Mapping A Diaspora

I was at first reluctant to review Paul Eid’s Book Being Arab: Ethnic and Religious Identity Building among Second Generation Youth in Montreal because the book is a study of second-generation Arab Canadians (or more precisely, Arab Québécois) and of this group’s ethnic and religious identity. I am a first-generation Arab Canadian or Québécois, among other things, and one of the few secular, heretic non-believers among this group. In short, I am an anomaly in a community where even members of the second generation consider religion to be an important factor in their lives. (According to the statistics in the book, 52 percent say that religion is “very important” and 30.5 percent that it is “important”). I am always slipping and twisting not to be confined within a single identity box with the label “A.” But then, somehow, reading through the book, and perhaps because I have been living in the West for a long time, I found myself feeling a certain communality with the second generation’s mode of an ever-shifting existence, and I was reminded of my own profound rebellion and self-imposed exile from first-generation ways of living and values.

Being Arab is a social and psychological mapping of a very misunderstood and neglected group, the second generation of Arab immigrants living in Montreal. Chapters and questions cover a wide range of topics, including language proficiency, the consumption of cultural goods, in-group friendship and parental commitment to ethnic identity transmission, and the place of religion in second-generation Arab lives. Eid charts the ever-volatile negotiation of identity and endless manoeuvring that is performed and adapted in the presence of the ethnic majority. It is a complex sociological analysis, backed by scientific data, which presents a portrait of the community I had rebelled against in many ways, covering attitudes toward gender, the predominance of organized religion and the confessional divides.

A multifaceted, multilayered and constantly changing identity is certainly not exclusive to Arab second-generation youth. It is virtually a universal second-generation immigrant experience, a fact that Eid is well aware of. As he states in the introduction: “It must be acknowledged that children of immigrants never mechanically replicate the cultural models and patterns to which they have been exposed. Rather, they draw on them to make contextual and multifaceted identity choices.”

What I believe justifies the book’s insular and geographically confined study is Eid’s insight into and awareness of the particularities of this community’s history and values, and the role of gender and religion therein. Such insight makes the community a unique case study. But, in the end, one must also stress that the book is not just an analysis of the Arab community of Montreal but also a reflection on the wider experience of Canadian multiculturism, particularly in Quebec.

The first Arab immigrants to this country were, for the most part, from a Christian Lebanese background. A mixture of religious persecution, war and famine in the motherland pushed this population in great numbers toward the West. In 1915, during the First World War, the Ottomans implemented a blockade of the Lebanese coastline. As a result, many thousands of the Lebanese population died of famine. The identity of this group of Canadians was always one of contingencies and of constant remaking. Some of the oldest generation still call themselves Syrians. Their parents or even grandparents arrived when the region of Syria, Palestine and Lebanon was labelled “Syria” under the Ottoman empire. The Lebanese Syrian Club, on Jean-Talon in Montreal, the oldest place of social gathering for the community, only recently changed its name to the Lebanese Club. On one of my trips to Sherbrooke, while I was working on an art project related to the history of the community, an older man with Lebanese origins told me how, when the community first came to Canada in the late 1800s, the men and one notorious woman (but that is a story on its own) worked as peddlers. This occupation was one that they had inherited from the original peddlers in the province, whom the French locals called at the time “les marchands juifs.” Later, when the Lebanese took over the peddling business, they were known as “les juifs chrétiens.”

The second-largest wave of Arabs to this landscape were, again, mostly Christian Lebanese. They came in 1992 after two factions fought a bloody, brutal battle for dominance of the Lebanese Christian fief. Some of this group, mostly the zealous right-wing Christian nationalists, reject the ethnic label of Arab. The revival of an ancient Phoenician empire as an alternative identity still hovers amongst them like a Wagnerian opera. This constructed identity is the residue of an extreme assertion of Christian nationalism and an unwarranted refusal of any communality with the Muslim majority. To quote Eid:

After September 11, these boundaries were certainly more paraded in the West by some Christians in order to distance themselves from the Muslims, who had become targets of suspicion. Once, over sips of Arabic coffee at my parents’ house, I listened to a Christian Lebanese Canadian man from Leamington, Ontario, tell us how his frequent crossings to the United States were always problematic until he thought to hang a large wooden cross from his rearview mirror. I asked him if this worked. He assured me that it did.

One of the strongest and most insightful aspects of Eid’s book is precisely that elaboration—premised on a deep understanding of the intricacy of the dialectic—of the divide and, more importantly, the communality on cultural and social issues between Christian and Muslim Arabs, particularly on issues of gender, religion and patriarchy. Another strength is how well the book succeeds in situating this internal social fabric against the backdrop of a multicultural metropolis like Montreal.

Eid’s studies on gender and the female role in the Arab immigrant family could only come from an insider who has lived, experienced and reflected on these issues. He describes how female virginity, chastity and the relation between tradition and family honour are important components in the tension that exists within the community—between first and second generation Arabs, and between young men and women (who have different perspectives on this subject). He shows how this tension helps build an invisible fence between the Arab community and the French Québécois. Luckily the book does not present this issue simplistically. For instance, according to Eid’s interviews, within the community the attitudes of young women toward virginity are nuanced. His study also indicates that attitudes on female chastity, honour and “protection” differ little between Arab Christians and Arab Muslims. And throughout the book, Eid does a impressive job of laying the data for potential cultural generalizations—the kinds of simplistic notions that some of the western media would love to exoticize and sensationalize to assert the superiority of one culture over the other—but then swiftly and thoughtfully reassesses these generalizations with nuanced analysis, data and interviews.

As Eid writes:

On the question of prayer frequency among the second-generation Arabs, the statistics in the book show that it is higher for Christians Arabs than for Muslim Arabs:

This is information that Mario Dumont, the current opposition leader of La Belle Province, should certainly consider before any populist assault on the veil and “reasonable accommodation.”

These are just a pair of examples of the data gathered in Being Arab. It is full of such insights. In short, the book is a thorough and thoughtful work that only could have come from within the community.

For me, the read was at times heart-wrenching, most particularly in the last segment of the book titled “Perceived Prejudice and Discrimination.” In this section, all the gathering, mapping and questioning are brought to a close and Eid leaves us with a picture of the complex lives of this sub-group. Theirs is a constant struggle to adjust and negotiate their identities. Eid describes a mode of existence that is characterized by “cultural switch codes” and “ethnic camouflage”—and the latter could well be taken literally. He tells the story of young women living in perpetual disguise, donning the veil at home and short skirts and makeup at school. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Informant K, a Muslim female of Algerian descent:

And here Eid notes that: “Their [second-generation Arabs’] acceptance as Canadians is contingent upon their ‘de-ethnicizing’ themselves in a social context.”

This supports the Hegelian idea of a reflective self-consciousness that depends on a sense of objectification—or what Hegel describes as “I am a being for itself that is only through the other.” It is this ultimate dependence on the Other’s gaze that is depriving these young Arabs of the chance to live authentic lives. Eid succeeds in showing how these young kids are sandwiched between, on the one hand, an archaic first generation’s obsession with mummifying old norms and establishing religious hegemonies carried and preserved like pickles in glass jars in old village attics and, on the other hand, the failed immigration policies dictated by establishments and bureaucrats dwelling in old castles and high rises. These policies, Eid argues, act as a kind of pacifying opium behind a smokescreen called Canadian multiculturalism.

In the final chapters, Eid proceeds to compare the diasporic Arab communities in France and in Canada. According to Eid, both communities are subjected to discrimination. But the two countries’ policies—and the reactions of the ethnic communities to these policies—are very different. France’s assimilationist approach aims for a forced integration, whereas Canada’s multicultural ideal permits—if it does not exactly encourage—minority groups to maintain their ethno-cultural differences. In France, the confrontational relationship between the Arab second generation (“les Beures,” as the French-born children of North African immigrants are called in France, a word created first by reversing the order of the syllables of arabe—pronounced in French as “a-ra-beu”—and then, eventually, dropping the last syllable to arrive at a word similar to beurre, or butter in English) and the majority is part of a wider dynamic, namely the struggle of the neo-colonized in French society. In contrast, the Arab Canadian relationship to the majority is not framed by historical injustices. Eid argues that discriminatory practices in Canada are far subtler. He cites Raymond Breton’s 1983 study, which shows “very low levels of racial discrimination awareness among visible minorities in Canada; rates of self-reported discrimination among Canada’s racialized minorities are abnormally low,” according to Breton, “when measured against the actual magnitude of the problem.”

Post-9/11, there is a new fascination in the West with Arabic culture and the Islamic world. Books and movies abound, and departments of Arabic and Islamic studies are even popping up like mushrooms in North American universities. Recently I posed this question to a friend who taught at a newly founded Arabic studies department on a Canadian campus: Who attends these courses?

Three groups, he said. Those curious about the culture and language, including third and fourth-generation Arabs or Muslims. A few academics. And then he stopped.

And the third group? I asked.

The third, he whispered, then smirked and mumbled two words—words that could summarize a series of critical theory essays, from Michel Foucault’s study of power and knowledge to Edward Said’s of culture and imperialism: RCMP officers.