Orientalizing America: Beginnings and Middle Passages
Author(s): Michael M. J. Fischer
Source: Middle East Report, No. 178, 1492+500 (Sep. - Oct., 1992), pp. 32-37
Published by: Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3012986 .
Accessed: 18/10/2014 17:25
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Middle East Report.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:25:13 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
the quincentennial year of 1992, critical Middle East
In studies can and should play a powerful, constructive
role in the battles against rightwing efforts to deny the
multicultural strands of American and Western identity.
The usual reaction is to attack ethnocentrism, stereotyp?
culture. But
ing and the Orientalism of establishment
such attacks, often defensive, do not go very far, and can
even reinforce the categories and stereotypes they mean
to deny. A stronger response would be to introduce alter?
native perspectives. This means not just different ways
of looking at the "non-West," nor just historical remind?
ers about 1492's legacies of monocultural intolerance?
the expulsion of the Muslims and Jews from Spain, the
collapse of cultures of learning that painstakingly needed
to be rebuilt; the "just wars" against the Amerindians?
but using encounters, influences and mixings between
East and West, past and present, to undermine the false
behind that intolerance. This article sug?
assumptions
gests some of the ways to reconfigure American and West?
ern identities in multicultural forms.
Orientalizing
America:
Preludes
As the great Duke Ellington observed, "We are all be?
coming a little Oriental." The Duke would have smiled at
the Five Percent Nation of Islam remapping Mecca in
Harlem, Brooklyn as Medina, and New Jersey as the
New Jerusalem. It is certainly no more odd than Shriners
parading as pashas and mamluks on their little petro?
leum-driven go-carts. And there is the fused image of
Malcolm X and Bilal, the first muezzin?a
postage stamp
of the Islamic Republic of Iran, not the wild imagining of
Salman Rushdie.
I want to explore through a kind of ethnographic lis?
tening. For guidance I am indebted to translators across
linguistic and cultural strata, people who tunnel inside
reveal?
assumptions,
monolingual or monoperspectival
hidden
and
who
and
multicultural
traces,
ing
amplifying
take the time to explain, to show connections, to tell sto?
ries, to borrow images and reinvent them with other cul?
tural content, to root around in history rather than ar?
resting or sentencing it, to search for the immemorials
that keep both memory and hope vibrant, to write out
and perform the sonic and visual codes of the present
tense. These include bilingual poets and writers, but es?
pecially such expository writers as Abdullah al-Udhari,
Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said), Fatima Mernissi, Boutheina
Shabaan,
Miryam Layoun, Miriam Cooke, Abdullah
Laroui, Ross Brann, Dan Pagis, and the Edward Said of
the images of body builders in After the Last Sky. While
it is the writers, poets and filmmakers who articulate
the emergent forms, the special skills of ear and pen and
eye of the expositors and translators, too often underval?
ued, are vital to understanding and creative analysis.
I seek the filaments of alternative, more cosmopoli?
tan, and more historically accurate visions of the mosa?
ics that have entered into and will continue to shape the
construction of the idea of America. How resonant "Rain
1953 exile song in Ku?
Song," Badr Shakir al-Sayyab's
wait, has become:
I roar at the Gulf: 'Gulf,
Giver ofpearls, shells and death!'
And the echo rings back
In sobs:
'Gulf,
Giver of shells and death...'
I can almost hear Iraq collectingand storing
Thunders and lighteningson plains and mountains,
And when the men snap their seal
The winds leave no trace
Of Thamud in the wadi*
and
Beginnings
Middle
I can almost hear the palm trees drinkingrain,
Villages crying,emigrants
Strugglingwith oars and sails
Against Gulf storms and thunders and singing:
'Rain...
Rain...
Rain...'
The devastations of this century out of which we build
our lives are not isolatable events: Auschwitz; Hiroshima;
the Siberian gulag; partition in India and Beirut; indus?
trial accident in Bhopal; Kuwait; Argentina; Cambodia.
But there is also hope, dignity and example. In the lovely
poem "Eurydice," Agha Shahid Ali reminds us of the ways
in which so many different identities suffer in a family of
resemblance
that makes of us all family, however
woundedly
antagonistic:
I am a woman
broughtlimping to Hell...
But they'velet him come
here to Belsen, rare passenger...
and his "Nostalgist's
Map of America":
When on Route 80 in Ohio
I came across an exit
to Calcutta
the temptationto write a poem
led me past the exit
so I could say
India always exists offthe turnpikes
ofAmerica
*TheThamudis,
reminds
Abdullah
al-Udhari
of70godsinNorth
us,aretheworshipers
Salih.Salihprayed
Arabia.TheThamudis
theprophet
toGod.Godshookthe
mocked
theshe-camel,
TheThamudis
killed
birth
toa red,pregnant
she-camel.
mountain,
giving
andas Salihwarned,
thepeople's
facesturned
red,thenblackbefore
yellow,
theydied;
anda firecame
their
their
Michael M.J. Fischer teachesanthropology
at Rice University
in Houston, Gabriel
screamed,
hearts,
ears,killing
them,
bursting
ripping
from
heaven
andburned
them.
down
Texas.
32
Middle East Report ? September-October 1992
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:25:13 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
so I could say
I did take the exit
and crossed Howrah
and even mentionthe Ganges
as it continued its sobbing
under the bridge
Europe. That Spain should offeritself as a site for a Middle
the
East peace conference further
corroborates
legacy.
symbolic importance of this
jL
What
is
about these
;_&&&!lk\~
important
the rehistorical registers is
The warm rains have left
many dead on the pavements
The signs to Route 80
all have disappeared
And now the road is a river
polished silver by cars
The cars are urns
carryingashes to the sea
The
Maghrib
as
Mediator
primary registers make North Africa a particu?
of
interlocutor
for the construction
larly resonant
America:
historical
(post)modern
registers from the
Middle Ages and Renaissance
that helped shape modern
Three
Passages
Michael
M. J. Fischer
consciousness;
contemporary historical grounds, espe?
cially via Algeria, for the theories of postmodernity; and
projective screens for the translations of the psyche as
the Middle East and North Africa become continuous with
Europe and America, by immigration to the latter and by
sociocultural change in the former, as well as by the pas?
sage back and forth by artists, from impressionist paint?
ers to contemporary filmmakers.
First there are the historical registers of the literary
and scientific matrix of Islamic Andalusia, a land of cos?
including at least six major
mopolitan multiculturalism
communities
(Arabs, Berbers, Jews,
ethnic-religious
muwalladun
Iberian
to Islam],
converts
[native
musta'ribun [Arabicized Christians] and saqaliba
[Euro?
of
Euro?
slave
Andalusia
was
the
center
soldiers]).
pean
pean high culture in the 11th to 15th centuries, to which
Europe looked for rational philosophy that challenged
faith (Aristotle via Ibn Rushd [Averroes]), for science and
math (our numeral system, algebra, geometry, astronomy,
the medicine of Ibn Sina [Avicenna]), for the arts (the sic
et non dialectical disputation method, epistolary forms of
fiction, dialogic forms of philosophy that became popular
in the Renaissance,
and vernacular poetry). This histori?
cal horizon is particularly important today, as various
parts of the world reconsider the 500th anniversary of
the expedition of Columbus, an expedition relying on the
Hebrew navigational astronomy and geodesy developed
at the Portuguese royal courts, developments in turn con?
tinuous with the worlds of Arabic astronomy and naviga?
tion. This key symbolic
event cannot
as a
pass
celebration
of
Christian
the
hagiographa
imperium, not
even for Spain itself, which is using the event to rejoin
Knowledge
Shall Rule!
||||
Bidjan
Assadipour
tion of genealoof
components
and America
to
modernity
recover
a
more accurate histhis is already betory. Much of
done
in
terms of the Hising
that include
panic component of America?contributions
such icons of the West as the cowboy, whose shoes, hat,
lasso, and ballads all derive from the Spanish-speaking
heritage of the US-Mexico borderland. This area today is
alive with cultural innovation and bilingual creativity.
There is no reason that this recovery should be limited to
the Hispanic Christian legacies in a land where perhaps
the first Black narratives were written by Muslims from
West Africa, and where conversos (Jews who converted
to Christianity to escape the Inquisition) helped create
the several attempts to set up independent buffer repub?
lics in Texas. Bharati Mukherjee, in one of her short stoconstrucgies of the
Middle East Report ? September-October 1992
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:25:13 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
33
ries about a drug-running outfit on an island in the Gulf
of Mexico, places her narrator among
Aztecs, Toltecs, mestizos...and a lot of Texans. I'll learn the
ropes....My firstAmerican wifesaid, in the dog-eat-dogworld,
Alfred,you're a beagle. My name is Alfie Judah, of the once
illustrious Smyrna,Aleppo, Baghdad?and now Flushing,
Queens?Judahs....We spoke a form of Spanish in my old
Baghdad home....I, an Arab to some, an Indian to
others....FromHis perch,Jesus stares at me out ofhis huge,
sad, Levantine eyes. In this alien jungle, we're fellowArabs.
You should see what's happened to the old stompinggrounds,
compadre. {The Middle Man and Other Stories, 1988).
dence and Vietnam, included Frantz Fanon, Albert
Memmi, O. Manoni, Kateb Yacin, and others, with Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir in support roles. Ali Shariati
was a powerful next-generation
follower. Bourdieu,
Derrida, Lyotard, Cixcous and the so-called postmod?
ernists or poststructuralists are the second wave.
If the first wave focused on the psychology of colonial
domination, the second wave focuses on the erasure of
local meanings in a global economy. If the first wave still
focused on individual psychology and face-to-face rela?
tions between, say (in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth),
torturers and the tortured, the second wave focuses on
the effects of the electronic media (movies, music, televi?
sion, computers, electronic bank transfers, F-16s, satel?
lite broadcast systems) which allow a subtler, more dif?
fuse regime of power, working as much through desire
(for commodities) as external domination, and which re?
quire new means of resistance. Lyotard suggests resis?
tance takes the form ofdifferends (cultural differences at
the level of basic assumptions that make translation dif?
ficult) and immemorials (ways of keeping the narratives
of past trauma from being erased, forgotten, or turned
into simple inert memorials), preserving these to gener?
ate perspectives that ensure alternative points of view
are always kept in play. What is at issue in the theories
of postmodernity is an opening for alternative perspec?
tives that value and empower multiple visions as being
what gives the idea of America vitality.
Visual
Something
Called
Postmodernity
There is the second, more recent, historical register: the
debate about America as the center of something called
postmodernity stems from theories largely generated in
Paris by either North Africans or Frenchmen deeply af?
fected by the Algerian war of independence. If the rise of
German fascism was the central generational experience
shaping the thought of German-derived social theory in
Europe around World War II, Algeria was the genera?
tional experience of the postwar period for French-de?
rived cultural theory. Bureaucracy,
pro?
rationalizing
cesses of the market, and the defense of civil society were
the obsessive concerns of German social theory. French
cultural theory has constructed alternatives to totalizing
ideologies, alternatives that can accommodate multiple
cultural perspectives and not insist that everyone see
history or progress the same way.
There have been two waves of powerful initiatives in
social and cultural theory construction emerging via Paris.
The first wave, spurred by the Algerian War of Indepen34
Displacements
There is the third, most immediate, register: the visual
register in such films as Ferid Boughedir's Halfaouine,
Child of the Terrace (a Tunisian-French
production),
Farida Ben Lyazid's A Door to the Sky (a Moroccan-French
production), Omar Allouache's Omar Gatlato, Whose Ma?
chismo Killed Him, Michel Khleifi's The Fertile Memory
and Canticle of Stones. These films?and
their Iranian
the archaicizing categories of so
counterparts?displace
much writing in area studies paradigms. They too work
with stereotypes, formulas, romanticizations.
One can
critique aspects of all of these films, but the immediacy
of dress, gesture, language, street scenes, sound, refer?
ences in popular music both to the past and to the
transnational, of dilemmas of love, economic struggle and
these things focus attention on
political repression?all
the present and its dilemmas in a way that the written
word often allows to slip away.
The film medium is a powerful yet very much
underutilized
in my
ethnographic
tool?ethnographic
sense of a vehicle for translation, for allowing multiple
voices to speak, for presenting the present. The techniques
of filmmaking, like those of other visual media?paint?
ing, photography, graphic arts in advertising, wall post?
ers, cartoons and graffiti?have
developed with strong
interactions between the Orient and the West: one thinks
of the ways in which the Mediterranean
light of Morocco
Middle East Report ? September-October 1992
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:25:13 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
set up dramatic exercises and learning laboratories for
the Impressionists, the ways in which arabesque, lattice?
work, tiling and architecture provided exercises in the
play of light and shadow, the ways in which Japanese
printmaking influenced ideas of perspective and depth.
Above all, films like Michel Khleifi's, and Shimon
Dotan's Smile of the Lamb, present dilemmas of psycho?
logical blockage and conflict laced with historical allu?
sions and grounded in ethnographic portraiture. Films
like Omar Gatlato present the sexual repressions and
their denials in ways that show how warm worlds of hu?
man interaction are created and broken; films like A Door
to the Sky portray the West-returned and the traditioneroded. There is a kind of cine-writing portraiture of time
and place, a performance of psychological mind sets, that
no other medium is achieving with any great success.
Borderlands
America and modernity that is part of the transforma?
tion of India from an agrarian and socialist-governed so?
ciety into a commodity-driven society increasingly domi?
nated by the world's largest middle class.
Beginnings
Jumping ship?the attempt at a clean break, a new life?
has been literalized in Bharati Muhkerjee's Jasmine. A
Phenomena
One of the most creative ferments of cultural creation at
the moment seems to be in the Borderlands?the
mythic
southwest from Texas to
space of the Mexican-American
California?in
bilingual writing, in art, in customizing
industrial commodities from low-rider cars to blue-painted
furniture to mesquite-grilled
fajitas in fast-food frana
Borderlands
is
term
that has conceptual as
chizing.
well as geographic uses.
If one looks to what is happening in creative writing
in English, in what has been called the decolonization of
English?the
expansion of the tonalities, diction, vocabu?
laries and cultural resources of English to include contri?
butions from other languages?then
surely the explosion
of writing and filmmaking from Iran, Pakistan and India
must rank among the most important of the Borderlands
reinventing the imaginations and languages we inhabit.
Nor is only English being decolonized. French through
Beur, North African, and francophone African writing is
undergoing a parallel process. Music, too, is an arena of
both fusion and contestation.
The arena of film has spread Urdu-Hindi as a vibrant
cultural mixer, turning Urdu from the language of po?
etry into a powerful sign of nostalgia, a powerful me?
dium of political slogans, and a vehicle of cultural cri?
tique. Many Urdu writers and poets were associated with
the People's Theater Association, the Progressive Writ?
ers' Association, and the Bombay film industry, the larg?
est in the world and one with audiences in many places.
Commercial film plays with notions of modernity, new
behavioral styles, material aspirations, violence, stratifi?
cation, and even with genre forms. The film Teja, for
instance, is a wonderful spoof on the Western, replaying
essentially the same story in three different genre for?
mats: a Western with an Indian family and Indian out?
laws set in a log cabin with horses in a Western land?
scape; then as an urban gangster film set in Bombay;
and then as a science fiction plot set in the Himalayas in
a ski lodge. There is an active play here with the idea of
Bidjan
Assadipour
young grieving widow carries out her dead husband's de?
sire to return to America, planning to perform sati on his
college campus in Tampa. Instead Yama, the god of Death,
cheats her effort at rebirth, afflicting her with rape and
murder. Jasmine appears as an avenging Kali with blood
dripping from her tongue; clutching her Ganpati, she slays
her tormentor and walks away unencumbered
by any
material possessions and a mind plagued by many pasts.
Negotiating is the long drawn out process that any
immigrant goes through. Perhaps the strongest is Hualing
Nieh. Anton Shammas's arrival in the same writing pro?
gram at Iowa that Hualing Nieh helped found is a premigration negotiation of a more middle class variety.
Hualing Nieh begins her novel of a split personality, Mul?
berry and Peach, with a hilarious scene of an immigra?
tion agent and Peach, who denies she is Mulberry:
...Peach laughs. 'Mr. Dark, you have a real good imagination.
What you see isn't real. What I see is real. You know what I
see when I look at you? A tigerwith nine human heads.'
...Peach laughs. "Mr. Dark, don't tryto be so smart! You
think I'm going to tell you that I was born in Nanking on 26
October 1929 so you can prove I'm Mulberry? Well, you're
Middle East Report ? September-October 1992
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:25:13 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
35
wrong,Mr. Dark. I was born in a valley when heaven split
fromthe earth. Where the flowersfellpeople sprangup. That's
how I was born. You people were born fromyour mothers'
wombs.
When heaven split from the earth is not a bad descrip?
tion of the cataclysmic events of the Chinese revolution,
when families were torn apart and individuals fled across
vast lands trying to keep body and soul alive; not a bad
description for the cataclysmic events that have shaken
almost every society in the 20th century, the US being
one of the few exceptions.
In the Iranian-American
film by Ghassam
Ebrahamian, The Suitors, an immigration officer asks Hajji's
wife to show her face to see if it matches the photo on her
passport. "Show the face all the way to the ear," he com?
mands, deliberately insisting that she acknowledge that
this is America where veils are out of place. Later, a
building supervisor notices blood dripping from the apart-
ment of the Iranians, who are slaughtering a sheep in
the bathtub. Fantasizing
it is an Iranian terrorist cell,
he calls in the SWAT team; meanwhile, he is listening to
a Christian fundamentalist preacher on the radio spout?
ing wild paranoia.
Dealing with the body and the unconscious is a com?
ponent without which the other strategies of narration
remain weak. As a strategy for focussing on its dilem?
mas, none perhaps is stronger or funnier than Rohinton
Mistry's neurotic constipated character who cannot def?
ecate in his new country.
Middle
Passages,
New
Spaces
Middle Passages refers to the ships that carried Africans
to America in the slave trade, passages that transformed
36
people from bearers of one culture into dominated work?
ers in another, much more complex, system of stratifica?
tion. My own family went through a Middle Passage on a
boat called the Zamzam, a European journey bound up
with Nazi debasements of slavery, annihilation and geno?
cide, a journey inextricably bound up with the Middle
East, not only through the name of the ship. On a table
on the deck, a young professor, released from a future of
being a plumber's assistant in Palestine, wrote his first
book in English, a book called The Passing of the Euro?
pean Age.
I am fascinated by Middle Passages, by hybridizations,
by adjustments and refusals of adjustments, refusals that
refuse to stand still but change their bearers.
Among the challenges to describing the new worlds
we inhabit are the new places that old identities must
negotiate. In a city like Houston, one of the more re?
markable of new spaces is the car auction. The auction?
eer sounds like a traditional cattle auctioneer, a rapidfire male voice operating between articulations of price
and information and a drone of nonsense filler that al?
lows the ear to distinguish one auctioneer from another.
The visual accompaniment
is his cowboy dress, weath?
ered face, Stetson hat,.tapered jeans, pointed boots and
silver buckle. He burbles rapid-fire words into a hand?
kerchief-wrapped microphone, while his youthful male
aide on the floor holds up fingers and points in visual
pantomime of the bids agreed to by the flick of an eye?
brow, the flash of finger, the nod of a head. The Anglo
auctioneer and aide have Black and white female book?
keepers. On the floor stand a few Texan farmers, vastly
outnumbered by Iranians, Lebanese, Saudis, Pakistanis,
a few Indians, and Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese
are
known as the sharpest dealers; if a Vietnamese bidder
looks serious, others will drop out. The Saudis dress in
the flashiest clothes, go for the big fancy cars and have
little competition except for the occasional Anglo-Texan
dealer. Most of the others dress down in American ca?
sual: shorts and t-shirts, jeans and open shirts, as if, in
venerable bazaar style, to mask themselves in a air of
indeterminate poverty.
Multiculturalism
takes on a new form in these spaces,
both like and unlike the older urban immigrant entrepots
of New York and Chicago. What fascinates me in these
spaces, places and passages are the cultural translations.
We need a new map of America that begins to envision
the pilgrimage sites that Indians are establishing among
the Hindu temples of North America, the establishment
of a little Tehran in Los Angeles. We need the resources of
the immigrant imagination. Above all, we need attention
to the discourses immigrants use in making sense of their
own lives, in comparing their own value systems with
their new settings, or in forging philosophically resonant
frames that draw on the genres, tropes, metaphors and
imagery of both old and new cultural settings. Are there
afsaneh?moral
parables, folktales like those that power
the Thousand and One Nights, Kalileh and Dimneh, the
Shahnameh?that
provide wombs of imaginative growth
Middle East Report ? September-October 1992
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:25:13 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
in new soil? The stories that are told about marriages
and funerals are a kind of folktale in the making: these
ethnographic fragments are the parables of ordinary folk,
their lives, their follies, their hard-earned wisdom. De?
scendants in the future may retell these stories differ?
ently and in more seamless, less discordant forms; for
the moment they serve as birth pangs of something new.
Towards
a Stable
Civil
Society
The introduction of alternative perspectives is the strong,
poetic way of combating monolingual, monocultural in?
tolerance, a much stronger way than the industry of
that serves only to solidify the very
Orientalist-bashing
Orientalist categories that the critics claim to want to
destroy. By paying attention to strong poetic multicultural
voices, we can provide the kind of expansion of the edu?
cational curriculum and political discourse that will re?
spond to the demographic changes occurring both within
the US and in the world at large.
Whether or not postmodernisms as writing and read?
ing strategies are passing fads, postmodernity is an es?
tablished sociological reality. This article is not a mani?
festo. It merely suggests approaches to mapping of emer?
gent realities. If we are to create pluralist, civil societies,
we will have to pay attention to the perspectives that are
registered in multicultural media: these media are the
places that show how different perspectives can survive
in the same social space.
?
in this Essay
REMEMBERS
recent
CoalitionAgainstU.S. MilitaryIntervention
in theMiddle East (Portland
Anti-Racist
Force
Task
OR);
(Albany,NY); Iowa Peace Network(Des
Moines);BlackHills TetonSiouxNation TreatyCouncil(Porcupine,
SD);
LocalAllianceforMideastPeace (Knoxville,TN).
Desert
Storm
The Second
Gulf War
Discussed
been fundingpeace and social justicefor25 years?
include:
We've grantrecipients
BS^Iffl
Shield
and Films
Adonis.An Introduction
toArabPoetics.University
ofTexas Press,
1990.
AghaShahidAli.A Nostalgist's
Map ofAmerica.Norton,1991.
Badr Shakiral-Sayyab."Rain Song,"1953; in Abdullahal-Udhari.
ModernPoetryoftheArabWorld.Penguin,1989.
RossBrann.TheCompunctious
Poet:CulturalAmbiguity
and Hebrew
Press,
Poetryin MuslimSpain. The JohnsHopkinsUniversity
1991.
MiriamCook. War'sOtherVoices:WomenWriters
on theLebanese
CivilWar.Cambridge
Press,1988.
University
FrantzFanon.TheWretched
oftheEarth.GrovePress,1963.
EricFischer.ThePassingoftheEuropeanAge.Harvard,1943.
MiryamLayoun.Travelsofa Genre:TheModernNoveland Ideology,
1990.
Princeton,
FatimaMernissi.TheVeiland theMale Elite:A FeministInterpreta?
1991.
tionofWomen's
Rightsin Islam.Addison-Wesley,
Rohinton
Lessonsand OtherStoriesfromFirozsha
Mistry.
Swimming
1989.
Baag. Houghton-Mifflin,
BharatiMukherjee.TheMiddleMan and OtherStories.GrovePress,
1988.
1989.
BharatiMukherjee.
Jasmine.GroveWeidenfeld,
and Peach.Women'sPress,1981.
HualingNieh.Mulberry
Dan Pagis. HebrewPoetryoftheMiddleAgesand theRenaissance.
1991.
ofCalifornia,
University
EdwardSaid.AftertheLast Sky.Pantheon,1986.
BoutheinaShabaan.BothRightand LeftHanded.Indiana,1988.
OmarAllouache.OmarGatlato.1976.
FaridaBen Lyazid.A DoortotheSky.1988.
FeridBoughedir.
Halfaouine,ChildoftheTerrace.1990.
ShimonDotan.SmileoftheLamb. 1986.
GhassamEbrahamian.TheSuitors.1988.
MichelKheleifi.TheFertileMemory.
1980.CanticleofStones.1990.
RESIST
Desert
to
Books
p.gut:
'JJ'ljijO
Dilip Hiro-MMHHHi
"... themostcomprehensive
oftheGulfWar overKuwait
history
to have appearedto date.The bookis a clearand concise
of
the
causes
and
courseoftheconflict,
witha
compendium
oftheimmediate
aftermath."
summary
- DailyTelegraph
"... admirably
cool and balancedaccountofthesecondGulfWar.';
- Guardian
"DesertShieldto DesertStormtellsthestoryas itshouldbe told,
fromall sideswithoutprejudice.Hirowritesdispassionately,
methodically,
painstakingly,
accumulatively."
- Financial
Times
19 blwillustrations,
12 maps,592 pp $59.95/cloth
$18.95/paper
Resistbeganin 1967 witha call to "resistillegitimate
and
authority"
to supportVietnamwar resisters.
Since then,Resisthas nurtured
a movementthatcontinuesto broadenits understanding
of whatcan and must
change.Remember,Resist!
Come help Celebrate our history,renewold friendships,
makenewones,and look ahead at whereour movementsneed
to go. Join us forpoetry,music,food, memorabilia,art,poli?
and ideas!
tics,propaganda,conversation,
dancing,inspiration
It's happeningat theJorgeHernandezCulturalCenter(Villa Victoria)
in Bostonon Saturday,November14, from6PM 'till 1AM.
so"^^ Available
atbater
bookstores
orfrom
ROUTLEDGE
IJ
29West35thStreet
g\
S m NewYork,
NY 10001-2299
Middle East Report ? September-October 1992
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:25:13 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
For info,directions,
grant
guidelines,or to makea donation,
contact:
RESIST
Summer Street
Somerville, MA 02143
(617) 623-5110
One
37