ALI/JOLLY/TEDRO: WRITING OTHERNESS INTO THE WEST

Hosted by Tulsa Artist Fellow Moheb Soliman
Featuring Kaveh Bassiri and Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Tulsa Artist Fellowship programming is free and open to all.

Through a public talk, reading, and discussion with other guests, interdisciplinary poet, and Tulsa Artist Fellow Moheb Soliman presents the research, writing, and speculative aspects of a work in progress. This poetry and history project centers on Hi Jolly/Hajji Ali, a mysterious early American immigrant figure brought to Texas by the military with others from the Arab world to help cross and dominate the Southwest desert in a fascinating, ultimately failed U.S. Army experiment: a "Camel Corps” involving dozens of imported camels. Though distant in time and space, the core issues of identity, place, belonging, settlement, and relationship to notions of American “wilderness” and “the frontier” resonate deeply in places like Oklahoma, which has its own complex history of these themes.

Join Soliman and featured guests and Tulsa Artist Fellowship awardees Kaveh Bassiri (writer, translator, TU faculty) and Arthur Malcolm Dixon (writer, translator, Latin American Literature Today editor), who are also working at the intersections of marginal and transnational literature to learn about this and other immigrant narratives and discuss larger questions of American identity, landscape, and myth.