ABSTRACT
From the end of the nineteenth century to the early to mid-twentieth century, migrants from the Eastern Mediterranean, formerly the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire and later regions of European colonialism and Arab nationalism, migrated to the Americas in the hundreds of thousands and collectively constituted what is known in Arabic as the mahjar. While the number of migrants to Colombia is less than the number to other areas of the Americas like Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and the United States, the figure of the Arab migrant or traveler nevertheless appears in several fictional works by canonical Colombian authors, especially Gabriel García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada [Chronicle of a Death Foretold] (1981) and Álvaro Mutis’s Abdul Bashur, soñador de navíos [Abdul Bashur, Dreamer of Ships] (1991). In both texts, the Arab protagonist dies before the narration begins, while a presumably European-descendant narrator mediates his life story. Reading this phenomenon as a “strategic formation” in Edward Said’s sense of the term, the present chapter explores the narratological structure as a constitutive component of Hispanic-American Orientalism that is concerned with authorship and knowledge production. Through a series of close readings, the chapter also shows how this structuring trope of death is reformulated in the novel La caída de los puntos cardinales [The Fall of the Cardinal Points] (2000) by Luis Fayad, a Colombian author and descendant of Arab migrants. Often read as a story about migrant integration, as it is replete with scenes of linguistic, social and culinary acculturation, the work engages in a more critical project of discourse. Rewriting the function of death through vast intertextual frames, Fayad creates apertures for dismantling the accretions of Orientalist tropes within Hispanic-American letters while indicating ways Arab authorship can be textually seen in the history of migration to the South American country.
