Stereotypes and Paranoia in America Post 9/11 in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land

Abstract

Among the many complications that the 9/11 attacks brought to the world is task of enhancing the distorted image of Arabs and Muslims in the Western World. This image has exposed the Arab diaspora in the West to new and growing forms of threats and convolutions. The American excessive sense of paranoia following the 9/11 disaster has created an unjustified fear and hatred towards Arabs and Muslims who play important roles in the American society. This has increased the number of Arab writers who have taken on the responsibility of representing a positive image of Arabs by expressing their desire to live in peace and harmony with the rest of the world. One of these writers who dedicated her fiction to demand a drastic change in depicting Arabs as other than terrorists is the Arab-American novelist, Laila Halaby. This paper attempts to show how Halaby employs her narrative, Once in a Promised Land, in order to present the majority of Arabs and Muslims as victims of stereotyping and by shedding light on the distorted image of Muslims and Arabs in Post 9/11 America. Also, the paper focuses on Halaby's employment of embedded texts and folktales by means of creating a mixture of truths and lies to reflect the reality of stereotypes.