American Arabesque

Front matter

ARABS, ISLAM, AND THE IQ9TH-CENTURY

IMAGINARY

American Arabesque

Contents

Preface: Roadside Attraction Acknowledgments

Introduction: Guest Figures

The Barbarous Voice of Democracy Pentimento Geographies

Preface

Roadside Attraction

Every January 10, the desert city of Quartzite, Arizona, holds a festival in honor of the “Syrian” camel driver Hi Jolly. Often cited as the first Arab to make his permanent residence in America, Hi Jolly arrived in the United States in 1856 as part of Jefferson Davis’s Fort Tejon Camel Corp experiment. The story of the Camel Corps is a story of fascinating failure. Davis sought to provide a reliable long-distance supply system for the dispersed forts on the frontier and commissioned forty or so camels to be shipped to the American Southwest from the Levant for that purpose. The camels performed well, but the outbreak of the Civil War made their job obsolete. Most of the dromedaries were dispersed in the desert. Eventually they entered into the myth of the American West spawning numerous folk tales and ghost stories. Reportedly the camels were last sighted as late as 1946. A man named Hadji Ali was among the camel drivers who accompanied the beasts of burden from the Levant. When the camels were released, Ali remained in the Arizona territory, occupying a number of colorful jobs before his death in 1902. A pyramidal monument marks Ali’s gravesite in Quartzite’s pioneer cemetery (figure 1). Atop the tomb is a bronze camel.

The Hi Jolly Memorial is significant not because it marks the burial site of the “first Arab” to live in America but rather because it demonstrates the role of translation in creating American images of the Arab, in creating American arabesques. The plaque adjacent to Ali’s tomb explains that because the soldiers whom the “Syrian” was tasked with training in the ways of the camel could not pronounce “Hadji Ali,” they changed it to “Hi Jolly.” Hadji Ali signifies, to a speaker of Arabic, a devout man who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca in accordance with religious duty. Hi Jolly, to an English speaker, is a somewhat ridiculous name that evokes laughter even as it speaks to the incongruity of a Levantine camel driver trying to x Preface

Figure 1. Hi Jolly Memorial, Quartzite, Arizona. Photograph by Jacob Rama Berman.

make his fortune on the nineteenth-century American frontier. Both significations, in their own cultural context, are appropriate nominations for the man behind the name. But between the two there is a cultural gap, one that can only be bridged by attention to the multiple linguistic registers the name evokes.

The name Hadji Ali is Arab. The name Hi Jolly is an arabesque—an imitation of the original that translates its meaning into a new cultural context. American arabesques emerge from the contact between Americans and Arab culture. American Arabesque traces the influence of this contact on the literary formation of nineteenth-century American identity. It is my argument that in the nineteenth century, Arabo-Islamic

Preface xi figures were woven into the very fabric of American culture. To dismiss the presence of referents such as Sherezade, Mecca, Alhambra, and the Sahara in contemporary America as kitsch or as mere adornment is to ignore the deep influence Arab culture has had and continues to have on the American imaginary, both national and personal.

The plaque relating the details of Hadji Alis American name change also relays the tantalizing piece of information that the camel driver had a Greek name, reading “His Greek (?) name was Philip Tedro.” The bracketed question mark embedded in the official history of Hi Jolly speaks volumes about the vernacular slippages of his identity. Was this putative first Arab resident in America actually a Greek man born in Smyrna who then converted to Islam and took the Hajj (thus acquiring the nickname “Hadji”)? Research on Philip Tedro reveals several sources devoted to the man’s Greek ancestry. These sources claim Hi Jolly as a pioneer Greek American. When later in life Ali/Jolly/Tedro married a woman from Tucson, he insisted on his Greek ethnicity (perhaps in order to avoid racist marriage restrictions). Yet his daughters were purportedly raised as Muslims. Other men in the group of Levantine camel drivers brought over in 1856 are alternately identified as Arabs, Turks, and Greeks in historical accounts. What would it mean if Hadji Ali was not an Arab from Syria but rather a mixed Greek-Syrian who took an Arab name?

Hadji Ali’s multiplicity of names gesture toward the profound cultural multiplicity of the nineteenth-century Levantine context from which he hails. The competing claims about Hi Jolly’s origin and legacy demonstrate that European, Turkish, and Arab culture are often blended in nineteenth-century American representations of the Orient. On the whole, whether a person is marked as a Turk, an Arab, an Oriental, a Syrian, or a Muslim has much more to do with an American context than it has to do with the actual cultural or ethnic background of the subject. The mystery surrounding Ali/Tedro indexes larger questions about the American imaginary and the place Arab and Islamic culture hold in it. What does it mean exactly to be Arab? For my purposes, what does it mean to be called an Arab in nineteenth-century America? How and when was being Arab different from being a Turk, a Syrian, a Jew, or an Oriental in American nomenclature? What are the stakes when these delineations are made?

Acknowledgments

The inspiration for this book is the time I have spent in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Near East. The people I met in these places, the stories I heard, and the things I have learned and unlearned about Arabo-Islamic culture motivated me to take a closer look at its representation in American literature. I had long felt that the narrative about Orientalist aesthetics dominating the conversation in the American academy told only part of the story. It took actual and prolonged firsthand contact with the Arabo-Islamic world to open my eyes and ears to the other parts.

This book has many translators, men, women, and organizations that have helped me turn ideas into words on the page. To Elsie Michie I owe a debt beyond my capacity to describe. The ultimate fruition of this book would be inconceivable without her patient engagement with both its ideas and its writing style. At every turn and with every read, Elsie has made this book better. I also owe a tremendous debt to my close friend, the indefatigable Matthew Sandler. Matt’s perspicacity, referential capacity, and sympathetic intelligence made this project a pleasure to share and were integral to its final improvements. I have received particularly illuminating commentary on sections of this book from Wail Hassan, Courtney Thorssen, Lauren Coats, Akram Khater, and Hester Blum. The engagement of these particular scholars is especially gratifying because of the immense respect I have for their own work in both American Studies and Arab American Studies. Lily Balloffet has been an invaluable resource for me as well, and this book has benefited incalculably from her historical knowledge, perceptive eye, and sensitive ear.

I thank Ivy Wilson for lending his considerable talents to American Arabesque in a number of ways both material and spiritual. I benefited a great deal from an invitation Ivy extended to me to present at a Nineteenth-Century American Literature conference he organized in the spring of 2008 at Notre Dame University. I received generous input on my xiii xiv Acknowledgments project that weekend from Dana Nelson, Chris Castiglia, Rodrigo Lazlo, David Luis-Brown, Glenn Hendler, and Chris Freeburg. This is also where I met David Kazanjian, who had the faith in the book that eventually led to my connection with NYU Press. The staff at NYU Press has made the experience of publishing my first book a pleasure from start to finish. To Eric Zinner and Ciara McLaughlin I extend my personal appreciation for your warmth and professionalism. I also would like to give a heartfelt thank you to the series editors, Priscilla Wald, Elizabeth McHenry, and David Kazanjian. My pride in the work I have produced is augmented by the superior quality of the scholarship these three editors have produced individually.

This book would not be possible without the institutional guidance, support, and training I have received over the years. From my time at the University of Chicago, I want to thank Gerald Graff, William Veeder, J. M. Coetzee, and Robert von Hallberg in particular for helping me hone the craft of research. I took a class with Bill Brown in the spring of 1996 that opened my eyes to the wonderful complications of nineteenth-century American literature, and for that, I thank him as well. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, I learned what it meant to be a professional scholar and teacher from the examples of Maurizia Boscagli, Giles Gunn, Chris Newfield, Aranya Fradenburg, and Dwight Reynolds. Maurizia’s intellectual honesty and scholarly rigor still drives me to do better and think smarter. Giles always asked me the right questions, the ones that made me puzzle through my arguments from a different vantage point. Chris’s enviable talent of distilling complex phenomena and sophisticated analysis into straightforward language has taught me a great deal about what good writing looks like. Aranya nurtured my propensity to make counterintuitive connections, and she encouraged me to take risks, for which I am forever grateful. I would also like to thank Rita Raley and Stephanie LeManager, both of whom gave me timely writing advice when they easily and justifiably could have demurred. Dwight is everything you could ever hope for in an intellectual interlocutor—incisive, knowledgeable, and demanding. He is also the most inspiring language teacher I have ever had. The classic Arabic poems you made me memorize, Dwight, have unlocked countless smiles and doors for me. I thank Magda Campo, Sandra Campbell, and Dwight for setting me on the path to speaking, reading, and writing Arabic. The job of a language teacher demands patience and passion. These three have an enormous supply of both. I would also like to thank the teachers and the staff at the Yemen Language

Acknowledgments xv

Center in Sana’a, Yemen, and at ALIF in Fez, Morocco. My experience in both Yemen and Morocco was immeasurably improved by the graciousness, hospitality, and kindness of the people who work at these two language centers. The English Department at Louisiana State University has provided me with all the intellectual camaraderie I could have ever hoped for. I am especially thankful for the various forms of support extended by J. Gerald Kennedy and Rick Moreland. Jerry’s expertise in all things Poe is an invaluable resource, but even more importantly, for me, he has always been open to entertaining a different perspective on subjects in which he is the expert.

The book never would have been completed without the financial and temporal support provided by fellowships. During my time at graduate school in California, I received multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships from the U.S. government. Without the FLAS awards, I would not have been able to travel to the Arab world for study and research. These stints abroad changed the very fabric of my project and helped me develop the language skills necessary to write the kind of book I believe in. The University of California also generously supported my project while I was in graduate school, in the form of several research fellowships and a President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship. The funding and teaching releases I was afforded as a result of this support allowed me to spend essential time with the archives at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. I would like to thank the staff at the Huntington Library for their attention and assistance. The Office of Research and Development at Louisiana State University has provided welcome financial support for this project in the form of a generous year-long research travel fellowship and two summer research stipends. These awards allowed me to give sedulous attention to archives at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., at the New York Public Library’s main branch, at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I would also like to thank the staffs at these libraries for their help, as well as their patience.

There have been many who have shaped this book in more informal ways. Dan Binkiewicz, Vaughn Montgomery, Adam Durflinger, Magaly Carranza, Teddy Macker, Laura Macker, Ryan Goodspeed, Aysha Hidayatullah, Aaron Tapper, Layla Lyne-Winkler, Jason Loverti, Chris Holmes, Rand Dotson, Todd Hedge, Sherri Folk, Hannah Shaw, and Ken Shaw have all, at one time or another, given me a reason to write something that matters. If I ever wondered why I was writing the book, I almost xvi Acknowledgments always thought of one of them. Finally, I thank Richard and Elizabeth Berman, my parents. This book is full of words, but I still don’t possess the ones that express how much I love you. I am grateful to the end for your steadfast belief in me.

An early version of chapter 1 appeared in the journal American Literature, and an early version of chapter 3 appeared in the journal ESC: English Studies in Canada.