December 2006

The small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania where Arab-American writer, poet, and activist Elmaz Abinader was raised had a powerfully discordant impact on the ideals and concerns that would one day come to shape her work. It is, she states simply, the place where her art began. As part of the only immigrant family in a town of 700 people, Abinader’s experience as an outsider allowed her to develop a keen understanding of the issues of diversity and social displacement at an early age. “When you find yourself different than the community around you, it gives you an opportunity to be reflective,” she explains. “Growing up [within a family] in a society where there was no space for us made me really look at culture and think a lot about American society and fitting in.”

The feeling of being different is a burden artists often bear, and one that Abinader instinctively merged with the artistic cultural traditions of her heritage to find her unique voice. “Lebanese people are poetic people,” she says, recounting family gatherings in Lebanon where the men would create poems about the day’s events and present them in the evenings. “Poetry is much more common in popular society there than it is in the United States. It is just part of who you are — everyone writes poetry and stories.”

The author of numerous essays, articles, performance plays, and two books — one a poetry collection called In the Country of My Dreams (1999) and the other a memoir titled The Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon (1997, 1991) — Abinader does not like to limit herself in terms of genre. Instead, she follows two basic thrusts with her work: the telling of a story and the interpretation of what’s going on in the world through her own point of view. The former Fulbright scholar to Egypt whose honors also include a PEN Award and a Goldiers Award for Literature succinctly explains her work this way: “I try to document the personal effects of political events.”

Her performance play Country of Origin, for instance — winner of two Drammies from the Oregon Drama Critics — examines the individual struggles three Arab women face in the midst of cultural and social change. Similarly the socio-political climate in Abinader’s current novel-in-progress, The Language of Dreams, is pivotal to the experiences of the main character, a woman from the Middle East who comes to the U.S. to marry her fiancé during the Lebanese Civil War.

As chair of the English department at Mills College in Oakland, California; co-director of the VONA Foundation (a nonprofit that nurtures the development of writers of color); and a fitness instructor, Abinader is eager for the solitude and time she has been given in the form of a five-week residency at The MacDowell Colony. She plans to use that time polishing a new collection of poetry titled The Torture Quartet and Other Works, continuing work on The Language of Dreams, and sharing her work with the public by offering a reading and answering questions from audience members at the December presentation of MacDowell Downtown.