General Area. Geoffrey P. Nash. The Arab Writer in English: Arab Themes in a Metropolitan Language, 1908-1958.
Boullata, Issa J.
Geoffrey P. Nash. The Arab Writer in English: Arab Themes in a
Metropolitan Language, 1908-1958. Brighton, Eng. Sussex Academic Press
(ISBS, distr.). 1998. ix + 177 pages. $59.95/[pound]39.95. ISBN 1-898723-84- 2.
In The Arab Writer in English Geoffrey Nash, Lecturer in English at
Qatar University, studies four Arab authors: Ameen Rihani, Kahlil
Gibran, George Antonius, and Edward Atiyah, offering a discourse
analysis of their works from the perspective of the postcolonial theory
of literary study. He does not justify his choice of these specific
Christian Arab authors who wrote in English, or his choice of the
theoretical framework adopted in his analysis. However, he succeeds in
presenting the four within the Arab discourse in English between 1908
and 1958 that dealt with colonial hegemony over the Arabs, and he shows
them to be, in various degrees, using the value system of the colonizer
rather than that of the colonized.
Of the four writers chosen, Gibran comes out as the least
interested in the Arab political discourse, although in the early part
of his life in America he is shown to have engaged in activities and
produced writings against the Ottoman Empire that dominated his Arab
people. Writing in English from 1918 onward, Gibran preferred to
transcend this early bent and to couch his message in universal terms
that would endear him to Western readers by its poetic and spiritual
appeal, using the evocative power of his Arab mystical heritage only to
enhance this message.
The other three writers are shown to have been deeply committed to
the Arab cause of liberation from foreign domination, but in various
ways their appeal was to the Western colonizers' ethical sense of
fairness, even when they sometimes invoked these colonizers'
self-interest in Arab liberation. Rihani's English novel The Book
of Khaled (1911) and his essays and lectures and contacts with Western
and Arab leaders are studied. His position in them is shown to be that
of an avowedly disinterested Arab-American mediator between the Arabs
and the West pleading for Arab modernization and American support.
Antonius's only book, The Arab Awakening (1938), is studied as a
grand narrative of the Arab national movement, whose aspirations the
British continually frustrated by duplicity and broken promises. His
articles, official memoranda, and political contacts further strengthen
his argument that the British should live up to their word of honor.
Atiya's English novels Black Vanguard (1952) and Lebanon Paradise
(1953) are considered, and his autobiography An Arab Tells His Story
(1946) and his historical study The Arabs (1955) are examined. He is
shown to be true to his British schooling and unwilling, although pushed
by events, to snap at the unfair British treatment of subaltern Arabs.
Yet all three authors are adamant in their opposition to Zionism and its
project of a Jewish state in Palestine, and in their warning to Britons
and Americans regarding the ensuing evils and future troubles thereof.
By 1958, this discourse was replaced by one calling for fighting
imperialism and struggling for liberation, propelled by a different
brand of nationalism and a vision of a new world order in which nations
were free by right, not out of toleration by great powers. "The
wretched of the earth" were up, and, in literature, "the
empire" began to "write back."
Nash's book is well researched and well written, although
slightly marred by a few misprints. One error he consistently makes
throughout the book is calling the Arabian peninsula "the Arabian
peninsular," even in quotations from other sources, as on page 56.
Issa J. Boullata
McGill University, Montreal
