Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream. (Book Reviews).

Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, editors. Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. 629 pages. Paper $17.46.

"Americans have trouble thinking of Arabs as a standard 'ethnic group,'" (p. 2) declare Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shyrock, in their introduction to Arab Detroit, an eclectic and compelling collection of essays, interviews, memoirs, and poems that document the Arab American/immigrant experience in Detroit. As the title signals, this is a book that claims and marks an "ethnic" space for Arab America in the city home to the American institution, the Ford Motor Company. The juxtaposition of two spaces, one "American" (the mainstream) and the other "ethnic" (the margin) provides the dialectic on which the material in the book is structured. Yet, these two sites are not discrete, and it is precisely in the ways in which these two worlds overlap, collide, and engage and confront each other that the editors, Abraham and Shyrock, perceive a movement from "margin to mainstream" as being perhaps inevitable. Arab Detroit, therefore, is that "in-between" place, one that necessarily inhabits both spaces simultaneously, whe re immigrants from vastly different worlds struggle to make new homes and meanings in the United States.

The book is arranged in 6 parts, with each section focusing on an aspect of Arab America. However, as the editors caution, the themes and issues raised in each section go beyond the labels imposed. With twenty-five contributors, the book offers a range of experiences and critical analyses that emphasize the diversity and vitality of Arab Detroit. Most refreshingly, the book offers glimpses of private worlds within Arab Detroit, where issues of race, identity, class, and ethnicity are negotiated within the home and family, and between home and community. Where most studies of Arab America have focused on the immigration of Syrians to the United States during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Arab Detroit reveals the ways in which this landscape has been dramatically transformed by the arrival of Yemeni, Palestinian, Chaldean, Iraqi Shi'i and other immigrants from West Asia. Not only the city's spatial arrangement--with the Ford Motor Company looming over Arab Detroit--but also Arab Detro it reflects the ghettoization of newer immigrants in specific sites within Arab Detroit, marking class and cultural distinctions and disparities between new and older immigrants. The book therefore explores not only the relationship between Arab America and "America," but also the nuances of inter-ethnic, religious, and parochial tensions now deployed in Arab America as new immigrants compete for space while asserting different identities and ways of living. What emerges is a community that is continuously being reconstituted as it creatively challenges processes of Americanization from without, and forces of tradition and religion (amongst others) from within.

How Arab Americans think about themselves, and how they represent themselves, then, are critical themes that run through the book. "8 houses from the birthplace of Henry Ford," writes Hayan Charara, Arab America is "a different place" (pp. 47-48). This consciousness of difference is experienced most acutely by Arab Muslims and first generation immigrants when they must negotiate the world outside. But the plight of Iraqi Shi'i points to the ways in which "difference" marks some minorities in palpably severe ways within Arab America, leaving them precariously on the margins of "ethnic" America. Linda Walbridge and T. M. Aziz's essay (pp. 321-342) highlights their isolation within Arab Detroit. As Shi'i, they are associated with Iran, although Iranians perceive them as being Arab and hence culturally different; as minorities in the larger Arab community, Iraqi Shi'i historically have been marginalized or persecuted. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Gulf war, Arabs have seen the Iraqi Shi'i as collaborators wit h the West since they rose up in rebellion against Saddam Hussein. The devastating repercussions of the failed uprising have left Iraqi Shi'i refugees in the United States particularly vulnerable. With no kinship networks to rely on in the United States, the new immigrants fight for survival is all the more desperate since much of Arab Detroit remains unsympathetic to their plight.

Other essays and memoirs in the book similarly point to the multiple levels at which processes of othering occur, as well as the processes by which identities are re-negotiated within Arab America. Sharkey Haddad's essay reveals his ambiguity in defining himself as "a Chaldean or an Arab or an American" (p. 210). Living in Baghdad, a Catholic amongst a predominantly Muslim population, he had seen himself as an Iraqi. Now in the United States, where most Chaldeans in Detroit traced their roots to ten villages in northern Iraq, Haddad discovers his heritage as a Chaldean. Such displacement of national identities for more parochial assertions of self and community is also seen amongst the Egyptian Copts in Detroit. Richard Jones notes that as orthodox Christians in Egypt, many of whom spurn an Arab identity to emphasize their descent from the "original" Egyptians, Copts in Detroit find the United States to be a place where they can freely assert their sectarian identities (p. 229). The Coptic Church in Detroit m oors the largely dispersed community to an ethnic identity that, according to Jones, provides "an almost exaggerated sense of self' (p. 30). The significance of the homeland in the Coptic diaspora in the United States also serves to reconstitute an ethnonationalism that is increasingly being translated into political lobbying in Washington D.C., some of which has had an adverse impact on Copts living in Egypt.

Arab Detroit thus also uncovers the particular ways in which various ethnonationalisms are articulated within Arab America, and the continuing importance of the homeland in the diaspora. For first generation immigrants the ties of kinship inevitably entail an emotional investment in a distant "home." Although the first Lebanese who immigrated at the turn of the twentieth century adopted a "white" American identity and are characterized in most accounts as assimilating into the American mainstream, for many the homeland continued to resonate in poignant ways. What distinguishes early Arab American immigration from Asian immigration of the period, is the significant presence of Arab women in the United States. Yet, the stories of these women are rarely heard in these histories. In Arab Detroit, Alixa Naff's haunting reminiscences of her mother's life address this gap in immigration narratives, giving us a glimpse of an intensely personal world that was probably shared by other women of her generation in the com munity. Naff's mother, Yamna, remained through her life emotionally anchored to Rashayya, an "unshakeable homesickness" (p. 118) for her ancestral home and family pervading her household in Detroit. The rituals and codes of life in Rashayya were very much a part of Alixa Naff's childhood, and although her mother made some allowances for Americanizing processes, Rashayya remained "a living presence" in the home (p. 117). When her parents were murdered, Yamna Naff and her sister put on mourning black which they continued to wear for seventeen years. The unending sadness of her mother's life, inexplicable in many ways to the narrator, underscores the haunting presence of another time and place within the Naff household, and however much they may try, as Alixa Naff admits, "Rashayya is still with us" (p. 148).

For second generation Americans, such as Alixa Naff and Lara Hamza, home is the United States. "We belong to America as much as America belongs to us," Hamza declares (p. 399). But, since they must negotiate their parents' and family ties to other homelands, she also concedes that these cannot be ignored in affirming an Arab American identity. For Nabeel Abraham, whose childhood loyalties leave him alternately identifying with and disassociating himself from an Arab homeland, his sojourn as an adult in Algeria, the "Arab world," leaves him with the realization that he is not "an Arab." His emerging sense of self as an "Arab-American" ironically serves to distance him from Detroit's Arab community since the Lebanese community that he grew up in has been marginalized by the now heterogeneously constituted Arab Detroit. Abraham's essay reveals Arab Detroit to be an inherently unstable site on which Arab American identity is continuously being narrated. For Abraham, being Arab American means occupying a "semimarg inal place in American society" (p. 456) and a place from which to engage mainstream America. Maya Berry, in her interview with Sally Howell, also reflects this sentiment when she emphasizes the importance of strategically mobilizing as an ethnic constituency and focusing on domestic issues. These are agendas that ACCESS, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, consciously pursues. Karen Rignall's account of the services provided by ACCESS reveals its critical role in providing a common ground for Arab immigrants and Arab Americans. By affirming a collective Arab American identity, ACCESS provides the institutional structure to advocate local and national "ethnic" concerns.

Arab Detroit, however, does not simply politicize an Arab American identity as the collective goal of the community. It critically includes essays and memoirs that shift the meanings of an "Arab" identity, pointing to the intensely parochial and personal ways in which diverse groups and individuals within Arab Detroit challenge any secure notion of an "ethnic" identity. Sally Howell's conversation with Mohsen and Lila Amen, for instance, discloses the ways in which conservative Islam plays a crucial role in prioritizing the need to define oneself as a good Muslim rather than as an Arab American. The different experiences of Mohsen and Lila Amen also point to the gendered perceptions of self and community. Moreover, as Nabeel Abraham's essay on the take-over of the "American" mosque by new immigrants reveals, what it means to be an "authentic" Muslim is itself a contentious issue within the community. The religious practices of the older Syrian-Lebanese community are viewed by many of the more recent immigrant s as being corrupted by American influences. Arab Detroit, therefore, presents Arab America as a site on which "authentic" identities and the right to represent an "Arab" identity are vigorously contested from within. Since transnational circuits of culture today ensure that rituals and cultural practices of a distant homeland can be reproduced in the diaspora, claims to "authenticity" are easily invoked in recreating an "ethnic" identity in the United States. Here, Anne Rasmussen's analysis of the role of music in shaping notions of self and community is particularly insightful in delineating the distinctive and selective ways in which certain sounds, rhythms, and songs come to represent the homeland.

For the most part, Arab Detroit is structured around the notion that these contests over authenticity and representation are responses to forces of Americanization. Abraham and Shyrock locate this work in discourses of otherness that affirm a multiracial/ethnic nation. Their self-conscious attempt to challenge the deferment of Arab America in narratives of "ethnic" America is part of a process of legitimizing an "Arab" space in the nation. In Arab Detroit, this space unfolds in the richness of its diversity and the vibrant spirit of the community. However, in claiming an "ethnic" site within the nation, Abraham and Shyrock are acutely conscious of "the growth of any ethnic consciousness as a mainstreaming phenomenon" (p. 30), raising the troubling questions of agency: if Arab America is the "margin" shaped by the mainstream, who authorizes it? Who determines the public face of Arab America? And, significantly, how efficacious is Arab America in serving the needs of its marginalized constituencies, especially those that are inherently subversive to an Arab American collective consciousness.

In problematizing Arab American identity, and in providing an exhaustive collection of material on the community's experiences in Arab Detroit, this book breaks new ground. Intervening in narratives of immigration, it writes itself into the nation by territorializing a very specific landscape, while providing no secure or comforting meanings. Abraham and Shyrock's introduction to each section provides a valuable critical analytic framework through which the contributions are filtered, but it is in the unabashedly personal assertions of self and community, and the poignant reminiscences of growing up in metropolitan Detroit, that the book derives much of its strength as an exceptional portrait of a vibrant "ethnic" community.

Sridevi Menon is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University.