{"id":27363,"date":"2023-07-17T09:04:42","date_gmt":"2023-07-17T07:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=27363"},"modified":"2023-07-17T09:04:42","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T07:04:42","slug":"ghassan-zeineddine-reflects-on-transcends-the-identity-zeitgeist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/ghassan-zeineddine-reflects-on-transcends-the-identity-zeitgeist\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghassan Zeineddine Reflects On, Transcends the Identity Zeitgeist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dearborn<\/a>, <\/em>stories by Ghassan Zeineddine
\nTin House 2023
\nISBN 9781959030294<\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

<\/h4>\n

Youssef Rakha<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

I interrogated Ghassan Zeineddine\u2019s Dearborn<\/em> harshly before I embraced it. I had to. In these fictional accounts of Arab American experience, the characters\u2019 identity can come across as almost generic: not just hookahs and hijabs, but war-torn homelands, oppressed women, closet queers, and far too many tribally minded exiles lurking in the background.<\/p>\n

This is not something the ten short stories making up the book state so much as imply, but most first-generation immigrants here \u2014 and these are foundational figures even if they are not the protagonists \u2014 are religious, materialistic, and resistant to change. They live in perpetual tension with almost every aspect of their adopted society: law and order, personal rights, non-Muslim and secular traditions. They may have been forced out of their home countries \u2014 the reason most frequently given is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 \u2014 but, even when they can safely return to those countries, they seem desperate to stay and accumulate money while remaining clammed up in their small, blinkered community, living more conservatively than they would if they had never crossed the ocean in the first place.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Dearborn<\/em> is published by Tin House<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The protagonists themselves are mostly second-generation, better adjusted to Western society and the contemporary world, but they are burdened enough by their parents\u2019 legacies that the sense of insularity is pervasive.<\/p>\n

This is hardly Zeineddine\u2019s problem, of course. Dearborn, Michigan \u2014 the collection\u2019s setting and, emblematically, its theme \u2014 has the US\u2019s largest per capita Muslim population, and it\u2019s probably even more claustrophobic in real life. My concern is that the worldview which informs these narratives and gives them meaning (while clearly not \u201cwhite\u201d) still feels oppressively American. Then again, I happen to be more interested in what it means to be a contemporary Arab-Muslim independently of the West<\/em> than in how to make the Arab component of American society more visible or agreeable to the mainstream, which is partly what Zeineddine seems to be attempting.<\/p>\n

Just underneath the demitasses of Turkish coffee and the bowls of pumpkin seeds, I could see that his presuppositions about love, faith, and the good life owe more to consumer capitalism and liberal, \u201cwoke\u201d morality than anything \u201cArab\u201d or traditional. People\u2019s lives are articulated in narrative and dramatic \u2014 not just linguistic \u2014 idioms that the average American can effortlessly understand.<\/p>\n

In the American view, whether true or not, practically all Muslims are practicing believers, for example. And so there is only one character in the book who says he is an unbeliever, Zizou in \u201cZizou\u2019s Voice.\u201d In America, success means making money by providing the largest possible number of people with a commodity they desire \u2014 something you achieve by developing your product, finding your target market and showing pragmatic rather than principled initiative. And so Zizou finds fulfillment not as a fantasy writer \u2014 his true passion \u2014 but as a voice actor. Why? Because a former friend of his who has been a reborn believer recruits him to recite the Quran \u2014 in English, though he has to put on an Arab accent \u2014 for a best-selling album he produces.<\/p>\n

Zeineddine\u2019s prose is eminently engaging. Yet I confess that, in making my way through Dearborn<\/em>, I found myself longing for the immigrants in Hanif Kureishi\u2019s work. Kureishi\u2019s characters too are Muslims in an English-speaking environment, but their identity fuels transgression rather than conformity. They rebel against both their ancestral traditions and the lowest common denominator of their immediate surroundings. Even when they decide to embrace their heritage, they end up demonstrating how impossible that is by turning into full-blown radicals. Not so the Dearbornites.<\/p>\n

In the opening story, \u201cThe Actors of Dearborn\u201d \u2014 in fact a version of this happens in \u201cMoney Chickens\u201d too \u2014 Arabs who have been in America for decades and never once thought of signaling their belonging suddenly start changing the way they dress or talk, in order to appear as all-American as possible. They do this because 9\/11 has left them terrified of being deported or persecuted. Their desperation is touching, but the way they flaunt an obviously fake patriotism is risible, as Zeineddine no doubt intends it to be, and the result is both compelling and outrageous.<\/p>\n

All through the book, Zeineddine walks a fine line between pathos and hilarity, balancing laugh-out-loud one-liners with moments of heart-rending melancholy. But since the stories don\u2019t get into the psychological complexity of his characters, what they do feels more like opportunism and hypocrisy than anything. This makes them not so much unsympathetic as unremarkable representatives of Arabness, and while it may be intended to humanize and demystify a potentially problematic identity, it also raises a question I\u2019ve long considered: how should South immigrants live once they have reached the North? And, assuming there is any element of choice, from the viewpoint of the oppressed \u2014 not that of the anti immigration oppressor \u2014 why should they really be there in the first place?<\/p>\n

There seem to be two models of equality at stake. One involves being integrated into a more or less homogeneous society of which you have the right to be a seamless part. The other consists of being cooped up in enclaves within a kind of federation of \u201ccultures\u201d where your prejudices can remain intact. Never mind that your outdated attitudes about women\u2019s premarital virginity or mental health, say, are contested even in your country of origin \u2014 equality means that they be \u201crespected\u201d by the liberal West.<\/p>\n

Again, this is not the author\u2019s fault. Kureishi\u2019s The Buddha of Suburbia<\/em> came out in 1990 \u2014 two years after Salman Rushdie\u2019s The Satanic Verses<\/em>, eleven before 9\/11 \u2014 and in the last 30 years history has undoubtedly pushed the Muslim immigrant experience further and further away from the first model into the second. Without the conservative, taboo-laden atmosphere that suffuses these lives, Zeineddine\u2019s stories would probably feel implausible.<\/p>\n

No work of fiction can fully capture Arab identity in the US anyway. And whatever my reservations about the way identity comes through in Dearborn<\/em>, it is also true that a topic and a subject are not the same thing. The Arab American community is Zeineddine\u2019s stated topic. His subject, compellingly pursued in the grand tradition of Maupassant via O. Henry et al, is the state of humanity after the digital revolution. In this sense, no matter what you think of the Zeitgeist his work reflects, Zeineddine transcends it. Arab, not, or not really, here are true individuals seeking ways to express their identity against and across resistant geographic and cultural reference points.<\/p>\n

In \u201cHiyam, LLC,\u201d a Lebanese divorc\u00e9e joins her immigrant son in Dearborn and ends up marrying a white man \u2014 she has him convert to Islam even though she knows he will neither believe nor practice the religion \u2014 and starts her own real estate business in defiance of the local Lebanese real estate tycoon.<\/p>\n

In \u201cYusra,\u201d a middle-aged butcher has lived his whole life as a violent alpha male when, with the help of the Internet \u2014 and unknown to anyone in the small patriarchal realm he has established in Dearborn \u2014 he finds a way to express his buried transgender identity.<\/p>\n

In \u201cMarseille,\u201d a Druze survivor of the Titanic \u2014 and one of the earliest Arab immigrants to settle in Dearborn \u2014 tells the story of the 20-old husband she lost when the ship sank in 1912, 86 years earlier.<\/p>\n

In \u201cRabbit Stew,\u201d a mysterious uncle who arrives in Dearborn in 1991, soon after the end of the Lebanese Civil War, claims to have been a ruthless sniper in a militia, but it turns out he recoils at the sight of a rabbit bleeding.<\/p>\n

Zeineddine casts as wide a net as he can, taking a broad and diverse perspective on his topic, and he subtly interlinks the stories, turning Dearborn in some sense into a collective mode of existence. But it is his eye for unusual, often surreal detail that enables him to construct unique narratives despite the overarching sense of an easily identifiable group with clear and predictable traits: a man hiding his cash savings inside frozen chickens (\u201cMoney Chicken\u201d), a dead and possibly imaginary lover commemorated by the cooking of rabbit stew (\u201cRabbit Stew\u201d), a girl who starts smoking at the age of seven to overcome her nosebleeds (\u201cMarseille\u201d). The plot lines are taut, but the stories remain open-ended, and regardless of how much time has elapsed \u2014 sometimes it is a few days, other times it is nearly a century \u2014 by the last line the protagonist will be in a different place.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Memoriam\u201d is the story of Farah (whose name means \u201cjoy\u201d), a young Lebanese American woman and practicing Muslim who dresses only in black, is interested only in death, and works as an obituary writer and copy editor at the local newspaper.<\/p>\n

Farah has never been to Lebanon, her parents\u2019 country, but nothing interests her more than the gatherings they organize in their basement or garage, where at some point each time fellow immigrants will start recounting tragic stories from \u201cthe old country.\u201d When she tries to tell her own tragic stories about younger Dearbornites who have killed themselves or died of an overdose, Farah is no longer welcome at these gatherings. The older generation will only accept the lies that they tell each other to cover up what they perceive to be taboos. But Farah manages to find her way back into the fold by starting to make YouTube videos commemorating their and other Lebanese people\u2019s dead loved ones.<\/p>\n

In the end, however, Farah\u2019s failure to make a life for herself, whether with the white American she falls in love with or anyone else, leaves her lonely and in despair. Her subtle journey from belonging to being cast out to finding a new way to belong \u2014 only to end up even more clueless than when she started \u2014 struck me as a brilliant metaphor not only for the Arab American experience but for the human condition itself. Tragedy lurks wherever we are, but Zeineddine reminds us that we can still marvel at it \u2014 and laugh.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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