New Body Politics

Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States

Therí A. Pickens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317819493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic American landscape of the present, understanding and bridging dynamic cross-cultural conversations about social and political concerns becomes a complicated humanistic project. How do everyday embodied experiences transform from being anecdotal to having social and political significance? What can the experience of corporeality offer social and political discourse? And, how does that discourse change when those bodies belong to Arab Americans and African Americans?

Therí A. Pickens discusses a range of literary, cultural, and archival material where narratives emphasize embodied experience to examine how these experiences constitute Arab Americans and African Americans as social and political subjects. Pickens argues that Arab American and African American narratives rely on the body's fragility, rather than its exceptional strength or emotion, to create urgent social and political critiques. The creators of these narratives find potential in mundane experiences such as breathing, touch, illness, pain, and death. Each chapter in this book focuses on one of these everyday embodied experiences and examines how authors mobilize that fragility to create social and political commentary. Pickens discusses how the authors' focus on quotidian experiences complicates their critiques of the nation state, domestic and international politics, exile, cultural mores, and the medical establishment.

New Body Politics participates in a vibrant interdisciplinary conversation about cross-ethnic studies, American literature, and Arab American literature. Using intercultural analysis, Pickens explores issues of the body and representation that will be relevant to fields as varied as Political Science, African American Studies, Arab American Studies, and Disability Studies.

1 Respirating Resistance

Suheir Hammad's Invocation of Breath

In 2001, Suheir Hammad closed the premiere episode of Russell Simmons Presents DEF Poetry by reading her poem “first writing since.” The last lines were:

there is life here. Anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting,
but breathing for sure. And if there is any light to come, it will
shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the
rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen.

affirm life.
affirm life.
we got to carry each other now.
you are either with life, or against it.
affirm life.¹

For me watching on television, it was a profound moment because Suheir Hammad voiced what it meant to be an Arab American woman watching “those / buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart.”²2 She spoke poignantly about being simultaneously politically aware and grief-stricken. She also alerted everyone listening to the necessity of affirming life at a time when ideology and rhetoric could overcome compassion and critical thinking. Moreover, she reminded mourning Americans of the danger posed by permitting “the obsessive focus on the Self in the United States [to obscure] the violence against the Other. ³

The DEF Poetry stage emerged as a multicultural and multiethnic site of artistic and political collaboration. The show, which would last six seasons and spark the Tony Award–winning Broadway production, featured a cast of poets who represented a variety of gender presentations, ages, sexual identities, geographies, races, ethnicities, occupations, and, broadly speaking, life experiences. During the first episode, Hammad performed after Nikki Giovanni and Benjamin Bratt, the latter of whom performed a poem by the late Miguel Piñero entitled “Lower East Side.” She also performed after Steve Colman, Georgia Me, Lemon, and Black Ice, all of whom would become her costars on Russell Simmons Presents DEF Poetry on Broadway.⁴ By featuring Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey) as its host and foregrounding Russell Simmons as its producer, DEF Poetry (and the later Broadway production) championed the poetic traditions of hip hop and slam as culturally and commercially viable forms of art. One critic and slam poet commented that with DEF Poetry “the marriage between hip-hop and spoken word was finally consummated.”⁵ Despite the clear multicultural influences within hip hop and slam, the two art forms have been understood as Black American music and poetry. The show fought against that by encouraging various traditions and poetic forms from its artists. The first episode’s multicultural lineup serves as a testament to that endeavor,⁶ even though critics like John S. Hall felt that DEF Poetry was simply slam poetry without scoring.⁷ DEF Poetry sought to craft a layered and multifaceted definition of poetry and poets for the future while creating a capacious genealogy of multiethnic forebears.

Considering that DEF Poetry re-created this context for a televisual medium on a national stage, it is important to note that most of the poets, like Suheir Hammad, had been writing or performing in similar spaces for a number of years. Russell Simmons admits to a New York Times critic, “I don’t pretend to discover ideas. [. . .] By the time I get hold of something, it’s already hot. I bring it to HBO, or Hollywood, or records, and it may be the first time that people have heard it outside of the core, but these people are already cultural heroes in their community.”⁸ Suheir Hammad had already surfaced as a figure and a writer who not only contributed to that cross-cultural conversation but also enacted it in her own writing. She draws heavily from her experiences as an Arab American from Brooklyn and Palestine. Hammad was born in October 1973 in Jordan. Her family later immigrated to the United States and lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where Hammad experienced the multiethnic space that fundamentally shapes her verse. In interviews, she has described her peers and their experience as a muse for how she shapes counter narratives within her poetry and essays. She notes, “The poorer you are, as in any situation in the world, the less access you have to your own history. I’m a product of the New York City public school system so I can definitely relate to one dominant narrative being projected onto a multi-ethnic, religious, gendered group of people.”⁹ Hammad’s writing is “conscious of the connections among people from different backgrounds and ethnic groups.”¹⁰

Integral to the conversation within this project is the way that Hammad’s poetry and essays sustain cross-cultural conversations amid a transparent struggle with language and words. First, language as inadequate or scarce is wedded to the medium of poetry in general and, certainly, spoken word poetic traditions in particular. Though Suheir Hammad is not exclusively a spoken word or performance poet, her affiliation with DEF Poetry and hip hop influences how others define her and her work. Hammad also performs at venues (college campuses and others) across the country, solidifying the expectation that her work straddles the page and the stage. The medium of spoken word tends to be considered ephemeral given that performances usually last less than five minutes, or three minutes in slam competitions. The brevity of the performances and the color of the performers often leads reviewers to be reductive, saying “there is a lot of rage on the stage”¹¹ or that the poetry is merely commentary,¹² or to call the performance a “gathering of angry young poets.”¹³ What lurks beneath the reviewers’ comments is that the poetry does not travel past the stage and that poets are simply speaking from experience rather than crafting a dynamic work of art. Certainly, it is important to acknowledge that Hammad’s and other poets’ work remains temporally bound to the performance, but it is important to note that their poetry circulates based on the poets’ relationship to one another and their audiences. For instance, Lemon mouths the words of other poets while he is onstage with them during group pieces. On the HBO television program, at least two people recited poetry from other poets, including comedian Tracy Morgan and poet/actor Lemon, who chose to perform Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up” and “I Sing to Thee of Shine,” respectively. At a spoken word venue, it is not uncommon for poets to perform their contemporaries’ work as a form of homage or for audience members to recite along with the poet. In short, the ephemerality of the stage performance is not an obstacle, but the beginning of an ongoing conversation.

Second, Hammad draws explicit links between hip hop, Arab oral poetic traditions, and American literature writ large. In one interview, she invokes working-class white male poet Walt Whitman, making it clear that she is part of an oft-forgotten multivalenced narrative.¹⁴ Whitman functions as shorthand for signaling that she and other voices like hers have been excluded from a largely white male (and presumed middle class) narrative about American poetry specifically. Walt Whitman’s working-class background surfaces in this context though it has been ignored in others. Hammad’s robust set of multicultural influences points to a sentiment expressed by Arab American literary critic Lisa Suhair Majaj: namely, that “contemporary Arab-American literature increasingly reflects the awareness of the need to forge connection beyond the insular boundaries of group identity.”¹⁵ Yet, the commentary about American poetics extends beyond the realm of the literary to how we think about inclusion. To be sure, Hammad’s claims about language engage with the semiotic question of how words maintain social and political meaning and who determines that meaning. As Edward Said has remarked, the ability to prevent certain stories “from forming and emerging is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”¹⁶ In other words, one cannot have domination of bodies without domination of discourse. Hammad focuses on the exclusion of various racialized, gendered, and classed voices. She claims that the result is language that remains ill-equipped to describe, define, or discuss everyone’s concerns. Hammad openly discusses the “transparent struggle that [she has] with the poem about finding appropriate language.”¹⁷ She recasts words like ‘occupation,’ ‘liberation,’ and ‘terrorist’ to examine why they are automatically ascribed to Arabs and Muslims. For instance, in "first writing since," she asks, "When we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, / why do we never mention the kkk?"¹⁸ Moreover, Hammad points out that people of color do not "have the power of the narrative" so their claims on language and meaning-making remain tenuous.¹⁹ As a result, their words can be "neutralized under the terms 'victim art' and 'political correctness,' [so that their] incursion into territory usually secured for whiteness can momentarily be tolerated and quickly dismissed."²⁰

Yet Hammad continues to mobilize the ephemeral to explain and explore concerns that are so easily and summarily dismissed. Turning again to her appearance on DEF Poetry, I wish to highlight how she understands breathing as integral to the act of affirming life. Within the logic of poem, those who are breathing make clear that “there is life here.” Hammad writes, “anyone reading this is breathing” despite their hurt. She repeats “breathing” and emphasizes it with “for sure.” When she underscores that life is present, she explicitly links the heft of existing after this trauma to the quotidian nature of breathing. Her call to “affirm life” is also a call to breathe and to honor those who do so. Notably, Hammad’s emphasis on living and breathing does not negate the fragility of either. Instead, her injunction relies on breathing and living as evidence of all our ephemerality. Despite the clear fragility of those actions, Hammad insists upon them as urgent and necessary counterbalances to injustice and pain.

In this chapter, I turn to Hammad for two reasons. First, she mobilizes breath—as metaphor, image, idea, and action—as an act of resistance. Within Hammad’s oeuvre, fragility does not need to be overcome or compensated for, but rather embraced as a way to reconstitute the past and move into a politically and socially progressive future. Second, her poetry and essays facilitate cross-cultural conversations between Blacks and Arabs about myriad social and political issues. As noted above, she enacts these conversations within her work based on the influences of hip hop, Arab oral poetic tradition, and spoken word. Of Hammad’s invocation of African American jazz traditions, critic Michelle Hartman notes that she “establishes an [Arab American] identity based on a shared cultural feature.” ²¹ In addition, Hammad draws inspiration from Black feminist traditions, particularly June Jordan and Audre Lorde.²² Hammad finds Jordan’s work “powerful and transformative” because Jordan wrote poetry about injustice in Nicaragua and Guatemala during the 1980s and linked it to other injustices in Palestine and the United States.²³ Hammad recalls that reading Jordan transformed her understanding of what poetry can do and who can have a voice. Hammad’s poetry takes up a project similar to Jordan’s, disc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figure
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Respirating Resistance: Suheir Hammad's Invocation of Breath
• 2 Try a Little Tenderness: Tactilic Experience in Danzy Senna and Alicia Erian
• 3 Unfitting and Not Belonging: Feeling Embodied and Being Displaced in Rabih Alameddine's Fiction
• 4 Beyond 1991: Magic Johnson and the Limits of HIV/AIDS Activism
• 5 The Big C Meets the Big O: Pain and Pleasure in Breast Cancer Narratives
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index