‘Suheir Hammad’s Negotiated Historiography of Arab America

The paper deals with the rise and restoration of the Arab American agency from a place of potential exile into a negotiated space of cultural existence. The attempt to create a realm of art that negotiates ethnic and racial specifity as it carves a space for itself represents the foundational logic of Suheir Hammad’s artistry. The study argues that objectification in Arab American representation conditions the psychotic foreclosure of history of the Arab American self. It is a process premised upon the inability to assimilate historical precepts- not that history does not exist, but that one’s present perception falls short of envisioning it into wholesomeness, owing to a breach, or a willful rejection of an incompatible instance that occurred in the past.
 
A confrontation with western historiography as the normative mode of narrativization is suggested in the study as a necessary starting point for reclaiming an authentic version of a true Arab American past. The reclamation of a mediated history of self and otherness outside of the patriarchal structure of western hegemony and the initiation of a relationship with the language of the Diaspora through hybridization lead to the conditioned birth of a new Arab American voice consciousness. A deconstructive negotiated historiography should deal with a direct engagement with difference not as a contested category of discord but as one that allows for a trajectory of cultural and historical emergence and intellectualization of vistas of Arab culture. The paper postulates that Suheir Hammad’s Born Palestinian Born Black, Breaking PoemsandZataar Divarearticulatesuchnegotiated historiography of Arab American cultural consciousness. Analysis of selected poems from the three volumes locate such new cultural consciousness.