Beyond Univocal Baklava: Deconstructing Food-as-Ethnicity and the Ideology of

Homeland in Diana Abu Jaber's The Language of Baklava

Author(s): Carol Bardenstein
Source: Journal of Arabic Literature , 2010, Vol. 41, No. 1/2, From Orientalists to
Arabists: The Shift in Arabic Literary Studies, Essays Dedicated to Roger Allen (2010),
pp. 160-179
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20720609

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 ournal
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Literature (

Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 brill.nl/jal

Beyond Univocal Baklava: Deconstructing

Food-as-Ethnicity and the Ideology of Homeland in
Diana Abu Jaber's The Language of Baklava

Carol Bardenstein
University of Michigan

Abstract
In this article I examine and analyze the complex configuration of diasporic/homeland relations
as represented in Arab American author Diana Abu Jaber's most recent "cookbook-memoir"
The Language of Baklava. Abu Jaber's work resists prevalent conventions of most nostalgic/
ethnic cookbook memoirs, by both diasporic authors from the Arab world who have taken up
residence in the U.S., and by some Arab American authors as well. The Language of Baklava
neither portrays a simplistic or reductive binary between homeland and hostland, constructing
the "old country" as a locus of unambiguous authenticity and familiarity, nor the hostland as
a watered-down, assimilated, or inauthentic version of "the real thing" back home, with nostal
gia and alienation as the prevalent respective tropes. Instead, Abu Jaber's work presents a
far more complex and ambivalent configuration of both the hyphenated existence of Arab
Americans in the contemporary U.S., and of "back home" and, very central to her work, a
nuanced portrayal of interactions between the two spheres and their inhabitants as complex
and inter-penetrating.1

Keywords
Diana Abu Jaber; cookbooks; memoirs; diaspora; homeland; hostland; identity; Arab Americans;
authenticity

Arab American author Diana Abu Jaber's latest work, The Language of Bak
lava, a cookbook-memoir, or a memoir with recipes, might raise expectations
on the part of the reader for a nostalgic work about ethnicity and ethnic

1 I am grateful to Roger for warmly welcoming me into the 'fold' of modern Arabic litera
ture when I was a young scholar-in-the-making, both as a graduate student and as I continued
to make my way in the field. Although I was never his student, Roger was as generous with me
as he was with so many others: taking an interest in our work, welcoming us, and making us
feel like we belonged and that we had a place in the field. I appreciate this, in addition, of
course, to his own pioneering and prodigious scholarly contributions to the field. Roger has
done so much to put modern Arabic literature on the scholarly map, in the West and elsewhere,
that his name and his work are synonymous with it.

? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/157006410X486792

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 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 161

food, both on account of its title, and because of conventions associated with
genres of the "cookbook-memoir."2 In spite of all their variety, cookbook
memoirs have tended to conjure up prior originary and ostensibly "authen
tic" worlds in a largely nostalgic register. These worlds are ones to which the
narrator has lost access, such as the world of ones childhood from the posi
tion of adulthood, a former homeland from which one has been forcibly dis
placed or exiled, or a country or homeland from which one has willingly
emigrated. This past world is conjured up through the recollection of food
from "back then" or "back there," and the memoirist or food writer brings
that past and other world to life in the present through recipes that may be
prepared and consumed, culinarily or textually. In these nostalgic cookbook
memoirs, partaking of food in the present is often portrayed as a "restorative"
or "reconstituting" process, as a gesture that aims to restore the (past) whole
through partaking of a (present) fragment?an integrated and "happy" if
compromised ending, that seems to heal and remove the previous tensions of
displacement, or being "of two worlds." And Abu Jaber s title, The Language
of Baklava, at first glance, would seem to be applying a version of reductive
identity politics to food?the implicit notion that baklava embodies or speaks
in a univocal language of authenticity, evoking a univocal nationality or eth
nicity, in this case, an Arab, or Arab American one.
However, as we shall see, Diana Abu Jaber delivers nothing of the sort to
her readers in The Language of Baklava. This highly complex and richly-textured
memoir with recipes, maintains a critical distance from simplistic nostalgia,
and instead, creates a sustained portrayal of a poignant, dialectical and constantly
evolving relationship between its protagonists on the one hand, and the places
and cultures they inhabit in Jordan and the United States, on the other. That
is to say, The Language of Baklava never collapses the fluidity and complexity
of these relationships into fixed, essentialized poles or binaries that are so
common in the cookbook-memoir genre, such as homeland and hostland,
before and after, loss and recuperation. Her memoir with recipes also eschews
elevating, exoticizing and privileging the "old homeland" as the locus of orig
inary authenticity, or as the site of unambiguous belonging?whether for her
immigrant father (who continues to zig-zag back and forth between Jordan
and the U.S.), or for Diana herself and the rest of her family. Abu Jabers
work offers neither facile recuperative solutions nor "happy hybrid" endings
to the evolving condition of multi-generational transnational experience.

2 Diana Abu Jaber, The Language of Baklava: A Memoir (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005),
hereafter cited by page number.

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 162 C. Bardenstein I journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179

In creating such a fluid and complex portrayal of Arab, American and Arab
American identificatory configurations, Abu Jaber's Language of Baklava is
not unique, whether within the rest of her own oeuvre of novels, or within
the body of Arab American writing (and other forms of artistic and cultural
expression, in the visual arts, in performance art, etc.) that has been unfold
ing since the 1990s, a great deal of which has tended to portray similarly
complex articulations of transnational identities and affiliations in unsettled
flux. Abu Jaber's novels that preceded Language of Baklava?Arabian Jazz and
Crescent?have presented unconventional or markedly complex portrayals of
Arab and Arab American identities and their inter-relationships. Much of the
sophisticated emergent Arab American writing and cultural expression start
ing in the 1990s has been both markedly experimental and cutting edge in
form?in new kinds of performance and spoken word art, (e.g., the work of
Suheir Hammad, Leila Buck) or within genres, (e.g., Rabih Alammedine's I,
The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters), and has also been characterized by
being very pointedly and explicitly politically engaged, in the wake of the two
Gulf Wars, and the events of 9/11 (as well as the Lebanese wars, and ongoing
events in Palestine).
I have singled out Diana Abu Jaber's Language of Baklava for consideration
here as an illustration of a complex portrayal of Arab American identity on
several counts. For one, it has not garnered the critical and scholarly atten
tion that her preceding two works have, attention which has focused on her
unconventional or non-reductive representation of Arab American identity.3
I think part of the reason Baklava has been largely overlooked, or mentioned
critically only in passing, is precisely because Abu Jaber has chosen to write in
a genre, the cookbook memoir, which is associated with nostalgia and with
more simplistic, essentialized conceptions of identity, i.e., a genre that is
viewed as conservative in its representation of ethnicity in the U.S. context,
not "cutting edge" or experimental, and one that is not explicitly politically
engaged, in contrast with other segments of Arab American writing of the
past two decades. Part of what I thus aim to show in this article is that
Abu Jaber upends the generic expectations of the family recipe and the cook
book memoir in unexpected ways, and deliberately evokes its nostalgic sensi
bility for ironic and at times comic purposes, to poignant effect, creating an
ironic narrative viewpoint that is not common in cookbook memoirs, in her
novels, or in much of Arab American literature. It also, working in part against
the grain of the cookbook memoir genre, articulates the point of view of a trans
national subject that evokes but stands apart from different identifications

3 Works by Fadda-Conrey, Gana, Hartman, Kaldas, Salaita, for example.

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 C. Bardenstein/ Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 163

and affiliations, from multiple homes and homelands, partly at home in all,
fully at home in none, and revisiting the usual sites of nostalgic recollection
with irony, humor and a critical sensibility.
A number of factors no doubt contribute to Abu Jaber s Language ofBak
lava standing apart from the conventional ethnic cookbook memoir in the
ways described above. One is that her own subject position is a complex
one?being of "mixed" Jordanian and American parentage, and of multiple
locations and moving between them, in that she and her family together and
separately have spent substantial time in both Jordan and the U.S.?could
tend to foster such de-essentializing tendencies. The fact that her memoir is
focalized very markedly through multiple and multi-generational points of
view?most pointedly hers and her fathers?further disrupts tendencies to
create a univocal nostalgic standpoint. Furthermore, she is writing this in a
period (2005) which finds both Arab American migratory patterns and con
comitant expressions of affiliation and belonging to be far more complex, in
a context of literary and cultural blossoming and sophistication that allows
for such complexity and ambiguity.
This last factor also suggests the evolving framework that would warrant
including the present study of an Arab American author in a volume honor
ing Roger Aliens contributions to the field of modern Arabic literature. In the
past, these would have seemed to be two very distinct spheres of literary pro
duction and scholarly inquiry. The past couple of decades, however, have wit
nessed a surge in the publication of literary works of fiction and non-fiction
by "Arab American" writers, an increasingly transnational sphere which has
come to include writing by an increasingly diverse collection of people. In
contrast to the more circumscribed sphere signaled by earlier use of the term
"Arab American" writers (largely immigrants or descendants of immigrants
from the late nineteenth-century wave of immigration from Bil?d al-Sh?m,
who settled and remained in the U.S. and wrote in English), in more recent
years, the Arab American sphere has become a far more complex configura
tion. It has come to include works by people who have come to the U.S.
from the Arab world as exiles, quasi-immigrants and immigrants, some of
whom have settled in the U.S. but many of whom have ongoing contact
with, and spend time back in their countries of origin or elsewhere in the
Middle East, or move back and forth between established bases in both loca
tions, producing works in both Arabic and English. It spans those who came
to the U.S. in early childhood, with a mixed linguistic configuration of Eng
lish and Arabic, to those who came in adulthood, with Arabic as their native
spoken and written language. It also includes the writings of those born in
the U.S., second-generation and beyond, some of whom have ongoing ties

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 164 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179

and experience with the places of their familial origins, some of whom do
not, who write primarily in English.
Organizations such as RAWI, the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc.,
have come to embody this more complex transnational configuration, in its
membership and constituency, and in its conferences and publications. Its
most recent conference (2007) was organized around the theme "Writing
While Arab: Politics, Hyphens and Homelands," a topic which brought the
full transnational range of writers and writing sketched above together under
one conceptual and analytical rubric. This is just one of many indicators that
a body of writing that is less easily or distinctly categorized as "Arabic,"
"Arab," "American," or "Arab American" has begun to be recognized and to
garner scholarly attention.4
In such an emerging context, it seems artificial to sustain overly rigid
boundaries between "Arabic literature" and "Arab American literature" when
what is actually being produced in these areas seems to be much more fluid
and the spheres more interpenetrating than those distinctions would indicate.
It is in the spirit of these shifting boundaries that are energizing the field, that
I venture to include a work of "Arab American" literature by Diana Abu Jaber
in this Festschrift honoring a scholar of modern Arabic literature.

4 A selection of presentations from the conference were published as essays in a forum enti
tled "Writing While Arab" in the prestigious mainstream PMLA {Proceedings of the Modern
Language Association of America) journal in 2008. Of note too is the appearance of such works
as Nouri Gana's forthcoming The Rise of the Arab Novel in English.
Other fields of Arab American cultural and artistic production embody a similarly layered
transnational configuration of practitioners, in the plastic and visual arts, in film-making, in
theater/performance, and the range of recently formed organizations, institutions and confer
ence forums. The Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, which opened in
2005, has itself become an institutional locus for this kind of transnational Arab American
ness, to some extent in its permanent exhibitions, but particularly in its visiting exhibitions of
painters, installation and multi-media artists, many of whose works are informed and consti
tuted by engagement with both the Middle East and the U.S. (such as the work of Doris Bittar,
Helen Zughaib, Sama al-Shaibi, and others), as well as in conferences it has instituted and
hosted, such as Diwan: Forum for the Arts (annual conference bringing together Arab and Arab
American artists, scholars, writers, performers, film-makers).
The 2006 Mapping Arab Diasporas conference at the Center for Arab American Studies at
University of Michigan-Dearborn, organized by its Director, Rabab Abdulhadi, was also a
forum which explicitly examined social and cultural bridges and interconnections between Arab
communities in the Middle East and at various diasporic outposts, including those in the
United States. Nibras, the Arab American Theater Collective, is another such Arab/Arab American
transnational forum. For a selection of works on the Arab American experience, see the Appendix.

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 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 165

In earlier work that focused primarily on the cookbook-memoirs of Middle

Eastern exiles,51 aimed to show how many of these works construct an ideol
ogy of homeland from positions of exile or removal that is enabled specifi
cally along the fluid trajectory of food. I argued that they tend retroactively
to construct a highly simplified, flattened, unambivalent relationship between
their protagonists on the one hand, and the homeland and its food on the
other, allowing for unimpeded nostalgic recollection and restoration through
food fragments. Upon closer examination, their relationships to both former
homeland and its food was much more complex, compromised, problematic
and deeply ambivalent. Two brief examples from my earlier analysis should
serve to more clearly situate how Abu Jaber s work stands in contrast to
them.6 Claudia Roden, a Sephardic Jewish emigree from Egypt and famous
cookbook author, explains in the introduction to her 1974 A Book of Middle
Eastern Food what drove her to write this first of many cookbooks. While her
vast oeuvre of cookbooks display Middle Eastern cuisine and her relationship
to it as complex, diverse, and evolving, this originary anecdote exhibits a
more simplistic logic. In it, she relates that the impetus to write her first
cookbook was the direct result of "nostalgic longing" for food from a world
from which she had been removed, after years of reverently eating cans of ful
(fava) every Sunday with her relatives in exile in Paris:

This meal became a ritual. Considered in Egypt to be a poor mans dish, in Paris
the little brown beans became invested with all the glories and warmth of Cairo,
our hometown, and the embodiment of all that for which we were homesick.7

At first glance this seems to be a simple instance of longing for a lost world
from exile, but the picture is in fact more complicated. Like many members
of certain cosmopolitan elites, while she was in Egypt Roden did not belong
in straightforward ways to the poor mans Egypt sincerely and nostalgically
evoked in exile. Andre Aciman has portrayed just how vehemently some of
these milieus ^affiliated with anything deemed Egyptian, Arab, or Middle
Eastern in language, food, and other cultural practices, and came to identify

5 Carol Bardenstein, "Transmissions Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory, and Gender

in the Cookbook-Memoirs of Middle Eastern Exiles," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 28/1 (2002): 353-87.
6 My brief mention of these two examples (Claudia Roden, A Book of Middle Eastern Food
[New York: Random House, 1974]; Linda Dalai Sawaya, Alices Kitchen: My Grandmother Dalai
and Mother Alices Traditional Lebanese Cooking [Portland, Oregon: Linda Sawaya Design,
1997]) is drawn from the Signs article cited above: see that article for more extended treatment
and analysis.
7 Roden, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, p. 1.

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 166 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179

with Egyptian-ness primarily in the wake of leaving Egypt, if they did so at

all.8 Such ambivalence is at odds with the simplicity of Rodens anecdote of
people presumed to be Egyptians with unambiguous ties to their originary
home, which they conjure up through partaking of fill as quintessential Egyp
tian cultural marker.
Linda Sawayas 1997 Alices Kitchen: My Grandmother Dalai and Mother
Alices Traditional Lebanese Cooking enacts a reconfigured transmission of food
knowledge stemming from the more "normative" break of immigration. The
U.S.-born Sawaya is the daughter of Lebanese immigrants who came to the
U.S. in the 1920s, and her book affirms the smooth continuity of life, food
traditions and knowledge, countries and generations. A rosy, cheerful nostal
gia permeates the portrayal of the "old country" of Lebanon, immigration to
the U.S. is portrayed as an utterly natural next step, and life in America is a
happy story of hard-working integration. Through text, photos, and Lebanese
food recipes, these different stages and locations are mapped along an unbro
ken continuum, one that is celebratory and unfraught, with no rupture and
no loss along the way. The Rodin and Sawaya examples (and others) also
posit a one-way linear narrative: there is exile or immigration away from the
former homeland, and the life that matters continues elsewhere, from one
generation to the next. The past, or former homeland, remains as a kind of
fixed "still life," to be partaken of at will from afar.
Abu Jaber's The Language of Baklava distinguishes itself from these and
other "classic" operations of the genre on virtually all counts.9 She manages
to maintain a non-reductive, three-dimensional portrayal of the nuanced,
humorous, and poignant ways that places, their migratory inhabitants and
their associated foods, resist settling into fixed, essentialized entities, but
instead remain in flux in a rich irreducible mix.
First, although The Language of Baklava is Diana Abu Jaber s memoir, her
father figures centrally in the work, with large sections focalized through him.

8 Andre Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir (New York: Riverhead, 1994).

9 It should be noted that there is considerable variety within the genre of the cookbook
memoir (as discussed in my "Transmission Interrupted" piece in Signs), in terms of the degree
to which they function as cookbooks or as memoirs, the quantity and distribution of recipes
and memoir-texts, etc. Rodens works are primarily cookbooks, not memoirs, but do include
introductions with anecdotes and other framing devices and bits of information that provide
some social and historical context, culinary history, etc. Sawaya's book is also primarily a cook
book of family recipes, with far less memoir-text than others analyzed in the Signs piece. The
works of these two authors differ from Abu Jaber s along these lines in that Baklava is clearly
not primarily a cookbook, but has far more emphasis on memoir-texts, that are inspired by and
built around the recipes as culinary narrative kernels. I brought these two brief examples for
comparison with Baklava for the sake of economy, as the other cookbook-memoirs discussed in
Transmission Interrupted are analyzed at much greater length and in much greater detail.

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 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 167

One effect of this is that this memoir with recipes does not simply portray
the perspective of a first-generation immigrant like her father, and his multi
ple relationships to Jordan and the U.S., nor does it settle on the single point
of view of the American-born, second-generation Diana, with very different
experiences of and sets of relationships to both places and cultures. It sustains
a more complex configuration articulated from multiple and changing points
of view.10
Furthermore, Jordan does not remain a fixed "still life" contemplated or
longed for from afar, in a uni-directional relationship, in part because both
Diana and her father go to live in or visit Jordan for extended periods of
time, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Each time Diana goes to Jor
dan, and then re-enters life in the U.S., her relationship to, and experience
of, both Jordan and the U.S. change, and are renegotiated, as is also the case
for her father. Related to this, the "America" that Diana and her family
inhabit, is portrayed as variably inflected with Jordanian-ness, and the Jordan
she/they inhabit, is infused with their "America." In other words, The Lan
guage of Baklava does not construct mutually exclusive binaries, but multiply
interpenetrating spheres. But, as we shall see below, neither does Abu Jaber
glide into a facile "happy hybridity" solution, in which her family's uneasy
mix settles from a process of ricocheting between Arab/American binaries on
the one hand, into some stable, unambivalent "third" entity that can then
proceed to navigate a smooth path, on the other. Overlapping in part with
Bhabha's formulation of a "Third Space," The Language of Baklava does not
"trace two original moments from which [a] third emerges," but rather artic
ulates a different kind of space, "which enables other positions to emerge,"
but positions that do not become fixed or stabilized.11

10 In my broader examination of "Middle Eastern" memoirs (beyond those examined in

"Transmissions Interrupted" and here), I have noticed that such "pairing between the subject/
author and one of his/her parents resulting in a blurred doubly-focalized memoir is rather com
mon. Examples include Raja Shehadeh, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Pales
tine (South Royalton, VT: Steerford Press, 2002), with its son and father pairing; Amoz Oz, A
Tale of Love and Darkness, tr. Nicholas de Lange (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), with its son and
mother pairing; and Colette Rossant, Memories of a Lost Egypt (London: Potter, 1999), with its
daughter and mother pairing. Space does not suffice for me to elaborate on this feature, which
figures rather prominently in The Language of Baklava, but it is something I hope to pursue in
future research on this and other memoirs. The particular "pairing" found here, between father
and daughter, and the fact of it being in the genre of a cookbook-memoir, might seem to invite
interpretation that foregrounds gender as an analytical lens. But as is evident from the few addi
tional examples of "pairing" in memoirs, there is not a discernable pattern in the pairing that
foregrounds gender.
11 The configuration in The Language of Baklava only partially overlaps with Bhabha's con
ception of "Third Space," because even though he does describe it as an "ambivalent" site, that

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 168 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179

In The Language of Baklava, the culture and food of her father's "back
home" (in this case Jordan), does not get elevated and exoticized as more
authentic, or more formative for the young and growing Diana, than her
mother's American background, or Diana's own blend. Although Dianas
father (whose full name is Ghassan Abu Jaber, but is referred to throughout
the memoir as "Bud" or sometimes "Gus,") is quoted making many pro
nouncements on "back home" being not only his, but the entire family's
"true" culture and home, it turns out to be more complicated than this not
only for Diana, of course, but for him as well. In The Language of Baklava, in
contrast with cookbook-memoirs more typical of the genre, food and a range
of other cultural markers and enactments are not portrayed as "restorative" or
making a fragmented reality "whole," nor are they put into circulation as
unambiguous markers of cultural authenticity. Attempts to bring one food
world into another are often portrayed as untenable, awkward, or embarrass
ing, as well as tasty and warmly social.

In all of the aforementioned ways Diana Abu Jaber not only presents a very
different kind of cookbook-memoir, that does not deliver at all what prospec
tive readers (or critics)12 might expect, but she also presents a complex and

engenders new possible positions that cannot be mapped within a binary, I still find the termi
nology of "new positions" to embody an implicit sense of fixedness, of new entities with mixed
or hybrid ingredients. In The Language of Baklava, we find a portrayal of an unsettled mix of
ingredients and positions that are themselves in flux. See Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and
Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28/1 (Spring 1984): 125-33; "Signs
Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May
1817," in Francis Barker et. al., eds., Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on
the Sociology of Literature, July 1984, vol. 1 (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985),
89-106; Jonathan Rutherford, "The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha," in Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 207-21.
12 Since the book's publication, in a number of contexts, in informal discussion at confer
ences and sessions on Arab American studies and in some blogs, in recent years, I have encoun
tered criticism of the idea of representing Arab or Arab American ethnicity through food
(sometimes with specific reference to Abu Jaber s The Language of Baklava, often based on the
tide alone rather than a sustained reading of the work). This criticism assumes that it automatically
essentializes ethnicity in reductive ways, and that it is "traditional" in a regressive way, outmoded,
and does not adequately represent the political realities of Arab American life today, as do other
cutting-edge and explicitly politically engaged modes of representing Arab and Arab American
ethnicity (in hip-hop, spoken word performance, installation pieces, blogs). As I assert here and
elsewhere, it is my view that within the genre there is indeed a preponderance of a conservative,
sometimes reactionary sensibility and impulse that assumes unambiguous contours of an ethnic
collective that converges in unity around its food in eminently "palatable" ways that rock no

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 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 169

fluid configuration of Jordanian-ness, Arab-ness, and American-ness, whose

ingredients are not essentialized, and resist settling into a fixed stable form.
In one of the memoirs first vignettes, "Raising an Arab Father in Amer
ica," barbecuing kabob figures centrally, as Abu Jaber conveys in great detail
the texture of the life of her extended Jordanian family?Dianas father Bud
and his many brothers (with similarly Americanized names: Uncle Hal, Uncle
Jack, Uncle Frankie, and so on), who work hard at many jobs, but gather
regularly on weekends for barbecues with the extended family. It seems like
we are in store for quaint but seamless recollections of "old world" customs
being incorporated into life in the new world, replete with a recipe for "Eat
It Now 'hot-orf-the-griir Shish Kabob." But then we are told, "one day the
shish kabob goes a little differently" (11). The barbecue this time is at Uncle
Hal's, who lives out in the country, on the outskirts of Syracuse, New York,
with chickens, a goat and a barn. The children are excited to find a lamb
there, which they play with for hours. Later, the children are taken away for
ice-cream, and when they return, it turns out there will be no kabob for din
ner, but stuffed squash and chicken, and they are told that "Lambie" went off
to visit his grandmother. The young Diana thinks she hears her cousin Sami,
newly arrived from Jordan, weeping behind the barn?all the relatives tease
him for being a "poet," but it becomes clear that he has been sent to his
uncles in America to "cure" him of his homosexuality and effeminate ways.
Only many years later does Diana learn from her father what happened that
day. The brothers saw the neighbor's lamb, and thought they could still
butcher a lamb the way they (or their parents) used to do when they were
children back in Jordan; the ten or fifteen years they'd been living in America
couldn't change that, they thought. But when they tried, it didn't work. Some
grew weak-hearted after seeing the children playing with the lamb, and the
one chosen to slit the lamb's throat while the others held it down made a
sloppy cut that didn't kill the lamb. What ensued was a grisly scene, with
multiple messy stabbings, blood, gore, a suffering lamb, and meat that was
not only no longer fit to eat, but that none of the men could stomach eating.
"We thought we could still do it," Bud said. "But we couldn't."

Making shish kabob always reminds the brothers of who they used to be... the
heat, the spices, the preparation for cooking, and the rituals for eating were all

boats. While this may be the case for many examples within the cookbook-memoir genre, or
other modes in which food is used as an unproblematized marker of ethnic identity, I have tried
to show that this is not the case in Abu Jaber s The Language of Baklava, in which, I argue, she is
up to something considerably more complex, though not explicitly political.

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 170 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179

the same as when they were children, eating at their parents' big table. But trying
to kill the lamb showed them: They were no longer who they thought they
were (19).

Immediately after this, in Abu Jaber's trademark understated humor, comes a

recipe for "Peaceful Vegetarian Lentil Soup." This is a far cry from rosy seamless
integration of "old world" customs into "new world" life. What the brothers
might have looked to as the old "authentic" or traditional ways has not stayed
in its place: both the brothers and "old world authentic," have shifted,
changed, become unsettled, and no new happy mix is offered in its stead.
Lest we think that, in spite of this, the "back home" food culture of Jor
dan, of shish kabob barbecuing, or lentil soup, are still privileged as the foods
of exoticized, exclusive interest, in one of the next vignettes, in a chapter
entitled "Native Foods," we are presented with a story built around, and a
recipe for, an American dish that Dianas American mother prepares. Bud has
gone off to Jordan for an extended period to explore possibilities and make
arrangements for the family moving there, and as a kind of "comfort food"
stand-in for his absence?in the home and in the kitchen?Dianas American
mother makes "Comforting Grilled Velveeta Sandwiches," with Velveeta and
Wonder bread. This section precedes the account of the family's move from
the U.S. to Jordan, and while it foregrounds the great differences between
Dianas father and mother, it puts Velveeta Wonder bread sandwiches on
equal footing with kabob and lentils ("where Bud is hot and worked up, she's
clear and cool and waiting; where Bud is talking all the time, she listens;
where Bud knows exactly where he's from starting a thousand years ago,
Mom shrugs and says: Irish, German, maybe Swiss or Dutch?" [30-31]).
Both American and Jordanian foods are placed under the sign of "native," but
native as used here does not evoke an exotic otherness, nor does it signal a
privileged authenticity. Instead, they are bound within the same rubric by
virtue of being foods tied to formative experiences of the Arab American
Diana.
Later in this same chapter, the family has relocated to Jordan and is set
tling in. Munira, the Bedouin maid, is lamenting the poor quality of Ameri
can food, based on how thin and unhealthy the family members look to her,
reassuring them that the food in Jordan is much better for them, that it's "real
food," that it's a good thing that they made it to Jordan "just in time," and
that it's going to take a while for them to recover from being Americans (35).
In a different memoir with recipes, Munira's might be the "voice of authen
ticity" of the old world ways and its food. But in Abu Jaber's memoir, the
authority of this would-be voice of authenticity is undermined, as it instead

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 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 171

becomes the catalyst for the urgent desire, on the part of Dianas mother and
her daughters to make American pancakes, also related within the rubric/
chapter of "native food." This does not result in their making and partaking
of an essentialized food-fragment of their American home, but instead gives
rise to a new and messy combination of ingredients. Shopping at the Jorda
nian open-air market for pancake ingredients, they find only approximate
substitutes. The neighbors crowd into their kitchen to smell and taste what
they start to call "burnt American flat food"; they actually ask for the recipe,
but also contribute their own food to the breakfast: good bread with sesame
seeds, fresh eggs, tomatoes from the garden, mint and tubs of yogurt, salty
white cheese, olives and pistachios. "All in all, its an excellent pancake break
fast," (38), the young Diana recalls, as the family embraces this complex mix
ture of foods as a new kind of American-Jordanian "pancake breakfast."
In yet another way, Abu Jaber s food memoir does not depict Jordanian or
Arabic food as the exclusively valorized medium of authenticity, or even "eth
nicity," to be contrasted with mainstream (read: Velveeta and Wonder bread)
America. For in other parts of The Language of Baklava, Abu Jaber portrays
heartfelt connections across ethnic/immigrant lines in the U.S. through shared
and exchanged food habits. In suburban Syracuse, Bud and the Italian immi
grant neighbor, Mrs. Manarelli, strike up a quick and close friendship by
entering each others kitchens, and by sharing countless cooking tips. And
in a poignant vignette, a moving connection is forged between Bud and
Diana on the one hand, and Dianas Russian-Jewish friend Olga and her con
centration-camp survivor father on the other, when the two fathers discover
that the other's food tradition includes stuffed cabbage. The young Diana had
observed Olga's father as removed, uncommunicative and depressed. His
haunted silence is broken when the two fathers exchange their respective reci
pes for stuffed cabbage by making it for each other. Lest one think Abu Jaber
is setting up originary foods within or across ethnic groupings as comfort
foods with recuperative powers, the vignette moves in a different direction
entirely. Although Olga's father becomes more communicative and makes
social contact through the sharing of the association-laden versions of stuffed
cabbage, soon afterwards his depression and hauntedness catch up with him.
He commits suicide by throwing himself out of the ward where he's been
hospitalized. This is a far cry from cookbook-memoirs in which partaking of
the food of the lost homeland results in a restoration of "the whole" or a har
monious integrated new present. Abu Jaber's memoir-with-recipes offers no
such neat, happy endings.
For Diana, the mix of food and other cultural ingredients in her life, are
woven in nuanced ways into her complex coming-of-age story, and how these

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 172 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179

ingredients function is something that evolves and develops in markedly dis

tinct ways over time. For the very young Diana early in the memoir (living in
the U.S.) this mix is portrayed as something utterly natural, unconnected,
and even undifferentiated to her. In the memoirs opening scene, we find a
six-year-old Diana together with her extended family as part of the studio
audience for a mainstream American TV show in the early 1960s, with the
host walking around making small-talk with the children, reading their
nametags: "Hello there, Bobby Smith! How are you, Debbie Anderson." He
begins to break his teeth reading her cousins' nametags: "Farouq, Ibtisam,
Matussem" and then is relieved to get to the more pronounceable "Diana,"
but then stumbles again clumsily (and clearly mockingly) through her last
name. She laughs to herself at him, thinking, "This guy's a scream!... What
an idiot!" When he asks her into the microphone "Now, Diana, tell me,
what kind of a last name is that?", barely able to contain her laughter, she
blasts into the microphone: "English, you sillyl" (3). She doesn't yet sense the
differentness of "Abu Jaber" in 1960s America.
After describing all manner of Middle Eastern food, her father cooks
something from their originary home, a dish that she has always taken for
granted as just "normal." She is made to experience this familiar dish, how
ever, from a somewhat different angle when she goes to elementary school.
She is grateful to be spared the pasty goops of "hot lunch" the others are
served, and instead brings things like chicken kabob, spinach pies, and felafel
from home. When one of the nuns learns she is from Jordan, the sister's eyes
light up: "The Holy Land. The River Jordan!' She begins to hang around
Diana constantly, as if to get some of the holy glow from her, and is com
pletely enthralled by the food Diana starts bringing her from home: "Food
from the holy land!" (21-2). Being exoticized as "holy"?both she and her
food?adds another layer to Diana's experience of herself as Jordanian-American,
as she begins to be made aware of her differentness.
The year the family goes to live in Jordan, when Diana is a young girl, is
also a complex experience, not portrayed as an unambiguous homecoming,
either for her father Bud, or for the rest of the family. Diana immerses in the
language, food, and social life of Jordan, being absorbed by her extended
family and a posse of close Jordanian friends with whom she runs around.
When she seems to suddenly become fluent in Arabic the way children her
age can with immersion, her American mother first notices her chatting away
with the Bedouin maid: in what seems like an accusation, or a feeling of
betrayal, her mother says, "Since when do you speak Arabic?" (34). "I look at
her and I see there's something in her eyes when she says this that I feel in the
center of my chest, just under the bone. Instantly, I don't want those words in

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 C. Bardenstein I journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 173

my mouth anymore." (34). This does not stop her from partaking of Arabic,
but the added associated layer of guilt and betrayal, that comes part and par
cel with her "naturalization" to the Jordanian context is unmistakable.
Some time after the family's return from Jordan, a new layer associated
with her coming into awareness of her "Arab differentness" in the U.S. is
added: that of shame. Abu Jaber writes of the family barbecues as they settle
into suburban Syracuse, and gives an accompanying recipe for "Distract the
Neighbors Grilled Chicken" (80-1). But what follows is her description of
how she comes into painful awareness of how her family does not actually fit
in seamlessly or belong through the preparation of this food. Neighbors
appear in front of the house gawking when Diana's family commits the
unwitting transgression of barbecuing in the front yard. Bud reflexively intro
duces himself, and invites them to partake of the food. The neighbors
respond awkwardly that they'd heard "maybe there was some kind of trouble
going on out here," that they were out here "eating or burning things," that
"you know, this is a nice neighborhood and all" (81). They apologize and
scamper off apologetically when Diana's American mother appears. She
writes: "And that's about when I get the feeling that starts somewhere at the
center of my chest, heavy... like fear or sadness or anger, but none of these
exactly." Of course, a schoolmate rival of hers is much less subtle, telling her
on the bus the next day that her own parents and all the neighbors are talk
ing about it, and it's just a "holy disgrace," "in this country, nobody eats in
the front yard," and that her parents would drive Dianas family out of the
neighborhood if they didn't get it. By then, Diana has internalized her fami
ly's otherness as perceived by their "mainstream" American neighbors, saying
to herself "She's right. Shame fills me" (82).
Althusser s much-cited conception of "interpellation," or "being hailed" by
a censorious authority (a police officer in his example, but other authorities?
individual, collective, or institutional, can be substituted), identifies this type
of experience as a salient ingredient in a subject's self-recognition, or in the
constitution/construction of the subject's self-identification by such exter
nally imposed actions.13 The identification and negative judgment of Diana
and her family as different in undesirable ways, by the neighbors as arbiters
of correct, normative behavior, and the way it shapes Dianas experience
and "recognition" of herself in their eyes, illustrate the phenomenon of
interpellation as formulated by Althusser. And Eve Sedgwick writes elo
quently of how shame shapes subjectivity: "Shame floods into being as a

13 See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971).

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 174 C. Bardenstein I journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179

moment, a disruptive moment, in a circuit of identity-constituting identifi

catory communication... But in interrupting identification, shame, too,
makes identity".14
In The Language ofBaklava, we witness the poignant and painful moment
shame floods into the young Dianas being, and how "shame attaches to and
sharpens the sense of what [she] is".15 However, this is portrayed as just one
more ingredient added to the mix for Diana; it does not dominate, or become
fixed. What her food and her culture mean for her continues to evolve. She
spills her soul about the front-yard barbecue incident to Mrs. Manarelli, the
Italian neighbor, who feeds her Panna Cotta (the recipe for this is provided)
and who then defiantly organizes a picnic out on the front lawn, everyone
waving shamelessly at passing neighbors in a proud assertion of multi-ethnic
otherness:

The neighborhood cars pass, some quickly, and some slowly, and we wave at
them all with the wave we've seen at Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, a feathery
tilt at the wrist, forearm upright. No one can tell us anything. We are five queens
drifting over the suburbs on our own private float. (86)

When Diana hits thirteen, her relationship with her father becomes more
volatile, as she begins the process of teenage differentiation from her parents
and background. In the chapter that gives this memoir its title, "The Lan
guage of Baklava," we find Diana and Bud arguing, and Bud threatening to
send her back to Jordan to learn proper behavior, after a bad report card and
trouble at school. Bud's sister shows up one day, visiting from Jordan, and
Diana is afraid she has come to take her back to Jordan. Aunt Aya, a fiercely
independent woman who never married, the only girl in a family of brothers,
is a not-quite-traditional Bedouin healer who lives on her own in the desert.
After Aya gives Diana one of her tea concoctions to help her calm down and
figure things out, Aya suggests that they bake. The rebellious and differentiat
ing Diana answers, irreverently to her own surprise: "Fine, as long as it isn't
Arabic... I hate Arabic food," expecting this brazen betrayal on her part to
get a rise out of Aya. Instead, Aya?who in a different cookbook-memoir
might be the authentic voice of tradition hailing from the homeland?

14 Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003), p. 36.
15 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 37.

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 C. Bardenstein I journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 175

surprises Diana with her response: "Im not so impressed. I hate it too! But
how do you feel about baklava?" (185). Once they agree that baklava is not
originally an Arabic dish, but comes from the Greeks or the Turks?they
never quite pin it down?and they agree that they will not use its Arabic
name baql?wah, they can partake of both cooking and eating it. "We can call
it 'baklava' since we both hate Arabic food," Aya says (185).
This, then, is the language of baklava: not a univocalizing ethnic or
national language, but rather explicit resistance to that kind of mono-glossia,
and in its stead, a language that resists its own mythologized origins, and
insists on multi-vocality, on polyphony. Aya and Diana spend the week mak
ing pastries of different ethnic and national origins, culminating in their bak
ing and eating a most exquisite baklava. Before Aya leaves, she uses her
authority with her brother on Diana's behalf, telling Bud that if he ever so
much as mentions the idea of sending Diana back to Jordan, she, Aya, will
never speak with him or set foot in his house again. Bud confesses he would
never send his daughter away?and all of this happens under the "sign" of
the simultaneous Arabness and non-Arabness of baklava.
A later vignette in the memoir portrays Dianas relationship to the food of
her family in a more extreme form, one of visceral rejection. When Diana is
yet further along in the process of differentiation vis-?-vis her family and
background, the first year she goes to college, a new food-related phenome
non sets in. Finding the dorm food inedible, Diana survives mostly on candy
at the shop where she works, and begins to lose weight. On her periodic vis
its home every couple of months, she partakes fully of Bud's home-cooked
Middle Eastern food, only to find, time after time, that in the middle of the
night, she becomes nauseous and vomits it out. This keeps happening over
the course of her first year at college. "I turn inside out, my body physically
rejecting the food. A rejection of something more powerful than food" (227).
Again, as in all of the examples presented above, we could not be
farther from the portrayal of food as essentialized cultural marker of authen
ticity with restorative and "whole-making" powers attributed to it so com
monly in other memoirs constructed around food memories and associations.
And again, it does not remain fixed or become essentialized as signifying vis
ceral rejection. For one night, on another visit home from college, Diana
experiences an expansive moment, looking outside the house at dawn: "I
sense the distances between places, our homes, even between America and
Jordan, start to disintegrate. Geography turns liquid. There's something in us
connecting every person to every other person" (229). Suddenly she is over
come by a strong urge for labneh, strained yogurt, "the simplest dish in the
world," a kind of "mother's milk." In the wake of this incident, "the nausea

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 176 C. Bardenstein / Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179

has stopped as mysteriously as it started," and she is once again able to eat her
fathers food, and to continue to carve out her own evolving borders and per
sonhood as a writer (229).
Later entries in The Language ofBaklava find Diana some years later, back
in Jordan for a year on a Fulbright doing research for a novel, and re-immersing
in Jordanian food, culture, and the vagaries of her extended family, much of
which has returned from extended sojourns in the U.S. This is followed by
her return to America, and even though she had looked forward to her return
with much anticipation, once back she expresses how she misses many things
in Jordan, warts and all. For her, ultimately, there is no settling down fully in
one culture or another, one home or another. She continues on her path of
movement and settling, describing herself by the end of the memoir as "a
reluctant Bedouin" who "misses every place, every country" in which she has
ever lived, and who never wants to leave any of those places for good. At the
end of the memoir, she echoes a question that formed in her long ago when
she saw parts of her father come to life when they were in Jordan. Her earlier
question was: "do people have to decide exactly who they are and where
exactly their home is? Do we have to know who we are once and for all?" She
closes the memoir saying: "I want to cry out, to protest... why must there be
only one home?!" (328). As a question that we must assume has been articu
lated in the "language of baklava," the answer, renegotiated in different ways
throughout Abu Jaber s memoir, is: there is not only one home. There could
not be only one unambiguous and fixed home for transnational subjects such
as Abu Jaber. Home is many places, to which one feels strong affiliations but
does not belong fully or unambiguously, affiliations that are in flux and re
negotiated over time, and both through experience and through the construct
of the ideology of homeland.

Appendix

For the interest of readers who may not be familiar with sources in Arab
American Studies, I provide here a list of selected works.

(A) Works pertaining to, and that underscore the complexity of, the Arab
American experience:

Abraham, Nabeel and Andrew Shryock (eds), Arab Detroit: From Margin to
Mainstream, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000).

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 C. Bardenstein I journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 177

Alsultany, Evelyn, "The Primetime Plight of Arab-Muslim-Americans Post

9/1 1: Configurations of Race and Nation in TV Dramas," in Naber and
Jamal (eds), pp. 204-28.
Bawardi, Hani, Arab Immigrants in Flinty Michigan: The Case of Merchants in
the Inner City, Masters thesis, University of Michigan-Flint, 1997.
Gualtieri, Sarah, "Strange Fruit: Syrian Immigrants, Extralegal Violence and
Racial Formation in the Jim Crow South," Arab Studies Quarterly, 26/3
(2004): 63-85.
Hanoosh, Yasmeen, The Politics of Minority: Chaldeans Between Iraq and
America, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2008.
Hassoun, Rosina, Arab Americans in Michigan, (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 2005).
Howell, Sally, "Cultural Interventions: Arab American Aesthetics Between
the Transnational and the Ethnic," Diaspora 9/1 (2000): 51-82.
Hussein, Lutfi, "Three Arab American Groups Respond Discursively to the
Attacks of September 11," in Rosana Dolon, Julia Todoli, eds., Analysing Iden
tities in Discourse (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co., 2008).
Jamal, Amaney and Nadine Naber (eds), Race and Arab Americans Before and
After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2007).
Majaj, Lisa Suhair, "Arab Americans and the Meaning of Race," in Postcolo
nial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity and Literature, ed. by
Amritjit Singh, Peter Schmidt (University Press of Mississippi, 2000).
Majaj, Lisa Suhair, "Arab American Ethnicity: Locations, Coalitions and Cul
tural Negotiations," in Arabs in America: Building a New Future, ed. Sulei
man, 1999.
McCarus, Ernest, The Development of Arab American Identity (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994).
Naber, Nadine, "Arab American Femininities: Beyond Arab Virgin/
American (ized) Whore," Journal of Feminist Studies 3211 (2006): 87-111.
Orfalea, Gregory, The Arab Americans: A History (Northampton, Mass.: Olive
Branch Press, 2006).
Salaita, Steven, Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures and Politics (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Suleiman, Michael, Arabs in America: Building a New Future (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1999).
The Arab American Experience in the United States and Canada: A Classified,
Annotated Bibliography (Ann Arbor: Pierian Press, 2006).

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 178 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179

(B) Anthologies of Arab American literature:

A Different Path: An Anthology of the Radius of Arab American Writers, ed.

D. H. Melhem and Leila Diab (Detroit: The Ridgeway Press, 2000).
Dinarzads Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction,
ed. Khaled Mattawa and Pauline Kaldas (Fayetteville: University of Arkan
sas Press, 2004).
Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry, ed. Sharif Elmusa and Greg
ory Orfalea (New York: Interlink Books, 2000).
Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, ed.
Hayan Charara (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008).
Post-Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing, ed. Khaled Mattawa
and Munir Akash, Jusoor, series 11/12 (1999).

(C) Selected recent works from the emergent body of scholarship on Arab
American literature:

Amireh, Amal and Lisa Suhair Majaj (eds), EtelAdnan: Critical Essays on the
Arab American Writer and Artist (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co,
2001).
Fadda-Conrey, Carol, "Racially White But Culturally Colored: Defining
Contemporary Arab American Literature and Its Transnational Connec
tions," Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University, 2006.
-"Arab American Literature in the Ethnic Borderland: Cultural Intersec
tions in Diana Abu-Jabers Crescent'; MELUS 3114 (Winter, 2006): 187-205.
Gana, Nouri, "Introduction: Race, Islam, and the Task of Muslim and Arab
American Writing," Writing While Arab, PMLA 123/5 (October 2008):
1573-80.
-"In Search of Andalusia: Reconfiguring Arabness in Diana Abu-Jaber s
Crescent" in Comparative Literature Studies 45/2 (2008): 228-246.
Hartman, Michelle, '"This Sweet/Sweet Music': Jazz, Sam Cooke, and Reading
Arab American Literary Identities," MELUS 31/4 (Winter 2006): 145-165/
Hassan, Salah and Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, On Arab American Literature
Special issue of MELUS, The Journal of the Society for the Study of Multi
Ethnic Literature of the United States 31/4 (Winter 2006).
Jarmakani, Amira, Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Mythology of Veils, Harems
and Belly-Dancers in the U.S. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Kaldas, Pauline, "Beyond Stereotypes: Representational Dilemmas in Arabian
Jazz; MELUS 3114 (Winter 2006): 67-185.

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 C. Bardenstein I Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010) 160-179 179

Ludescher, Tanyss, "From Nostalgia to Critique: An Overview of Arab Amer

ican Literature," MELUS3U4 (Winter 2006): 93-114
Majaj, Lisa Suheir, "Arab American Literature: Origins and Developments,"
American Studies Journal 52 (Winter 2008): article 2.
Orfalea, Gregory, "The Arab American Novel," MEWS, 31/4 (Winter 2006):
115-133.
Salaita, Steven, "Sand Niggers, Small Shops, and Uncle Sam: Cultural Nego
tiation in the Fiction of Joseph Geha and Diana Abu Jaber," Criticism 43/4
(Fall 2001): 423-444.
Wathington, Priscilla, "Eating Homes: A Critical Inquiry into the Represen
tation of Arab American Identities in Contemporary Arab American Writ
ings on Food," Masters thesis, Georgetown University, 2007.

(D) A selection from the growing number of new Arab American writers
publishing (or performing) alongside earlier more established writers:

Almaz Abinader, Rabih Alameddine, Leila Buck, Hayan Charara, Susan Muaddi
Darraj, Joe Geha, Suheir Hammad, Nathalie Handal, Randa Jarrar, Fady Jouda,
Mohja Kahf, Lala Lalami, Lisa Suheir Majaj, Khaled Mattawa, Najla Said,
Naomi Shihab Nye, Heather RafTo, Betty Shamieh, Will Youmans.

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