“Tales From Arab Detroit” Screened At UCLA Conference

By Pat McDonnell Twair

For documentary filmmaker Joan Mandell, the culmination of two decades of involvement with Arab people is her video, "Tales From Arab Detroit." More than one year of preparation went into the production centered around the U.S. appearance of storytellers from the Nile Delta who can recite more than 114 hours of the Abu Zayd al-Hilali epic. The classic story has been passed through 14 generations of illiterate storytellers from the village of Nakhli and relates the adventures of Abu Zayd, who was cast out of Arabia and led his al-Hilali tribe through many challenges to a new and better life in the Maghreb.

Mandell's video, which was co-produced by her Los Angeles-based Olive Branch Productions and ACCESS (Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services) in Dearborn, MI, was shown in its entirety at UCLA's May 26-27 Cinema Displacement conference. The two-day session dealt with films focusing on the lives of Middle Eastern émigrés and exiles as well as filmmakers dislocated from their homelands. Featured speakers were two scholars recognized for their work on films dealing with Middle Eastern identities in transition. They are: Prof. Hamid Naficy of Rice University and Prof. Ella Habiba Shofat of City University of New York.

Mandell, who holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree from UCLA and teaches at the University of California at Irvine, has produced two earlier videos: "Gaza Ghetto" and "Voices in Exile: Immigrants and the First Amendment." She told the conference audience her goal in producing "Tales From Arab Detroit" was to challenge racist depictions of Arabs in the American mass media and open the eyes of non-Arab viewers by making them question negative stereotypes.

This isn't the first documentary made about Arab Americans, but I will wager it is the most significant. The video is a story within a story within a story. We hear the storytellers relate Abu Zayd's adventures while we observe the nostalgia of older Detroit Arabs again hearing verses they had only heard in their homelands. We also witness American-born youths' interactions with their parents who fear their children are losing touch with their cultural roots.

"It didn't take me long to discover the identity problem looms larger for the parents than for their children," Mandell told the Washington Report. "The American-born generation believes it is perpetuating the Arab culture in its own way. It is. It is creating its own traditions."

Mandell says she received her undergraduate education in Montreal, where she became friends with Arab students and was shocked at how poorly their culture and political history have been portrayed in the West. She traveled to the West Bank, taught English as a Second Language at Bir Zeit University and learned Arabic. In 1980, she was one of the organizers of al-Fajr, an English-language newspaper published for the next 14 years in East Jerusalem.

Although the production process for "Tales From Arab Detroit" took only a month, more than one year went into preparation for the film. It could prove to be a classic in terms of examining the multi-generational Arab-American community. Mandell confesses it took several debates before a consensus was reached to concentrate on the response of Arab Americans to the storytellers rather than on their performance itself.

ACCESS made the decision to bring the storytellers to the United States in the hope they would appeal to older generations and that their recitals would bring the emigrant and American-born generations together. Mandell says ACCESS succeeded because the nightly programs cut across all divisions in the Arab-American community as they united to hear the beloved tales of Abu Zayd.

Older Arab-American viewers will readily identify with the segment entitled "Children of the First Wave," but probably will reject the segment dealing with Arab youths who dress and look like Latino gang members or perform hip-hop or sing rap lyrics. But herein lies the resilience: these are Americanized teens dancing with an instinctive Arabic rhythm, or rapping from an Arab perspective of life in Detroit/Dearborn.

"I hope, after viewing it, that viewers will want to meet the people in the video," Mandell commented. "When the lights come on, I want them to realize the story's not over, it's just begun."

She hopes to market the video with universities, libraries and individual sales. "I wish the Detroit Tourist Bureau would show this as an incentive for people to come visit Detroit," she said earnestly. Readers interested in obtaining the video can call Olive Branch Productions at (310) 444‚9715.

Arab-American Author at UCLA

One of the zaniest novels ever written is Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz, about a dysfunctional Arab-American family. In it, we meet emigrant widower Matussem, his half-Arab daughters, Melvina and Jemorah, and his sister Fatima, who is obsessed with finding husbands for her nieces. There's much more, including Matussem's jazz band, the Ramoudettes, with Jesse, Owen and Fergyl on organ, bass and maracas backing Matussem on drums, and an Amazon truckdriver named Train who seduces Matussem. The book won the Oregon Literary Arts Book Award for Abu-Jaber, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon who specializes in modern American and Canadian fiction, and feminist, minority and Third World literature. Her class on Middle Eastern literature and culture has been termed an overflow course at the University of Oregon where, Abu-Jaber says, most students have never tasted hummos nor seen a keffiyeh except in photos of Yasser Arafat.

"I want the students to get a broad view of the Arab culture," says Abu-Jaber. "In addition to reading novels by Etel Adnan, Nawal El Saadawi and Abdelrahman Munif, they hear speakers who can discuss the religions of the Middle East—Sunni and Shi'i Islam, Maronite and Orthodox Christianity, the Copts and the Druze—political ideologies, and musicians or dancers." Abu-Jaber even has introduced her students to Lebanese cuisine at a small restaurant in Eugene, Ore.

"The result has been very positive," Abu-Jaber reports. The students are eager to study a culture they knew little about and, by the end of the course, most say they are more sympathetic toward the Arabs. They feel as if they've had a political awakening."

Abu-Jaber just completed a stint as visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles where she invited local experts from the Arab-American community to talk to her class. Radio personality Casey Kasem was a guest speaker, as well as Palestinian filmmaker Hana Elias, and Aisha Ali, who performed dances of several Arab countries. Other speakers included a political activist, a poet and a specialist on Middle Eastern religions. Her multidisciplinary approach requires students to make presentations, discuss Arab writers, and produce a project.

"I want to present students with a full, multidimensional experience of the Arab culture which is difficult to do without visiting the Middle East," she said. "Many of my students at UCLA were of Arab heritage, but many of them don't speak Arabic and have never been to the Middle East. This is a way of connecting them with their heritage."

Now she and her husband, law and literature professor Michael Clark, are en route to Jordan, where she will be a Fulbright professor during the coming academic year. Her Jordanian students are in for an American-style learning experience with Abu-Jaber, who also is the author of the novel Memories of Birth, and who was nominated for The Pushcart Prize for her 1992 fictional piece "Desert" and her 1994 "Loving You." Her book Arabian Jazz is available through the AET Book Club.

LLCS Aids Students

Since 1985, a band of dedicated Lebanese-American women in the greater Los Angeles area have worked diligently to promote their culture and provide scholarships to disadvantaged children in Lebanon. Despite their faintly antiquated title, members of the Lebanese Ladies Cultural Society (LLCS) have performed a high-tech job of extending scholarships to more than 2,100 needy children since 1987. These provide an average of $200 per student from kindergarten through grade 12.

Scholarship Chairman Denise Kafrouni has allocated one room of her spacious La Cañada home as a scholarship office where files keep track of the progress of student recipients. Mrs. Kafrouni proudly points out that children of all religions and from every region of Lebanon are considered equally on the basis of grades and financial need. To ensure that each student receives the money alloted to him or her, a photo and birth certificate of the recipient is on file and the student's family is notified that money is being sent to the school in the child's name. LLCS members in Lebanon deliver the scholarships and visit the recipients.

L.A. Welcomes New Lebanese Consul

The Greater Los Angeles Lebanese community is welcoming Gebran Soufan, who assumed duties this spring as consul general of Lebanon. A community‚wide committee honored the new envoy with a reception in the Beverly Hilton Hotel and the youthful diplomat has been welcomed at a series of private gatherings in his Southern California district. The new consul general is an attorney with a master's degree in law from St. Joseph's University in Beirut and worked in the firm of Fouad Boutros and Bahige Tabbarah. He launched his diplomatic career in 1978 with an assignment to the International Organizations Department in Beirut and then served as a consul in New York from 1979 to 1984. His credits also include service in Washington as Lebanese Embassy liaison officer with the State Department and the National Security Council from August 1990 to January 1995. He is the author of an essay entitled "Antagonisms and Controversies Related to Nuclear Free Zones."

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.