin, Gunew (“The Melting Pot”), Narayan, and Root.

⁶ Crescent was originally conceived as a modern version of Othello, but Abu-Jaber decided to remove all the direct allusions to the play (except the reference in the Salahadin story) because of its overly dramatic qualities and its overreliance on the villain–hero opposition (“Interview”). Nevertheless, one must note that it is fundamentally the notion of the exotic that characterizes Sirine's initial attraction to Han as well as Desdemona's to Othello. It is, in fact, the dangers that both Han and Othello have faced during their travels that make them attractively exotic to both women. Sudanese Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North offers its readers a more elaborate Arab version of Othello, effectively drawing on the trope of the exotic Moor to dramatize the Arab protagonist's encounters with European women.

⁷ See Carol Bardenstein (“Beyond Univocal Baklava”) for a more detailed discussion of the deromanticization of the Old Country in diasporic food writing in general and in Abu-Jaber's The Language of Baklava in particular.

⁸ I am drawing here on Freud's essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” where he distinguishes melancholia from mourning in that it symptomizes a continuing cathectic investment in the lost object, whether that object is a person, a country, or an ideal.

⁹ Curiously, the manuscript of Crescent was submitted shortly before the World Trade Center attacks to be published in April 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In the following, Abu-Jaber demystifies any perceived authorial prescience in her book with regard to the events of September 11, 2001:

When I wrote the book, it was all pre-9/11. I never expected it was going to be published right when we were going to war with Iraq. I was so tired of the negative media portrayals—it seemed like it was constant. And I had just read an essay by Edward Said, too, about how the Arab was the last ethnicity that it was okay to denigrate and to be openly racist about. It really made an impact on me when I was writing Crescent. I was thinking about how that's all we ever get—the idea of the terrorist. And I realized that people are so afraid of difference; they're so afraid of people who look different or sound different. If there's any social agenda in what I do, that is probably the number one thing: trying to counteract the media portrayals—the terrorist for the Arab man and the oppressed, hidden, exotic Arab woman. I talk about them in terms of diversity and humanity. I think the best way that comes through is by addressing vulnerability. (“Interview” 219)

¹⁰ See, for example, Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj's Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (2000).

¹¹ This kind of argument may also be made about the inordinate popularity that the Middle Eastern escapee narrative has achieved in the aftermath of 9/11. The succès de scandal of Jordanian-American Norma Khouri's Honor Lost (2003), a fake memoir about honor killings in Jordan, is simply one salient example among many of the extent to which post-9/11 representations of Middle Eastern violence and suffering may be said to be implicated in the restructuring of the Western repertoire of the exotic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Atef Laouyene

Atef Laouyene is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, where he teaches postcolonial and Anglophone literatures.