Arab American Identity in Exile:

Abstract

This study discusses the struggle of Arabs and Arab Americans, especially those of Iraqi origins, with identity conflicts in Crescent (2003) by Jordanian American Diana Abu Jaber. Crescent offers characters that face different forms of exile and have to work through broken, destabilized identities to create for themselves new identities that embrace their hyphenated positions. For that, the choice to use the psychoanalytic theory was the right call. Further, as the novel was written by a female writer and discusses the life of a female protagonist, the necessity recall using the feminist theory as a way to understand the feminists ideologies which the writer indirectly used within the events of the story. Moreover, the thesis presents three chapters. The first one gives us a detailed description of the immigration process and the reformation of so called Arab American community. While, the second chapter represents a rich depiction of the triangle love, food, and identity intertwined with memory. The final chapter describes the immigrants’ attempts to cope with the new environment that is crowded with various ethnicities. Besides, the novel presents a spectacular protagonist “Sirine” who succeeded to work as an ethnic bonding agent, as through her cooking, she managed to draw most of the different ethnicities of Arabs and non-Arabs together in the space of Um-Nadia café. In the end, the thesis shows no alternative for the characters except the coexistence with the minority groups accepting the reality of in-betweenness as a temporary solution and looking optimistically for a better future