Session 5(a): Literature/Food for Thought

Palestinian Diaspora goes global through American-Palestinian Prose
Wesam al-Assadi
American University of Sharjah

To write the country
as a poem
incomplete
is the truth
of geography

(Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet)

This contribution examines the shifting location of the modern Palestinian literature written in English by Americans of Palestinian origins, rooted in diasporic countries but focused on Palestine. It explores how themes such as return, literal or metaphorical, identity and existence function in a selection of Palestinian-American novels and memoirs and how Palestinian diasporic   literature embodies the reality of today’s Palestinians across geographical barriers.
Although diasporic literatures are common in today’s world, the phenomenon is more manifest among Palestinians, not only because their diaspora was largely involuntary and remains extensive, but also because the continual emphasis on the motherland which, in Said’s words “stems directly from the story of their existence in and displacement form Palestine.”
For decades, the literature of the Palestinian diaspora has been too political, too academic and too elitist to attract the non-involved American reader. This literature is said to lack the imaginative essence that portrays Palestinians not as victims, but as normal human beings with faces and names, and are more than the United Nations’ maps and statistics that signify the Palestinian cause.
The academic and official portrayal of the Palestinian problem deprived the Palestinians the real sympathies of the public where the battle for American minds is being waged and one that the Palestinians do not seem to be winning. The fight is in the minds of the average American who seeks out good stories and novels or compelling non-fiction. However, one can depict the emerging of a specific Palestinian literature in the west; the Anglophone Palestinian literature, particularly Palestinian-American, such as Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place, Ibrahim Fawal’s On the Hills of God and Shaw Dallal’s Scattered Like Seeds that are used here as case studies.

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Post Communist Identity in the Diaspora: A Success story of Ideological Colonization
Mihai Mindra
University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

My paper will endeavor to demonstrate the impossibility to reconstruct in the Diaspora the culturally determined political self, as illustrated by the Jewish-Romanian-American writer Norman Manea’s post-communist work. I shall focus on his exilic work discussing pre- and post-1989 political and ethnic outcomes of Ceausescu’s national communism.
The literary, essayistic and interviewee production of this period refers to the three locals of the writer’s captivity/colonization process: Antonescu’s Transnistria, Ceausescu’s Romania, and the America of his immigration. In the first two he confronts historical tyranny and impositions under open violent anti-Semitism and communist political coercion. The last and present inhabitance concerns the entrapment of language, the “snail’s house”, in Manea’s symbolical rendition: the creator must keep alive his native language under the natural siege of the linguistic American albeit multicultural mainstream.
How does the artist, “Auguste the Fool”, engaged in a strenuous battle with the “White Clown” (Manea’s ironic coinages) colonizer, manage to survive in his work, with his genuine identity untainted by the cultural/political colonial past and present? The answer in my paper will focus on the specific survival strategies developed by the writer during his continuous colonial scuffle. These strategies have, apparently, helped the artist to carry on under political and cultural pressure, but they have also, inevitably, molded his identity to such an extent that he preserved it almost untouched by his diasporic condition.
Post-communist Manea, in his post-1989 books of essays and interviews appears as the cultural produce and victim of his three stages of colonization: shy of acknowledging his formerly clandestine ethnicity, poetically/symbolically/covertly discussing his tragic ethnic persecution, mildly, as justly observed by Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick, critical of Romanian intellectual anti-Semitic tradition, ironically abashed by genuine American multicultural tolerance and material prosperity. At the core of this actively swiveling cultural construct (multilingually distributed worldwide), detectable in Manea’s post-communist literary output, one discerns the Eastern European hub of Bukovinian Jewish extraction: the equipoised, sensible, morally correct and introverted intellectual.
His diasporic condition manifests itself through North American and West European acknowledgement of political foreigness aesthetically expressed. The Diaspora prized Manea as a live proof of Eastern-European Communist culture. Expertly packed in elegant bookbinding boasting artistic photo portraits that suggest suffering and intricacy, Manea lives his third, state-of-the-art this time, exile.

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Migration, Settlement and Identity: A Cultural Theme of the Muslim Diaspora after Partition of India – 1947
Muhammad Abrar Zahoor
Department of History, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Pakistan

India experienced one of world’s largest population displacement and Diaspora in 1947 at the time of partition of British India. The magnitude and repercussions of calamity were neither anticipated by the policy makers and administrators of the time nor could they pre-empt it through their will. On the other hand people cut-across on religious lines became so antagonistic to each other that they did not spare themselves from ethnic cleansing. Moreover, partition of India bore a distinct characteristic because whole provinces were included in one country or the other in addition to two provincial partitions. It was characterized by a slow-moving, selective and voluntary process of migration from different parts of India two the provinces of Sindh and the Punjab. However, the nature of assimilation in both the aforementioned provinces was different to each other. Diaspora population was congenially assimilated in the Punjab (with some cultural retention of identity) while it aroused differences of socio-political nature in Sindh.
Despite the fact that migration has got religious sanctity in Islam— the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) migrated from Mecca to Madina for the purpose of preaching religion to the people of Madina who showed more receptivity to the new religion—the Muslims of Pakistan use the term Muhajir (one who undertakes migration) in derogatory sense. This cultural theme can sufficiently be corroborated from the fact that the local population in Sindh as well as in the Punjab do not like to marry with Muhajirs. More so, people in the Punjab, in order to show themselves sons of the soil, speak like: Mein koi muhajir haan? (Am I a muhajir), tu muhajir tan nahin? (Are you a muhajir). These symbolic manifestations of chauvinism deepen the differences between the communities and it hurts Diaspora population psychologically.
Historiography on partition has not yet focused the cultural and psychological impact of the migration and diaspora. However, novel and fiction writing has contributed its part in highlighting consequences of partition. Thus the human dimension of partition needs to be explored through physical and psychological impact of the experiences of violence, abduction, migration and settlement. There are, nevertheless, some biographical accounts which are very relevant and important in unfolding this human drama.

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The Forming of Stereotypes among the Armenians in Armenia on the Cuisine of the Diaspora
Evgenia Gulyaeva
European University at Saint Petersburg; St. Petersburg, Russia

Modern Armenia is only a small part of what was  Historical Armenia, which is commonly divided into the West and the East due to the fact that these two parts have been incorporated into territories of various states over the centuries. This political division has been further deepened by the ethnographic differences between the East and  West Armenians. After the genocide of 1915-1916,  West Armenians lost their homeland and the major part of the Diaspora was formed. Therefore, it may be  stated that for the modern West Armenians,  East Armenia is a symbolic homeland rather than  the real homeland of their ancestors. Therefore, the differences between the East Armenians and the West Armenians are projected onto the relations between the Diaspora and the Republic of Armenia. Following the end of  WWII many members of the Diaspora (mostly  West Armenians) returned to  Soviet Armenia ( East Armenia). It is the influence of the repatriates on the modern Armenian cuisine that I would like to make the subject of my paper.
The repatriates brought along their ‘own’ culinary tradition and meals which had never existed in East Armenia spread out widely. A stereotype appeared among the local Armenians that the new arrivals from the Diaspora had  preserved their culinary traditions better. It may be assumed that the local features of the cuisine of the Diaspora are identified by the locals as the old pan-Armenian traditions which have been preserved by the Westerners  but forgotten by the Easterners. In other words, there is a tendency to view the traditions brought in by the Diaspora or the ones existing among the members of modern Diaspora as the ‘archaic’, or ‘real Armenian’ traditions.