Arabic Mahjar or Mahjar Arabs in Latin America: Memoir of an Emigrant

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

Speakers: Abeer Abdelhafez Abdelaal

The literature of emigration in the 20th and 21st centuries occupied a prominent place in the literary, historical, and intellectual panorama, being one of the sources of human and documentary baggage together with the literary value that it contributes. Memorias de un emigrante (Memoir of an emigrant ) (1942) by the Syrian-Chilean writer Benedicto Chauqui (Homs 1895-Chile 1970), tells the story of his emigration from Syria to Chile as a thirteen-year-old teenager in the year 1908 with his grandfather and some of his relatives to join his two uncles in Santiago de Chile to escape the extreme poverty and hardship of life in the Levant at that time and under Turkish rule. Chauquí's emigration was not intentional but a mere chance to accompany his elderly grandfather. Once he finds himself in this new world in a country he doesn't know and a language he doesn't speak, his only weapon was his scholarly prowess, his strong Christian faith, and his yearning for the ideal.
Chauqui's memory has been a great success since the date of its publication (1942) and up to the present, it has become a historical document that singles out a crucial period in the world at the beginning of the 20th century on the one hand, and the history of the Arab and Latin American countries on the other. The autobiography focuses on the intimacy of the emigrant and inquiries into the individual experience of man in front of the world, and in this way adds to the trail of essential memory books, diaries, and confessions.

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