Well, first I’d like to say thanks for joining me in an exploration of a part of the literary world that is still relatively unfamiliar territory even for me.  My naive humanistic goal for any literature class is some form of enlightenment, I guess, some degree of improvement in our understanding of the human condition in all its complexity and commonality.  So if you now comprehend something about the universe and your place in it that you didn’t comprehend before—something about the relationship between your own culture and that of a previously unfamiliar part of the world, for example, then you should count this class as at least a modest success.

One of my guiding assumptions in studying literature is that humans make sense of things by making stories about them.  I.e., I deeply believe that what we know or think we know—about ourselves and others—is built largely on narratives, on the stories we hear and tell and repeat to one another through many different media.  Very often the stories that we hear and tell and repeat about other people bear very little relation to the ones that those people might tell about themselves.  So with the texts I set in front of you for this course, the first thing I wanted to do was to piece together a more complex story of a badly understood part of world, one that might let outsiders like us peer into the Black Box of the Middle East and examine some fragments that a few of its foremost storytellers have composed. 

And yet, even as you’ve built up what I hope is a more accurate picture—or at least a more complicated picture—of the modern Arab World by listening to some of its best writers, I hope you’ve resisted the impression that their stories just transparently “represent,” like an open window into someone’s house, something called “Arab Culture.”  Any cultural object will inevitably carry the burden of representation, I guess, and it’s true that in our class we have often implicitly, and perhaps problematically, regarded many of these texts as social texts—i.e., as more or less accurate, realistic depictions of certain cultural and political realities common to a particular region of the world.  But one of the things I also wanted to offer was a variety of voices from the Middle East, a variety of approaches to the purpose and the craft of storytelling.  So it’s salutary to remind ourselves periodically that the writers we’ve read aren’t necessarily—or are not merely—trying to “represent” their countries and cultures, let alone of some vast, monolithic, homogeneous entity called the “Arab World”:  since they’re writers, film-makers, fiction-makers, they are deliberately crafting and often criticizing a reality, not producing anthropological or sociological documents about it. 

Still, if we’re looking for some common ground, we might well conclude that, like people anywhere else in the world, people in the Middle East (including its creative artists) are trying to figure out how to think about gender and sexuality, class and power, trying to come to terms with their religious and political beliefs, trying to understand their histories, and just trying generally to make sense of and get by in the modern world. Modern Arab literature has been fertile ground for a kind of home-grown Existentialism--which means that like writers and thinkers everywhere, Middle Eastern writers wrestle with accepting responsibility for their own existence, living in resolute awareness of their own fates, overcoming their fears and claiming their futures. 

And speaking of mastering dread and ensuring yr own future:  let me end with afinal nod to Scheherezade, a figure to whom, as you’ll remember, many Arab writers pay tribute as the mother of long-form fiction in Arab world. Scheherezade told stories because her life quite literally depended on it, and if the stakes for her modern-day descendents are not always quite so pressing, they’re still quite high. There's often the threat of political persecution, of course. But as I said at the beginning of this course, there’s still a lot riding on the ability of Arab people to narrate their own stories, to talk instd of being talked about, to appear in Western discourse as their own authors, as critics & explicators of their own work, as singers of their own songs.  To simply and genuinely acknowledge their right to do so amounts to some pretty elementary consciousness-raising; you'd think we'd be beyond that by now. But if this is the most basic task of living in a multicultural world, then it's also, unfortunately, the most abiding:  hearing people insist that they don’t fit the stereotypes others have created for them, that they have a right to choose the words and images that best describe who and what they are, that they have the intelligence and the creativity to analyze and work out their own problems, on their own.