Fady Joudah Explains the Literary World's Anti-Arab Problem to Itself
Poet and translator Fady Joudah writes at the Los Angeles Review of Books about the reality that Arab-American writers must contend with a thoughtless racism that permeates everything, including the world of letters. In response to a piece Joudah called "repulsive," "The Fine Art of Learning to Say Nothing in Arabic," he points out Literary Hub's efforts to redress the issue after their publication caused a certain stir. "They were ... quick to point to their history of publishing pro-Arab pieces or, more to the point, pieces about Arab suffering and humiliation — that is, pieces wherein the Arab remains, with an air of inevitability, outside modernity, outside beauty." This "blip on the radar of progressiveness slipped through the enormity of submissions, undoubtedly aided by a publishing house’s powerful connections and the like." More:
The point is that we live in a moment where racism against Arabs and things Arab is permissible. It goes by with hardly anyone batting an eye in the literary world beyond a few gestures of “solidarity.” Our entire culture has drunk the Kool Aid, and the Kool Aid has infiltrated our marrow. The Lit Hub piece is not an isolated, or even rare, incident.
Recently, an influential poet, critic, and editor apologized and deleted a tweet she’d posted in which she described George W. Bush as a better American than Trump in terms of their treatment of Arabs and Muslims. “The Iraq war was terrible but” is already a hackneyed trope. This kind of “slip” is an act of nationalistic forgetfulness — a political act, whereby the devastated and murdered Iraqis (to say nothing of the victims of that war’s domino effect) are erased.
Arabs are only alive on the surface of the liberal psyche. They bob up bloated, are sometimes acknowledged, other times swiped aside.
A few months ago, I sat face to face with a prominent poetry editor. Another poet was present. The editor asked me in earnest: “Do you think that Solmaz Sharif would have received the attention she’s had if she was not Arab?” “I hope to God not,” I replied, “because she’s not Arab.”
Before asking his question, the editor shared with me how attentively he’d read Sharif’s book, the brilliant Look, but struggled to imagine a future in her art. He was very aware he was talking to a Palestinian. What did he feel about my work, then? Was he oblivious to the insult he’d handed me or was this a classic passive-aggressive move? Does it matter? He is not an anomaly. He’s incapable of reading the work of an Arab (or para-Arab) without blinding biases that are inextricably linked to the national, hegemonic vantage point. The other poet in our company said nothing.
Read on at LARB.