Najee Mondalek & Guilia Loli

It’s obvious that since September 11, 2001 Muslim Americans have been under the spotlight in many arenas of society.  At times critiqued by their own neighbors and targeted under national law, it’s safe to say that they have been living differently the past nine years.  Yet this is not to say that Arab Americans and Muslim Americans haven’t gone to great lengths to try to clear the air around the way they are perceived in modern American society.

Najee Mondalek, a Lebanese immigrant living in Dearborn, Michigan, has taken an interesting approach to the situation as a whole.  While many go out and campaign for their cause, Najee writes plays.  One of his latest plays is entitled “Me No Terrorist” and, though a comedy, depicts a Middle Eastern tourist’s experience in the US.  When he is asked at customs what his purpose is in the US he is misunderstood: instead of hearing “I’m a tourist from the Middle East” officers hear “I’m a terrorist from the Middle East”.  Guilia Loli, a Middle Eastern DJ in New York, makes music.  But it’s not just any music: she gathers traditional music from her hometown in southern Egypt and splices it with Western hip hop and dancehall.

Both of these people are working in unique ways to creatively combat the established government and media take on Middle Easterners in a western society.   The first thing they do is debunk the idea of the Muslim or Arab as un-American.  Her East-meets-West style is what makes Loli’s music so popular with such a wide crowd.  For Loli, it’s important that the American majority stop taking action making it easier to discriminate against Arabs and Muslims in the US, but rather embrace the fact that the US is about the blend of cultures.  From the very beginning, there was no essential American identity.  All that exists today is an identity that has been crafted in the past few hundred years and is largely one of symbols, values, and documents.

            

Najee works to try to expose xenophobia present in current US government and politics.  “[I just want to] teach that not all Arabs are bad guys” Najee said to the Detroit News in May of 2004.  Through his comedy he is able to deconstruct the idea of an official Middle Eastern culture and replace it with one that is very similar to that of the United States.  Even though a Lebanese immigrant, Najee is now producing very accessible comedy that has gained traction among Arab and non-Arab communities.  Though he confronts themes pertinent to the Arab world, his style has often compared to that of Jerry Seinfeld.

            

Edward Said has famously analyzed the ways in which Orientalist discourse has been created in an attempt to preserve Arab/Islamic society as exotic and outside the influence of modernity.  When the Middle East is represented as an undeveloped region of the world where human rights are treated with complete disregard it only further reinforces the Western tendency towards the colonialist mentality.  The mentality that large groups of people exist that “need saving” is not only in many cases inaccurate, but often insulting to the targeted groups.  It’s my belief that the use of soft power is the most substantial way of combating the illusion of “the Orient” as an Other.  Najee Mondalek and Guilia Loli are both important examples of the real-world effect of  soft power.  By producing high quality music, plays, and other artwork that can be easily consumed by the Western public, Mondalek and Loli have become some of the most successful players in disassembling the incorrect construct of the Middle Eastern Other.  By exposing the ways in which official cultures never reflect actual diversity within countries, competing perspectives can be better exposed in a public light and eventually (hopefully) understood.

by Grayson Smith


Works Cited:
"NPR : Arab-American Artists Respond, Voices of Reflection." NPR : National Public Radio : News & Analysis, World, US, Music & Arts : NPR. 8 Sept. 2002. Web. 04 Dec. 2010. <http://www.npr.org/news/specials/091102reflections/arabart/index.html>.

Defying Othering through Art: Lalla Essaydi’s “Les Femmes du Maroc”:

This piece explores the complex nature of Arab feminine identity through the lens of past and present by pulling inspiration from several iconic 19^th century American and European Orientalist paintings. For example, one photo is posed like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingre’s Grand Odalisque. Essaydi recreates these depictions without male figures and elegant details so that the women become the sole focal point of the piece. She also displays small copies of the Orientalist original nearby on the wall to help visitors make the connection. She deliberately poses Moroccan women in draping white fabric. She illustrates, with henna, Arabic calligraphic script writings from her own personal journal that cover every surface of the print.

In the past, calligraphy was an art form practiced exclusively by men for the transcriptions of sacred texts. One of the purposes of Essaydi’s photographs is to eliminate the original Orientalist photos of their misogynistic and Euro-centric discourse. Historically, Orientalist paintings were used to eroticize the Middle East, thus giving Europeans a view of a mysterious land and the “new Islamic world.” Each woman in the set of photos has a moderately to openly hostile expressions.

"I always had this love-hate [relationship] with Orientalist paintings," Essaydi said. "I find them exquisite but at the same time, the content is absolutely outrageous."

Throughout her work, Essaydi wishes to present herself though multiple, diverse lenses—as an artist, a Moroccan, a liberal, a traditionalist, and a Muslim. She invites viewers to resist stereotypes with her images. This particular piece, absent of male figures, functions to take the power back from the original Orientalist images and redistributes the power to these women and to all women who are objectified. She challenges the archaic view of the exotic, unexplored, Muslim woman and aims to create a more honest view of Muslim women. Thus, she challenges the idea of each woman as “the Other” in the original Orientalist depictions. She wanted to give the real image of the Moroccan women she knows. “She is not repressed - she has determination and creativity like any man or like any woman in the West or any other part of the world!" exclaims Essaydi. This sort of influence would be very powerful if it were spread more widely and throughout more of popular culture.

This painting was purchased by the Louvre and can be seen in the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. Art is often considered high culture and inaccessible to the general public. Low culture seems to only show that Muslim women are oppressed and that cultural relativism isn’t something we have time to be concerned with. Does accessibility to low and high culture inform how we view a culture? Since certain people do not have the luxury to go to visit such an exhibit, do they not have the same impression of Islamic Women?

As stated in “Racism in the Name of Feminism: Imperilled Muslim Women in Norway,” the body of the Muslim woman is fixed in the Western imaginary as confined, mutilated, and sometimes murdered in the name of culture. The argument here is that this idea serves to reinforce the threat that Muslim men pose to the West. Cultural relativism is the principle that the standards of one culture cannot be used to understand or judge another culture. People that are not directly part of Muslim culture presume to know how Muslim men oppress Muslim women. We must use positive expressions such as this one to stop “othering”. If more people could see and experience this exhibit, preconceived notions about Muslim women and oppression of all Muslim women would be challenged.

By: Gianna Fazioli

Works Cited

Razack, Sherene. Racism in the Name of Feminism: Imperilled Muslim Women in Norway. University of Toronto Press. 107-144.

http://www.artwithoutpretense.com/2010/02/art-review-lalla-essaydis-les-femmes-du-maroc/

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v007/7.1unit04.html

Said, Edward W., “Orientalism,” in Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, eds.  The Edward Said Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 63-75.