Arab American Writing

The Situe, or Arab grandmother, moves in and out of this collection of eleven short stories, forming an irresistible drama of an extended Arab family in twentieth-century America. Frances Khirallah Noble's deft and accomplished tales draw her experiences and the stories told by grandmothers, aunts, and other female relatives. Each story is complete in itself, but read together they fuse to form a powerful whole. Khirallah Noble writes of immigrants tom between two cultures, the lure of capitalist success versus the cost of assimilation, marital and parental tensions, youth and age, innovation and tradition. Chronologically arranged and covering much of the twentieth century, the book begins with Hasna Elias's immigration to America from what is now Syria and Lebanon, and ends in the present, where the situe lives in a Southern California home for the elderly. Containing elements of magic and stoicism, the stories present textured characters rich in independence, creativity, and initiative. As the stories move forward in time from the Old World to the new, Frances Khirallah Noble's style shifts subtly from folk tale to contemporary fiction. “The Situe Stories” gracefully captures the integration of Christian Arab women into American culture.

In this deftly turned story, author Frances Khirallah Noble presents a story that is at once sublimely comic yet surprisingly erudite in the subjects it tackles. Its hero, Kahlil Gibran Hourani, is an ordinary, in fact rather bumbling, middle-aged Syrian American optician. On the eve of his fifty-third birthday Kali finds himself confronting seminal questions. "I face the last third of my life," he reflects, "and I don't know what to do with myself. Every day I ask how should I be living now? What should I do with the end in sight? Can I come to terms with it?" Enter his dead grandmother, the wisely sardonic Situe. Although she appears in a dream at first and reappears at whim, Situe's presence will turn Kali's life upside down. Through a series of misadventures Kali is abducted and wrongly suspected of being a terrorist by apparent rogue government agents. His darkly absurd experiences force Kali to question his own perceptions, inviting the reader to do the same. Part myth, part magical realism, always knowing, the book offers a biting critique on issues of race, constitutional rights, and the realities of Arab American life in a post 9/11 world.