The Arab Body

Abstract

The Arab body has long been a focal point of literary, political, technological, and military interventions. The state of otherness attributed to the embodied nature of Arab identity has made it a key locus of social domination as well as, more positively, a springboard for fresh takes on social domination far beyond the particular social suffering of a single social category. By engaging in a close reading of Kerouac's On the Road in tandem with an autoexperiential account of sociopolitical developments targeting Arab corporeality in the post-9/11 era, this article demonstrates the contradictions and potentialities of social suffering. To be a bearer of an Arab body is to be the on the receiving end of a whole host of societal suspicions, social anxieties, modes of surveillance, military incursions, and, more generally, deployments of negative symbolic power. But this state of domination turned corporeal also makes for a potential site of freedom, a vector for new solidarities with other groups and categories turned alien and other. What is it to have an Arab body? “When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York” (p. 117, Kerouac, On the Road). It’s all right there, in Kerouac’s novel, everything of relevance has already been said...The Arab’s body is violence, an unapologetic celebration of hot-headed exuberance, intemperate and irrational outburst of pure passion: as the Norwegians say, sint som en tyrk, “angry like a Turk.” The brown-bodied Orientals, all of the same sort, homogeneous bodies, Deleuze’s smooth spaces against the striating maneuvers of Western statecraft...I passed through customs at God knows which one of those miserable US East Coast airports – what was it Joe Biden said? “If I took you blindfolded and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you must think ‘I must be in some third-world country’” – you must think – all those brown bodies, crowded and sweating over impossible suitcases, huddled masses, wretched refuse of a teeming shore... Arriving in America, through the airport, a chaotic mass of automated passport scanners stretched out across the polished airport arrivals hall, how many billions went into them that should have saved the homeless from sleeping under overpasses – self-administered discipline, then, proclaiming the ascendancy of the administered self, even the penalization of the self, no longer a panopticon but a synopticon, even an autosynopticon, a self-seeing-all – those automated checkout counters at Safeway must have saved the corporation billions, and when I go grocery shopping, every item bipped is a unit of labor performed for the corporation and its shareholders...At JFK Airport I stood before the machine, scanned my own passport, all those biometric and digital fingerprints sucked up by the machine and fed into the vast surveillance-assemblage, what Lanier (2014) calls “Siren Servers,” probably into the Utah Data Center, which mindlessly absorbs “all forms of communication,” it has been said, and all this on a beautiful piece of Western land: have you seen the play of light and shadow on ochre hills overlooking these idiotspies in the Utah desert? The cruel machine that guzzles up the earth, when we should all be out hiking under God’s sky and find contentment... “Siren Servers are usually gigantic facilities, located in obscure places where they have their own power plants and some special hookup to nature, like a remote river that allows them to cool a fantastic amount of waste heat” (Lanier 2014: xv). But Lanier’s technocentricity doesn’t allow him to see that all this fantastic data computation is too effective, it captures too much stuff: the siren song of Lanier’s Siren Servers is the illusion that they actually work; but they can only end in one “giant confusion,” as Žižek (2014) says, a confusion that whirls and whorls around the likes of me, and the million innocents, always with the Arab body on its mindless mind... (Paranoiac moment, another reminiscence: boarding an Air France flight in Paris bound for New York, find myself taken aside at the gate, an additional inspection, but why me? Always this hysterical, insistent self-questioning: why, why me, what have I done? Must’ve been something I did, the sinking dread that makes guilty men of innocents. Otherwise the Gaze, “lidless and wreathed in flame,” wouldn’t have thrown its unflinching glare upon your body...which is just where they want you, they’ve got you cornered now, my boy...And yet isn’t the hysteric’s discourse the path to liberation? In Gérard Wajcman’s (1982/2017) pithy formula: “The hysteric ushers the articulation of knowledge.” And we should all be much more hysterical, to break from our somnolent, torpid march through history. (Another reminiscence: a Pakistani friend took his girlfriend from Europe to New York to visit the opera, wealthy types, undoubtedly, he said the whole airport experience left him shaken, he told me this whispering, years later, thousands of miles away, in a dimly lit bar back in Old Europe, still quivering at the memory of humiliation, and his realization of her sudden realization of the insurmountable difference between them, differance all the way down, also, the guilt of being weak, for are we not men? Why should we shudder at uniforms and a few innocent questions? Thin-skinned? Where’s your potent masculinity and strength gone? But then again, who can truly stand up against the terrible symbolic might of the state? For the state is “the realization of god on earth,” says Bourdieu [2000: 245].) I throw a quick glance at a piece of printed paper left carelessly for all to see on the table where one of the stewards, an apologetic Oriental in Air France uniform stands ready to rifle through our things while all those comfortable passengers sit observing this morality play, something to break the monotony of waiting, Dance Negro! Dance! We’re here for their entertainment now, the Theatre of Security (“For theater on a grand scale,” says one commentator in the New York Times, “you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration...The T.S.A.’s profession of outrage is nothing but ‘security theater’” [Stross 20006] – a profession of outrage, and now I’ll profess my own outrage, if I may) – damn you, France, for all your hollow talk of egalité, my soul rages suddenly at this obsequious type, a house Arab working in the master’s house. The sheet of paper has my name on it, and six or seven others besides – but by what ghoulish algorithm? With what variables and factors? Checked and crossreferenced by what criteria?) (And is the Other always consigned to a schizoid discourse? To realize their experiences in linear language must always feel like a betrayal of the authentic experience. The problem of representation is all-consuming, condemned to speak in weird ways and thereby always fail to be properly understood—dismissed and ignored. This skewed meaning is always looked at askance. I have no patience for those well-behaved littérateurs who try to make it at Princeton (Said), in the pages of The Atlantic (Coates)—their thoughts too polite, rarely intruding upon roiling virtuality, which always goes deeper, farther, and is more tangled up than the limitations of social-scientific or analytic-philosophical writing will permit: there’s too little of Escher, the Moebius strip, toruses, impossible topological donuts in them.) Back at JFK: there a cheap little webcam snapped a photo of me, finally the booth spat out a receipt with my name and passport details and picture on it; also, a big, fat “X” across my face, my photograph with an “X” on it, which meant: go talk to a US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officer, and every time I go to America it’s the same, randomly selected for additional screening purposes, etc., and I’ve stopped going to America now because America makes me paranoid. No clearer expression of the state’s discipline than that “X” across your face (I think it was even in red, though I can’t say for certain: they made certain they took it away from me when the interrogation, or interview, was over, and can’t the absence of an object be as clear an admission of guilt as its presence, negative evidence?) The Arab body is above all else a paranoiac body. Item: a Welsh (and Muslim) math teacher traveling to the US with a group of schoolchildren: “I gave one of the American officials there my passport. My first name is Mohammed. It felt as if straight away she looked up and said: ‘You’ve been randomly selected for a security check’” (Morris 2017). Impersonal bureaucracy becomes intensely personal when confronting the world through the Arab body: the sweat in shoes, the metallic tang of anxious armpits. “I was polite and followed all the instructions. She took me into this room. There were five or six other officials.” Sinister secret police officers, security officials, faceless bureacrats, governmental inspectors ready to conduct conduct...“They made me take my jacket off...They made me stand on a stool. They rubbed me all the way down.” Inspection as an erotic game, sexual domination, the frisson of the inspector’s voyeurism, sadism and glee, imperceptible little shivers of delight from the master’s hand – “They even pulled my trousers down to check my boxers...” – inquisitive latex-gloved fingers poking and prodding, probing. “Eventually they let me go through.” Arabicity is not a condition reserved for those ethnoracially or ancestrally hailing from the Arab world but is a condition that spils out from its proper vessel. Anyone can partake of Arabicity, or Arab-ness. Spinoza, the parvenu Sephardic Jew, a wanderer from Iberia to continental Europ