Haunting as Inheritance

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance

Available on-demand

How does language haunt the displaced? Join Noor Naga, author of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, and Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora, as they explore “linguistic slippage” and the “untranslatability of the self.” From post-revolutionary Cairo to the Arizona desert, discover how spectral forces beneath the English language shape modern identity. Listen in for an essential interrogation of life in the “in-between” spaces.

This event is sponsored by Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, Department of American Studies, Institute for Social Concerns, Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grants, The Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good/Henkels Grant.

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance is a research collective, conversation series, and digital archive dedicated to contemporary literature shaped by exile, transnational migration, and human rights violations. The series brings Southwest and Southeast Asian and North African writers and artists into sustained dialogue with American writers and scholars to imagine new modes of literary production across borders and cultivate intersectional solidarities. The series was developed as a global public humanities project in partnership with institutes and initiatives both within and beyond the University of Notre Dame, and was founded by author and Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at Notre Dame, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in 2020.

For more information visit the event website.

Hosted at the University of Notre Dame by the Initiative on Race and Resilience, this installment of the “Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance” series featured authors Hannah Lillith Assadi and Noor Naga. Supported by various campus institutes, the event interrogated the psychospiritual pressures of statelessness within global Anglophone fiction.

In the featured novels Sonora and If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, the “Drama of Language” serves as a primary site of ontological friction. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi interrogates how English acts as a vessel for “spectral forces,” where languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish hover beneath the surface, threatening to subsume the dominant tongue. This “linguistic slippage” reflects a profound loss of command over the self. Naga deconstructs the “forensic” nature of accents in Cairo, where the specific texture of one’s speech carries literal economic weight, determining the price of mangoes or the cost of a plumber. For the displaced, language is not merely a tool for communication but a betrayer; the absence of linguistic fluency at a checkpoint or in an argument signals a totalizing defenselessness. Arabic remains a “loving language” of intimacy, yet English persists as an “observed” register that often hedges its arguments for a global, indeterminate audience.

The “Geographic and Historical Hauntings” in these works further interrogate the hybrid experience. Assadi describes a “fluid spatial architecture” where the Arizona desert serves as a portal to the vanished landscapes of Palestine. This terrain is not passive; the Sonoran desert is a “retaliatory force” that avenges its history of colonial violence through mysterious suicides. Assadi synthesizes this through the image of her father’s taxi, the “Battlestar Galactica.” This vehicle serves as a metaphor for a vessel traversing a “nowhere between galaxies,” playing classical music while crossing the Superstition Mountains—a life lived at the limits of stationary belonging. Naga’s Cairene setting is equally vital, as she argues that her characters’ intersection is predetermined by the “grimy” geography of downtown Cairo, a space where an Americanized Egyptian and a rural local collide in ways impossible within cordoned-off, affluent districts.

The “Post-Revolutionary Void” is analyzed through Naga’s 2016–2017 timeline, a period she characterizes as a “breakup” with the 2011 Egyptian revolution. This era represents a transition from collective hope to jaded survivalism. In this void, a sharp friction emerges: the male character clings to his “ego attachment” to the revolution to maintain his sense of self-worth, while the female narrator—an American newcomer—arrives “years too late,” attempting to buy an “ethnic experience” she can never truly inhabit. This leads to a rigorous “Industry Critique,” where both authors reject the role of “cultural mascots.” They interrogate the “literary tourism” demanded by Western publishing, which favors defensive “post-9/11 reactionary writing” intended to humanize minorities. Instead, they champion “aesthetic autonomy,” prioritizing “lived lives” over “representative lives.” By focusing on the “untranslatable” and the “hall of mirrors” inherent in the diaspora, Assadi and Naga challenge the industry’s desire for marketable identities, favoring instead a profound engagement with the mystery of language and the burden of history.

These specific narrative arcs illuminate the broader mission of the series to bridge the gap between global history and personal memory.

These insights illuminate the complex interplay between racial identity and global resilience. By examining the mechanics of memory and the limits of translation, the discussion provides a necessary framework for understanding the “in-between” existence of the contemporary global Anglophone writer.

- The “Elliptical Form” of Time and Memory Assadi’s work employs a non-linear temporal structure where chapters repeat—specifically August, February, and April—to reflect how time operates as a continuous loop. This form mirrors the subjective perception of history, where traumatic or exilic experiences refuse to follow a straight line and instead function as a palimpsest of recurring memory.
- Class and Race as “Untranslatable” Realities Naga identifies the ontological friction that occurs when American racial binaries are superimposed upon the Cairene landscape. The “untranslatability” of the hybrid self becomes a site of danger, as social and linguistic fluency—or the lack thereof—exposes characters to physical and economic violence.
- Silence as Both a Survival Mechanism and a First Memory Silence is characterized not as a void, but as an active, foundational memory of displacement. For those smuggled out of conflict zones, the literal silencing of a child’s cry by a mother’s hand serves as the first entry point into a world where belonging is precarious and self-refashioning is a constant requirement.
- The “In-Between” Space of the Outsider The “outsider” is defined by a lack of stationary belonging, moving between worlds where they are often misread as locals. This existence creates a unique vantage point where one is surprised by “the wrong things,” inhabiting a “third space” of perpetual transition that defies neat categorization.
- The Move from “Reactionary Writing” to “Aesthetic Autonomy” Both authors advocate for a shift away from “defensive” writing that seeks to humanize minorities for a Western audience. Instead, they emphasize “aesthetic autonomy,” focusing on the private relationship between author and text and the “lived life” rather than performing for a “safari” market.

“Silence is my first memory… my mother had her hand over my mouth to muffle my cries. What baby is not allowed to cry at birth?” — Hannah Lillith Assadi
“English is so Global you have no idea who your reader is and so you almost have to kind of hedge your arguments a bit more.” — Noor Naga
“The experience of watching languages and the selves that are attached to them collide and disappear into one another is at once unsettling and clarifying.” — Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
“I do think that the languages that we don’t speak but that we grow up around haunt us in a way… like a frequency is missing.” — Hannah Lillith Assadi
“I think that we’re in a place now where we’re no longer writing in this sort of reactionary and sort of defensive way.” — Noor Naga