Raghda M.Ali al_Jabban1, Azra Ghandeharion2 *, Zohreh Taebi Noghndar3
1- MA of English Language and Literature, Ferdowsi university of Mashhad,
2- Corresponding Author, Assistant Professor in English Literature and Cultural Studies, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad,
3- Assistant Professor in English Literature, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Abstract
Diaspora as one of the main discussed themes in the modern literature means that there are many people who are away from their own country and are deprived of growing up in their true homeland. This study aims to apply the tenets of American school comparative literature to analyze the two pieces of poetry titled as Tigris the Donor of Welfare (Ya Dijlat Alkhayr) by Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri (1899-1997) as one of the most famous modern Iraqi poets and Date Palm Trinity by Khaled Mattawa (1964- ) as an eminent Libyan-American poet, writer, and translator in order to explore the theme of diaspora in their poetry. Both poets have written and published their works in diaspora. To do so, this study will compare the previously mentioned poems in order to find their similar and different features and the significance of these features. Likewise, and regarding the notions of diaspora and Arab exile, this paper will benefit from the theories of Edward Said, Salhi, Netton, Faist, and finally Al-Maleh. It is concluded that these two poets’ personal experiences like being exiled have been reflected through their writings in order to create an intimate text which in turn validated their poems.
Key Words: Comparative Literature; Date Palm Trinity; Diaspora; Exile; Homelessness; Migration; Tigris the Donor of Welfare
- Introduction
Diaspora as one of the main discussed themes in the modern literature means that there are many people who are away from their own country and are deprived of growing up in their true homeland. Certain emigrant groups like Albanians, Hindu Indians, Irish, Kashmiri, Kurds, and Arabs characterized as “long-distance nationalists” are considered as diasporas because of their continuous involvement in their homeland politics (Anderson 1); what is meant by these homeland politics include their supporting the terrorist or ultra-nationalist movements (Sheffer 23; Bhatt and Mukta 407-441).
In his influential book on diaspora and exile, Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays, Edward Said as an exiled intellectual has argued the reason why Israel expelled Palestinians continuously from their homes and camps in Lebanon. He claimed that it is as if the reconstructed Jewish collective experience as represented by Israel and modern Zionism could not tolerate another story of dispossession and loss to exist alongside it (Said 178). However, the Arab diaspora is not solely made of Palestinians; it encapsulates all Arabs living permanently in countries other than their original country. At this point, a clear distinction needs to be made between the various categories of the members of the Arab diaspora. In addition, diaspora may refer to a movement of emigration from one’s original homeland to the different parts of the world; likewise, this concept is often used to denote some religious or national groups that are living outside an (imagined) homeland (Faist 9). The diaspora poets have written extensively about their living state and sufferings outside their country.
For Said, it can be declared that perhaps this is the most extraordinary of exile’s fates: to have been exiled by exiles, to relive the actual process of up-rooting at the hands of exiles. (Said 38) explains the different types of exile and stresses that it can be both “actual” and “metaphoric”, “voluntary” or “involuntary”. In Representations of the Intellectual, Said (2000) has also clarified that exile has become a remarkable political indication for those who are against the authorities of their countries (39). Though it seems that the data overlaps with postcolonial theories, this this is mostly focusing on Said’s ideas related to diaspora and exile.
In addition to applying the theories of Edward Said, regarding the notions of diaspora and Arab exile, this study will also utilize the theories of Salhi and Netton who have been mainly obsessed with the issue of Arab diaspora, Faist (2010), regarding the concept of diaspora in general, and finally Al-Maleh (2009) for Mattawa, because he is Arab, while writing in English. For example, in The Arab Diaspora, Salhi and Netton (2006) have described diaspora as those who are in exile, living far away from home regardless of the reasons which have made them run away; no matter if they have escaped prosecution or have chosen to live far from their country. They are all keeping an idealized image of their home as a paradise from which they were forced to escape. Faist (2010) has also analyzed diaspora and transnationalism as research perspectives rather than as characteristics of specific social communities. He has focused on conceptual uses, theoretical challenges, and methodological innovations in the study of social links that transcend nation and state boundaries.
Faist (2010) has also introduced three characteristics of diaspora, which can be subdivided into older and newer usages, including: 1-the first characteristic is related to the causes of migration or dispersal (i.e.: forced dispersal or labor migration diasporas); 2- the second characteristic links cross-border experiences of homeland with destination (i.e.: shape a country’s future by influencing it from abroad or by encouraging the return, or diasporic experience of all mobile persons as ‘trans-nation’, or imagined homeland that can be a non-territorial one, such as a global Islamic umma); 3- the third characteristic discusses the incorporation or integration of migrants and/or minorities into the countries of settlement (i.e.: assimilation would mean the end of diaspora, or emphasis of the cultural hybridity) (11-13). Moreover, Al-Maleh (2009) has discussed a complete exploration of the field of Anglophone Arab literature produced across the world. He also seeks to place Anglophone Arab literary writers such as Mattawa within the larger field of postcolonial literature, as it finds that the authors like him are haunted by some ‘hybrid’, ‘exilic’, and ‘diasporic’ questions.
- Theoretical Framework
The current study is an examination of Al-Jawahiri’s Tigris the Donor of Welfare and Mattawa’s Date Palm Trinity from a comparative perspective. As Jost (1972) has argued, the American school of comparative literature is chiefly concerned with the relations and analogies, movements and trends, genres and forms, and themes and motifs (24). Thus, this study is going to investigate the most important and similar socio-political situations that have caused the mentioned poets to write in a similar way through applying the tenets of the American school of comparative literature. Therefore, the present research will employ theories of both the American school of comparative literature and the concepts of exile and diaspora proposed by Said (2000, 2012) and Faist (2010).
This research will also benefit from other theoretical views in the course of literature of diaspora like: Al-Maleh’s (2009) and Salhi and Netton’s (2006) ideas regarding Arab diaspora, Kalra, Kaur, and Hutnyk’s (2005) Diaspora and Hybridity, and also Grace’s (2007) Relocating Consciousness: Diasporic Writers and the Dynamics of Literary Experience to have a more detailed overview of this notion. Benefitting from these views, this article will show how Al-Jawahiri and Mattawa, in their examined poems, have shared with the reader their own experiences and sufferings to provide them with an accurate account of exiled writers’ melancholy in general. Particularly Faist’s categorization of diasporic stages may work regarding the questions. The term diaspora signifies a concept of a home or a center from where someone is removed.
It also brings the concept of multiple journeys (Brah 29). According to Kalra, Kaur, and Hutnyk (2005), diaspora can denote ideas about belonging, about place and about the way in which people live their lives. When thinking about the processual condition of diaspora, we do need to consider the place of residence as well as intimate or material connections to other places.
Grace (2007) has also declared that a diaspora is a community of people that lives together in one country, that “acknowledge that the ‘old country’—a notion often buried deep in language, religion, custom or folklore”—always has some claim on their loyalty and emotions (27). A member of a diaspora community, moreover, is “demonstrated by an acceptance of an inescapable link with their past migration history and a sense of coethnicity with others of a similar background” (18).
Diaspora writers have attempted to discuss this position by emphasizing how they have preserved their connection to their homeland. This is also true about Al-Jawahiri and Mattawa. This is why this study is going to have a comparative approach towards reading two pieces of poetry by Al-Jawahiri and Mattawa as two representatives of the already mentioned writers in order to explore their similarities and differences regarding the concept of exile and diaspora themes.
- Relevant Studies
Comparative literature has drawn a lot of critics’ attention; for example, Wellek (1965) has announced that texts are detached from their literary values; likewise, French and American schools are applied to draw comparison. The most important difference between these two schools is related to the matter of influence. Wellek has also declared that it is only through the comparative approach that we can achieve an unlimited set of topics. This approach is concerned with comparing two or more different works, which belong to different backgrounds, including a great number of different dictionaries, bibliographies, guidebooks, novels, and poems (Wellek 334). Similarly, Brown (2013) argues that comparison is involved within a minority of criticism and through that it is interwoven in all thought, “The poet Matthew Arnold coined the term of Comparative Literature in a translation of Literature Comparée, and claimed that no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other literature” (70).
As another critic, Marsh (1896) has stated that the term of ‘Comparative Literature’ is adrift term, and difficult to obtain or encompass (163). Comparative method is in fact employed in many other fruitful developments as in natural sciences, comparative anatomy, comparative grammar, and in language. The task of comparative literature in different conceptions is when it gives investigations and categorizations of diverse forms in which imaginative and literary reasons, motives, subjects, causes, and themes have been assumed in the literature of different populates, in addition studying the origins of these causes and the matter of their dispersion (164). Francois Jost (1979) claims that “Literary works should be studied together, whatever their national origins as soon as they are ideationally or factually related, as soon as they belong to . . . the same aesthetic category or genre, or as soon as they illustrate the same themes or motifs” (13). He also added that the research in comparative literature has these areas: understanding studies in 1) relations and analogies, 2) movements and trends, 3) genres and forms, or 4) themes and motifs (Jost 24).
Regarding the theory of diaspora, Brubaker (2005) has stated that emigrants are theorized as Diasporas. In a further extension he states “diasporas have been seen to result from the migration of borders over people, and not simply from that of people over borders. This still leaves a very large residual set of putative ethno cultural or country-defined Diasporas. The academic literature includes references to Belarusian, Brazilian, Cambodian, Colombian, Egyptian, English, Estonian, Ethiopian, Gypsy, Hawaiian, Igbo, Iranian, Iraqi, Japanese, Javanese, Kazakh, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mayan, Polish, Romanian, Scottish, Senegalese, Somali, Soviet, Sudanese, Syrian, Tutsi and Ukrainian diasporas. Then there are putative Diasporas of other sorts: the Dixie diaspora, the Yankee diaspora, the white diaspora, the liberal diaspora, the conservative diaspora, the gay diaspora, the deaf diaspora, the queer diaspora, the redneck diaspora, the digital diaspora, the fundamentalist diaspora and the terrorist diaspora” (3).
Diasporas are large groups often used to refer to national or religious ones. These groups took residence outside their country homeland (Faist 9). It is an important concept in many fields including political and academic research. Diaspora is a “politicised notion”; it” is an old concept whose uses and meanings have recently undergone dramatic change”. Initially, the term refers to the historical knowledge of a certain kind, precisely Jews and Armenians. In the past 1970s, ‘diaspora’ experienced a real rise in applications and clarifications, and it can be briefed to three characteristics according to their sub division of older and newer usage. As he states, “The first characteristic relates to the causes of migration or dispersal. Older notions refer to forced dispersal, and this is rooted in the experience of Jews, but also – more recently – of Palestinians. Newer notions of diaspora often refer simply to any kind of dispersal, thus including trade diasporas such as that of the Chinese. The second characteristic links cross-border experiences of homeland with destination. Older notions clearly imply a return to an (imagined) homeland” (12).
Salhi and Netton (2006) as two main critics have argued that ‘Diaspora’ indicates dispersal, scattering, or shatat in Arabic. A great record of dictionaries outline Diaspora as the ‘dispersal of the Jews after the Babylonian and Roman conquests of Palestine’ or, ‘the Jewish communities outside Israel’ (Salhi and Netton 2). Iraqi-Israelis are the most effected in their self-images with the terms of ‘Diaspora’ and ‘Exile’. Anti-Semitism resulted from the growing of Nationalism in Iraq, which leads to their great migration from Iraq to Israel in 1950 during the inter war era. For these migrated Iraqis, Iraq meant ‘homeland’ while Israel meant ‘Diaspora’. In Israel, they were forced to face discrimination, but these emigrants-writers has kept the feeling of nostalgia for Iraq, and this was obvious in their writings in Hebrew and Arabic (8). The feeling of betweenness is very clear in their writings and how they miss their original homeland and the way they describe it is so powerful that we feel sympathy towards them. In the United States’ Iraqi-Americans exchanging race on two explicit levels, Firstly they adapt the ‘good’ self-controlled citizen, in that; they embrace European ideals of civility, individualism, productivity, and capitalism. While in their homes, they seek to preserve the family structures and their original good identity. Secondly, the immigrants Iraqis exchange their belonging is through invoking the rhetoric of the United States as a cultural sweet tender vessel, in order to make their place in the US community legitimate (9).
Al Maleh (2009) has declared that Al Mahjar or the immigrant’s new country (early-twentieth-century émigrés in the USA) the mass population of Arab immigrants that was witnessed in the last or past decade was the most influential one in encountering so many new writings including anthologies written by Arab-American which was welcomed by publishers. Welcoming publishers took up several anthologies of work by Arab-Americans. “The twenty-page booklet entitled Wrapping the Grape Leaves: A Sheaf of Contemporary Arab-American Poets (1982), at first edited by Gregory Orfalea, one of the main chroniclers of Arab-American history and literature, went through several subsequent editions and additions with slight changes in title. Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry (with co-editor Sharif Elmusa 1998) was a substantial contribution to the field, expanding in number and quality the earlier version. A few years after each other other publications arose like: Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab-American Writing (1999), edited by Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash, Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab-American Women on Writing (2004), edited by Susan Muaddi Darraj, and Dinarzad’s Children (2004), edited by Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa” (Al Maleh 14).
Many factors forced immigrants to leave their original homeland and settle in new countries including The Palestinians’- Israel, wars which forced them to leave their country in 1948, Lebanon civil wars in 1967 and 1973, the Iraqi two Gulf wars and exile. “Whether forced or self-imposed, escaping from dictatorships – domestic (familial) or political – pursuit of self-betterment through education and decent work, the expanding mobility of capital, and people’s desire to seek opportunities to improve their life (Al Maleh 22).
The poems have also been analyzed through different critics’ viewpoints. Khaleel (2015) has examined the relationship between human rights and poetry in 1930s with examples of two different poets one from the West and one from the East. Through a comparative framework, two prominent poets of this period is compared through selected poems from W. H. Auden and Muhammad Mahdi Al Jawahiri. This project compared two different poets from different backgrounds and it showed how human rights is presented in their poems and how it is presented across their culture. In addition, this study showed how these two poets were defenders of human rights each in their society (Khaleel 1). By analyzing selection of poems by these two prominent figures of the 1930s period, it presented the role of poetry used as a voice of human rights, especially in reacting to violations and in raising awareness. The study also showed the unique language of poetry, its closeness to the thought that inspires it together with the gifts of remembrance and durability, reacted to major violations of human rights (Khaleel 1).
Shaaban (2009) has also argued that Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri is a true Iraqi poet, who was born in al-Najaf al-Ashraf in 1900 and died in 1997. He presented the history of Iraq clearly in his poetry. The life of Al-Jawahiri was filled with so many events that happened in the Iraqi community, Al-Jawahiri positioned among them. Throughout the whole of his life, he rebelled against most of these serious events and all of these rebellions was clearly reflected throughout his poetry (Eshkevari 6). Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri suffered repression from the government of his original homeland (Iraq) because of this; he was forced to flee out of his country mostly due to his liberty poems that calls to free his nation from the suppression they were going through under Abdu al Kareem Qasim and Saddam Hussein’s rule.
In When the poet is a stranger: Poetry and agency in Tagore, Walcott, and Darwish (2009), it is stated that Khalid Mattawa is a Libyan-American poet, born in Benghazi in 1964; he went to the United States at the age of 15 in 1979, he is also a writer, and a translator. Mattawa came to the United States in his mid-teens immediately after so many rebels were hanged during the revolt against Gaddafi, In an interview Reuters had with Mattawa he said “Even the boy and girl scouts were governmental organizations that had to show loyalty to the regime,” (Mattawa 2011). Until now Mattawa finished publishing four volumes of his poetry, he was the coeditor of two anthologies of the Arab-American writings, and he translated many writings of Arab poets into English, including Syrian poet Adonis during his 32 years in America. “He’s one of the few exiles who have a foot in both worlds,” Colla (2011) said, noticing that Mattawa’s work translating Arab poets had kept him attuned to events in the Arab world (1).
- Discussion
This project as a comparative approach towards the poetry of two prominent poets who belong to two different backgrounds but with similar experiences intends to analyze their theme of diaspora. Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri is an Arabic writer who has been regarded as one of the most famous Iraqi poets during the modern times (Marouf 1). The other poet is Mattawa, a Libyan-American poet, who has written his poetry mostly in English. It can be claimed that the significance of this study lies in filling the wide gap regarding Arab literature of diaspora with the comparative perspective. What makes this research significant is its comparing two pieces of poetry which have been written by two Arabic poets while in exile.
Thus, the current study is an examination of Al-Jawahiri’s Tigris the Donor of Welfare and Mattawa’s Date Palm Trinity from a comparative perspective. As Jost (1974) has argued, the American school of comparative literature is chiefly concerned with the relations and analogies, movements and trends, genres and forms, and themes and motifs (24). Thus, this study is going to investigate the most important and similar socio-political situations that have caused the mentioned poets to write in a similar way through applying the tenets of the American school of comparative literature.
To analyze the role of the socio-political context which forced Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri and Khaled Mattawa to leave their homeland, the writer has examined the sociopolitical background of the two poets in order to explore the circumstances which led them to be exiled. It is discovered that both these poets experienced a similar situation which led them to discuss the theme of displacement from their homeland. The other point to be discussed is the way their poetry includes the details and implications of the poems’ present reality juxtaposed with those of the geography of their life in their motherland. In discussing why Al-Jawahiri and Mattawa have captured in their poetry the tribulations of the entire Arab World more vividly and why they have played an important role through their poetry in the political scene of their time, stimulating public emotions against political corruption, and subsequently suffering oppression and exile, it has been declared that diaspora may have different types like the Palestinian diaspora, African diaspora, Jewish diaspora, and Libyan diaspora which is important in answering the second question, regarding the similarities in the depiction of diaspora themes (including migration, homeland and nostalgia) in Al-Jawahiri’s Tigris the Donor of Welfare (Ya Dijlat Alkhayr) and Mattawa’s Date Palm Trinity.
This article will also discuss that poets like Al-Jawahiri and Mattawa ask for their motherland to be restored in their poetry through various signifiers including colors: ‘the color of face’, sensations: ‘the warmth of body’, and flavors: ‘the taste of earth’, the land, the rivers, the way of living, the grass, the boats, the birds, and even the mud. Here with a detailed analysis of the works, their forms, and their imageries, it is examined how diaspora themes like migration, homeland and nostalgia are similarly depicted. In addition, it requires the writer to benefit from the principles of the American school of comparative literature which started with new criticism and the intrinsic values of the text along with the ideas of Said (2000, 2012), Faist (2010), and Salhi and Netton (2006). In fact, Al-Jawahiri and Mattawa both experienced almost the same Arabic traditions and were both exiled from their countries, and this is the reason why both of them were always obsessed with such political themes as exile and diaspora.
Regarding the differences of Al-Jawahiri’s and Mattawa’s aforementioned poems, this study has studied the concept of exile and diaspora themes. The core of the theoretical background of investigations and arguments to answer this question is through using diaspora and exile studies, drawing upon the critical insights of theorists such as Edward Said, because his concept of exile adds new depths to understand the differences in the depiction of resistance, motherland as the true home, and identity. Besides, the seminal theories of Al-Maleh (2009) regarding the diasporic writing of Anglophone Arab literature, Salhi and Netton (2006) concerning the notion of Arab diaspora, and Said can pave the way to analyze the differences between Al-Jawahiri and Mattawa’s artistic creations. Said (2000) has argued that, ”The Pathos of exile is in the loss of contact with the solidity and the satisfaction of earth: homecoming is out of the question” (179).
This study has also benefitted from Faist’s (2010) categorization of diasporic characteristics; for example, in order to answer the first question, this study will utilize the first characteristic that is related to the causes of migration or dispersal. In addition, the second feature that link cross-border experiences of homeland with destination and the third which reveals the incorporation or integration of migrants and/or minorities into the countries of settlement, can be analyzed in terms of similarities and differences in the artistic creation of Al-Jawahiri and Mattawa. While cross-border experiences are present in both works, hybridity of migrants is absent in Al-Jawahiri and weakly represented in Mattawa.
- Conclusion
The findings of this paper have disclosed that Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri and Khaled Mattawa have had similar experiences during their life time which have been very influential in their writings; they mostly evolve around the themes of homelessness, loss, and nostalgia. In fact, the traces of political, social, and diasporic issues can be very well noticed in all their writings. It is also found that what drew Al-Jawahiri’s attention to such issues like Iraq’s revolution in the 1920s and king Faisal I’s repression Shaaban (2009). Mattawa suffered the same situation, because his most important motivation to write specific poems was his being suppressed by Muammar Gaddafi. The current study has also indicated that these two poets’ personal experiences like being exiled are clearly reflected through their writings in order to create an intimate text which in turn validated their poems (Shaaban 311-314).
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