Speaking in Tongues: Arab Autobiographical Discourses of Americanization

Abstract

The article discusses narrative and ideological conceptualizations of Arab-American authors-immigrants who wrote their autobiographies in English, the primary case studies being Edward Said's Out of Place, Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt, and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage. The main focus is on the language aspect -namely, Bakhtinian polyphony and hybridity -which exposes the unavoidable plurality of immigrant selfhood.Physical and psychological relocations between different cultural zones, languages, landscapes, social infrastructures, and political climates expose the identity-making mechanisms in the increasingly transcultural and multilingual realities of our world. How do we construct our personal and collective identities when crossing over from one culture to another? How do multilingual immigrants choose a language to articulate their selfhood most accurately? By looking at three autobiographical works by immigrant Arab authors composed in English -Edward Said's Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage: From Cairo to America -A Woman's Journey (1999), and Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt: Scenes and Fragments of an Autobiography (1986), I argue that a complete cultural and linguistic crossover is, in fact, impossible, but one always keeps looking back, never able to fully settle down on the other side.In his Letters of Transit, André Aciman delineates the nature of exile, based on his own experiences as an Alexandrian in exile via Europe and then the United States:With their memories perpetually on overload, exiles see double, feel double, are double. When exiles see one place they're also seeing -or looking for -another behind it. Everything bears two faces, everything is shifty, because everything is mobile, the point being that exile, like love, is not just a condition of pain, it's a condition of deceit. (13) 1. Fusha is a formal, written register of Arabic.