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I left this place by running all the way to California. An exile which lasted for years. I came back on a stretcher, and felt here a stranger, exiled from my former exile. I am always away from something and somewhere. My senses left me one by one to have a life of their own. If you meet me in the street, don't be sure it's me. My center is not in the solar system.1
THE IRONY OF ANGLOPHONE ARAB LITERATURE IS that it did not gain attention or attain recognition until the world woke up one day to the horror of the infamous 9/11 and asked itself who those 'Arabs' really were. The additional irony is that anglophone Arab writers are perhaps the furthest away from paradigmatic Arabs, themselves being the progeny of cultural espousal, hybridity, and diasporic experience. It simply so happened that their works came in handy in recent years, as they seemed to meet the needs of a readership eager to learn about Arab culture and intellectual make-up in a language that was the lingua franca of the modern age. Bookstores in Western cities and towns began to display on their shelves arrays of anglophone Arab works placed next to Afghan, Pakistani, and Iranian ones.2 It did not seem to matter who was who, so long as the names and titles fed the euphoria of luring the reader to a better comprehension of the 'terrorist Other'. I was most amused when I discovered that even Amazon.com, the famous book supplier, was 'resurrecting' and recommending to its readers with Middle Eastern interests books such as Agatha Christie's They Came to Baghdad (1950) and Murder on the Orient Express (1934) for the frisson of the name 'Baghdad'.3 However, the more significant and noticeable mark of increasing interest in anglophone Arab literature was not in the bookstores but in the growing number of universities world-wide that began to add to their curricula courses which engaged students in the study of the Arab/ Muslim mind and Islamic theology, and found in anglophone Arab writers a convenient window on Arab thought and culture. Arabs at last became 'visible'; a pity that this visibility was filtered through 'terror', rather than through the catharsis of...