by Jordan Elgrably

Levantine Cultural Center has the good fortune to welcome to our national advisory board three Middle Eastern iconoclasts, Nathalie Handal, Ella Habiba Shohat and Babak Nahid, each of whom has exercised a decisive influence on my own development in contextualizing Middle Eastern cultures. In fact, each of these writer-activists has played a significant role in bringing greater understanding to American readers—Nathalie as a poet and editor of a groundbreaking anthology of Arab women poets; Ella as a film critic and post-colonial scholar; and Babak as the editor-publisher of the former journal, Suitcase.

When people ask me how I came to conceive of Levantine Cultural Center in the first place, it takes me back to my own inner journey of discovery, looking for the shards of my cultural identity in the bookstores and cafés of Paris and Madrid during the 1980s. My father was an immigrant from France but his family had left Morocco early in the 20th century to look for prosperity in France, where they remained (although from 1941 to 1945 they hunkered down in Casablanca to escape the worst of the war years). Growing up in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. during the '70s, I did not experience much Arab or North African culture. It was really in Paris in the '80s, which had a large population of Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians and Lebanese, that I started reading Arab writers, making the connections between common stories of exile, immigration and hybridity.

Returning to Los Angeles during the '90s, I looked around and saw a growing population of people of Middle Eastern and North African heritage, but found there was no focal point to bring these communities together. Early in 1997, I began organizing public programs on contemporary Arab, Iranian and Sephardic culture, and a few years later, a core nucleus of committed activists cofounded Levantine Cultural Center with me. Our vision has been to create the region's first pan-cultural Middle Eastern arts complex, a project taken shape in gradual stages...

(L to R) Deema Shehabi, Elmaz Abinader, Dima Hilal and Nathalie Handal

I first got to know Nathalie Handal in New York during my visits there in the late '90s. Later, when her fine anthology The Poetry of Arab Women appeared, I invited her to Los Angeles for her first Levantine program, which took place at Beyond Baroque in Venice in November 2001, with Nathalie, Deema Shehabi, Elmaz Abinader and Dima Hilal reading. The event was cosponsored by Al Jadid magazine and editor Elie Chalala (pictured at right).

Nathalie described her own story in a recent interview, in which she says, "I grew up in Europe, the United States and the Caribbean. My grandfather was born in Bethlehem and emigrated to the West in the early twentieth century, and my parents mainly grew up with a French education, and of course, with strong Christian Bethlehemite traditions, this was transmitted to me. When my parents left Europe and went to Boston I was about one or two. I spent many years in Boston before we left again for the French islands, and then eventually, I went back to study and live in Boston, France and much later on England. So I basically grew up with a strong French-American-Bethlehemite culture if I could put it that way…. I often go to Bethlehem and its narrow streets, stone houses, the olive trees, lemon trees, orange trees, the smell of rose wood in the prayer beads, the nativity church, constantly roams inside of me… even if it is a fragmented experience…

"When I left the United States for Paris in 1992, I started to work more with the Arab world, and I soon realized that Arab women writers were marginalized in Arabic literature and the Arab literary scene. I also knew that in the United States, Arab-American women authors were one of the most invisible groups in the American literary circle. At the same time, Arab women writers were virtually unknown to Arab-Americans and Americans in general, and Arab-American women writers unknown to the Arabs. So it became very important for me to give birth to this project in order to eradicate invisibility, introduce Arab women poets and demonstrate the incredible diversity of Arab women's poetry. It was equally vital to unite these Arab women poets regardless of what language they wrote in and whether they were born in the Arab world or not. Hopefully, this anthology will be taught in schools, colleges and universities and will finally give Arab women poets the recognition they deserve. (Remarks excerpted from an interview in Pif Magazine with Rachel Barenblat.)

Ella Habiba Shohat is an Israeli-born author whose family emigrated from Iraq; she has been living in New York for most of the past twenty years. Her early work includes Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, and she became known for championing the Arab cultural identity of Middle Eastern Jews, in essays such as Reflections of An Arab Jew. Though she took this stand in the 1990s, it continues to rankle the Jewish community until today (see the latest attack in the Forward).