Trickster Humour in Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home: Negotiating Arab American Muslim Female Sexuality

Abstract

Randa Jarrar’ s A Map of Home (2008), a major contemporary Arab American woman's novel, utilizes trickster humour as a way to resist the ideological manufacture of the Muslim female body propounded by US orientalism, Islamist orthodoxy and secular Arab patriarchy. Current scholarship on A Map of Home has not examined the relationship between humour and contemporary female sexuality. Focusing mostly on authorial tone, this article reads the novel's narrator-protagonist, Nidali Ammar, as a trickster figure, who resists being perceived as a cultural heroine and in doing so disrupts the sacredness of social conventions. The trickster A Map of Home celebrates, and Nidali enacts, prompts readers to laugh at key cultural norms shaping the Muslim female body in post-9/11 US sculpture. This inquiry examines a range of interconnected sexual themes—most notably, ‘proper’ sexual boundaries, orientations and codes of virginity—to illustrate how trickster humour fosters Arab American women's agency.

Keywords:

• Arab American
• body norms
• Islam
• Randa Jarrar
• sexuality

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my mentor and colleague Professor Vince B. Leitch, of the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma, for having read and commented on this article. Vince's suggestions and questions have definitely enriched my revisions and widened the scope of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Jadallah describes A Map of Home as ‘delightfully humorous, poetic, and thought-provoking’ (Jadallah 2010: 110). Salaita characterizes it as ‘by turns and sometimes all at once funny, moving, lewd, introspective, crass, sarcastic, witty, crude, and sincere’ (Salaita 2011: 130). Majaj and Sorgun—Majaj more than Sorgun—touch lightly on the feminist use of humour in A Map of Home, but neither examines how humour contributes to Arab American Muslim female agency. Sorgun seems apologetic about the novel's humour (Sorgun 2011). Majaj argues that by ‘using both black humor and an understanding of human complexity, Jarrar is able to raise difficult issues while at the same time fending off cooptation’ (Majaj 2012: 234).

2. Obviously, cultural stereotypes against Arab and Muslim women in the United States escalated after 9/11, so ‘some Muslims chose to become stealth to protect themselves. … Other Muslim women in the United States who formerly did not cover their hair as an expression of their religious faith chose to start wearing the hijab as a political act. These women chose to no longer fly under the radar undetectable as Muslim and to visualize their identities. Wearing the hijab became an expression of solidarity with other Muslims under siege, as a mark of identity as opposed to an expression of religious piety’ (Alsultany 2011: 309). I use the phrase ‘the Muslim female body’ to denote communally fabricated normative images of Arab Muslim women's bodies both in the United States and the Arab world. I employ the singular expression ‘the Muslim female body’ in an indicative, not descriptive way. This invented expression can thus be read as a parody of how the bodies of Arab and Arab American Muslim women have long been singularized, prescribed and defined at the hands of numerous social institutions, as well as cultural discourses. I considered using the lower-case ‘muslim’ to subvert the dominant ready-made assumptions that the ‘muslimness’ in each Muslim woman's life is the sole determiner of the identity of her body, but, for purposes of clarity, I decided to abide by the regular spelling of the word.

3. While patriarchy, Islamism and orientalism are vastly different historical systems, they overlap and cooperate in imposing strictures on women, the female body and sexuality (see, for example, Khan 2000).

4. Like Gana, I appreciate how Abu-Jaber integrates Arab American politics with daily life routines. Gana notes: ‘the novel does not tarry with a sterile polemic or a journalistic apportioning of blame, but instead interrogates the political against the multiplicity of the quotidian in ways that make readers think for themselves about the travesties of politicizing culture and defusing the heterogeneous experiences of Arab lives into homogenous totalities’ (Gana 2008a: 237). Significantly, Crescent does not create white guilt.

5. Hassan correctly qualifies US orientalism as race-based: ‘In the U.S., Orientalism has been thoroughly racialized, something that was central to the early Arab immigrant experience since the late nineteenth century, when race had cultural, political, and legal implications. In fact, American Orientalism is indelibly marked by race and the history of racial thought in the U.S., where questions of citizenship and immigration were formulated in racialist terms’ (Hassan 2011: 15).

6. Recent scholarship has paid attention to traps into which Arab and Arab American feminists may fall defending Islam against western stereotypes.

7. I am especially indebted to several contemporary Arab American critics for their broad overviews of the field. To start with, Ludescher, inspired by wide-ranging critic Lisa Suhair Majaj, argues that in order for future scholarship to appreciate the ‘subtle’ treatment of ethnicity, it needs to move beyond analysing content. One way to do so, Ludescher argues, is to explore ‘ethnic humor’ (Ludescher 2006: 109). Although Ludescher is mainly talking about the second wave of Arab American literature, I find her recommendation particularly applicable to the third wave, to which A Map of Home belongs. Ludescher agrees with Majaj (1999), and I do too, that contemporary Arab American literature and scholarship need to go beyond defensive preservation towards creative transformation (Ludescher 2006: 108). I see multi-ethnic comparativism as part of such a transformation.

8. In the preface to her famous Borderlands, Anzaldúa defines borderlands as ‘physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy’ (Anzaldúa 1987 ). Given this definition, Jarrar's Nidali occupies a borderland on various levels. On a spatial level, she belongs to more than one home and, on a psychological level, she is a nerd, who sees school as her only home. Yet, at the same time, she is a sexual maniac, plus, on a sexual level, she does not want to be contained by one sexual boundary, whether homosexuality, heterosexuality or masturbation.

9. Exploring trickster traditions in Middle Eastern cultures, Marzolph argues that Juha, the foremost Arab trickster figure, was ‘first found in Arabic literature in the ninth century’ (Marzolph: 661).

10. ‘This genre was begun by Badi ‘al- Zaman al-Hamadhani (968–1008/356–398), who was followed by many others (Jayyusi: 8).

11. There is not space here to document the many commonalities and similarities between Arab and Arab American tricksters.

12. ‘Because trickster won't be contained, trickster strategies and tales provide a way of pulling together conflicting world views and sets of values into coherent, new identity. This identity is turbulent, shape-changing, contradictory, “bad,” culturally central, liminal, powerful, [and] power-interrogating’ (Ammons and White-Parks 1994: xi).

13. Fadda-Conrey analyses the relationship between the multiple Arab geographic identities characterizing the setting of A Map of Home and the growth of its heroine's ‘Palestinian consciousness’. She rightly argues that it is the continuous ‘negotiation and transgression’ of the ‘constructed political borders’ of these countries that leads Nidali to conceptualize home as a plural entity (Fadda-Conrey 2014: 133–4).

14. In her short review of the novel, Weisman offers a representative judgment: ‘the only negative is that the novel is perhaps unnecessarily laced with strong language, which may make it less universally appealing’ (Weisman 2008).

15. For example, Jadallah expects a true representation of Palestinian history. She worries about how Jarrar ‘airs the dirty laundry’ of the patriarchy of the father in public (Jadallah 2010: 112).

16. In ‘Gazing East from the Americas’, Salaita rewrites the term ‘gaze’ to explain how Arab American authors employ ‘an inverted form of the traditional [colonial] gaze’ (Salaita 2006a: 133). My focus on the female gaze extends his argument.

17. I agree with Vizenor's astute observation that: ‘Trickster stories break out of the heavy burdens of tradition with a tease of action and a sense of chance’ (Vizenor and Lee 1999: 60).

18. Vizenor defines survivance stories as ‘renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry’ (Vizenor 2008: 1).

19. On further use of the grotesque in relation to the question of state and colonial authorities, see Mbembé (2001: ).

20. Arab American Nidali Ammar's sexuality is parallel to Lulu Lamartine's, a Native American trickster character in Erdrich's celebrated novel Love Medicine. The sexual inclusiveness of both Nidali and Lulu reflects their survival ideologies. Lulu, too, believes that her erotic relationships with men enable her to negotiate culturally constructed body boundaries (Erdrich 1993: 80–1).

21. In most Arab countries, virginity is explained in relation to the presence or absence of the hymen. In light of this definition, virginity cannot be tested against anal sex, homosexual relations or sex that may not include penetration. Khayyat offers an ethnographic analysis of vagina-based honour and shame (Khayyat 1990).

22. Needless to say, A Map of Home does not belittle the effects of war, exile or domestic violence on the Ammar family. There are moments in the novel where the father worries that his children may have post-traumatic stress disorder, and there are occasions when Nidali imagines seriously bad incidents, including being raped by villagers. Nidali is constantly troubled by exile. However, her overall motive is to survive; humour is her main strategy.

23. Referring to the Qur'an, Sorgun also acknowledges Nidali's liberated sexuality (Sorgun 2011: 80).

24. My analysis of Jarrar's A Map of Home is part of a book in progress, which also examines Yunis's The Night Counter (2009), Halaby's Once in a Promised Land (2007), Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), Serageldin's The Cairo House (2000), Abu-Jaber's Crescent (2003), El Saadawi's Zeina (2011), Al-Tahawy's The Tent (1998) and Al-Sane's Girls of Riyadh (2007).