Neophilologus (2010) 94:637–652

DOI 10.1007/s11061-010-9202-8

Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz: An Orphic Vision

of Hybrid Cultural Identity

Nayef Ali Al-Joulan

Published online: 29 April 2010

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract While most critics relate Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz to African American
art, this paper considers the myth of Orpheus a more viable destination, arguing that
Arabian Jazz adopts an orphic vision as a model for cultural hybridity. The myth of
Orpheus appealed to Abu-Jaber for various reasons. First, the myth underlines the
significance and power of music, both matters celebrated in Arabian Jazz. Second,
the myth deals with love, a missed wife, and a husband’s loneliness after his wife’s
death as exactly is the case of Matussem. Third, Orpheus is known for his ability to
harmonize the extremes and Arabian Jazz has so many contending poles: American
and Arab cultures; man and woman; young and old; modern and traditional. Fourth,
the myth is relevant to Arabian Jazz because it is related to modern and traditional
Arab American literary incorporations of orphic music. Abu-Jaber hence poses as
a prophetess of orphic doctrines concerned about hybridizing the contesting parties
in the psyche of the Arab American. Such an orphic model for cultural hybridity,
the study suggests, might be considered in cultural studies, particularly in cases of
incorporations of music in minority literatures, along with such concepts as
‘internationalism’, ‘middle passage’, ‘mezzaterra’, and ‘borderland’.

Keywords Diana Abu-Jaber
Arabian Jazz
Arab American Literature

Hybridity
Orpheus
Jazz

Introduction: Abu-Jaber, Orpheus and Cultural Hybridity

Jem had been studying ancient mythology in tenth grade English that year, and
they’d just had a lesson on demigods and fabulous beasts. Jem’s favorite
creature was lovely, its upper parts those of a boy, the lower those of a goat. It

N. A. Al-Joulan (&)
Department of English, Al al-Bayt University, Mafraq, Jordan
e-mail: nayef-ali@rocketmail.com

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played pipes, haunting the forest with music that was a thing of the heart or the
body… ‘A graceful, shining boy on lightning hooves’. (35–36)
Thus Abu-Jaber puts forward her preferred mythical model in Arabian Jazz. The
details accompanying the description of Jem’s ‘lovely’ and ‘favorite creature’ are,
however, confusingly mixed up; no wander it is attributed to a tenth grade lesson.1
While the flute player directs us towards Orpheus or a satyr—the latter more likely
in the light of the goat-boy shapeS, it is still baffling that such a reference is
compromised by the ‘lightning hooves’ which point towards a faun. This is
strengthened by the teacher’s assertion, Jem recalls, that ‘‘a faun is far more special
than a satyr or a nymph’’ (36). A satyr is a half-goat half-boy mythical figure, with a
goat’s tail, though sometimes that of a horse, usually associated with love for pipe
music and dancing with nymphs in Dionysian festivities or those of Faunus and
Fauna. A faun, on the other hand, is a Greek place-spirit which differs from satyrs in
having goat hooves and not human feet. Nymphs are mythical female figures with a
human female shape (Burkert 1985; Kerenvi 1951). Thus, while Abu-Jaber’s
distinction between faun and satyr is viable, that between faun and nymph is not.
Can Jem’s statements be incorrect recollections from an elementary school lesson?
Jem’s explication emphasizes the power of music, flute playing, on objects of
nature. Though satyrs are associated with pipe music, flute-playing is much more an
attribute of Orpheus. In addition, satyrs show up in Dionysian festivities, which may
link with Orpheus’s music because Orpheus is considered to have settled the conflict
between Apollo and Dionysus as will be clarified in due course. Here one may refer
to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in which he diagnosed the malady of Western
culture consequent of a long history of the clash between the spiritual and the
physical, as the Dionysian creative energy has been weakened by favoring
Apollonian forces. Nietzsche laid emphasis on the opposition between Apollo and
Dionysus, along with the goat-like satyrs attributed to Dionysus’s celebrations,
whereby the antagonism between the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals are sorted
out by a music that belongs to both the spirit and the body—Sperhaps like Jem’s
‘music that was a thing of the heart or the body’. Nietzsche asserted that the
interaction between Apollo and Dionysus is essential for artistic creativity: ‘‘these
two very different drives run in parallel with one another, for the most part
diverging openly with one another and continually stimulating each other to ever
new and more powerful births’’ (Nietzsche 2000, 19). Music, Nietzsche believed, is
the only art form which can transcend the forms of appearance, as it motivates the
movement from Dionysian physicality to Apollonian spirituality. Hence Nietzsche
recognized the tremendous effect of Orpheus and his music in bridging such a
conflict. Robert McGahey, a persuasive champion of Orpheus studies, reported that
orphic music is ‘‘a copy of an original which can never in itself be represented’’ for
it is an ‘‘immediate objectification of the whole world;’’ that is, music ‘‘is not a copy
1
Diana Abu-Jaber (b. 1959) is the daughter of the Jordanian American immigrant Ghassan Abu-Jaber
and the American citizen Patricia Abu-Jaber. After earning her PhD from the State University of New
York in 1986, Diana taught contemporary and postcolonial literature and creative writing at a number of
American universities. She is now an associate professor of English at Portland State University. She
wrote three novels, Arabian Jazz (1993), Crescent (2003), and Origins (2007), and a memoir, The
Language of Baklava (2007). Her work features mainly heroines and focuses on Arab American life.

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of the Ideas’’ but is rather ‘‘the heart of things’’ (McGahey 1994, 65). This anti-
platonic appreciation of orphic music should not necessarily be linked with a direct
reference to Orpheus, particularly that Orpheus is considered to have experienced
camouflaged appearances in various mythical and artistic domains.2 Along with this
multifaceted indirect presence of Orpheus, his role as a cultural hero of enchanting
music, and the significant opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian cultural
models, one may underline the magnitude of Orpheus and his music in joining the
extremes in cultural terms, an issue of paramount importance in Abu-Jaber’s novel
which, this study attempts to show, adopts an orphic vision as a model for
harmonizing the conflicting cultural poles of the psyche of the Arab American.
Before discussing the novel’s orphic aspects, it is essential to examine why Orpheus
or orphic music would be of interest to Abu-Jaber; that is, Orpheus’s magnitude as
champion of cultural hybridity.
The concept of hybridity has developed and become popular with the rise of
postcolonial theory. As Edward Said (1993) says, ‘‘Culture conceived in this way
can become a protective enclosure,’’ a matter by which works of literature rooted in
such an understanding of culture represent a reaction against the ‘‘imperial process’’
which stereotyped that culture (xiv). In this context, Roger Bromley argues that
‘‘hybridised discourses are writing very much against the idea of a melting pot or
mosaic… and, if anything, are sites of cultural resistance and refusal,’’ a matter
Bromley relates to Gloria Anzaldua’s notion of a borderland in the light of what she
calls ‘the new mestiza,’ which represents the development of a context for ‘‘a
tolerance for contradictions,’’ the result being ‘‘hyphenated identities, living hybrid
realities which pose problems for classification and control, as well as raising
questions about notions of essential difference’’ (4–5).3 This cultural stance lies
behind Homi Bhabha’s conception of the rise of ‘internationalism’ and the
establishment of a ‘middle passage’ within which a new ‘imagined community’
arises. Such a new community is that in which cultures may interact and influence
each other in a state of co-existence rather than opposition, a creation of a ‘third
2
Scholarship in the field has shown that Orpheus has been transfused with later mythical and more
realistic figures across history. While ‘‘the early musicians were the gods… Next in order came a few
mortals so excellent in their art that they almost equaled the divine performers. Of these by far the greatest
was Orpheus’’ (Hamilton 1989, 103). It is even argued that the Romans also had a god named Faunus and
goddess Fauna, who, like the fauns, were goat-people. The myth of Faunus and Fauna is a later
manifestation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (Macleod 1911). Richard Tarnas argued that ancient
mythical deities defy strict definition since they simultaneously feature as actual deities, allegorical
figures, characters, psychological attitudes, types of experience, philosophic stands, religious doctrines,
and sources of poetic inspiration (Tarnas 1991, 13–14; 16). Orpheus, for example, contributed greatly to
Pythagorean philosophy and science (Tarnas 1991, 23). With the emergence of Christianity, ancient
deities and mythical figures were transformed into moral values, themes, qualities, and representative
characters, Orpheus, for example, becoming an emblem of the good shepherd Christ and the poet-prophet
David (Tarnas 1991, 109–110), particularly that Christian art fused ‘‘religious vision with the Greco-
Roman tradition’’ (Matthews and Platt 2002, 193; 178).
3
The hyphen in the term Arab-American, Fadda-Conrey argued, is ‘‘an elemental component of Arab-
American identity… the hyphen itself replicates this complexity of ‘cultural realities,’ instead of
mirroring a ‘well formulated synthesis’’ (204). That is, the hyphen suggests that the word ‘Arab’ is not a
modifier for the word ‘American’, but an equal part with the hyphen suggesting a bridge between the two.
Thus, while ‘‘the hyphen implies a well-formulated and/or single synthesis of the Arab and American,’’ it
does not sort out the ‘‘complex realities of the community’’ (Hatem 1998, 386).

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space’ about which Bhabha says: ‘‘it is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation
and negotiation, the in between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of
culture’’ or the ‘‘the politics of polarity’’ by which ‘‘we emerge as others of
ourselves’’ (38–39). Hence, Bromley asserts that such writers with ‘hyphenated’
identities experience ‘‘contradictions and ambivalences, split between home and
school languages, physically and racially marked as others yet only knowing
America,’’ an experience that is ‘‘marginal’’ or ‘‘between cultures’’ (104–105; 115).
Bromley’s emphasis on location brings once again Bhabha’s (1994) assertion, in
The Location of Culture, that: ‘‘the social articulation of difference, from the
minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize
cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation’’ (2).
Bromley describes such ‘‘discourse of boundary’’ in the ‘‘host society’’ as
‘‘strategies of the diasporised’’ which he relates to ‘‘a matter of ‘becoming’
(negotiation, perhaps) as well as ‘being’ (maintenance, perhaps)’’ (9; 10). Hence,
Abu-Jaber’s novels might be creations of a desired space, a third way of sorting out
cultural clashes. In such a space, the stigmatized perception of the other, the Arab-
American, may be neutralized. Although she seems on certain occasions perpetuate
traditional stereotypes of Arabs, of Arab women, and especially of Islam, Abu-Jaber
shares most Arab-American writers their concern about neutralizing misrepresen-
tation of their ethnicity.
Critics of Abu-Jaber relate the jazz in her novel and in other Arab American
literature to African American art, because there was much in common between
Arab Americans and African Americans, including racist stigmatization, detention,
and suspicion (Samhan 11–28; see also Majaj 1999b). Many others considered this
affinity the motive for identification with African American art (Hartman 2006,
146ff; Hartman 2002; Majaj and Amireh 2002). It is thus argued that Abu-Jaber’s
use of Jazz is part of this identification—African American identity now an
established part of the American community—and a means to escape the
constraints on Arab American identity and literature (Hartman 2006, 149; Shalal-
Esa 2002, 4–6; Shakir 1993–1994, 75–76). As Hartman puts it, because ‘‘the
Ramouds do not quite fit into this poor white community that has few ‘ethnics,’
their friends, family, and neighbors understand them in relation to African
Americans,’’ an attitude that reflects ‘‘the unstable racial categories of Arab
Americans’’ and thus ‘‘the ‘jazz’ of the [novel’s] title begins as a reference to
‘black music,’ but then becomes ‘Arab’.’’ (Hartman 2006, 153–154). Hartman
concludes that in their use of Jazz, Arab American poets and novelists have made
‘‘connections [that] can be seen as appropriations of African American musical
traditions in the service of Arab American identity building’’ (Hartman 2006, 160).
Hence, Hartman’s examination of Arab American literary incorporation of Afro-
American jazz comes along with issues of cultural representation and identity,
such as the unstable Arab American racial identity in the light of that of other
ethnic minorities in America.
This issue of unstable racial identity has already been examined along with the
Arab immigration to America and the legal and social developments of categorizing
Arabs as ‘white’ or ‘not white’, matters that contributed to the shaping of the Arab
American sense of ethnic identity, which basically passed from a desire to

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assimilate to a yearning for minority status.4 Ahdaf Soueif described such a state
saying ‘‘it meant that I had to make a choice and stick with it. And whichever group
I opted for I would be despised by the other,’’ a social demarcation process that
belongs to ‘‘the ‘with us or against us’ mentality’’ (Soueif 2004, 4). Rather than
exclusive identification, Soueif sought an identification based on acceptance of
difference; she is against ‘‘the mentality that forces you to self-identify as one thing
despite your certain knowledge that you are a bit of this and a bit of that’’ (Soueif 4).
Soueif’s solution for such a troubled identity and catastrophic social classification
was reflected in what she called the ‘mezzaterra’ which she defines as ‘‘[T]his
territory, this ground valued precisely for being a meeting-point for many cultures
and traditions’’ (Soueif 6). Thus, later generations of Arab Americans proposed
cultural hybridity as a better frame for coexistence and interaction with the other
components of the American community. Carol Fadda-Conrey called this stance a
‘‘borderland of ethnic intersections’’ which ‘‘features various intersecting cultures
and maps different minority groups… that occupy the same geographical and ethnic
space,’’ within which the ethnic group can maintain its distinction and at the same
time coexist with other ethnicities (Fadda-Conrey 2006, 188; 191–192). It is within
such understanding of borderland that the Arab American community may establish
their own distinctive ethnicity and negotiate with others. Hence, fiction becomes a
mechanism of defining one’s individual and communal identity, a matter that Abu-
Jaber distinctively does and discusses in her work, whereby writing is presented as
an act of inventing/discovering the self. As migrant narratives, Abu-Jaber’s novels
‘‘are equally concerned with developing appropriate metaphorical resources for
constructing a self through tropes of agency, cohesion and continuity which are
simply recognised as ‘ethnic’, or ‘different’,’’ because, after all, ‘‘storying is a
process of self and other recognition, sustained and mediated through cultural
vocabularies’’ (Bromley 2000, 120).
The connection with African Americans is an interesting way of looking at the
recruitment of music in Arabian Jazz, but I propose to see it as an orphic element—
which can also account for issues of confused identity, along with traditional orphic
Arab American literature, as in the case of Gibran Khalil. It is a pity that none of
those critics paid attention to the orphic aspect as a significant model of harmony for
the Arab American nor even thought about its occurrence in the earliest Arab
American literature of Gibran. Gibran’s great interest in the power of orphic music
need not be disputed. For him, the pipe and piper are pacifiers of conflicts between

4
The inclusion of the Arab American community within the category ‘white’ by the ‘‘US Census
Bureau… [meant] this group has no legal position within the spectrum of minority cultures from which it
can legally articulate its communal concerns about discrimination’’ (Fadda-Conrey 188; see also Salaita
2001; Naff 1985; West 2000). Historically, Arab immigration to the US passed into three sages; the first
immigrants were mainly Lebanese Christians who by then rejected any national identification with the
Arab world and sought assimilation in the American community as white citizens (Naber 1998, 1–2). The
second and third groups of immigrants were mostly Muslims with strong national sentiments and less
interest in assimilation (Saliba 1999, 311–312). Apart from the first-phase immigrants, Arab Americans
sought minority status rather than inclusion in the category ‘white’ (Gualtieri 2001, 52; Majaj 1999a,
322). This lead to an unstable Arab American identity marked by ‘‘honorary’’ or ‘‘probationary
whiteness’’ and a precarious legal and social status (Massad 1993, 101; Samhan 2000, 11–27; Haney-
Lopez 1996, 49–77; Gualtieri 2001; Jacobson 1998, 57, 174).

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body and spirit, Dionysus and Apollo, a matter reflected in Jem’s aforementioned
interest in orphic music ‘that was a thing of the heart or the body’. The recurring
couplet in Gibran’s ‘‘Al-Mawakib’’ is a clear testimony to this orphic vision: ‘‘Give
the pipe and sing for the sad singing of the pipe lasts after the extinction of
existence;’’ orphic music dominates the poem: ‘‘Give me the pipe and sing for
singing erases calamities/Give me the pipe and sing for singing is the best drink’’
(my translation). Orpheus is the eternal piper whose music harmonizes all opposites
and Gibran used this orphic vision in his poetry while seeking harmony between his
spirit and body, his real life and imagined and desired existence, a harmony
Abu-Jaber and the Arab American needed. This vision requires an understanding of
Orpheus and of music according to cultural theory, whereby the myth of Orpheus
can be seen as a model for cultural harmony and music or song ‘‘[A]s a form of
cultural expression’’ (Herndon 1992, 165–166).5
Orpheus is the opposite of Prometheus.6 As Walter Strauss says, ‘‘the antithesis
to the Orpheus myth is the Promethean theme.’’7 Prometheus and Orpheus are demi-
gods and mythological ‘‘culture-heroes’’; the former defies Zeus in behalf of
mankind and is martyred for his deeds, while the latter is ‘‘the eternal rebel’’ whose
attitude towards the unjust external world has different implications, for he provides
an example of the individual’s inner metamorphosis by reforming himself (Strauss
10). The Orphic and Promethean themes are different attitudes of social
transformation. Orpheus is also known as the harmonizer of Apollonian and
Dionysian principles. Apollo is associated with heaven, the spirit and air, while
Dionysus is connected to Earth and the body. Orpheus reconciles these opposites.
His lyre, musical powers and abandoning of earthly joy associate him with the solar
enlightenment of Apollo, who also had the ability to calm wild beasts by his music
(Strauss 18; Guthrie 1993, 42). Besides, Orpheus’s death relates him to Dionysus
who was torn asunder by the Titans (Strauss 39). Hence, Orpheus ‘‘ideally suited to
bridge the gap between two modes of looking at the world… the fusion of the
Apollonian dream and of Dionysiac intoxication’’ to become, as Strauss calls him, a
‘‘servant of Dionysus and pupil of Apollo’’ (Strauss7; 18). That is, ‘‘If he [Orpheus]
preached the religion of Dionysus he at the same time reformed it’’ (Guthrie 41–42).
In other words, Orpheus is both rather than either.
5
It is argued that ‘‘points in which the human life cycle that are recognized as important in a given
society will be marked by song’’ (Herndon 165–166), an understanding drawn from ‘ethnomusicology’
which accounts for the relation between music and ethnicity (Blacking 1992, 86–92).
6
Orpheus, the son of Oeagraus and Calliope, was a lyricist possessed of powers by which all nature was
subdued. He married Eurydice who died soon after their marriage. Setting off on a journey to the
underworld and pleasing Pluto and Persephone by the power of his song, Orpheus was permitted to bring
Eurydice back on condition that he would not look back at her till they cross the edge of the underworld, a
condition he did not fulfil and thus lost her again, to return to the upper world alone. He then discarded
feminine company and was hence attacked by the female followers of Dionysus and torn apart with his
head floating down the river to eternally play music, sing, and prophesy (Strauss 1971, 5–6).
7
Prometheus, an aid to Zeus, is the son of Iapetus and Clymene. Prometheus disagreed with Zeus over
the unjust distribution of a sacrificial animal between the gods and man, and when Zeus refused to permit
man the gift of fire, Prometheus stole it from Heaven and returned it to Earth. Zeus punished Prometheus
in two ways; first, he created Pandora and sent her to Earth with a box full of evils to spread among
mankind; second, he chained Prometheus to a rock to be daily tortured by a vulture devouring his liver
which would regenerate every night. (Strauss 10; Marcuse 162; 171).

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Prometheus does not reconcile opposites and rather emphasises their collision.
Thus, Prometheus suits works of literature promoting a notion of revolution while
Orpheus those liberal and peace-mongering ones, with internal individualistic
reformation leading to communal transformation. These ‘internal’ dimensions of the
Orphic voice are meant to reflect on the external reality, the social scene, whether on
the political, religious, literary or social level. The harmonising Orphic vision
attempts social change at large, though it approaches it through the individual. This
is exactly the case of Abu-Jaber who considered writing an act of imagining and
inventing the self (qtd. in Norton and Comp., para. 5 of 6)8 and who attempted to set
on an inward journey, into the self, to establish a sense of identity that can live
amidst the opposites. Rather than the promethean method of revolution, she adopts
the orphic vision of peaceful co-existence amongst contraries with recognized and
accepted differences. Abu-Jaber lived and wrote the psychological chasm the Arab
American suffers because of the conflicting nature of living in, Suad Joseph
described, ‘‘two worlds that have often been in conflict’’ (Joseph 1988, 25).
Abu-Jaber represents this situation in the symbolic setting:
He saw their country home as a place of perfect forgetting, lost in a gully of
trees, boundless fields… the bedrooms were downstairs facing over the front
lawn, living and dining rooms up; everything was a little odd about the
place… Jem loved the new house. It was sprawling, almost haphazard in
design… it was a dark place, close with memory, the scent of absence. (86)
While Matussem is troubled by such a place in which he sought to forget and be
forgotten, Jem likes it and considers it perfect for remembering; two contrary views
of the same place are brought together as one and another rather than one and the
other, the former belonging to the older (male) and the latter to the younger (female)
generations of Arab Americans. The symbolic descent represented by the setting
seems like Orpheus’s downward journey before his ascent. Before choosing
American or Arab culture, Abu-Jaber seems to suggest, the young Arab American
(female) need to comprehend the two. Rather than the constantly revolting
Prometheus, the preferred mythical model for the Arab American is Orpheus, the
peaceful harmoniser of opposites. Abu-Jaber tries to perform such a role as she
assimilates Arab themes into her fiction, cultural attitudes which she criticizes along
with counter details of the American community, an act marking her attitude of
fusing Arab and American cultures.

Hybridizing Critique of Arab and American Extremes

While criticizing her own minority, Abu-Jaber also offers a critique of cultural
values in the American community. She seeks comprehensive social amelioration
based on understanding all opposites before reforming and harmonizing them. She
brings the internal conflicting poles of Arab American life side by side. Her
characters speak on behalf of these sides. Fatima, on the one hand, and Melvina and

8
Available at: http://www.wwnorton.com/rgguides/originrgg.htm.

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Jem, on the other, are such contesting opposites. Through these characters
Abu-Jaber presents the contending feminist views of the novel. The disputed
perceptions of Arab American women are those regarding the female body, makeup,
marriage and babies, though these women altogether are in a conflict with the other
women of the American community concerning the proper means of preserving
one’s own cultural background. Fatima holds strongly to traditional Arab views as
she remains ‘‘true to the ways of her mother and mothers before her’’ (41) and Jem
and Melvie criticize Fatima’s view. Nonetheless, both suffer racism in the American
community which is also presented in the novel to have similar problems of
marriage, female body and babies. Abu-Jaber brings the two communities to face
their own realities. Her liberal and objective vision is also grounded into her own
cultural background; she refers to the Bedouin saying ‘‘in the book of life, every
page has two sides’’ (78). By presenting the multilayered sides of this conflict, she
attempts to harmonize all rather than side with any; she seeks a middle state, an
orphic goal of establishing cultural negotiation. No wander then that, in a critical
essay examining Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Dian Abu-Jaber appreciates the character
of Shahana who resists the dictates of her oriental cultural past to live as ‘‘daughter
of both East and West’’ (Abu-Jaber 2003, 27–28).
One major moral concern for Arab American families is the sexual behavior of
their daughters whom they arrange to marry Arab men to procreate children who
will preserve their original Arab culture. Arabian Jazz is emphatic on the ‘‘sacred
obligation’’ to marry ‘‘someone’s son… to preserve the family’s name and honor’’
(10). This moral concern, however, is accompanied by animalistic brutality: ‘‘Each
summer, visiting Auntie Nabila or Lutfea or Nejla would take Jem’s face between
her hands to examine Jem’s lips to see if she’d been kissed. ‘Not yet,’ they’d
whisper, crossing themselves. ‘Alhamd’illah, thanks be to God. She is a good girl!’’’
(9–10). The young Arab American girl has to comply with the dictates of her
original culture or be considered evil or animal, a shrew to be tamed: ‘‘You get a
skittishness in you like a horse around cows. What you need is an experienced
cowboy’ (24). On the other hand, the male is in a better position in patriarchal Arab
culture that favors him: ‘‘There had been seven girls… When Matussem was finally
born… there was at last ease in her parents’’ (118). Matussem ‘‘was born so
fortunate! Born a man’’ (334) whereas ‘‘it’s terrible to be a woman in this world’’
but ‘‘there are ways of getting around it… First and last is that you must have
husband to survive on the planet earth’’ (116–117). The male, as a husband, is the
female’s only means of survival in a sexist culture.
Nonetheless, Abu-Jaber evens things when she bluntly presents Fatima as an
animal performing a predatory search for husbands, associating tribal systems with
the laws of the wild:
Fatima reluctantly surrendered Farah Farah. As the party progressed, she
moved through the crowd with predatory concentration, scanning tables, her
hands grazing a shoulder here, an arm there. She moved like a sheikh, with the
sword of her gaze tearing away veils, appraising family trees, bank accounts,
and social standing. (62)

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Fatima is a masculine figure designated as a sheikh. The reference to the sheikh with
a sword alludes to Bedouins (meaning chieftain), to Muslims (Muslim clergyman)
and traditional Arab communities. Nonetheless, Fatima is a fierce predator
surrendering, scanning and grazing; she pursues flesh as she seeks a prey and her
voracious acts are paralleled to pre-marriage inspection of the body of the Arab
female, as done by the veiled mother. Abu-Jaber brings into the spotlight animalistic
treatment of young Arab American girls whose bodies are inspected by mothers of
ugly, aged suitors:
a woman dressed and veiled entirely in black who had moved between her and
Salaam. There was no hint of her except for a pair of aviator glasses propped
over the veil… She circled around Jem and grappled her Jaw. ‘Open’. Jem
jerked back as Melvie grappled the woman’s wrist. ‘unhand her!’ Melvie
cried. ‘Naughty, naughty girls’ the mother said, while Fatima sighed heavily
as if to say, I know. ‘How can I know my daughter-in-law before I know her
teeth? You told me she was a good, obedient girl, sweet as chicken… Allah
the merciful and munificent! A demon-ifrit’. (64)
The mother is caricatured. Like the aforementioned manner in which her aunts took
Jem’s face between their hands to check if she was ever kissed, the veiled woman’s
inspection of Jem’s teeth and breath here is a further satirical criticism of Arab
cultural treatments of women as animals, by women themselves. The girl who
resists such cultural customs is also considered a ‘demon-ifrit’; but if she conforms,
be ‘a good, obedient girl’, she might be honored identity as ‘sweet chicken’. There
might be an orphic interpretation for this. As Herbert Marcuse puts it: ‘‘[T]he song
of Orpheus pacifies the animal world, reconciles the lamb and the lion with man.
The world of Nature is a world of oppression, cruelty, and pain, as is the human
world; like the latter, it awaits its liberation’’ (Marcuse 1955, 166). Putting these
animalistic attitudes under focus, Abu-Jaber attempts that liberation.
In relation to the question of marriage, female make-up is humorously criticized
in the novel: ‘‘Fatima took extra time on her index fingers. They were the most
important… After the fingernails came the eyebrows, tweezed to exclamation
points’’ (41). It is the style of Abu-Jaber that is raised to the exclamation points.
Melvie and Jem disrespect Fatima’s view and annoyingly make fun of it as they
‘‘grow her [their] eyebrows in a line straight across her face if she could, simply to
aggravate Fatima’’ (41). To be fair, Abu-Jaber also caricatures Melvie’s facial
features. She seems to be looking for a state between female’s lack of attention to
her body and extreme obsessions about it. It is this middle place or meeting point
between these cultural attitudes that she might be looking for. In addition, the novel
examines the female body according to the two cultures in which the Arab
American lives. The younger girls prefer to be slim, a shape Fatima attaches to rats:
‘‘Still looking like rats! Starving rats’’ (53). For Fatima, slimness is a sign of
sickness and an obstacle against these girls’ chance of getting married; while
‘‘[I]t helps to have good bust’’ these girls are now ‘‘built like starving rats’’ and they
do not only need to be well-fed and have ‘good bust’ but also to have ‘‘already
snagged some man to see it’’ (116–117). It is not for the sake of healthy life but
rather to attract a husband that Fatima cares about her nieces’ bodies.

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On the other hand, Abu-Jaber couples her critique of Arab cultural stands with a
parallel criticism of American ones. A major conflict in the novel is the racist
treatment of the Arab American in the American community. Jem complains:
‘‘I don’t fit in… I’m so tired of being a child, being good, wanting people to like me.
They don’t like me. They don’t like Arabs’’ (328). She then makes her mind up to
stay in America, to go back to school and fight against racist hatred of Arabs (362).
Jem’s and Melvie’s childhood experiences in America, recalled as memory, are
marred by ‘‘incidents of hostility…, physical aggression and racist labels’’ (Cherif
2003, 211). Arab males also suffer racist treatment. Hence, Abu-Jaber asks for an
American understanding of minorities as well as intra and inter-ethnic understand-
ing and recognition of communal and individual differences. And between Fatima’s
obsession with sexuality, female body, makeup, and marriage and her nieces’
asexuality, lack of interest in marriage, children, makeup and female body,
Abu-Jaber maintains a balance. Such is an orphic attitude.
Criticizing similar attitudes in the American community, Abu-Jaber makes it
clear that she does not target a particular culture but rather a particular cultural
attitude. The novel offers a critique of Western societies in which the female is the
victim of relations outside marriage and it also criticizes rural and other
communities where families produce so many children neglecting the rights,
welfare, and health of the mother, the children, and the community: ‘‘A band of
seven boys, ranging from around ten to eighteen, emerged from the defunct bus…
The Broom kids looked savage. Their faces were sharp and blank, branded with
grime… those children that no body wanted’’ (91–92; 94). They are already drug
addicts ‘‘swallowing stashes of drugs’’ and serious criminals carrying ‘‘knives’’ or a
‘‘pistol’’ (94). Abu-Jaber satirizes the community that produces such children and
their mothers who are constantly pregnant ‘‘that they’re all like balloons with the air
let out’’ (127). Dolores, a representative of such mothers, has been with so many
men and was pregnant most of the time that she can not remember a time when she
was not; asked about her age when admitted to hospital, she says: ‘‘twenty-nine. I
had little Wally when I was twelve… Tell me one thing… Am I still preg?’’ (133–
134). Dolores is a symbol for all similar American or even Arab women living
according to worn out traditions whereby the female is exploited by men who are
not at all lovers nor appreciators of women’s spirituality, a matter that is essential in
Abu-Jaber’s orphic vision which creates the character of Matussem, the orphic
musician and lover.

Orphic Music and the Artist’s Vocation for Cultural Hybridity

Orpheus was a lyrist and his power was present in his music and songs. This is
evident in Arabian Jazz with a mixture of Western (jazz) and Arabic music: ‘‘when
he [Matussem] played jazz they heard noise, and when he played Arabic music, they
could dance’’ (2). It seems that dancing is suggestive of harmony and symbolic of
the characters’ overcoming of their sense of chaotic life. This reveals that both
Arabic and American music (cultures) are to be harmonized, mixed, and coupled so
that the Arab American may lead a bearable existence in exile. It is common sense

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to say the music is a universal language but it should also be stated here that the
novel identifies the nationality of the music, thereby underlining the two cultural
backgrounds of the Arab American. As such, music performs an orphic role of
harmonizing the two contending cultures in the psyche of the Arab American to
bring them into a state of coexistence. Arabian Jazz is ‘cacophonous’ which means
bridging two seemingly incompatible worlds and this is true of the case of the Arab
American in need of harmony in cultural terms.
The novel presents music as an escape and a means to overcome so many
troubles in the Arab American’s life: ‘‘Only at his drums did he seem to focus,
concentrate with the purpose of remembering, steering rhythms into line, coaxing a
steady—in his word, peripatetic—pulse out of air’’ (1). Matussem’s emphasized
concept ‘peripatetic’, meaning wandering, roaming and nomadic, stresses his state
and identity, a person with an unsettled Bedouin life. Music becomes the Arab
American’s way of overcoming confusion and achieving control over his/her
psyche, whereby music becomes a means of focus and concentration for a more
important goal, remembering: ‘‘His wife’s face was imprinted on his conscious-
ness… His sense of loss was sometimes so potent that he became disoriented. His
need to drum grew sharp as a knife cut; he tapped and shuffled behind his desk’’ (1).
Like Orpheus, Matussem lost his wife and sought reconciliation in and by music.
Music and love are interconnected here, a matter that also links with Orpheus who
was a musician and a lover. Like Orpheus, Matussem tries to recover his wife from
the world of death and, failing to do so, he abandons feminine companionship and
lives with the spiritual memory of his dead wife, a memory that is central in his
great interest in music which enables him to achieve that sublimation. Thus,
Abu-Jaber’s treatment of the power of art to overcome the bounds of mortal love is
a stage in her orphic quest, a means for transcending earthly obstacles against
spiritual strength, just along with the aforementioned physical notions of the female
body by which the female is denied her spiritual significance. In dealing with the
theme of love she sides with Orphic artists for whom ‘‘Orpheus is not so much
important as a poet as because he is a lover’’ (Huxley 1932, xiv). Nonetheless, one
may say here that the significance of art (music) is essential for spiritual love which
both Orpheus and Matussem experience by means of memory enabled by music.
In order to remember one may need silence. But it is to be noticed here that in
both cases of noise and silence one cannot hear, for in both cases when nobody is
speaking and when everybody is talking the listener cannot comprehend; thus noise
becomes a means of silencing the speech that hinders memory and remembrance. In
addition, the confusion that the Arab American suffers and the heaviness of the
obligations of his/her American life render a disorganized mentality that, in order to
remember, his/her mentality need be first reorganized. It is in, by, and through music
that reorganization is achieved. For, as evident in the pre-quoted lines, concentra-
tion, focus, and steadiness are merely achieved by drumming; Matussem’s sense of
loss and its consequent disorientation are also behind ‘his need to drum’; and it is in
drumming that he regains control over his life ‘steering rhythms into line’. Music
(drumming) becomes the realm in which the Arab American can achieve or make
the order he/she desperately needs in order to remember. Before moving to memory,
this perception of music needs clarification. Such an understanding is based on the

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cultural significance of music and song. As Herndon puts it, ‘‘song is associated
with marked events, transformations, and resolution of conflict. It serves to create
special kinds of temporal-spatial continua as well as to signal the support of the
social system’’ (emphasis added, Herndon 165–166). It seems that music provides
Matussem with the needed space and time as well as the support of one’s social
background. But Matussem’s music and songs belong to the Arab and American
cultures, hence creating a space in which these two worlds are brought to negotiate,
coexist, and influence each other, in what seems a meeting point, a mezzaterra, or a
borderland.
Nonetheless, Matussem’s Arabic songs carry memories of his original culture.
Memory represents a major conflicting aspect for Matussem and the Arab American
in general. The opposition between the original Arab past and present American
context creates this conflict between the remembered and the lived. St. Augustine’s
definition of memory and recall might help explaining this issue; for him, memory
is:
like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all
kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses… When I use my memory, I ask
it to produce whatever it is that I wish to remember…, allowing my mind to
pick what it chooses, until finally that which I wish to see stands out clearly
and emerges into sight from its hiding place… and as their place is taken they
return to their place of storage, ready to emerge again when I want them.
(Augustine 1961, 214)
According to Augustine, the present and the past are always negotiating in the
human psyche; memory is actively involved in a dialogue with the person’s present
action and feeling. Perhaps one may need to see how far Abu-Jaber believed in this
vision, since the following phrase keeps recurring in her novel: ‘‘Ach du…
Augustin’’ (152).
This negotiation between the past and the present, a mixture of two different
worlds, is presented symbolically in the following reference to music and song:
‘‘Omar Sharif? Or it is Valentino?… ‘Into your tent I will creep’ he sang…I am the
Sheik of Syracuse! The lovely ladies will be all passing out when they are seeing
me’’ (45). Matussem mixes between the Bedouin and the Western/American lover
(Valentino and Sheik) along with a middle state figure represented by Omar Sharif.
In the character of Matussem, Abu-Jaber tries to create this middle point, where the
two opposed cultures are bridged; playing ‘‘Arabic tapes,’’ Matussem ‘‘was adorned
in silver rings, chains, and bronco belt buckle. All that plus his hair, which appeared
to have been dipped in car oil, made him look like a cross between Elvis and
Dracula’’ (emphasis added 56). Matussem poses as an ornamented oriental idol to
become a cross, which represents a meeting point where the opposites are
recognized separately and individually but with a bridge connecting them. To put it
in the light of Soueif’s ‘mezzaterra’, Abu-Jaber believed that Arab Americans
‘‘recognized an affinity between the best of Western and the best of Arab culture;’’
because ‘‘in today’s world a separatist option does not exist; a version of this
common ground is where we all, finally, must live’’ (Soueif 7; 9).

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Matussem and all of Abu-Jaber’s characters are carefully woven to hold symbolic
codes, thereby reflecting the artistry of the novelist. Here lies another possible
motive for Abu-Jaber’s recruitment of an orphic vision. The myth of Orpheus
asserts the power of the artist who can translate the unconscious, a venture
Orpheus’s journey to the underworld symbolises. As Maud Bodkin puts it:
‘‘Entering imaginatively into the full significance of the story, one must, it seems to
me, feel the longing for love as a poet feels it who has power within the sphere of
his art’’ (Bodkin 1934 202; Segal 1989, 4). Abu-Jaber believed in that power. She
employed the myth in her art to achieve a middle state that can ease the unconscious
tension in the life of the Arab American. She is an orphic female writer with her
own unconsciously—or even consciously—tensed literary identity. In addition,
Orpheus’s vision is considered to have materialized a religion called Orphism (Cody
1969, 32). Abu-Jaber preaches such a doctrine; she even refers to a female prophet,
a ‘‘Prophetess’’ (71). She also mixes prayer with music; Matussem ‘‘sat under the
flashing mirrored ball, drumming, praying, alone in the back of the Key West’’
(16–17). Once again, music, which earlier appeared as a mechanism by which the
Arab American can focus and concentrate, is brought as a means by which the Arab
American can find spiritual, psychological settlement. The problems of the Arab
American man, woman, or artist are social, political, religious, literary or otherwise
but they turn, nonetheless, into psychological states. And the psychological aspect
of the myth of Orpheus is thus significant to the Arab American.
In Arabian Jazz, Abu-Jaber managed to voice out her unconscious feelings of
instable identity torn among many conflicting edges and her desire for a harmony
amongst the extremes. The characters she created represent voices of the many
views contesting in her psyche. Aasked if she feels: ‘‘a responsibility to the Arab
and Arab American community as a writer? Some of the stories you tell are the
‘forbidden stories’,’’ she answered:
I am very interested in the matrix of stories that we whisper to each other, the
things that we don’t want to show the outside world, and how that creates the
inside of a culture. I feel like those kinds of secrets and that kind of closing
down is part of what keeps the Arab and American worlds separate from each
other. Part of my project is to try to open that out. And really, sometimes I
push on stereotypes. I will deliberately press on these long-held clichés as a
way of perversely testing them. I really like to try to open everything up…
There is a deliberateness about that for me… I do feel I have a responsibility
to create as true and multilayered a character experience as I can. I’m very
interested in the experience of empathy and creating a connection with the
reader. (Field 2006, 211)
There are a few points to be underlined in this disclosure purposefully quoted at
length. Abu-Jaber admits being concerned about the isolation of Arab American
community which she tries to overcome by facing the truth and discussing the
secrets openly, a matter that can initiate an inter-ethnic reformation process. Abu-
Jaber asserts that this may enable the Arab American to ‘connect and empathize
with others’, and also motivate the others to understand the Arab American. Such
coexistence and mutual understanding can be achieved within the borderland of

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intersection Abu-Jaber creates in her novels which hence become a third space, a
third way of sorting out cultural clashes, a space in which the stigmatized perception
of the Arab American may be neutralized, the mezzaterra contributing to
‘‘demythologizing the representation of the Muslim and the Arab’’ (Soueif 10).
This is an orphic attitude which bridges the gabs rather than strengthen the chasm.
Abu-Jaber stresses her role as an artist who can achieve such inter-ethnic and
intra-ethnic metamorphosis. Creating ‘‘characters that you really connect with…
enables us to feel with other people’’ since ‘‘[N]ovels are tutorials in how to connect
and empathize with others. Novels are one of the very few forms that we have
available to really instruct us in the experiences of others,’’ that matter being not just
‘‘a cultural responsibility—it’s more about art’’ (Field 211). A great deal of the
content of the novel is rendered through Abu-Jaber’s skilled characterization. Her
emphasis on her individual identity as an artist brings into account her image as an
orphic writer. Matussem is the clearly orphic figure in the novel, but it is Abu-Jaber
the novelist who creates this orphic character. The vocation she attaches to her
profession as a writer, her ‘cultural responsibility’, poses her as an orphic artist. She
admits being concerned about initiating understanding within the Arab American
community and also amongst the various components of the American society. She
is thus an orphic artist, not a promethean one. Unlike Prometheus’s alienation,
retreat and rejection, Orpheus’s method of sorting out problems is based on seeking
reconciliation: ‘‘Orpheus does not rebel; he does not lead people; he charms them.
Prometheus aims for an outer transformation of the society… All modern literature
tends to fall within the area of these two points of reference’’ (emphasis added,
Strauss 10–11; Sewell 1971, 404). Abu-Jaber is not a rebel; she does not lead
people; she charms them and leaves them the duty of performing their ‘inner’
individual transformation, just like Orpheus.

Conclusion

To conclude, the following aspects make it inadmissible to argue that the myth of
Orpheus appealed to Abu-Jaber who perhaps built her Arabian Jazz on an orphic
model and vision. First, the myth underlines the hybridizing power of music (art),
a matter celebrated in Arabian Jazz. Second, the myth deals with love, a missed
wife, and a husband’s loneliness after the death of his wife, which is exactly the case
of Matussem. Third, Orpheus is known for his harmonizing role, his ability to join
together the conflicting extremes and Arabian Jazz has so many of these contending
poles: American and Arab cultures; man and woman; the young Arab American
female and the old Arab female; the modern and the traditional. Fourth, the myth is
relevant to Arabian Jazz because it is related to modern Arab American literary
incorporations of music—as in Etel Adnan’s (2000) ‘‘Beirut Hell Express’’ and
Suheir Hammad’s (1999) ‘‘daddy’s song’’—and to traditional Arab American
literature as represented in Gibran, whom Abu-Jaber mentions explicitly in the
novel. Abu-Jaber hence poses as an Orphic artist concerned about harmonizing
contesting parties, a harmony she does not impose but rather suggests. She is also a
prophetess of orphic doctrines. Thus, this study offers an alternative interpretation

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of Abu-Jaber’s novel to be seen side by side with other studies where the issue of
jazz is related to African art as an attempt of the Arab American writers to relate
themselves, their art and their community to other minorities who achieved
recognition in the American community. This orphic model for cultural hybridity
need be considered in cultural studies, particularly in cases of incorporations of
music in minority literatures, along with such concepts as ‘internationalism’,
‘middle passage’, ‘mezzaterra’, and ‘borderland’.

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