Abstract :
“Once I claimed a past, spoke my history, told my name, the walls of incomprehension and hostility rose, brick by brick: unfunny ‘ethnic’ jokes, jibes about terrorists and Kalashnikovs, about veiled women and camels … Searching for images of my Arab self in American culture I found only unrecognizable stereotypes,” says Lisa Suhair Majaj (1994, p. 67), depicting her experience of what it is like to be a Palestinian living in the US. This paper strives to shed light on precisely this search for the self in the “Other,” focusing on the discursive formation of an anti-essentialist Arab-American subjectivity entrenched in the Arab-American experience, through a close analysis of the delineation of the individual and communal selves in the works of three Arab-American writers: Suheir Hammad, Mohja Kahf, and Diana Abu-Jaber. In their books Born Palestinian, Born Black, E-mails from Scheherazad, and Crescent, these three female writers, of Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian origin, respectively, represent the paradoxical and contradictory place Arab-American women, and by extension Arab-Americans in general, are allotted within the US. By drawing on their experience of living in the US as women of color, the aforementioned writers discursively contest and undercut the majority’s preconceived notions of what constitutes Arab-American subjectivity
