From Aloneness to all-Oneness: Evelyn Shakirs Bint Arab as a Site of Settled Places and of Border-Crossings
Evelyn Shakir’s Bint Arab (1997),2 which follows the journeys and un/homed experiences of three generations of Arab-American women and their search for self, identity, and voice, puts a “human face,” to borrow Taynyss Ludescher’s words,3 on Arab-American fiction, and presents multiple perspectival narratives and subject positions which depict the stories, utterances, fractures, slippages, and exilic consciousness of Arab- American women and their attempts to negotiate an inbetween space for themselves in which a potentially vast number of relations coalesce. Shakir’s narrative not only seems to echo Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia,” as it “permits a multiplicity of social voices,”4 but it also seems to resonate with recent scholarship on the ethics of literature, particularly with Martha Nussbaum’s claim that narratives formally construct empathy and compassion “in ways highly relevant to citizenship.”5
