ADONIS,

ASHOUR, AND THIRD WORLD SOLIDARITY

As it does in other politically committed literary works of the early 1970s, a Third World solidarity framework animates “Qabr min

ajl New York” (published in 1971) and al-Rihla (set in 1972). Like most (but not all) politically committed Arabic literature written from the 1960s onward, these works are critical of U.S. government policies in the Third World and of the Vietnam War in particular.

⁶

Taking U.S. policies to task for their racism, at home and abroad, is a relatively standard theme in literature of the era that deals with the United States, including that by Arab and Arab American authors.⁷

Though not all literary works of the era discuss the oppression of Black Americans specifically, and negative stereotypes of them certainly exist and are reproduced in Arab contexts,⁸

the African (and Native) American is a figure who is often shown empathy and compassion as a symbolic victim of U.S. oppression.⁹

Thus, the comparison of Adonis's and

Ashour's works highlights not only their shared frame of reference, but also a frame of reference that is representative of a broader phenomenon of committed literature in an era in which disenfranchised groups were building alliances of solidarity.

Muhammad Ali's statement of solidarity with the Vietnamese people, as a Black American, must thus be seen as part of broader social phenomena and activities that engaged African Americans with peoples in the Third World. As George Lipsitz has argued, Dizzy Gillespie's satiric campaign for president of the United States in 1964 underlines “the affinities that might link aggrieved communities of color in the United States to anticolonialist struggles overseas.”¹⁰

As a major player in the Nonaligned Movement and supporter of Pan-Africanism, Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt was a common point of reference for Third World solidarity and for many African Americans. One example is Malcolm X, who was an outspoken admirer of Nasser and spoke at the Bandung conference in favor of the United Nations' Afro–Asian–Arab bloc as the rightful place for Black Americans to affiliate themselves globally. In her article on the “honorary white status” of Egyptian in the United States, Soheir Morsy demonstrates how this worked reciprocally—for example, with the explicit political involvement of Egyptian students in the United States in the 1960s in local university chapters of the Organization of Arab Students, Muslim Student Association, and Organization of African Students. She cites the solidarity shown by Egyptian students with African people in the diaspora, mentioning, for example, the 1962 meetings with Malcolm X at Harvard by African, Arab, and Muslim students.¹¹

In addition to this, many international liberation movements used African America in their imagery, rhetoric, and even names.

¹²

The 1970s saw the Irish identifying themselves as white Negroes; Quebecois separatists referring to themselves as the Nègres blancs d'Amerique; and a group of Mizrahim founding a movement in Israel called the Black Panthers.¹³

These three examples are perhaps so striking because, within the United States, the Irish, Quebeçois, and Jews are all groups that were assigned a “white” label in the hierarchy of racial categorizations by the later part of the 20th century. These gestures of solidarity in the 1970s draw on the symbolic capital of African Americans to develop intellectual and political thought and actions in a “third way” that embraced neither of the polarized positions of the Cold War superpowers. Such efforts demonstrate the attempt to form alliances that would cross such monolithic and necessarily opposed categories and it is within this context that works such as “Qabr min

ajl New York” and al-Rihla were conceived and written.

READING THE INTRICACIES OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES

Because of their location within this solidarity framework, African Americans can thus be written into Arabic literary texts about the United States not only as distant suffering human beings, but also as a part of the racialized and marginalized community of Third World peoples. It is therefore possible to write African Americans into Arabic works as sympathetic figures with whom the Arab characters identify. As I have argued elsewhere, Arab identity is proposed in many Arabic literary texts dealing with the United States by positing an Arab “self” as opposed to a U.S. “other.”

¹⁴

The logical extension of this, as both Adonis's and

Ashour's texts demonstrate, is to draw a parallel between the Arab self and the African American and place these figures in contrast to a white U.S. “other.” This construction of race, however, is problematic in the context of the United States because Arabs, like other groups, have been deeply involved and implicated in the racial politics and policies of the United States.

As with other groups, the legal existence of Arabs as immigrants was based on belonging to a racial category.¹⁵

In its very first pronouncement on the subject of citizenship, the U.S. government restricted naturalization in 1790 to “white persons,” a racial prerequisite to citizenship that lasted until 1952.¹⁶ As immigration laws in the United States were modified over time, the way in which this “whiteness” was defined also shifted and changed, leading to the “racial prerequisite cases” in which people petitioned the U.S. government for the right to be recognized as white and therefore eligible for citizenship. Some groups were recognized consistently as whites and others were not, but judges vacillated over the cases of Syrians, Arabians, and Indians, underlining their continuing ambiguous status over time.¹⁷ The case of the Syrian George Dow in 1915 was one around which the Arab American community rallied, and it is often considered the legal starting point for the acceptance of Arab Americans as whites in the United States.¹⁸ Today Arab Americans remain officially categorized as white for government purposes, including the census. Through this status, they have gained access to privileges reserved for whites, such as land ownership, which groups and individuals not so designated did not.¹⁹

Although Arab Americans have clearly benefited from this racial designation, analysts pointed out long before 11 September 2001 that the fragility of “honorary white” status has meant that it can be revoked at any time.²⁰

The literary and critical output of a new generation of Arab Americans, moreover, explores commonalities with other racialized groups in the United States by identifying themselves as “people of color,” highlighting this disparity between official status and experiences of exclusion and discrimination. The common issues frequently dealt with include racial profiling, political racism, and police and community violence. They have also noted the gap between the white status and privileges that Arab Americans officially enjoy in the United States and the treatment they receive as a racialized group.²¹ Many Arab American writers and poets have sought to build links with African Americans, and other people of color as well, around these issues.²²

Within the messy racial hierarchy of the United States, however, racial belonging and solidarity is extremely complex. Sarah Gualtieri has shown, for example, how early Syrian immigrants to the United States built an ethnic and racial position on the basis of being “white” and fought for this status rather than challenging the racial prerequisite for citizenship as a flawed premise. Arab Americans, like other “white” groups, therefore have benefited in the U.S. racial system by defining themselves explicitly as opposed to Blacks, who were deemed inferior.

²³

Thus, in fighting for their “white status,” Arab Americans have contributed to maintaining a system of racial hierarchy and privilege that has had deleterious effects on African Americans.²⁴

Gualtieri also argues that these discourses around race informed the discussions of the lynching of the Syrian immigrant Nicholas Romey in Florida in 1929.²⁵

Although solidarity building as people of color is the project of many Arab Americans today, the history of Arab American white privilege and the concomitant Arab prejudice against African Americans has led to Black American anger and resentment toward Arab American communities in the United States.²⁶

Thus, the straightforward terms with which Arab visitors from outside the United States have viewed their relations with Black Americans often differ considerably from the experiences and views of Arabs and Arab Americans who are implicated in the racial schema of the United States. My readings of Adonis's poem and

Ashour's memoir thus highlight the complexities of their engagements with race, and particularly how these are entwined with gender in their textual journeys to New York City, in which they employ the connected symbols of Harlem and the Statue of Liberty.

A TRAITOROUS “LADY LIBERTY”?

The Statue of Liberty is perhaps the most potent and immediately recognizable symbol of New York City—and, indeed, of the United States. Reproduced romantically, satirically, patriotically, defiantly, or as a parody, the image of a woman holding a torch and clutching a tablet has seeped into the public imagination, worldwide, to represent the United States and its claims to uphold liberty. Like other politically committed texts that critique the United States for its policies in the Third World, Adonis's and

Ashour's works use the statue as a symbolic site for protest and contestation—particularly against the war in Vietnam and U.S. collusion in the destruction of Palestine and the dispossession of its people in the aftermath of the 1967 June war. Both “Qabr min

ajl New York” and al-Rihla invoke the Statue of Liberty directly and relatively frequently. Although these textual locations are not always explicitly linked to African Americans or the question of race in their works, the discussions imply a connection to U.S. racial politics and policies and make use of the statue's gender, as I will elaborate.

“Qabr min

ajl New York” introduces the statue in the eighth line of the poem, in its second stanza, following its opening lines which link the earth (al-

arḍ) to a pear (ījjāsa), a breast (thady), and then a tombstone (shāhida).

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This clearly marked female figure is directly and explicitly connected to New York City, which is being addressed by the poet: The first part of this quotation uses a simile to equate New York with “a woman,” reinforcing its grammatical feminine gender as a city (madīna). But this woman, whom the reader might first assume to be a flesh-and-blood person, is quickly specified as not a “real woman” but merely a statue, suggesting the unnatural and artificial quality of the city, which is reinforced in the next section. The unnaturalness of this woman is highlighted by the Arabic word for statue (timthāl) whose root, “m-th-l,” more largely relates to representing and resembling. It is not a woman here but merely a pale imitation of one, and this is then immediately shown also to be a representation of New York City and the United States. No doubt remains about the identity of this statue in the following two lines, where the poet draws on the well-worn iconography of the Statue of Liberty—she has one raised arm and is holding both liberty (ḥurriyya) and history (ta

rīkh). The imagery, however, is confused and even inverted here to advance Adonis's message. The “document called history” and “rag called liberty” in this example are necessarily held in the same lifted hand, presumably referring to the hand that holds the torch. The second hand in this case is suffocating [the] Earth, here identified as her child. Therefore, if drawing on the iconographic Statue of Liberty, one imagines the tablet shifted to the hand holding the torch and a juggling act being performed so that she could thus “suffocate a child, called earth” with her other hand. This scrambling of the icon relays the poet's message about the treacherous nature of this woman, whose gender is accented yet again in this example, by being cast in the role of infanticidal mother.

The second part of this quotation offers a greater elaboration on the city's perfidy, repeating its name for the third time in fewer than fifteen lines in the poem. This word functions as a punctuating interjection; written in boldface and repeated twenty-five times in the poem, it occurs more frequently than any other word. The woman from the first section is now replaced with a mere body (the noun jasad is indefinite, underlining its insignificance), the color of asphalt. This recalls the unnaturalness of the traitorous woman/mother who is only a statue and would suffocate her child. She is thus connected to the coldhearted world of steel and concrete made famous by New York's skyscrapers, her face locked and inaccessible. The rest of the section further reinforces the gap between the statue's mythology and reality. The poet invokes Walt Whitman, a positive U.S. figure recurring throughout the poem as a counter to the government and military's greed and materialism, to act as a guide away from these problems.³⁰

Whitman, however, can only offer up the very people who should be granted refuge by the Statue of Liberty. These lines recall Emma Goldman's poem printed on the statue's base, but unlike her poem, they offer no path toward liberty. As the poet points out, the option of the Brooklyn Bridge, after all, is what connects these disparate and contradictory parts of New York and the United States—Whitman and green grass to Wall Street and greenbacks.³¹

This implicit invocation of the Statue of Liberty is echoed in an explicit reference in section three of the poem, where she is made plural (tamāthīl al-ḥurriyya), “Disintegrate, you statues of liberty, you nails driven deep into the breast with a wisdom which imitates the wisdom of the rose. The wind suddenly blows again from the East, uprooting the tents and skyscrapers.”³²

Once again, the statue is shown to be merely a representation, and one that betrays her vocation; she is inimical to wisdom and thus a symbol of people's oppression rather than of the liberty to which she lays claim.³³

Echoing this opening of section three of “Qabr min

ajl New York,” section four also opens by addressing a woman (

ayyatuha al-mar

a). Though it does not specifically mention the statue, I read it as linked to the earlier passages:

This final quotation shows the woman as distant, opaque, undefined, and unambiguously sexual. If one of her thighs is in the water and the other in the heavens, it is clear that she is straddling the land or the earth (al-

arḍ), referred to in the opening of the poem. This sexualized female imagery recalls the breast of the opening lines of the poem, relating the earth to the tombstone, inverting an image related to nourishment and life-giving to one of death. It also even more powerfully recalls the suffocation of the earth/child by the Statue of Liberty, here suggesting both a sexual metaphor and a mutilated childbirth.

These gendered and sexualized images draw on the familiar misogynistic representation of women as betrayers to mount and reinforce the poet's critique of the United States. This recurs in a more graphic and sexually violent image, in which the poet will “pulverize her with his eyes” and then command the female city to “throw herself down between my [the poet's] thighs so that I might grant you another dimension.”³⁵

Adonis shows the woman in this poem as a symbol of treachery, which underlines the corruption of New York and thus the United States. As suggested earlier in relation to New York's grammatically feminine gender, this is also inscribed in the poem on the level of language. Convention demands that the poet address the statue and the city in the feminine singular; thus, in a passage condemning the U.S. economic stranglehold over the Third World, he writes, “New York/Laki fī baladī al-riwāq wa-l-sarīr (NEW YORK/in my country you own the corridor and the bed).”³⁶ In this particular quotation, Adonis makes further use of the feminine address to rhyme the second person feminine singular verbs “talhathīn” and “tusābiqīn” with “filasṭīn.” These two verbs are related to what the United States is doing in the Third World (striving/panting and competing) and its disastrous effects there, particularly in Palestine. The rhyme not only gives textual prominence to Palestine, one of the issues highlighted in this poem written in the aftermath of the 1967 June war, but also connects the policies of the United States to specific locations, accenting this treachery by using female images, such as the Statue of Liberty, and feminine grammar and rhyme to reinforce it.

Adonis uses the symbol of the Statue of Liberty here to emphasize perfidy, and the poem draws on imagery that is clearly sexualized and gendered as female. “Qabr min

ajl New York” reproduces the notion that the Black/Third World subject is male by writing a male-scripted story through the male voice of the poet. This can be read in conjunction with Ali

s statement in which he names himself a “Black Man” as an expression of political solidarity. Here he not only evokes a racialized symbol of oppression but also firmly asserts his gender identity. Within the United States, to assert a proud Black male identity has specific connotations, particularly as it is well established that the Black male body is a site on which some of the most horrific of racist crimes have been visited—for example, by way of lynching in the United States, a particular type of murder that is often linked to sexuality and gender.

³⁷

This should not be read, however, as unproblematic. Gendering the male body as the universal image of the African American erases the body of the Black woman, which was also violated, through rape and forced pregnancies, by the colonial and slave systems.³⁸

“Qabr min

ajl New York” reproduces this problematic gendered paradigm within its stance of solidarity with African Americans, positing the male as universal and casting female symbols as negative.

“I CAN'T SEE THE STATUE OF LIBERTY”:

ASHOUR'S STRATEGIES OF MARGINALIZATION

Radwa

Ashour's critiques of the United States in al-Rihla have much in common with the substance of “Qabr min

ajl New York.” She condemns the war in Vietnam and U.S. complicity in the destruction of Palestine, and she powerfully argues for Third World solidarity. Also like Adonis, she is skeptical of the Statue of Liberty and the freedom it purports to represent in the United States.

Ashour, however, does not share Adonis's strategies for undermining the figure of the Statue of Liberty in her text. Rather than sexualize the statue or insist on its femininity,

Ashour constantly marginalizes it, replacing its importance in her text with other places, people, and issues, particularly focusing on groups that are socially and economically marginalized. Indeed, in the memoir

Ashour is able to present her reader with a considerably more textured analysis of these issues—particularly gender—than Adonis does, partly due to the greater generic flexibility provided by a memoir as opposed to a poem, even an extended prose poem.

Ashour does not feminize the Statue of Liberty as Adonis does. Instead, she layers her interactions with it with gendered elements, many of which propose the feminine as positive. Al-Rihla is a narrative account of

Ashour's journey to the United States, the first of four major journeys that structure this work of the same title with great trepidation, but also with a desire to deepen her knowledge about African diasporic literature.

³⁹

This memoir records her life in the United States in the early 1970s as well as the three other major journeys—two back to Cairo and this one to New York City, on which I will focus here.⁴⁰

Ashour's gendered experience as a woman is a key to understanding all of these textual journeys. For example, she frames her decision to embark on her studies in the United States with similar travels of Egyptian men who have preceded her, invoking the name of perhaps the most famous among them when she writes, “Just like Rifa

a, I set out on my way.”

⁴¹

This reversal of the gender of the traveler is continued throughout the work. The character Radwa has left her husband Murid, who is a stateless Palestinian, back in her homeland, Egypt, while she pursues her doctorate in the United States.⁴²

When he is finally able to come and visit her, she shows him the new world she has encountered, acting as his guide and teacher in the United States and of all she has learned. Radwa therefore is the expert throughout these sections, showing her husband the places she has gone and explaining elements of U.S. culture to him—reversing the (stereo)typical roles. This reversal of roles is particularly notable in relation to Radwa and Murid's encounters with the Statue of Liberty.

The power of these encounters in al-Rihla is located in the alternative locations offered each time the Statue of Liberty is mentioned. All of these occur within chapter 11, which is devoted to the visit to New York City. The chapter opens with Radwa and Murid's arrival at a hotel and immediate desire to explore the city. Because their hotel is located near the Empire State Building, they decide that they will climb up to the observation tower on the top. The first direct speech recorded in this chapter is Murid's declaration, “I can't see the Statue of Liberty” (lā

arā timthāl al-ḥurriyya).

⁴³

This symbolic statement foreshadows the couple's conversations about visiting the statue, which punctuate the chapter. The fact that neither Murid nor Radwa can see the statue reflects the absence of “liberty” or “freedom” that they observe in the United States, particularly for U.S. blacks and Latinos. This becomes a recurrent theme throughout their journey in New York City specifically. Radwa then searches in her handbag for a map and points in the direction of the statue, but the fog is too thick to see it—another symbolic message. As they leave the Empire State Building, they recite four lines from T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land”—starting with “Unreal city under the brown fog of a winter dawn”⁴⁴

—printed in English in the book rather than translated into Arabic, a feature which I will discuss in detail below.⁴⁵

This initial mention of the Statue of Liberty establishes the visit to this monument as a leitmotif throughout the chapter. Shortly thereafter, Radwa and Murid are deciding on a plan for visiting the city, and she asks him, “Do you want to go to the Statue of Liberty…. Or should we go to Harlem?”

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They choose the latter and spend the day traversing Manhattan island, meeting Hare Krishnas, hippies, West Indian musicians, and a Palestinian pizza maker along the way. The naming of these particular groups once again foregrounds

Ashour's insistence on depicting the people who make up the “other” America and the diversity of people she encounters. The next time they must make a decision about how to spend their time in New York, Radwa asks, “Should we go to the Statue of Liberty?” and Murid replies, “Let's go to Guernica.”

⁴⁷

They pass their day at the museum looking at Guernica and contemplating political art.⁴⁸

At the very end of the chapter, Radwa and Murid have packed their bags and are spending their last moments at the Puerto Rican parade. As they prepare to catch their bus back to Amherst, Radwa jokingly jibes Murid, “It isn't right to come to New York and leave it again if you have not visited the Statue of Liberty or bought a small model of it or sent postcards with pictures of the city on them to your friends.” His reply—“We will ask this family for a Puerto Rican flag!”⁴⁹

All of these examples show how, while invoking the Statue,

Ashour at the same time denies its importance by valorizing other things within New York. Her descriptions of the positive elements of New York are even stronger than Adonis's somewhat comparable references to Walt Whitman. Each distraction that keeps the couple away from this icon operates symbolically to show the depth and texture of New York society and, therefore, the United States more generally, as well as to critique the statue for not valuing these elements of its own culture. The things that are shown to be more important than the Statue of Liberty are Harlem, the Puerto Rican parade, Picasso's Guernica, meeting a Palestinian, and listening to the music of the counterculture. This series of textual refusals to pay homage to the statue provide the context for

Ashour's direct indictment of New York for its cruelty and racism, engaging some of the same themes as “Qabr min ajl New York”:

Ashour here identifies New York as a reflection of the Statue of Liberty, marked as a European woman. Rather than highlight the statue's gender, she thus chooses to focus on her national/racial affiliation and to link this to ideology. It is not just that “the new” York is European or “white” in origin but what this implies as a direct result for those who are racialized within it, the Blacks of Harlem: they are kept oppressed in a ghetto and are far from free.

Ashour uses the Statue of Liberty therefore to establish an opposition between Blacks and whites in this passage. She also parallels these oppositions with other groups of people in her text, including Palestinians and Puerto Ricans, hippies and Hare Krishnas. This is a typical strategy employed in al-Rihla's critiques and depictions of the United States.

Ashour demonstrates the racism embodied in the statue itself by pointing out that the statue represents a white European woman and linking this directly to Black people's lives, but she does so in a way that also affirms the wealth of experiences and diversity, particularly within communities of color, in New York. Thus, although

Ashour manipulates the symbol of the Statue of Liberty in ways related to both race and gender, her powerful commentary draws on elements such as consumerism—such as her remarking to Murid about buying a model or postcards of the Statue of Liberty—rather than sexualizing or racializing the statue itself to convey the message. Therefore, in contrast to Adonis,

Ashour is able to write a narrative of the Statue of Liberty that does not demonize its femininity. Indeed,

Ashour tells her story through a female narrative voice that treats the issues of gender and race as intertwined but neither glorifies nor demonizes one group or category. The different gendered assumptions underlying this text, and the greater space the genre allows it to do so, provide a much more complex and layered approach to these questions.

“I DO NOT COME FROM THE OUTSIDE”: ADONIS' S AND

ASHOUR'S HARLEMS

In its marginalization of the Statue of Liberty, al-Rihla presents this powerful symbol as a counterpoint to Harlem. African Americans are alienated by the white United States, and

Ashour proposes Harlem as both a symbol of an impoverished ghetto and the spiritual center and capital of Black America. Both al-Rihla and “Qabr min

ajl New York” use and treat Harlem in some detail, both as a specific location and by drawing on these and other symbolic meanings.

While they are alienated from the Statue of Liberty as Arab “outsiders,” both

Ashour and Adonis feel that they belong to Harlem as Third World “insiders.” “Qabr min

ajl New York” expresses this explicitly in terms of “inside” and “outside” when the poet declares at the opening of section five, “HARLEM/I do not come from the outside. I know your rancor, I know it's good bread.”

⁵¹

In claiming that he is not “from the outside” (min al-khārij), but privy to understanding Black America as represented by Harlem, Adonis is thus able to valorize African American feelings of anger. This passage opens section five of the poem, in counterdistinction to the openings of sections three and four, which contain the images of the woman/statue, and it maintains oppositions similar to

Ashour's portrayals. Also similar to Adonis's poem,

Ashour's narrative travelogue frequently underlines her friendships, bonds, and affiliations with Black Americans. She even remarks on the fact that she looks like her Black friends and colleagues, sharing the same wheat-colored (qamḥī) complexion.

⁵²

An example of how, like Adonis,

Ashour feels that she is an insider is found in her description of Radwa and Murid's social life in the United States: “We invited our Afro-American friends over to our house and we went over to their houses and moved in their circles as though we were a part of them.”

⁵³

Ashour asserts this relationship by saying that she moved in their circles, “ka

annana minhum.” This expression emphasizes both insider status and belonging, particularly with the use of the preposition “min.” Both texts use Harlem as a location and symbol to valorize Black American culture, art, and literature. The texts also treat the complexities of the paradoxical position of African Americans within the United States and the global struggles of people of color in the 1960s and 1970s.

DREAMS DEFERRED: THE STATUE OF LIBERTY VERSUS HARLEM

As noted earlier, Harlem is first mentioned in al-Rihla on Radwa and Murid's visit to New York in direct contrast to the Statue of Liberty as a preferable place to spend the day. After symbolically refusing to pay a requisite visit to the statue, Radwa recites Langston Hughes's famous poem, “Harlem (2),” widely known as “A Dream Deferred,” as they begin their walk to Harlem:

This is the second poem related to New York that Radwa recites during this visit, and it contrasts with her recitation of the lines from Eliot's “The Waste Land” in several ways. First, the poetic integrity of this short piece is preserved as it is presented in its entirety, informing the reader that she wished to convey an artistic message rather than simply a somewhat joking literary allusion to the fog shrouding the statue and thus the city. More important, however, this poem is not transcribed in its original English-language version in the text, as was Eliot's, but is translated into Arabic.

⁵⁵

In this way, Hughes's poem acts as a textual intervention accenting

Ashour's commitment to preserving and conveying the African American literary heritage and its creativity. Once again,

Ashour acts as the teacher and guide to her husband, himself a well-respected poet, proud of her expertise and willing to share it.

By including the Arabic translation of this poem in the text, rather than its original English version, moreover, she is textually conveying a message of Third World solidarity. Not only does she ensure that this masterpiece of Black literature is understood by her Arabic readership; she also refuses the English language as a vehicle for Black expression. Surely, African Americans have challenged “standard English” in myriad ways and created these strategies to develop their own vehicles of expression, as have other writers of the African diaspora.

⁵⁶

Ashour's translation into Arabic here, however, can be understood in the political context of Third World writers, especially African writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who reject colonial languages to reclaim indigenous ones in their creative expression—a hotly debated issue throughout the formerly colonized and diasporic world.

⁵⁷

Her emphasis on African solidarity and African American–Third World solidarity is instructive, as is her position as an outsider to the United States who is translating African Americans into another context.

Following Radwa's recitation of the poem,

Ashour then contextualizes it with a brief analysis,

Once again assuring the reader of her deep feeling of connection to Harlem through her studies,

Ashour underlines that Harlem is a real place where real things happen and not merely a symbol. She contrasts the true yearning for liberty on the part of poor Black Americans escaping the South for better lives with the mere image and symbol of this freedom, the Statue of Liberty, once again identifiable by her torch. She contrasts these two symbols of liberty further by labeling what these poor Black migrants hold in each of their hands. Rather than with a torch and a tablet, they enter New York holding their children and a suitcase.

Ashour thus underlines here both the past and hope for the future.

Ashour's analysis emphasizes the content of the poem “Harlem (2),” already stressed by the insistence on presenting it to the reader in Arabic. Though of course much of the “poetry” of “Harlem (2)” is lost in translation, the Arabic rendition makes this piece more accessible to her audience.

Ashour's use of textual space to translate one of Hughes's most famous poems into Arabic valorizes African American creative and literary works within her text and implicitly offers the reader a more comprehensive understanding of the field of her doctoral studies. Thus, in a certain sense she is also providing a justification for her residence in the United States, about which she is openly ambivalent throughout the text. The work can be read as a chronicle of the development of her increasingly complex and nuanced feelings about the United States.

⁵⁹

Radwa's teaching of the poem to Murid emphasizes her discovery and increasing knowledge, which on some level justify not only the book but also her actual voyage and years' residence away from her husband, family, and country. It also functions as a lesson to her Arab readership, in Egypt and elsewhere, to reject negative stereotypes of Black Americans.⁶⁰

In addition, this passage demonstrates the contributions of Black Americans to literature and culture while maintaining

Ashour's insistence on underlining the link to both Africa, thus Egypt and Arabs, and the Third World more generally, doubly reinforcing the message of a shared identity.

The recitation of “Harlem (2)” also specifically recalls a similar example of Radwa teaching Murid about the culture of Black America when they read newspapers in Amherst, Massachusetts, on the Fourth of July. Relaxing on a park bench on this hot July day, Radwa excitedly informs Murid that The New York Times has reprinted Fredrick Douglass's famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

⁶¹

Their discussion of the speech occupies most of the thirteenth chapter of this fifteen-chapter book. Here, Radwa encourages Murid to read the speech—which he does with great interest—while she once again holds forth, contextualizing it and providing details needed to understand some of its complexities. Again, large portions of the text of the speech itself are included in translated Arabic in the text so that Douglass's message is clearly understood. Prefiguring Muhammad Ali's words by more than 100 years, Douglass declares, “The Fourth of July is your day, it is not mine.”⁶²

That Douglass's words are translated at length in

Ashour's text once again demonstrates not only the long history of the oppression of Blacks in the United States, but also their ingenuity and creation of art in spite of this and in order to subvert it. The chapter continues with Radwa and Murid's analysis of the connections between this speech and the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the events of the Boston Massacre, and the slave-owning histories of “great U.S. leaders” such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

⁶³

The chapter then ends with the words of an Indian revolutionary who witnesses massacres in the Asian subcontinent in 1890, saying that these historical events mean “the death of a people's dream.”⁶⁴

This chapter is indicative of

Ashour's approach to the issue of race and racism in the United States, especially in relation to the African American community. First, she brings in a good deal of historical and cultural knowledge to contextualize the situations that she is describing, analyzing and critiquing. This approach to writing,

Ashour has claimed, is common to her generation of writers of Arabic literature as a response to the growing awareness of world manipulation and the double pressure, from within and without, to which their collective consciousness was subjected.

⁶⁵

Ashour does not historicize for ideological reasons, she asserts, but because she has “no other means to conceptualize my existence and reconstruct it into meaningful categories.”⁶⁶

This approach to writing history into literary works is reflected in her novels, as well—for example, her acclaimed trilogy set in Granada as well as her recent autobiographical novel, Atyaf, which interweaves the story of a character called Radwa and her imagined, twinned alter ego Shagar.⁶⁷

In Atyaf, historical documents, speeches, newspaper articles, and testimonies related to the massacre at Dayr Yasin are interwoven into the stories of these two women's lives to create a novel that is at once personal, imaginative, and historical. This historicizing project is central to

Ashour's message of solidarity between Africans/Egyptians/Arabs and Black Americans and to building connections between Third World peoples without effacing their individual and unique histories. While underlining the specific literary creativity and artistic contributions of the Black American community, for example, she also draws links to Palestine, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, and Iran. Within the U.S. context,

Ashour is careful to show people who are politically and culturally marginalized as differentiated from the mainstream of U.S. culture, insisting on Puerto Ricans in particular.

What is somewhat less clear in al-Rihla, however, is how to cope with the paradox of Black American belonging and alienation within the U.S. context. As an outsider,

Ashour offers penetrating analyses of U.S. society and shows her deep affiliations with African Americans, both individually and collectively. However, an analysis that primarily privileges the marginalization of Black Americans in the United States as parallel to that of other groups also runs the risk of effacing the complexities of the specific positions of different racialized groups within the United States and their dynamic encounters with structures of racial oppression. Thus, while

Ashour's position of solidarity is powerful and offers fruitful perspectives from which to understand some elements of the race dynamics in the United States from an Arab perspective, representing Blacks primarily as marginal within this context, and as linked to other groups, can minimize their specific struggles to claim their place within the United States, thereby erasing their agency as actors in this process.

“WHEN WILL YOUR NEXT REVOLUTION COME?” ADDRESSING HARLEM IN “QABR MIN

AJL NEW YORK”

Like

Ashour, Adonis uses Harlem as a symbol of contrast—indirectly with the Statue of Liberty, and more explicitly and importantly in relation to other locations in New York City. Apart from “New York,” no one word is as important structurally to the poem as is “Harlem,” repeated fourteen times and marked in boldface throughout. These repetitions punctuate the poem, and although they occur as early as the first section, they gain momentum and are more frequent particularly in the middle of the poem, in the fifth of ten sections. Often, the word “Harlem” is juxtaposed with the name of other neighborhoods, just as its most important thoroughfare, 125th Street, is contrasted with other streets. An example of how this works is found in the first section of the poem, which is divided into five sections after an opening stanza. The sections are marked by these place names (which are all represented in boldface in the original Arabic and with capital letters in the Jayyusi/Brownjohn translation):

Here, Harlem is clearly contrasted to wealthy, white areas of New York—Madison, Park, and Fifth Avenues, known for their elite apartments and exclusive shops, and Wall Street as the center of U.S. capitalism. The sections following each of the latter three divisions all deal in one way or another with disparities in the situation of living things and demonstrate the negative qualities of New York. For example, the final lines of this section read: In these lines, as elsewhere in the poem, the poet's attention is trained on the situation of the poorest in society, those whom New York's opulent wealth has left behind. The references to slave markets (sūq al-

abīd) of course has particular resonance in an African American context, and the suggestion is that some people, the wretched and poor, are hidden from sight as eternal victims.

The ghetto that houses the people whom “nobody ever sees” (ghayr manẓūrīn) is identified as Harlem, which can be seen in the only textual location where another largely Black neighborhood is mentioned in conjunction with it:

Describing the poverty and overcrowding in these two largely Black neighborhoods highlights the difficult realities of the lives of African Americans. Rats appear more than once in “Qabr min

ajl New York” to symbolize not only poverty but also corruption; this link is made clear in the passage cited here. The inability to feed children with quality food is paralleled with the image of impoverished animals. But there are also other rats feeding on the children of Black America, and the “trinity” presented in the next line (the tax collector, policeman, and judge) will slaughter and exterminate them along with their parents. Adonis thus highlights three primary locations of racist injustice in the U.S. system—the economic, law-enforcement, and judicial systems.

At the same time that the poem constructs a binary opposition between Black and white Americans, however, it also works to unpack it. Adonis posits African Americans as a part of a larger Third World solidarity and identifies himself, as an Arab, with them, but this is also problematized. One example of this is the recognition of how complex histories complicate solidarity between oppressed groups with seemingly shared experiences as in, “Harlem (the black hates the Jew)/Harlem (the Black does not like the Arab when he remembers the slave trade).”⁷¹

Moreover, within the poem U.S. Blacks are shown to be somehow a part of New York City in the way that Arabs and other Third World groups are not. One example is the way in which the poem is punctuated throughout by place names in New York City—Harlem, Wall Street, Madison, Park, and Fifth Avenues (as well as Broadway, Central Park, Lincoln Center, and Bedford Stuyvesant). These are used as punctuating marks in boldface in the original Arabic, which divide the text and provide an organizing logic. Therefore, the capital of African America, Harlem, is located textually within the United States rather than as linked to the Afro-Asian context, for example, as used as a parallel or in connection to other locations in the text such as Hanoi, Jerusalem, Havana, and Beirut. These are of course also locations that emphasize the political and anti-imperial nature of Adonis's critique of the United States. In most other sections of the poem, locations are juxtaposed to show their affinity, as in, for example, “Corpses in streets of sunlight link Hanoi with Jerusalem, Jerusalem with the Nile.”⁷² Indeed, throughout the poem the message that the poet “does not come from outside” proposes an implicit link between these “Arab Afro-Asian” locations and Africa in America (Harlem), although there are no specific references linking them together.

In addition, the use of Harlem has a powerful rhetorical thrust in the poem. It remains very much a symbol rather than a reality. Except for one mention of 125th Street, no specific locations in Harlem are referred to, nor are any Black American poets, writers, or cultural figures associated with Harlem. Thus, the identification with the African American by the poet who labels himself an “Arab Afro-Asian” remains a site of tension in “Qabr min

ajl New York.” Noting that Blacks may resent Arabs calls to attention the difficulties of solidarity given the histories of these two communities. It also highlights the limitations of the poem's expressed solidarity with African Americans. Because “Qabr min

ajl New York” is unable to extricate Harlem and Black Americans from their location within the United States, the Black American is not a full actor in the Third World solidarity inscribed in the poem, a theme to which I will return.

Another way in which Adonis explicitly treats issues of Blackness and whiteness is in a passage dealing with a U.S. figure who, like Whitman, is depicted positively in the text: Abraham Lincoln. The poet calls on Lincoln to be educated in order to help bring about a revolution in the United States. Adonis tries to recover Lincoln as a positive role model who must be freed from the marble stones of Washington, D.C., where he is immortalized in a statue and does not belong:

Unlike the Statue of Liberty, Lincoln can be freed from his frozen status, the marble and whiteness—as well as from Nixon and the guard/hunting dogs, symbols of the U.S. military and political power structure. Adonis here tries to recuperate the figure of Lincoln, making him more civilized and human, by recognizing his likeness in Harlem.

Adonis's choice of Lincoln and definition of him in this relatively positive light is likely connected to Lincoln's reputation as the U.S. president who “freed the slaves.”

⁷⁴

According to the poem, however, he must break free of the control that Nixon, and others who have allowed U.S. transgressions such as the war in Vietnam, continues to have over him. Here as elsewhere, Adonis explicitly criticizes the war and other U.S. policies, making clear that they are perpetrated not by—but, rather, against—African Americans. For such a liberation to occur, however, Lincoln must be educated by reading “with new eyes” (bi-

ayn jadīda) what others before him read, including a Black and an Arab leader. Thus, the contributions of a Black figure are valorized here and shown to be part of what will contribute to the revolution in the United States, freeing it from what has kept it immobile.

⁷⁵

Moreover, Ali ibn Muhammad is textually linked to an Arab Muslim philosopher and three Communist leaders, underlining the international reach of their political solidarity and messages. This passage underlines the contribution of a Black leader to world culture—associating him with leaders such as Marx, Lenin and Mao, and the Sufi thinker Muhammad ibn

Abd al-Jabbar al-Niffari.

⁷⁶

It is relevant, however, to underline again that in this political-solidarity context it is not Black American leaders who are mentioned. Once again, although Black contributions to society and culture are noted by Adonis, the Arab Afro-Asian solidarity seems primarily to include those not based within the United States. Thus, throughout the text Harlem is a positive symbol as contrasted to the Statue of Liberty and addressed as a victimized male actor against a perfidious female aggressor. The specific textual affiliations between African America(ns) and the poet are limited, however, partly by the unresolved paradox of the Black American being at once distanced from and a part of the United States.

Within Adonis's poetic renderings of Harlem and the Statue of Liberty, therefore, the Black American is depicted primarily as an “other” in relation to the United States. In this case, privileging the Black/African half of the identity label over the American half reinforces the position of the Arab outsider in the United States.

⁷⁷

In such a representation, the construction of race reinforces the oppositional stance between the two terms of the identity label, “Black American”—highlighting the difference of people so identified within the “mainstream” United States.⁷⁸

As I have shown,

Ashour's al-Rihla takes a somewhat different approach to race and demonstrates a considerably more nuanced understanding of the complexities and paradoxes of African American identity. As the readings of their texts have demonstrated, Adonis and

Ashour largely share Muhammad Ali's sentiment that the Black man is not an American. They both, however, grapple with the complex question of how Black Americans can simultaneously be a part of and not be a part of the United States in their texts.

This complexity underscores the difference between having a “hyphenated” identity within the United States and experiencing the political, social, and cultural impact of U.S. racial hierarchies as outsiders. Because Adonis and

Ashour are travelers to New York and

Ashour is a student in the United States, the racial system does not affect their own identity construction. They will leave and return home. Their positions and analyses are also affected by the history of Arab racialization in the United States and the ambiguous place that Arabs have had within its racial schema. This once more highlights the distance between their experiences and African Americans' not only as Arabs in the United States but as Arab visitors as opposed to Arab Americans.