Writing Indiana- Flatness as Complexity

 I do not recall how I came across Indiana as Islamistan: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. No way I could not read anything with that title.

Crystal Maritta Sam is an UK Ph.d candidate and her writing does smack of the academy. I was wholly unaware of The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. However, having read the essay I want to read the novel. I suspect here is another Indiana writer - the novel's writer did reside in Indiana - Hoosiers  could read with profit and enjoyment.

...Set in the 1970s and 80s, Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) charts the spiritual and social landscape of Muslims in Indiana, in a way that emphasises a shifting understanding of place and with a particular focus on migration. Throughout her life, the protagonist Khadra Shamy encounters various geographies ranging from the flat lands of Indiana to the rich and varied landscapes of Syria. In the novel, Kahf complicates the stereotypical portrayal of suburbia and seemingly homogenous suburban homes through a vivid description of domestic interiors. The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf further complicates the idea of home in the migrant imaginary through its Syrian-American protagonist Khadra Shamy. By considering these complications, this article seeks to highlight the role of both material and metaphorical spaces in Kahf’s novel and examine how they inform and affect the private and public lives of the characters, as well as the memories the characters associate with those spaces.

Ms. Sam refers to my favorite current Indiana writer , Michael Martone:

The American writer Michael Martone, a native to the American Midwest, presents an understanding of the idea of flatness in American literature, which we can consider in relation to Kahf’s novel. In his essay ‘The Flatness’, Martone repeatedly affirms the geographical flatness of the Midwest, and yet, even as “flatness informs the writing of the Midwest”, he also suggests that “the flatness of the landscape can serve as a foil, the writing standing out […] in opposition to the background” (Martone 48). He urges us to think of the material environment as a living, breathing being. Martone writes, “the way I feel about the Midwest is the way my skin feels and the way I feel my own skin—in layers and broad stripes and shades, in planes and in the periphery”. In this way, Martone presents the Midwest as “an organ of sense and not power, delicate and coarse at the same time” and as “the place of sense” (48-9). As a native of the Midwest, Martone possesses a sense of intimacy with the land. While Martone admits that the Midwest may lack natural beauty or industrial growth, it is this sense of absence that forces its inhabitants to introspectively look within themselves. A similar trajectory occurs in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf; when Khadra’s background is elaborated upon in the novel we can see how the flatness of the land is symbolic to the sense of loss and nonbelonging that she feels. For Martone and Kahf alike, the Midwest landscape becomes a place of “deeply dissolved meanings, settings, events, and fundamental particulars of everyday practice and life” (Pred 50)....

 Understanding there was a complexity in Indiana comparable to William Faulkner's Mississippi took me 40 years and a governmentally sponsored exile to New Jersey. I infer Ms. Kahf understood this complexity well before me and without a trip to New Jersey. Right now, I have taken up the idea of Indiana being a place created by our imagination. Our humanity remodels geography 

I hope any aspiring Indiana writer will read this and tell their stories about the place they call home.

Good luck.

sch 6/4/22