Middle Eastern and North African Studies Colloquium Series

Arab Family Narratives: Death, Graves, and Obituaries in Amin Maalouf’s Origins with Dr. Salah D. Hassan

Abstract: Documenting the lives of Arab immigrants to the Americas in the 1880-1920 period is a vexed affair. Often Arabs who left villages in Ottoman-ruled Syria disappear into the masses, leaving behind few traces. In other cases, Arab immigrants participated prominently, producing an abundance of records attesting to their presence. Even when there is an archive, the lives of Arab immigrants remain a mystery. In Origins, Amin Maalouf, the French Lebanese novelist, narrates his family history, focusing largely on the life of his paternal grandfather, Boutros. At the core of the family saga is, however, the story of his great uncle Gebrayel’s death in Havana. Gebrayel’s grave is one of the primary destinations in Maalouf’s quest to learn the truth of his great uncle’s life and death in Cuba, a story wrapped in family lore. This paper begins by examining several Arab American death records, gravesites and obituaries as a way of documenting the often-undocumented presence of Arabs in the Americas; it then focuses on Maalouf’s account of his great uncle Gebrayel’s life in Havana to explore the tension between family lore and the facts of Gebrayel’s death. The paper seeks to address the problematic relationship between family oral history and archival documents. This issue raises questions of subjectivity/objectivity, private/public, silence/fabrication, and collective/individual truth.

Speaker Bio: In addition to his current position as Director of the Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities Program, Salah Hassan is a professor in the Department of English and core faculty in the Muslim Studies at MSU. His areas of research and teaching include postcolonial literature and theory, mid-20th century anticolonial intellectual movements, literatures of empire, and Arab and Muslim North American studies. His research projects have recently focused on representations of Arabs and Muslims in the media and also projects of Arab and Muslim self-representation. He is the author of Portraits of Sam Hallick: Modern Arab Presence in Early 20th century North America (2023). He is also the founder of the Muslim Subjects website and blog (2012-2020), and coordinated the following projects on that site: “Migrations of Islam,” “American Halal,” and “Journal/Islam.” Muslim Subjects was established with grant that he received from the Social Science Research Council in 2011. He produced the short documentary film, “Death of an Imam” (2010) and the feature length film “Migrations of Islam” (2014).