Race,gender,and the exotic in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees

Abstract

Focusing on Canadian author Ann-Marie MacDonald’s critically acclaimed Fall on Your Knees (1996), this essay argues that the figure of the Arab in the novel represents an ethnic otherness whose strategic exoticization exposes a highly racialized and gendered early twentieth-century North American culture, one that has historically been informed by a latent, economically motivated exoticism. It is in fact this underlying exoticism that has persistently structured the experiences of several generations of racial and sexual minorities in North America and relegated those minorities to the margins of social life. MacDonald’s novel thus deserves renewed attention precisely because it traces critically the historical continuum along which exoticist constructions of race and gender have shaped the experiences of many immigrants in North America. Only by attending to the cultural politics of the exotic, I want to suggest, can we open up discourses of race and gender to productive and transformative cultural critique.

The experience of the exotic is perhaps nowhere more common than in a multicultural environment where encounters with cultural difference often trigger a variety of impulses, ranging from desire and fascination to fear and trepidation. Often, the assimilation (translation) of such difference into a sphere of intelligibility entails the deployment of a constellation of familiar meanings, images, symbols, stereotypes, and myths. However, and in the context of Western commodity culture and the latter’s penchant for “cultural cannibalism”, as Deborah Root (1996: 30) puts it, this process of cultural translation and appropriation, that is, of using the language of the familiar to understand and assimilate the unfamiliar, often becomes complicit with a form of commodity exoticism where the ultimate end of the translational task is in fact to highlight the very attributes (mystery, magic, luxury, menace, and so on) that allow cultural difference to be consumed precisely as exotic. Either as a co-opted form of cultural translation or a more complex system of perception and representation, exoticism remains a significant analytical framework for understanding the multiple contexts in which different modalities of valuation take place.

Often subsumed under the discursive umbrella of Orientalism, exoticism has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves, particularly in postcolonial studies. In fact, and since the publication of what is by now a locus classicus in postcolonial scholarship, namely, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), exoticism has been construed either as a subdivision/sub-discipline of Orientalism or as a descriptor for various kinds of Orientalist representations and the exotic effect they create. It is beyond the purview of this essay, however, to elaborate on the distinction between exoticism and Orientalism, but suffice it to note from the outset that while they may be ideologically and historically intertwined, both discourses have distinct theoretical and cultural applications. ¹

Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001) remains perhaps the only and most elaborate study of the exotic as a persistent and controversial category of valuation in the field of postcolonial cultural production. ² Huggan argues that in order to alert the Western reader against any facile assimilation of their work as a mere “window” into an exotic elsewhere, postcolonial writers deploy what he calls “strategic exoticism”. According to Huggan, “strategic exoticism” designates “the means by which postcolonial writers/thinkers, working from within exoticist codes of representation, either manage to subvert those codes […], or succeed in redeploying them for the purposes of uncovering differential relations of power” (2001: 32). In other words, postcolonial authors like Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, and Hanif Kureishi, Huggan suggests, strategically play up the exotic aspects of their ethnicity in order to parody the exoticizing paradigms of the metropolitan consumer culture in which their works circulate (2001: xii). Retaining Huggan’s idea of “strategic exoticism”, I want to expand its horizons of applicability by locating it specifically in the context of early twentieth-century North American culture, and this through a close reading of the Arab intertext in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel Fall on Your Knees (1996). More specifically, I argue that the figure of the Arab in the novel represents an ethnic otherness the strategic exoticization of which exposes a highly racialized and gendered early twentieth-century North American culture, one that is informed by a latent and often economically motivated exoticism. It is this underlying exoticism, MacDonald suggests, that has persistently structured the experiences of several generations of racial and sexual minorities and relegated those minorities to the margins of social life. Only by attending to the cultural politics of the exotic that has historically underwritten much of the North American commodity culture can we open up normative discourses of race and gender to productive and transformative critique.

As I point out elsewhere (Laouyene, 2009: 128–9), critical literature on MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees has hitherto focused mainly on issues of race and gender in relation to contemporary debates about Canadian multiculturalism. For instance, both Melanie A. Stevenson (2001) and Pilar Somacarrera (2004) place the novel in dialogue with Shakespeare’s Othello and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, respectively, and this in order to emphasize its subscription to multiculturalism as an alternative to racialized and gendered constructions of identity in Eurocentric colonial discourses. Katarzyna Rukszto, on the other hand, argues that Fall on Your Knees in fact exposes “the limits of multiculturalism” as a divisive discourse that often relies on such reductive categories of identification as race, language, religion, custom (2000: 25). Critically insightful though these and other studies are, one must nevertheless note that they say little about the predominant trope of the exotic in the novel and its significance to MacDonald’s critique of normative discourses of race and gender. In fact, in 2005 the Canadian Review of American Studies devoted a special issue to MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, yet none of the contributions really tackled the significant ways in which the novel’s investment in the exotic consistently intersects with a critique of contemporary discourses of race and gender. The purpose of this essay, then, is to address this gap and suggest that MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees claims renewed critical attention precisely because it brings into focus the dynamics of exoticization that have historically characterized multicultural encounters in early twentieth-century North America and informed contemporary discourses about racial and gender identity.

Narrative, race, and Arab exotics

MacDonald’s debut novel, Fall on Your Knees, tells a multi-generational family saga in which Arabs and Arab-Canadians rub shoulders with a host of other ethnic minorities (Jews, Africans, African-Americans, Scottish, and Irish). Set mainly in early twentieth-century Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and partly in New York City during the Jazz era of the early 1920s, the novel chronicles the horrific unfolding of an interracial marriage between two first-generation immigrants: James Piper, a young Scottish-Irish piano tuner, and Materia Mahmoud, a thirteen-year-old Lebanese. Disowned by her father for eloping with an Enklese (Lebanese Arabic for Englishman), Materia marries James and soon gives birth to three daughters: Kathleen, an up-and-coming opera diva whose career prospects were stymied by her father’s overprotective and ultimately destructive tenderness; Mercedes, a devout Catholic who assumes her mother’s role after the latter takes her own life using the gas oven; and Frances, an obstreperous but gifted girl guide who turns bar stripper/prostitute and manages to give birth to an illegitimate mixed-race child. In order to further her singing career, Kathleen moves to New York City where she becomes sexually involved with Rose Lacroix, her African-American piano accompanist. Soon enough, James leaves for New York and summons her back when he receives a letter from an anonymous well-wisher (revealed later to be Rose’s white mother) informing him of his daughter’s illicit interracial (but not lesbian) affair. Upon her return to Cape Breton, Kathleen becomes pregnant and dies giving birth to twins, Ambrose and Lily, whose real father is revealed later in the novel to be none other than James himself. (The rape/incest takes place in New York when James finds Kathleen in bed with Rose whom he takes for a black man.) At this point, the narrative unravels into a bleak and ghastly family drama of betrayal, incest, homicide, homosexuality, and interracial conflicts.

If in The Arab’s Mouth (1995), a play set in late-nineteenth-century Scotland, MacDonald’s incorporation of Arab culture is limited to passing textual allusions (Stevenson, 2001: 41), ³ in Fall on Your Knees she foregrounds that culture as an integral element of the book’s thematic structure. ⁴ Moreover, while the play is concerned mainly with gender politics and fin-de-siècle theories of biological determinism (eugenics in particular), MacDonald’s novel expands the play’s thematic scope to include a litany of other issues related to ethnicity, race, immigration, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity, and this within the specific context of North America’s multicultural society as the latter gradually took shape during the first half of the twentieth century.

Fall on Your Knees shows how inter-ethnic relations in early twentieth-century Canada were informed by two intertwining discourses of alterity: exoticism and boutique multiculturalism. Boutique multiculturalists, as Stanley Fish has suggested, are those who celebrate and consume cultural difference but who “will always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends against the canons of civilized decency as they have been either declared or assured” (Fish, 1997: 378). Fish’s conceptualization of boutique multiculturalism clearly draws upon the paradigms of Western exoticism, that is, upon an exoticism that revels in a fascination with the external markers of ethnic difference (dress, food, folklore, song, dance, etc.) but that remains firmly grounded in a universalizing system of valuation. A boutique multiculturalist is, in fact, an exoticist who admires other cultures but who also believes in a set of unchangeable, inviolable, almost sacrosanct universals that define us as “rational” human beings. Cultural diversity in this respect can be accommodated and celebrated but only to the extent that it does not disturb one’s faith in those universals (Fish, 1997: 380). The boutique multiculturalist may, for instance, find pleasure eating couscous in a local Moroccan restaurant or watching a TV programme featuring exotic tent-dwelling, camel-riding Bedouins, but he or she may also be quick to dismiss lamb-slaughtering as barbaric and backward. Such a dismissal may become even more categorical particularly when core ideals of Bedouin honour, modesty, veiling, and martyrdom are implicated. For these often enter into conflict with such Western (i.e. universal) principles of Reason, human dignity, individual freedom, and the sanctity of human life. In Islamic orthopraxy, performing animal sacrifice, observing certain dietary laws, and abstaining from uncharitable thoughts and physical pleasures during the holy month of Ramadan are as crucial as the profession of faith itself. But the boutique multiculturalist often sees such rituals and practices as mere “overlays on a substratum of essential humanity” (Fish, 1997: 379), not as irreducible ontological determinants of collective and personal identity.

At the other end of the multicultural spectrum, Fish identifies “strong multiculturalism” as a deep and often exaggerated immersion in the culture of the other:

Whereas the boutique multiculturalist will accord a superficial respect to cultures other than his own, a respect he will withdraw when he finds the practices of a culture irrational or inhumane, a strong multiculturalist will want to accord a deep respect to all cultures at their core, for he believes that each has the right to form its own identity and nourish its own sense of what is rational and humane. For the strong multiculturalist the first principle is not rationality or some other supracultural universal, but tolerance. (Fish, 1997: 382, emphasis in original)

A strong multiculturalist is, then, someone who “values difference in and for itself rather than as a manifestation of something more basically constitutive” (Fish, 1997: 382). But the strong multiculturalist, Fish goes on to argue, faces an inevitable dilemma particularly when the perceived intolerance of the other’s culture threatens to override his or her own: either one extends one’s tolerance to encompass the very intolerance of the other’s culture, in which case the very concept of tolerance loses its validity; or one dismisses “the core intolerance of that culture […] in the name of some supracultural universal”, in which case one comes to represent “somewhat a deeper instance of the shallow category of boutique multiculturalism” (Fish, 1997: 383). As such, the strong multiculturalist is different from the boutique multiculturalist only in degree, not in kind. On the other hand, to accept unquestioningly the unfolding of certain radical regimes of truth, such as accepting the death sentence on Salman Rushdie or the motives behind Middle Eastern terrorism, will inevitably turn one into a “uniculturalist”, not a multiculturalist. Thus, Fish deduces, multiculturalism does not exist, for “no one could possibly be a multiculturalist in any interesting and coherent sense” (Fish, 1997: 384). In other words, a multiculturalist can only be a tolerant, not an accepting, individual, that is, one who accepts and enjoys cultural difference only in so far as it remains reducible to, and subsumable under, the familiar and the same.

In Fall on Your Knees, James Piper’s relationship with the Mahmouds is redolent of a boutique multiculturalist’s capacity to consume and condemn in one breath the object of his exoticist desire. In fact, it is paradigmatic of that exoticist paradox of fascination and fear where the foreign/exotic object is simultaneously praised and dreaded precisely because of its incommensurable foreignness (Todorov, 1993: 265). ⁵ When Mrs. Mahmoud offers James her home-cooked Lebanese food, “he was afraid she’d feed him something exotic and horrible” (MacDonald, 1996: 18; ⁶ emphasis added). But when she reads “the tea leaves at the bottom of [his] cup” and predicts prosperity and happiness for his future household, he feels “neither frightened nor skeptical”; rather, he finds himself “drawn in with involuntary faith” by the strange psychometric powers of the Arabian matriarch (19). Moreover, no sooner does he meet her daughter and his would-be wife in her Ottoman-style home than he imagines himself “an Aladdin in an orchard dripping diamonds”, spellbound by the “sweet and strange” smell of her hair and surrendering to the “evil enchantment slid[ing] from him”. And when she speaks, he cannot but surrender to the mesmerizing musicality of her “Arabified English” (20). Be all that as it may, the moment Materia tells him that she has been promised to a Lebanese dentist since she was four, he immediately unleashes a racist tirade against the “Old Country” (Lebanon) and its “barbaric”, “backward”, and “savage” customs (21).

Like that of a boutique multiculturalist, then, James’s fascination with the Mahmouds is little more than an overlay on deep-seated ethnocentrism, for his initial attraction to Materia and her exotic, sand-colour skin is soon superseded by a latent anxiety about miscegenation (20). When James’s favourite daughter Kathleen is born, with her “[s]ilky red-gold hair, green eyes and white white skin” (40), his anti-Arab prejudices do not take long to emerge. Unable to fathom the source of Kathleen’s interracial proclivity (her attraction to Rose), James simply attributes it to a congenital predisposition characteristic of her mother’s race:

James is grateful that all his girls turned out so fair. But there’s obviously a morbid tendency in the blood they inherited from Materia that made Kathleen lean towards color. James has taken delivery of another crate of books. He has dipped into Dr Freud in an effort to discover where to lay the blame for Kathleen’s perversity. Freud calls women “the dark continent”. James couldn’t agree more. He doesn’t hate blacks, he just doesn’t want them near his bloodline. (335)

James’s immersion in Freudian and Darwinian theories soon leads to fervent preoccupation with turn-of-the-century eugenics and other forms of scientific racism according to which the purported intellectual imbecility and moral deviance of non-white races may be attributed either to bio-psychological queerness or to inherited deficiency in the genes. ⁷ James’s real anxieties, however, stem from the realization that even the white race, the pure epitome of which would be none other than his “peaches and cream” Kathleen (95), may also carry within it a strand of wickedness. Disavowing his own miscegenetic desire for dark-skinned Materia, James imputes Kathleen’s for people of colour to a defect in her Arab matrilineal bloodline. In addition, James’s conflation of race and gender is nowhere more apparent than it is in the above passage. For not only does he take Freud’s phrase “dark continent” literally, associating both darkness/blackness and women with menacing inscrutability, but he also subsumes virtually all dark races under the same category, including his in-laws whose immigrant status in Canada, curiously enough, has historically eluded racial and ethnic categorizations.

James’s ambivalent relation with the Mahmouds — one that vacillates between fear and fascination, desire and derision — is in fact indicative of the challenges that the racial status of the early Arab immigrants posed to Canada’s racialized immigration policies between the 1880s and the First World War. The early Syrian immigrants in particular were subjected during this period to the same racial restrictions imposed on Asians whose “undesirable” entry into Canada was made virtually impossible by the exorbitant $200-per-capita tax requirement (Abu Laban, 1980: 85). ⁸ Moreover, not only were the Syrians and Lebanese mistakenly viewed as Turkish subjects, but their alienation grew even worse particularly when Turkey entered the First World War as Canada’s enemy (Abu Laban, 1980: 87; Sawaie, 1985: xiv). The Syrians’ reaction to the Canadian government’s racialized immigration policies consisted of a threefold claim: first, Syrians were white/Caucasian; second, the immigration policy targeted the Hindus, not Syrians; third, and in keeping with “the 1920 San Remo conference […], Syrians should be classified as of European rather than of Asiatic origin, because Syria (i.e. the Greater Syria region, including modern Syria and Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan) was under British and French protection” (Abu Laban, 1980: 85–6).

As Ibrahim Hayani suggests, these restrictive immigration measures reflected official “concerns about ‘ethnic purity’ and the need to protect Canadians from the ‘grave consequences’ of having more Orientals come to Canada” (1999: 285). It is worth noting here that Canada’s immigration policies and naturalization laws during the early decades of the twentieth century drew their pseudo-scientific legitimacy and force from contemporary eugenicist thinking. The purported intellectual inferiority of certain immigrants and their offspring was frequently attributed to hereditary genetic deficiency. ⁹ After the Second World War, however, and especially after the 1953 Immigration Act and its subsequent amendment in 1967, such policies became relatively more liberal and encouraged a second wave of Arab immigrants from countries other than Syria and Lebanon. With Canada becoming more conscious of its multicultural make-up, particularly during the 1960s and the 1970s, the racial status of Arab immigrants was less tenuous, especially of those who “came to be classed with Europeans rather than Asians and were subject to more liberal rules of sponsorship by relatives who were Canadian residents” (Hayani, 1999: 285). In general, Canada’s multi-racial and multicultural diversity began to be viewed as an asset that deserved celebration and preservation.

The ethnically diverse characters that populate MacDonald’s novel indicate that Nova Scotia, a region whose inhabitants are often assumed to be of predominantly Scottish descent, was a “multicultural, and multi-racial society”, although “one that combined relative tolerance with Victorian racism” (Stevenson, 2001: 43). Fall on Your Knees, however, and as Stevenson argues, does not simply draw attention to the ethnic diversity of early twentieth-century Nova Scotia; it also “dramati[zes] the shifting social processes whereby ‘race’ is constructed” (2001: 43). For instance, the fact that Middle Eastern characters such as the Mahmouds are considered “somewhat colored” in early twentieth-century Nova Scotia means that they are able to negotiate “the color bar that guards access to most aspects of society” (MacDonald, 1996: 115). Raced white at times and black at others, the Mahmouds are thus able to foreground the cultural aspects of their identity that grant them access to white privilege and to suppress those that do not. This is not to mention that the social mobility of the Mahmouds and their passing as white are also facilitated by the fact that they are wealthy businessmen owning “a major Maritime import/export company with a big warehouse in Sydney and headquarters in Halifax” (315). ¹⁰ As Somacarrera (2004: 70) notes, this conflation of race and class in the construction of whiteness is most conspicuous when Kathleen is seen at school as dark because she “belongs in the Coke Ovens”, the working-class “colored” section of Cape Breton, whereas the Mahmoud girls are seen as white simply because “they’re nice girls and rich rich” (95, emphasis added): “‘She [Kathleen] may be peaches and cream but you should see her mother … black as the ace of spades, my dear.’/ ‘You know that sort of thing stays in the blood’” (MacDonald, 1996: 95). The indeterminacy of the Mahmouds’ race, in conjunction with their well-off status, allows MacDonald to bring into sharp focus the fundamental ambivalence of whiteness as a signifier of racial difference and to call into question processes of identification that are based on such reductive categories as race, class, religion, and language.

Perceived racial differences also tend to pale in significance when personal interests are in the equation (Stevenson, 2001: 44). Both James Piper and the Mahmouds are willing to suppress their racial prejudices when their professional needs compel them to do so. Similarly, Mahmoud becomes attached to Teresa Taylor, his Barbadian housekeeper from the Coke Ovens, precisely because of her unique ability to run his household after his wife’s death and especially because of her expertise in Lebanese cooking which surpasses even that of his own wife. Teresa’s talents as maidservant are such that Mahmoud considers accepting “her most intimate ministrations without yielding a particle of his dignity” and probably asking her to marry him some day (306–7). Nevertheless, and no sooner have his wife’s rubies gone missing, stolen by his own granddaughter Frances, than Mahmoud’s racial prejudices come to the fore and he immediately gives Teresa her marching orders under the assumption that “colored” people are innately predisposed to kleptomania: “What enrages Mahmoud is that he let himself be lulled into trusting Teresa — into thinking she was different. That’s when the viper strikes. He should never have forgotten her color” (305). In similar fashion, Teresa, a devout Christian, cannot but attribute Mahmoud’s ungratefulness and false accusations to his ethnic background, calling him “[n]asty, low-down, filthy Syrian” not unlike “all the rest only worse” (307). Interestingly enough, when the thefts continue after Teresa’s departure, Mahmoud goes as far as to suspect his own daughter Camille who becomes in charge of the household and who, in his mind, may have been “polluted by her no-good Arab husband into a petty thief” (MacDonald, 1996: 307). Earlier, I have described James Piper as a boutique multiculturalist; much the same might be said of Mahmoud, whose interest in the Other is only skin deep and whose racial biases do not take long to resurface when his well-being is compromised. In the end, what this particular theft incident does, besides de-centring the myth of a dominant and homogenous Celtic–Nova Scotian ethnic identity, is illustrate the ways in which multicultural relations in the region have historically been fraught with potential racial tensions and class contestations.

The Mahmouds’ racial unclassifiability also allows them to distance themselves from the purportedly darker and less-civilized Arabs of Lebanon’s hinterland and claim connection to the “more Mediterranean” (i.e. whiter and more refined) Arabs of Lebanon’s coastal areas (456). In the novel’s penultimate section entitled Hejira, ¹¹ Kathleen relates in her diary how she finds herself at pains to explain the ethnic identity of her mother’s family to Rose when the latter identifies them as “Ayrab”, a demeaning, lowbrow phonetic distortion of “Arab”:

“She’s an Ayrab?”

“They don’t like to be called Arabs. Especially not ‘Ayrabs.’”

“What’s wrong with that, that’s how I’ve always said it”.

“Well. Anyhow, a lot of Lebanese come from the coast and they’re more Mediterranean, more European, you know. Not like Arabs”.

“She musta come from inland”. Then she looked at me and said, “Coulda fooled me”.

I said, “I’m not trying to ‘fool’ anyone”.

“You look pure white”.

“I am pure white. My mother is white”.

“Not quite”.

“Well, she’s not colored”.

She smiled — sneered is more like it — and said, “Don’t worry honey, you plenty white for the both of you”. (456–7; emphasis added)

The Mahmouds’ appropriation of a “more Mediterranean” identity reflects their assumption that geography (proximity to Europe), like class status, may further warrant their claim to whiteness and thus to social advantages otherwise denied non-whites in early twentieth-century Nova Scotia. Blaming himself for marrying “his most beautiful daughter [Camille] to a dirty half-civilized Arab [Jameel]”, Mahmoud insists that “[t]he Jameels are Arabs. We the Mahmouds are more Mediterranean. Closer to being European, really” (306). Ironically enough, however, Mahmoud himself is revealed later in the novel to be an Arab from southern Lebanon who “spent his boyhood picking cotton in Egypt” and then returned to Lebanon to marry into a well-off cosmopolitan family from Beirut whose members “spoke more French than Arabic [and] considered themselves Mediterranean, even European” (316).

The ambiguous racial status of the Lebanese characters in the novel thus places them in a particularly strategic position, one that allows them to arrogate to themselves different identities, European and/or Oriental, depending on their professional needs and personal interests. Frances, for example, draws on her Lebanese background in order to seduce her clients at Jameel’s strip club. At times she plays “Mumma’s old vaudeville music from the hope chest” or sings “‘I’m Just Wild about Harry’ in pidgin Arabic” while donning Rudolph Valentino’s “striped robe and turban” (275–6). At other times, she appears on stage as an erotic belly dancer bejewelled with rings and earrings stolen from the Mahmouds’ household and shimmying in the manner of Babylon’s Salome of the “seven veils” or the more contemporary but equally infamous Dutch dancer Mata Hari (276). Eventually, Frances offers herself as an exotic sexual commodity to the predominantly “white” clientele of the “only drab house in The Coke Ovens” (267): “A hand job costs two-fifty […]. Another fifty cents buys you patter, a song, any name you want to hear. Touch her little chest and cough up an extra buck” (276). Soon enough, and thanks to Frances’s growing popularity in the region, “Jameel’s blind pig in the Pier” where “trouble-seekers come […] to fight, play card, and pass out” transforms into a “cultural Mecca” of sorts yielding handsome revenues to its owner (284). While Frances’s “sexual promiscuity is intended as a punishment for her father” who abused her sexually when she was a child (Somacarrera, 2004: 72), I would like to suggest that her self-fashioning as an exotic Lebanese entertainer/stripper in particular serves a twofold function in the novel: first, it allows Frances to assert her mother’s ethnic (Arab) identity, an identity that James has persistently sought to suppress in his daughters by banning Arabic from his household; and, second, it allows MacDonald to lay bare the cheap commodity exoticism that often informed interethnic relations in Nova Scotia at the turn of the century.

Because he does not want them to grow up confused, James prevents his daughters from speaking Arabic and orders them and their mother to speak English instead (MacDonald, 1996: 39–40). Be that as it may, and after Kathleen’s and Materia’s deaths, both Frances and Lily, Kathleen’s surviving twin, invent a form of pidgin Arabic the practice of which becomes their bedtime ritual and secret paean to the lost mother(land):

Inshallah [God willing] is Lily’s magic word. It is from the language that she knows ought not to be used by day except in an emergency. Because the words are like wishes from a genie — don’t waste them. Lily has not even a rudimentary understanding of Arabic; it is, rather, dreamlike. At night in bed, long after lights-out, she and Frances speak the strange language. Their bed language. Frances uses half-remembered phrases and tells fragments of old stories, weaving them with pieces of songs, filling in the gap with her own made-up words that approximate the sounds of Mumma’s Old Country tongue. Lily converses fluently in the made-up language, unaware which words are authentic, which invented, which hybrid. The meaning resides in the music and the privacy of their magic carpet bed. Arabian Nights. (230)

Frances and Lily use the invented Arabic lingo not simply as “one of their special codes” intended to circumvent their father’s command (230), but also as a means whereby they retrieve the memory of the mother and thus keep alive an organic connection to their Lebanese identity:

“Frances. Al akbar Inshallah?”

“In fallah inti itsy-bitsy spider”.

“Ya koosa gingerbread boy kibbeh?”

“Shalom bi’ salami”.

“Aladdin bi’sesame”.

“Bezella ya aini Beirut”.

“Te’berini”.

“Te’berini”.

“Tipperary”. (367–8)

Language for MacDonald is more than an instrument of communication. It is a receptacle of memory, intimacy, emotions, and instincts. When asked about the significance of the linguistic richness of her novel, MacDonald emphasizes the irreducible intimacy that one’s mother tongue provides:

I feel language is a very, very tender relationship — the relationship with a mother tongue. Or a language that is being lost to you, a language that belonged to your parents, or a language that only belongs at home, you know? They are repositories. Emotional repositories. Repositories of history. […] Language is a very intimate thing. It’s like a loved one. And it’s the poignancy of losing it and replacing it with another one. I find it very moving. And I also think it’s to do with secret codes, as well, I mean, the little girls are closer to their mother as long as they’re speaking Arabic. And if they don’t have enough Arabic, they’ll invent it. Invent a secret language that helps keep their bond alive, their connection to their mother. (Lockhart, 2005: 141–2)

Earlier in the novel, both James and Materia use their respective mother tongues to express their passion for each other: “He sang her a Gaelic lullaby which made him cry because, if such a thing was possible, he loved her more in his mother tongue” (MacDonald, 1996: 22). Materia also turns to Arabic to declare her love for James: “‘Habibi’ [my love], she whispered, ‘BeHebak’ [I love you]” (23). Relying on the soothing music of Arabic lullabies and other endearing expressions of love, Materia tries to bring herself to love and be loved by a daughter (Kathleen) whom she secretly wished to have been a son, a son that would have helped her reconnect with her family and thus atone for the “ayb” (disgrace) she committed by eloping with an enklese (24):

Feeding the child [Kathleen] some lovely mush at the kitchen table, Materia leaned forward and cooed, “Ya Helwi. Ya albi, ya Amar. Te’berini” [Sweetie. My heart, my moon. You bury me]. The child smiled and Materia said a silent prayer of thanks, because at that moment she’d felt a faint breath of something not far from love. (40)

On one level, Frances and Lily’s contorted and nonsensical pidgin Arabic evokes those echolalias and glossolalias that Julia Kristeva attaches to the Semiotic operating within poetic language. Devoid of any paradigmatic or syntagmatic order, pidgin Arabic may be said to represent that “ultimate and primordial leash holding the body close to the mother before it can become a social speaking subject” (Kristeva, 1980: 30). Facing the potential hegemony of the father’s language (English), a language that threatens to erase the Arabic side of their identity, Frances and Lily nostalgically seek refuge in the elemental musicality, in the phonic materiality, of a mother tongue that is “anterior to naming, to the One, to the father, and consequently, maternally connoted to such an extent that it merits ‘not even the rank of syllable’” (Kristeva, 1980: 133).

On another level, and by virtue of its transgressive heteroglossia, the two sisters’ pidgin Arabic replicates linguistically the unconventional black vaudeville music that their mother played briefly at the Empire Theater to support her family and that James has forbidden his daughters to play because “it’s colored music” (MacDonald, 1996: 230). ¹² Conjuring the unconfined, free-form musical performances that turned their mother into “a bit of a celebrity” in the local entertainment business (56), France and Lily’s pidgin Arabic acquires a parodic, carnivalesque function in the novel, and this by grafting itself onto the father’s English, breaking down its logic and subverting its hierarchies (“Ya koosa gingerbread boy kibbeh?”). ¹³ In short, pidgin Arabic becomes a significant intertext in the novel, effectively partaking in MacDonald’s strategic exoticism. For while it indexes an exotic otherness that Frances strategically exploits to advance her career at Jameel’s strip club, it also functions as a means whereby Frances and Lily transcend the father’s prescriptive, Eurocentric monologism and keep alive “their connection to their mother” (Lockhart, 2005: 141–2).

Unlike Frances, Kathleen insists on her Europeanness/whiteness (“I am pure white. My mother is white”). But, like Frances, she is also aware of the “marketability of Western exotic myths” (Huggan, 2001: 147), and she capitalizes on such myths in an effort to secure professional success as an exotic opera diva:

Kathleen intends to be the Eleonora Duse of the operatic stage. […] Her Celtic-Arab blood and her origins on a scraggy island off the east coast of a country popularly supposed to consist of a polar ice-cap are enough, by American standards, both to cloak her in a sufficient diva mystery and to temper the exotic with a dash of windswept North American charm. She’ll refer to pickled moose meat and kippered cod tongues and occasionally swear in Arabic just to get the legend rolling […]. (MacDonald, 1996: 120, emphasis added)

To the curious male spectator/consumer in the U.S., Kathleen’s exoticness stems largely from her multi-ethnic background, that is, from that combination of Oriental charm (Lebanon), Celtic mythicism (Ireland), and polar provenance (the Canadian North), something which indicates that the categories of the exotic are neither fixed nor limited to one race or nationality. ¹⁴ By consciously coding her ethnic identity as multiple, Kathleen draws her audience into “the immanent mystery” of the exotic, that is, into “a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity (Huggan, 2001: 13). In short, by promoting her mixed ethnic heritage as an exotic commodity for metropolitan consumption, Kathleen turns the enigma of her ethnic identity into a marketable value.

More specifically, Kathleen recognizes the exotic fascination that her connection to Lebanon, and the Middle East in general, will exert on a metropolitan audience. For “Lebanon is the Pearl of the Orient. And Beirut, where [her mother] was born, is the Paris of the Middle East” (MacDonald, 1996: 86). But Lebanon is also a country that the Piper sisters are “lucky to have escaped”, as Materia tells Frances and Mercedes when she explains to them how their grandparents, the Mahmouds, had to flee the atrocity of the Turks who often descended on Lebanese homes “looking for Christian babies to kill” (87). Lebanon is “a part of the world that hasn’t seen a moment’s peace in hundreds of years”, as James also tells Kathleen when he explains to her the barbaric behaviour of the Mahmouds, who clubbed him for having eloped with her mother (95). As such, Lebanon is not simply a land of “romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said, 1979: 1), but also a land of suffering, destitution, and brutal inter-ethnic violence. And it is precisely these paradoxical attributes that make Lebanon exotic in the eyes of Kathleen’s audience and that she seeks to exploit in pursuit of her career. In fact, Kathleen envisions her rise to stardom in the U.S. by offering herself, in part at least, as the embodiment of that Middle Eastern spectacle of magic and misery, beauty and brutality, with all the frisson, the seductive shiver, that such spectacle usually triggers in metropolitan audiences. Such is the legend that she wants to get rolling by strategically reinserting herself into the ethnic fold of an Arab.

On another level, Kathleen’s experiences as a White Canadian in New York City during the 1920s reveal the complexity of the dynamics of exoticization, particularly in a multicultural setting where multiple processes of cultural (mis)translation and (mis)appropriation often take place. In Harlem, a city where “[y]ou can walk for an hour and never hear a word of English, you can eat in five different countries in five blocks, you can hear music everywhere”, Kathleen cannot but feel “weird for being white” (MacDonald, 1996: 427; 428). For all its urban and multicultural vibrancy, Harlem remains for Kathleen disappointingly mainstream:

It reminded me of New Waterford, except Harlem is really prosperous. Not to mention that here I’m the odd one out. Everyone stared at me as I slunk by till I felt like something out of P.T. Barnum, “See the white slave princess, raised by wolves in darkest Canada!” A couple of young fellas sang a little song at me as I passed — softly, not nasty or anything, but it made me blush anyhow, calling me “sugar” and “baby”, oh what I’d give to be invisible. (458; emphasis added)

As soon as she arrives in Harlem, Kathleen’s whiteness appears conspicuously exotic and out of place, in the same way that a cultural artefact appears exotic once removed from its familiar, indigenous environment and transplanted into a new one. For nothing is inherently exotic about Kathleen’s identity; it is rather the condition of being “unhomed” that makes it so. As Huggan puts it:

The exotic is not, as is often supposed, an inherent quality to be found “in” certain people, distinctive objects, or specific places; exoticism describes, rather, a particular mode of aesthetic perception — one which renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them. (Huggan, 2001: 13, emphasis in original) ¹⁵

Thus Kathleen’s difference, constituted here as whiteness, becomes visible enough to elicit the exoticizing gaze of non-white males. Kathleen’s alienation in Harlem may therefore be said to result from an interesting case of reverse exoticism where both her race (white) and nationality (Canadian), two categories often associated with dominant cultures, are perceived as exotic by an ethnic group (African-American) itself traditionally associated with the exotic — very much in the same way that earlier in the novel James Piper, the Scottish-Irish “blond boy so carefully combed [with] his eyes so blue [and] his skin so fair”, is seen as exotically attractive by the dark-skinned Lebanese Materia (MacDonald, 1996: 19). This reversal of the exoticizing gaze attests to the fact that the dynamics of exoticization are both “dialectical and contingent” and operate “at various times and in different places” (Huggan, 2001: 13). Hence its significance as a crucial category of analysis for understanding the multiple processes of cultural coding and de-coding that take place particularly in a multicultural and multi-ethnic environment.

Film, gender, and harem erotics

Kathleen’s fantasy about her career as an exotic megastar in the entertainment business emanates largely from her exposure to the Orientalist iconographies of early twentieth-century Hollywood cinema. The Piper sisters frequent the movies so regularly simply in order to watch The Thief of Baghdad (1924) featuring Douglas Fairbanks, the silent screen sensation of the 1920s. While Kathleen fancies herself a larger-than-life opera celebrity, her sister Mercedes fantasizes about Ralph Luvovitz, her Jewish neighbour and secret crush, in the role of The Sheik’s impossibly good-looking Rudolph Valentino sporting a turban and lounging his time away “in his lavish striped tent, or galloping across the sands on a white Arabian charger” (MacDonald, 1996: 186). What is doubly ironic here, and certainly more telling about the protean nature of the exotic and its shifting trajectories, is that the object of the Piper sisters’ scopic desire is less the Westernized Oriental than the Orientalized Westerner. ¹⁶ In other words, the object of their gaze is not so much an “authentic” (in other words exotic) Oriental male as it is an ersatz version of him. This kind of sartorial manipulation of identity in Orientalist Hollywood cinema, while indicating a latent desire for transgressive role-playing, implicitly ironizes the myth of authenticity that drives the Western quest for the exotic.

Cinema in MacDonald’s novel serves as a cultural repository for the exotic East. Abundant references to such Hollywood hits as The Sheik (1921), The Thief of Baghdad (1924), and Harem Scarem (1932) — all of which draw to varying degrees on Richard F. Burton’s translation of A Thousand and One Nights (Alf Leila wa Leila) — gesture toward the Orient-obsessed popular culture of early twentieth-century North America. The on-screen caption of The Thief of Baghdad, for instance, reads “Douglas Fairbanks in ‘The Thief of Baghdad,’ An Arabian Nights Fantasy”, followed by an excerpt from the opening paragraph of Burton’s introduction to his notoriously erotic sixteen-volume translation of the Oriental saga (1884–87). If E. W. Lane’s 1841 translation of the latter was bowdlerized, presumably in keeping with Victorian moral codes, Burton’s own translation derived its undying allure primarily from “the fiction of the erotic East” it provided its Western readership (Kabbani, 1986: 7). By conjuring Burton’s nineteenth-century translation as its immediate textual source, the film seeks to compensate for its literal acoustic silence and to highlight the spectacle of Oriental eroticism it promises to deliver.

It is again in New York City, hub of North American metropolitan culture, that MacDonald makes a mockery of the eclectic and cheap exoticism animating the Orientalist Hollywood film industry. Kathleen and her black lover, Rose, visit “a place that was half theatre, half bar, called Club Mecca” in order to listen to the “Cleopatra of Jazz” Jesse Hogan (MacDonald, 1996: 424; 472). With Rose donning her father’s suit and passing as Kathleen’s male partner, the couple enter the club, and right before beginning their alcohol-induced public flirtation, they witness what turns out to be a jazzed-up, overly eroticized harem scene from Paramount’s blockbuster The Sheik (1921). The curtain is “sparkly purple […] with ‘MECCA’ written à la Araby in gold sequins against a silhouette of minarets” (470), and it parts on a glitzy spectacle in which both the Orient, with its familiar bevy of belly dancers and lewd sultans, and the Occident (France, Holland, Canada) become highly eroticized topographies:

The curtain parts on a harem. Light-skinned girls and a very fat dark sultan lounge on striped pillows. The girls dance the seven veils while he sings a song of illicit lust for one of them — the lightest one — and the band plays snake music. The tent flaps part and handsome Prince Ahmed [Valentino] pokes his turbaned head through and kisses the heroine. Then bingo, you’re in Gay Paree doing the cancan, and then the same young lovers flee the evil sultan all through the world’s capitals while the chorus girls quick-change and outdance Ziegfield’s. We went to Hawaii, Japan, Holland and Canada, where they pretended to be Eskimos and mounties! And although the girls changed costumes and countries every five seconds, they never wore more than half a dozen square inches, even when they were fur-clad in Canada’s frozen wastes. (470)

While participating in the booming Orient-inspired musicals, operas, and concert dances of the 1910s and the 1920s in the United States, this harem scene also dramatizes what will soon become one of the most pervasive Orientalist topoi in the Hollywood film industry throughout the century: the handsome European hero disguised in Arab dress triumphantly rescuing the white European damsel about to be raped by the wily and lecherous Arab. ¹⁷ This rape-and-rescue motif, however, and as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have argued, does not simply proclaim “the denial of any erotic intercourse between Europeans and non-Europeans” all the while reaffirming the stereotype of the sexually threatening, gold-and-blond-obsessed Arab; it also, and more importantly, betrays the European subject’s “latent desire to transcend fixed national and gender identity” (1994: 157). That Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Baghdad, Elvis Presley in Harum Scarum (1965), ¹⁸ Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar (1987) are all made to “masquerade in Arab disguise” shows the ways in which the Orient in Hollywood filmmaking often functions as a remote, exotic locus for “subliminally transsexual tropes” and “an outlet for a carnivalesque play with national and gender identity” (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 167).

MacDonald appropriates this subversive cross-dressing fantasy and extends it beyond the eroticized harem spectacle presented at the Club Mecca. The heterosexual white male fantasy that the harem spectacle produces on stage is ironically undercut by the homoerotic interracial Sapphism that Kathleen and her cross-dressed partner enact offstage. Shortly after the “irredeemably puerile” Club Mecca show and after Jesse Hogan’s “crude but compelling” performance, both Kathleen and Rose sneak out into one of the dim-lit alleys and surrender themselves to passionate embraces (MacDonald, 1996: 471; 473). Relying on “the social legibility of dress” (McClintock, 1995: 174), MacDonald not only inscribes a feminist-inflected mockery of the harem erotics so pervasive in early Hollywood cinema (belly dancers, slave girls, lewd Arabian sheikhs, and so forth), but also underscores the inventedness and performativity of identity by dis-arranging its conventional dress codes. In the same way that Kathleen and Frances foreground the cultural/racial elements of their identity that meet the exoticizing expectations of their audiences, Rose dons the trappings of masculinity and performs a gender identity that conforms to the rigid heterosexual matrices of contemporary society. In a period (the 1920s) when “women’s newfound possibilities for sexual and social freedom were much discussed and derided” (Studlar, 1996: 106), MacDonald creates a feminist counter-utopia where female cross-dressing and transgender role playing actively parody the male-dominated, exoticist culture of the time, all the while suggesting that racial, national, and gender identities are performative social constructs that can be transcended as easily as a mere change of costume. Ultimately, MacDonald incorporates harem erotics as a master trope in early twentieth-century Hollywood films in order, first, to parody the commodity exoticism that underwrites the North American culture industry and, second, to legitimize interracial homosexual desire by making it the very instrument of that parody.

Conclusion

In Fall on Your Knees, the inscription of a transgressive female agency against the backdrop of male-centred commodity exoticism throws into relief the high correlation of the latter with the dominant politics of race and gender in early twentieth-century North American culture. Such politics, the novel suggests, exoticize racial difference in the same way they “otherize” gender nonconformity, defining both as potential threats to the cultural and moral integrity of the nation. James’s rape/insemination of his daughter Kathleen, which constitutes the traumatic centre of the novel, may therefore be interpreted as dramatizing a eugenicist containment of her reproductive agency, an attempt to tame her womb into white childbearing and thus protect the nation from the purported threat of racial mixing. While it may be said to betray a subliminal white male desire on James’s part to wipe out his family’s Arab genes and to produce a pure pedigree immune to racial and sexual perversity, the rape/incest may also be understood as a metaphor for the racialized and gendered pronouncements of early North American culture on its racial and sexual others.

It also bears emphasizing that exoticism in MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees serves as the cultural and ideological crucible in which multiple discourses of alterity converge, ranging from James Piper’s ethnocentrism, through Harlem’s multiculturalism, to Hollywood’s Orientalism. In fact, MacDonald’s novel deserves renewed attention precisely because it traces critically the historical continuum along which exoticist constructions of race and gender have shaped the experiences of many immigrants in North America. Immigrants of Middle Eastern descent in particular, such as the Mahmoud daughters and then the Piper sisters, often find themselves trapped in a multicultural environment that either relegates them to the status of exotic commodity or dismisses them as social and moral nuisance. Written in a period (the 1990s) when multiculturalism was at the centre of intense public debates, Fall on Your Knees may be said to intervene in such debates by warning its readers against the superficial posturing of boutique multiculturalism and the ways in which the latter may easily become the covert handmaiden of a culture industry thriving on the commercial packaging of its exotic others. As such, the strategic exoticization of things Arab/Middle Eastern in the novel points toward a potential collusion between multiculturalism and exoticism as two racialized and gendered discourses, on the one hand, and the commercial culture industry that feeds on both, on the other.

In short, MacDonald’s novel suggests that unless we are alive to the ways in which the Western cult of the exotic is inextricably embedded in the racial and sexual politics of market-oriented North American culture, racial and sexual minorities will continue to be confined to the margins of social life and denied access to political representation, social justice, and citizenship rights.