Woe to your sons and lovers.

[ajnabieh]

The fields are your birthplace
but filled with your boa constrictors.
The mines are your cradle
bu filled with their poison.
The mountains of richness are your throne,
but surrounded by their wild animals.
Woe to your sons and lovers.

Your drink is silver and your food is gold
Your dress is the most valuable of silk and
the rarest of jewels.
Your sandals are the wings of knowledge
but your heart is of tar set on fire.
Woe to your sons and lovers.

The daughter of richness and monopoly
In your stores are the productions of the world
In your safes the immense heaps of money and jewels
In your castles the wonders of civilization
And your dark cottages--poverty, hunger and sighs.
Woe to your sons and daughters.

Highness, and immensity in the womb of commerce, called
greatness, and splendor by your merchants, and
this is your beauty.
But woe to them and thee because they are liars.
The beauty of their idols like a dollar, minted
in the night and gilded in the day.
Woe to this beauty.

--Cited by Michael W. Suleiman, in "Impressions of New York City by Early Arab Immigrants," in A Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City."

I love this poem for a lot of reasons--not least that I recognize the New York that this anonymous Arab immigrant wrote about nearly a hundred years ago. But I also wanted to take a moment to acknoweledge the debt I feel to Mike Suleiman, who wrote the article containing this piece. I met Mike write after I defended my dissertation prospectus, at the Middle Eastern Studies Association Conference; he complimented me on my paper, and mentioned an upcoming conference on Arab-American women he was organizing. I remembered seeing the announcement, but, well, I'd be prepping my prospectus, plus my wife and I had just had a baby (he was 5 weeks old at the conference), so I'd forgotten the deadline--I said, "I'm guessing it's too late to submit an abstract? I'd love to come." He gave me a sharp look, and said, maybe--and cornered me in the book exhibit the next day to pitch him prospective articles, and then hassled me into calling him three days later to pitch more fully, and then said to send him an abstract within 24 hours--and so I got a paper accepted to the conference, as I later discovered, two months after the CFP had closed.

Those three days in Manhattan, Kansas, were some of the most productive of my career. The papers varied wildly in topic and tone, but it was my first sustained interaction with the field of Arab-American studies, and the variety of people there, and with whom I got to discuss my work, was amazing. It was at this conference that I became convinced that, if I could help it, I only wanted to go to minor themed conferences from then on, because that is where the intellectual action is. And I owed it to Mike, who grabbed a brand-new and totally inexperienced graduate student and brought her into the big leagues.

The book that will come out of this conference is still very much in progress; the review process takes forever, and it was slowed down by the fact that, shortly after the conference, Mike became ill. He passed away in March of 2010, and is much missed by all of us in Arab-American studies as a pioneer in the field.

There's a conference in his honor planned for the fall, and I'm hoping to attend. (It'll also be my first chance to visit Dearborn--and I think Arab-American studies scholars are among the very few people to be excited to utter those words.) In any case, it's worth thinking fondly on those who gave us our inspiration, especially when they continue to inspire us from the page.