Editors' note: While this story—written in spring and early summer, before terrorists launched attacks on the United States September 11, 2001—addresses Mizna's efforts to defeat the negative stereotypes in general about people of Arab descent in the United States, the editors of Minnesota are compelled to note the particular relevance of the story's topic.

When Arab American students fill out tests, applications, and other forms at the University of Minnesota, they pause at the boxes listed under Race/Ethnic Group. The choices include non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaskan Native, and international. But there is no clear and distinct place for people of Arab descent to mark. It is even difficult to find out how many Arab American students are enrolled in the 20 colleges and professional schools on Twin Cities campus. The University's Arab Student Association (ASA), part of whose mission is to change negative stereotypes about Arabs in Minnesota and at the University, has approximately 80 Arab American members and 260 from Arab countries. But these numbers include only those who are active in the ASA.

The Arab American community is largely invisible, says Charles Sugnet, assistant professor of English at the University. He subscribes to novelist Bharati Mukherjee's idea that "until people are given literary representation, . . . [it's] as if they don't exist and we don't notice them unless we read about them," Sugnet says.

Sugnet has been a mentor to the founders of a young journal in Minneapolis that is giving much needed literary representation—a place to explore questions of heritage, culture, and identity—to Arab Americans. Mizna, a literary journal started in 1998 by University of Minnesota alumna Kathryn Haddad (M.L.S. '00) and School of Mathematics teaching specialist Saleh Abudayyeh, offers a lively forum for literary work by Arabs and Arab Americans. Featuring poetry, essays, visual art, and short fiction, Mizna (which in Arabic means "the cloud of the desert," one that shades and protects desert travelers from the sun) expands from the daily lives of Arab Americans to their personal, cultural, and political encounters with the Middle East. Mizna is also committed to presenting a variety of concerns. Issues of sexuality, feminism, religion, class, and nationality fill its pages. Published three times a year by the nonprofit organization that shares the magazine's name, Mizna has a subscriber base of 300 and a production run of nearly 700. Mizna began as the Chronicle, a newsletter for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Minnesota, in 1996 but soon began to include literary pieces beyond news items of interest to the Arab American community. Under Haddad and Abudayyeh, the newsletter broke free and dedicated its pages solely to art and literature. Mizna is now the recipient of many prestigious grants—including from the Jerome Foundation—and is also funded by private donations and advertising. The Library of Congress retains a yearly subscription.

Haddad, executive director of Mizna, describes its twofold goal: "We want to be a journal for the Arab community. We also want to be a literary journal . . . that stands along other journals of literature. We need to tell our stories for each other, but we also feel like we want to tell our stories for others who don't know." A recent issue of Mizna includes an essay by an African American writer exploring the relationship between Arabs and African Americans, cartoons by a Lebanese lesbian artist who lives in New York City, a short story about arranged marriage and a young Arab American woman who resists tradition, and an account of a trip to Iraq by a non-Arab woman. Most of Mizna's contributors reside in Minnesota, many of the writers and staff members are University of Minnesota students or alumni, and most are women. And yet differences abound: Many were born in the United States, while some are immigrants who have lived most of their life in this country, and still others are international students and scholars. The striking range of writers and genres matches the diversity of the Arab community itself. Indeed, Mizna aims to represent a community that shares a language but encompasses many different countries, histories, and perspectives. "There is a very real lack of understanding of Arab culture in the United States, of Arab contributions to civilization, of the richness of the Arab community," says Lisa Adwan, editor of Mizna. "It is vital to cultivate an understanding and appreciation of Arab culture in the United States in an attempt to counter the negative stereotypes that currently pervade the media, film, and advertising industries."

Haddad, a native Minnesotan of Lebanese descent, is familiar with the dissonance created by competing versions of what it means to be Arab American. "The stories I heard at home about Lebanon, the pictures, the relatives, were so different from the stories I saw on the news and on television and from the people around me," Haddad says. "That huge disconnect is something that just makes you want to act. . . . So it was at a political and personal level that made me feel that Mizna was absolutely necessary."

A past president of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Minneapolis, Haddad sees Mizna as responding to what she calls the very real racism that characterizes the way the mainstream press, television, and movies generally represent Arabs. "It's still acceptable to have an Arab as a villain, as a terrorist in a movie," Haddad says, citing Disney's animated film Aladdin, in which the villains speak with Arabic accents, what appears to be Arabic writing in a bazaar is really just scribbles, and a character sings, "Oh I come from a land/ from a faraway place/ where the caravan camels roam/ where they cut off your ear/ if they don't like your face/ it's barbaric, but hey, it's home." There are many examples, says Haddad, including the 2000 film Rules of Engagement, directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Lieutenant's Woman). In it, a U.S. Marine squadron kills dozens of Yemeni civilians depicted as a murderous mob, including women and children who hide guns in their robes.

The negative stereotype of Arabs as terrorists is well-accepted, Haddad says, pointing out a series of op-ed pieces that appeared in the Washington Post in August. Writers Michael Kelly, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will contended that Israel should escalate the violence and wage a short war against Palestinian forces, identified as the aggressors in the Middle East conflict. "No major newspaper would publish continued calls for destruction of any other ethnic community," Haddad says. "For some reason, it is still acceptable to print calls for blanket violence against Arabs."

In addition to being characterized as terrorists, Arabs are also commonly portrayed as greedy oil sheikhs, erotic belly dancers, or veiled, oppressed women. For these reasons, Haddad notes, some Arabs avoid calling attention to their ethnic backgrounds. "If you look at a lot of businesses [in the Twin Cities], they won't say they're a Palestinian grocery store. They'll say 'Mediterranean.'" Motivated by the frequent misunderstanding of Arabs, Mizna serves not only as a corrective tool but as a place where the potential for understanding deepens. "The fact that we are misunderstood affects people's lives at a very basic level," she says. "People think it's OK to bomb Iraq because the people there are nameless, faceless 'terrorists.' There's nothing that would drive an Iraqi writer more than the need to give . . . some humanity to who you are."

Sugnet met Haddad—who is also a published playwright, high school teacher, and co-founder of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis—at a teaching seminar sponsored by the Guthrie Theater and subsequently became one of her professors and mentors. He recounts a similar situation of wild misperception: In the 1970s, a major publishing house asked Columbia University professor and renowned Palestinian writer Edward Said to compile a list of the best fiction by Arab writers, to be translated for a new series. He presented the list, but when nothing came of the project Said, upon inquiry, learned that the upper levels of the company had decided that "Arabic was a terrorist language."

"It wasn't about the content that was in the books," says Sugnet, a non-Arab, "but that anything that was in Arabic was terrorist. I think this is a relative widespread belief among people who make movies in the United States, the people who control the broadcast system."

Misunderstanding is not the only phenomenon Mizna addresses. The mere existence of the magazine calls attention to the substantial Arab and Muslim community in the Twin Cities. How to represent a unified picture of Arabs and Arab Americans, however, became an urgent question during development of Mizna. Mazher Al-Zoby (B.A. '94), a graduate student in the department of Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, was involved in these early discussions. He explains that many Arabs have responded to the history of colonialism in Arab countries by insisting on "the unified nature of the Arabic 'character,' the Arabic culture, the Arabic language, the Arabic memory, the Arabic history." When it came to creating Mizna, Al-Zoby recalls, one of the emergent questions was, What kind of magazine would Mizna strive to be? "If you asked what is the identity of this magazine," he says, "anybody would say it's the Arabic experience. But what does capture the Arabic experience? That proved to be very, very difficult to answer . . . because of the experiences of the people who actually inhabit that status as Arab Americans. Some come from the Middle East as refugees. Some actually were kicked out of their countries in the wake of the Gulf War. Some come here for economic reasons. Some come for schooling and go back. Given these circumstances, it is really difficult to imagine what would enable one voice."

The participants in Mizna's beginning quickly found their magazine would be a forum for many voices and often competing views. As with many immigrant and minority experiences in the United States, no single narrative can sum up an entire general condition. "Diversity actually exists in the Arab community," Al-Zoby says. "An Egyptian has different concerns than a Palestinian; an Algerian certainly has a totally different experience than someone from Iraq. And how does one recount and unify all these experiences?" Throughout the pages of Mizna the heterogeneous quality of various writers' opinions, styles, and lives jumps out. From one article to the next, a lively discussion of identity, culture, and memory emerges.

Mizna has the added challenge of drawing attention to what is specific about being Arab American without ignoring what is shared among minorities and immigrants in Minnesota or the United States in general. "Any immigrant community would face the issue of whether to assimilate, whether to maintain their heritage, how can they remember their past, how can they remember their home, how can they actually translate all these memories or thoughts to their children," Al-Zoby explains. "It's a really laboring task to begin with. But in the case of Arab Americans there is a double bind: not only what I have just described but also the fact that the Arabs have been constructed as the oppositional enemy. . . . How do you logistically deal with the issues of coming into a different culture, assimilating your values, but at the same time, how do you justify yourself?"

As a twin project of explanation and exploration, Mizna does not draw a strong distinction between politics and literary expression. It doesn't have to, according to Adwan, a non-Arab who joined Mizna as editor after the second issue. While Mizna is not explicitly a forum for Middle Eastern politics and current events (plenty of those already exist, she says), Adwan claims that there is something "inherently political about being an Arab, simply because of the state of world affairs today."

Sugnet agrees. Politics and references to what is often called the Arab-Israeli conflict occur throughout the journal, he says, but as "part of life experience for some people rather than as an issue. It's smart for them not to be trying to take on direct polemics about the issue," he continues. "That's not what they're there for."

The decision to have Mizna focus on the literary work of Arabs and Arab Americans was not a difficult one. Haddad, who had been active in the Asian arts community in the Twin Cities, wanted to address issues specific to Arab Americans. "I was putting my voice in there," she says, "but I always felt it would be really nice to have a group of Arab writers, to have an outlet for Arab literature. I was really sad that there wasn't anything that I could find anywhere."

A lack of literary representation and the proliferation of mainstream misrepresentation are not the only reasons for Mizna's commitment to literary expression. "Literature can be an extremely effective vehicle for addressing political issues and raising awareness," Adwan says. "Many people are bored or overwhelmed by politics and don't want to be bothered with it. And many, especially Americans, approach politics with entrenched preconceptions. But through literature one can plant a seed that may engage the readers' interest, pique their curiosity, and later lead them to ask questions."

Because non-Arabs have articulated much of what has been said and written about Arabs, Mizna is compelled to intervene against superficial language, wrongheaded analyses, and racist stereotypes. Literature, Al-Zoby says, "becomes a new way, a new angle for understanding the moment in crisis. . . . The task of any literary production—be it nonfiction or fiction—is really to express, to articulate, to agitate and highlight the realities of existence. But not only that. It also has to think of conditions of possibility. So it has the task of going beyond just reporting, and to do that with an eye toward the possibilities of transformation."

At the University of Minnesota, the Middle Eastern Studies collection—once housed in the basement of Wilson Library—has been dismantled and integrated into the general collection. There is no discrete department of Middle Eastern studies. Classes in Arabic are taught by the Department of Afro-American and African Studies. History classes about the Middle East are offered infrequently. With the low profile of Arab Americans at the University, Haddad is quick to credit Professor Sugnet for helping her work at Mizna. "I think that if I hadn't met Charlie, I don't know what I would have done, where I would be."

According to Sugnet, Haddad and her colleagues have done quite well. "I think the magazine is smart for its breadth and for bringing Arab life down to questions of meals and marriages and houses and parents and children instead of it having always to be questions of bombs and peace treaties and terrorists," he says.

Mizna faces a daunting task. After all, its essays, poems, personal narratives, and short stories amount to a modest response to an often hostile environment. And yet the pages of Mizna offer a needed education, a generous invitation, and a welcome celebration of a marginalized culture.