Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916. This map was a proposal that influenced the border settlements of 1921. In the context of ongoing post-WWI disputes, Syrians resisted partition, the Repulic of Turkey asserted itself, and the newly established Soviet Union refused to cooperate with Imperial powers. The border of the British and French Mandate territories have now solidified, the colonial carve-up of historic Syria conditioning politics in the region since the 1920s.
Historical accounts of Arabic-speaking immigrants emphasise peddling as their primary occupation – a common-sense explanation for the dispersal of Syrians across the United States, the peddler thesis. The peddler was such a pervasive figure of the Arab other that he appears in literary works as a pseudo-exotic persona. Glenn Ward Dresbach’s 1924 poem 'The Syrian Peddler' is thoroughly orientalist in its structuring of the tension between the stealth peddler and the men hard at work in the fields, and its reliance on romance between the peddler and a farm girl. The peddler is an illusionist, who 'Quickly spread his wares upon the floor,/Peddler-wise'. 'Bright- colored silks and laces billowed out/in airy grace and skillful hands', which mesmerise the naïve girl. The cunning Syrian peddler is the seducer, and the lonely farm girl is his potential victim. Here is not just the pernicious othering, but reductive over-emphasis on peddling, neglecting the greater number of Syrians employed in other occupations, notably the many women in the textile mills of the US northeast. In the 1960s, Arab American folklorists proposed the peddler thesis, the pursuit of untapped markets in the interior of the USA to explain the spread of Syrians beyond urban centres and more importantly to recover the peddler. The peddler thesis asserted belonging in the wider country redefining as an origin story a stigmatised aspect of Arab American history. Rather than presenting the Syrian peddler as a beggar, a huckster, or a cheat, Arab Americans have reclaimed the peddler as a tireless worker who courageously ventured into the heartland of America with little more than a pack of wares and dogged determination, laying the foundation for all the Little Syrias of twentieth-century American cities. For twenty-first century Arab Americans the Peddler’s Route Map is a visual representation of Arab migration contemporaneous with the spread and settlement of Arabic-speaking immigrants across the United States. The map is a confident cultural self-representation of Arabness at
Syrian pack peddler from Birmingham, Alabama, circa 1890.
Faris and Yamna Naff Arab-American Collection, National Museum of American History
time when Syrian immigrants had achieved public presence throughout the territorial expanse of the nation. The map indicates the extent of early twentieth-century Arabic language across the country transforming the United States into a place where Arabness fits within the borders of the nation, a testament to cultural belonging, communicated from the past to the present. This proof of historic presence translates across time into a certificate of contemporary Arab-American belonging. However, presence does not necessarily produce a sense of belonging—that seamless correspondence between the self and a place, or an unquestioned relationship between cultural identity and social space. Implicit in the notion of belonging is an ethics of possession – a place belongs to people, and these specific people belong in that place. Immigrant narratives are always about un- belonging: dislocation from a place of belonging and dispossession of one's belongings.
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
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