If you need a ride or can give a ride, please post here with your email address.

If you can bring any one of the following things, let us know:

paper plates
plastic silverware
ice
napkins
beverages

Best,

Chris

Okay, okay. One last freebie for the semester. Technically.

I've made this translation of the song "Le Bruit et L'Odeur" by the French Rock/Rap group Zebda.

A few cultural explanations: Zebda is the Arabic word for "butter," which, in French, is "beure." "Beur" is the word for Arab in French ghetto slang (verlan), which is based on the inversion of the syllables of a word. So, "arabe" becomes "beure." Etcetera.

The title of the song has two references: first to a speech by Jacques Chirac, the president of France, in which he decribes the "Sound and the Odor" of the immigrants in public housing; the second reference is to Shakespeare's line "the sound and the fury" (Henry IV, The Tempest, Lear, Hamlet?--I don't remember which), which in French translates to "Le Bruit et la Fureur." Get it!? It's also the title of a Faulkner novel narrated from the point of view of a mentally retarded man-child.

Another freebee...

This article will support our discussion of the clips we will watch in class next tuesday ("24," "Over There," "The Siege," "Three Kings").

There are a couple of things you might consider commenting on in this articles:

1) Do you agree with the idea that racist ideas about Africans and Jews have been transfered to Arabs? Do you agree with the explanation Stockton gives for this theory? What's wrong with this theory?

2) Think of how Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden portrayed in the media today, or how Qaddafi and Arafat were (way back when). How do these images relate to Stockton's assessment (with no prejudice against the fact that Hussen and Bin Laden are not innocent victims of racial stereotyping)?

Spend some time trolling the internet for racist images of Arabs and post them here.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, one of the reigning sentiments was that "nothing will ever be the same again." Many literary critics interpreted the event and this sentiment as a crisis of story telling: How can we continue to tell the same kinds of stories after a trauma so intense?

Interestingly, the two short stories we have for Tuesday end with the events of Sept. 11. Why do you think they end with these events rather than begin with them? What would it mean for the stories to begin with Sept. 11?

Mohja Kahf's story also deals with the gender issues we discussed two weeks ago. How does her story relate to those themes (in her poetry, in Randa's work, etc.)? How does Sept. 11 affect the plot of her story?

As for the Nabeel Abraham article, you'll probably notice right away that it predates 9/11 by about ten years, which is truly unfortunate. However, it does provide an excellent background to the existing racism in American toward Arabs before 9/11. While you're free to use this article as an interpretive tool for the short stories, I'm curious to hear what is useful about it or not, other than the lack of facts and commentary on the treatment of Arab Americans after 9/11 (which we probably all know quite a lot about anecdotally--no-fly lists, detention centers, secret trials, violence etc.).

This one's a freebee since a lot of you are very far behind in posting on the discussion forum. So...

I want you to begin discussing Randa's work and questions it raises that you would like to discuss with her.

Post one question you have about her work or that you would like to ask her and respond to someone else's posting.

I would also like you to take a look at the following websites:

Randa's blog where you can read two of her short stories published online: "You Are a 14-Year-Old Arab Chick Who Just Moved to Texas" and "The Lunatics' Eclipse".

You might also be interested in browsing through

As I mentioned in class, I would like you to consider this story's narrative point of view. It's told in the first person by a Palestinian refugee living in New York after the first Gulf War and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Like "Lost in Freakin' Yonkers," this story is somewhat biographical in the sense that it corresponds roughly to the life of the author's father (she seems to have split herself into two characters--the daughter and the oldest son).

You might consider questioning this story as both pure fiction and (auto)biography. How does problematize the major crisis/resolution of the story? How does it change the story's thematic emphasis?

Tuesday we will be discussing the question of gender as it relates to the writing of Arab-American women.

If women face special challenges as authors, those challenges are compounded for Arab-American women authors. The three authors we will be discussing Tuesday--Suheir Hammad, Randa Jarrar and Mohja Kahf--all address the expectations and prejudices about "Oriental" women: the femme fatale (Medea, Cleopatra) and the Odalisque or harem girl.

Beginning with the Mohja Kahf's poems from the collection E-mails from Scheherezad, I would like you to comment on Kahf's strategies for dismantling and replacing these stereotypes of Oriental women in the Hijab scenes, "My Babysitter Wears a Face Veil," "If the Odalisques" and "E-mail from Scheherezad." I would also like to see your thoughts on her poems "Copulation in English" and "Affirmative Action Sonnet," particularly regarding the "intrusion" of Arabic in "Copulation" and especially if you can't read the lines in Arabic.

For Thursday we have one (short) short story by Khaled Mattawa, "First Snow," and two poems. We'll talk more about "Growing Up With a Sears Catalog in Benghazi, Libya" than "Borrowed Tongue."

As I suggested in class today, I'd like you to try your hand at analyzing the short story AND the poem using the following elements:

• Theme: the topic of the narrative (adolescence, gender, sexuality, patriotism, pride, ethnicity, morality, etc.)
• Plot (exposition, complication, crisis/climax, resolution, epiphany)
• Character: major/minor, round/flat, protagonist/antagonist, motivations, fate
• Setting: location/site, movement, changes in setting
• Point of view: narrator (omniscient, limited, objective, reliable/unreliable, first-person, second-person, third-person)
• Irony and paradox: reader’s point of view

There are several issues I'd like you to start discussing now that we will pick up in class in regard to these short stories.

First of all, how would you evaluate these short stories in terms of what Hayan said in class about writing fiction/prose and what Lisa Majaj recommended in "New Directions"?

With "Arabic Lessons," what do you make of Uncle Joe and Cousin Nour as foils for each other? What, besides Arabic itself, is the lesson that the narrator Eli and his sister learn from Nour?

How do these two short stories portray adolescence? Since adolescence is a transient state of being, the time of becoming an adult, how do these characters, Eli and Lugman, undergo their transformations? How do their cultures (Arab and American, Maronite and Muslim) play similar or different roles in that transformation?

Tuesday we have the privilege and pleasure of a visit from Hayan Charara.

There are a couple of things I'd like you to consider about his writing before we meet.

First, we have two genres of writing from Hayan's work: poetry and prose. Keeping in mind what Lisa Majaj said about the move from poetry to prose, how would you compare Hayan's approach to similar themes in "8 Houses from the Birthplace of Henry Ford" and "Becoming the Center of Mystery." Also, think of questions you might ask him regarding the advantages and pitfalls of these different genres.

Second, Hayan's writing (especially "Camp Dearborn," "Becoming the Center of Mystery" and "8 Houses from") is very localized in Detroit. In that sense, it is probably more "sociological" than anything else we've read so far--except perhaps The Book of Khalid, which alludes to the communal life of the Syrian quarter of Manhattan. Think of questions for Hayan regarding the social life of Arab immigrants in Detroit.