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In the short story "Alone and All Together" by Lebanese American writer Joseph Geha, the teenage protagonist Libby (an Americanized version of the Arabic name Labibeh) is watching the events of September 11 unfold on TV in her suburban Chicago home while talking on the phone with her sister Sally (originally Salma) in New York. Distraught by the "strip at the bottom of the screen" indicating "that everything points to the hijackers being Middle Eastern extremists," Libby declares: "I just wish they wouldn't say it's us . . . until they're, like, sure." On hearing this, Sally fires back: "Us? . . . What us? . . . We were born here, and so were Mom and Dad, right here in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. . . . What I want to know . . . is when 'us' stops meaning ibn Arab [son of Arabs] and starts meaning American!" (53). More than merely pointing to some of the debates within Arab American communities pertaining to the adoption of the Arab American label,1 Sally's and Libby's respective espousal and disavowal of a Middle Eastern, or more specifically, Arab identity become symptomatic of a divisive rhetoric that quickly dominated post-9/11 national discourse. This rhetoric separates the American from the un-American, the patriotic from the unpatriotic, with Arabs and Muslims being squarely cast in the latter category.2
This essay focuses on some Arab American fictional texts that respond to the post-9/11 political and social terrain in the US by capturing and challenging homogenized depictions of Arab Americans, forging in the process revisionary spaces that stand against and redefine exclusionary conceptualizations of US citizenship. In addition to problematizing simplistic types of post-9/11 patriotism that demand a unilateral type of national identity, the creation of these revisionary spaces responds to racial stereotyping, blanket labeling, and discriminatory profiling by insisting on complex representations of Arab Americans.3 The focus on literary texts, specifically fiction, is meant to highlight the role of minoritarian artistic production in shaping discussions of national belonging in the US, particularly following such an intense and traumatic crisis in the history of the nation as the 9/11 attacks.4
The attacks of 9/11, however, do not mark the first or single event that fomented the reductive perception of Arab Americans...