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HOMOSEXUALITY AND EPISTEMIC CLOSURE IN MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2013

Khalid Hadeed
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Abstract

In this paper I argue that representations of homosexuality in modern Arabic literature have tended to isolate it and contain its threat through a conceptual strai(gh)tjacket that I term “epistemic closure.” I begin by analyzing Saʿd Allah Wannus's play Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat as an essentialist paradigm of closure, where a language of interiority and essence identifies male homosexuality with passivity and femininity, subordinated a priori to a sexually and socially dominant masculinity. Then, I examine ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani's novel ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan as a constructionist example of the same closure, in which homosexuality is explained through a narrative of abnormal development that circumscribes its diffuse potential. Finally, I read Huda Barakat's Sayyidi wa-Habibi as a “queer” novel that links homosexuality to the continuum of male homosocial desire, thereby disrupting the normative distribution of center and margin and suggesting a way out of the epistemic closure imposed on homosexuality.

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Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Special Issue 2: Queer Affects , May 2013 , pp. 271 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

NOTES

1 Examples of works that have seriously engaged the political and cultural dimensions of gender oppression include Kanafani, Ghassan, Ma Tabaqqa Lakum (Beirut: Dar al-Taliʿa, 1966)Google Scholar, published in English as Kanafani, Ghassan, All That's Left to You, trans. Jayyusi, May and Reed, Jeremy (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Khalifa, Sahar, al-Mirath (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1997)Google Scholar, published in English as Khalifeh, Sahar, The Inheritance, trans. Bamia, Aida (Cairo: University of Cairo Press, 2005)Google Scholar; al-Duwayhi, Jabbur, Matar Haziran (The Rain of June) (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2006)Google Scholar; Ibrahim, Sunʿ Allah, Dhat (Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 1992)Google Scholar, published in English as Ibrahim, Sonallah, Zaat, trans. Calderbank, Anthony (Cairo: University of Cairo Press, 2001Google Scholar); al-Shaykh, Hanan, Hikayat Zahra (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 1980)Google Scholar, published in English as al-Shaykh, Hanan, The Story of Zahra, trans. Ford, Peter (New York: Readers International, 1986)Google Scholar; and Mustaghanami, Ahlam, Dhakirat al-Jasad (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1993)Google Scholar, published in English as Mosteghanemi, Ahlam, Memory in the Flesh, trans. Sreih, Baria Ahmar (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Ibrahim, Sunʿ Allah, Sharaf (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1997)Google Scholar; Mahfuz, Najib, al-Sukkariyya (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1957)Google Scholar, published in English as Mahfouz, Naguib, Sugar Street, trans. Hutchins, William and Samaan, Angele Botros (New York: Doubleday, 1992)Google Scholar; al-Ghitani, Jamal, Waqaʾiʿ Harat al-Zaʿfarani (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 1976)Google Scholar, published in English as al-Ghitani, Gamal, The Zafarani Files, trans. Wahab, Farouk Abdel (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and al-Samman, Ghada, Bayrut ‘75 (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1975)Google Scholar, published in English as Samman, Ghada, Beirut ‘75, trans. Roberts, Nancy N. (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

3 Lagrange, Frederic, “Male Homosexuality in Modern Arabic Literature,” in Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East, ed. Ghoussoub, Mai and Sinclair-Webb, Emma (London: Saqi Books, 2000)Google Scholar.

4 al-Samman, Hanadi, “Out of the Closet: Representation of Homosexuals and Lesbians in Contemporary Arabic Literature,” Journal of Arabic Literature 39 (2008): 270–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Al-Samman seems to intend “sexual differentiation” to refer to the development of difference in sexual orientation.

5 See Massad, Joseph, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 3, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World.”

6 Sedgwick, Eve, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990), 1Google Scholar.

7 Wannus, Saʿd Allah, Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat, rev. ed. (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1998)Google Scholar.

8 al-Aswani, ʿAlaʾ, ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan, rev. ed. (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 2004)Google Scholar, published in English as Aswany, Alaa Al, The Yacoubian Building: A Novel (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

9 Barakat, Huda, Sayyidi wa-Habibi (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2004)Google Scholar.

10 Sedgwick, Eve, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1–2Google Scholar. It is crucial to note here that for Sedgwick male homosocial desire is a function of a patriarchal legacy that renders agency and status, that is, personal and political autonomy and prestige, essentially masculine prerogatives.

11 While I have chosen to focus on texts that represent male homosexuality, I contend that my argument about epistemic closure is relevant to literary representations of female homosexuality as well.

12 As the mufti's henchmen, ʿAbbas and al-ʿAfsa both belong to a class of men (al-zgurtiyya in the Damascene dialect) who embody the values of chivalry—especially strength and invulnerability—at a more physical level than do the notables to whom they pledge their loyalty and protection. ʿAbbas, however, is more renowned and feared as a zgurti than is al-ʿAfsa; this gendered power differential between them gets coded as sexual attraction.

13 See El-Rouayheb, Khaled, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Wannus, Tuqus al-Isharat, 32. All translations from the novels are my own.

15 Ibid., 87–88.

16 For an extremely insightful discussion of homosexual desire as a function of socially negotiated orientations—toward sexuality as well as kinship and life—see Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Booth adds the important qualification that when the narrator is nameless, makes no reference to him/herself, and stays out of the narrative's events, there is no distinction between him/her and the implied author. See Booth, Wayne, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 D. A. Miller introduces the concept of the “open secret” in his discussion of the policing strategies at work in the tacit collusion between the omniscient narrator and the reading public of the Victorian novel. See Miller, D. A., The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988), 207Google Scholar.

19 Wannus, Tuqus al-Isharat, 85.

20 Ibid.\, 87.

21 Massad, Desiring Arabs, 367.

22 See Mahfuz, Najib, Zuqaq al-Midaqq (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1947)Google Scholar, published in English as Mahfouz, Naguib, Midaq Alley, trans. Gassick, Trevor Le (Beirut: Khayat, 1966)Google Scholar; Jamal al-Ghitani, Waqaʾiʿ Harat al-Zaʿfarani; and Barakat, Huda, Hajar al-Dahk (London: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 1990)Google Scholar, published in English as Barakat, Hoda, The Stone of Laughter, trans. Bennett, Sophie (Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Publishing, 1995)Google Scholar. For an interesting discussion of the ways in which Barakat's novel reinforces gender polarization while seeming to subvert it, see Aghacy, Samira, “Hoda Barakat's The Stone of Laughter: Androgyny or Polarization?,” Journal of Arabic Literature 29 (1998): 185–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality, 158–61. Although the term al-mithliyya al-jinsiyya, a literal translation of “homosexuality,” hasn't gained much currency outside of academic circles, it represents a more neutral alternative to al-shudhūdh al-jinsī, a term whose use by the author goes beyond considerations of strategic negotiation, answering the cultural imperative to isolate and contain. Considering that al-Aswani is a part-time journalist with an active interest in the social and political life of Egypt, the likelihood increases that his own views are reflected by those of the implied author/narrator.

24 Al-Aswani, ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan, 53.

25 Ibid., 182.

26 The irony in this conditional gesture of tolerance is magnified by the narrator's resort to the premodern Arabic lexicon to establish a cultural precedent for the appreciation of male beauty. While his comparison of Hatim's beauty to the mukhannath and, later on, to al-ghulām al-jamīl (the beautiful boy) invokes the pederastic dimension of premodern Arab culture as a basis for tolerance, his adoption of the language of sexual deviance pathologizes all expressions of homosexual desire and atypical gender regardless of the power dynamics that frame them. The anachronism exhibited by al-Aswani's narrator points to the continuing difficulty faced by Arabic sexual epistemes in accommodating homosexuality, suspended as they are between phallocentric articulations of sexuality, a religious discourse of moral and immoral sexual acts, and an assimilated colonial heritage of heteronormativity.

27 Al-Aswani, ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan, 250–56.

28 Hanadi al-Samman criticizes the novel on these grounds in “Out of the Closet.”

29 See Shukri, Muhammad, al-Khubz al-Hafi (Casablanca: Dar al-Najah al-Jadid, 1982)Google Scholar, published in English as Choukri, Mohamed, For Bread Alone, trans. Bowles, Paul (London: Telegram Books, 1973)Google Scholar; al-Ghitani, Jamal, “Hadha Ma Jara li-l-Shabb alladhi Asbaha Funduqiy,” Risalat al-Basaʾir fi al-Masaʾir (Cairo: Riwayat al-Hilal, 1988)Google Scholar; al-Shaykh, Hanan, Misk al-Ghazal (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1988)Google Scholar, published in English as Women of Sand and Myrrh, trans. Catherine Cobham (New York: Anchor Books, 1992); and Ibrahim, Sunʿ Allah, Sharaf (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1997)Google Scholar.

30 Examples of postwar Lebanese literature engaging the war's repercussions include al-Daʿif, Rashid, ʿAzizi al-Sayyid Kawabata (Beirut: Riyad al-Rayyis li-l-Kutub wa-l-Nashr, 1995)Google Scholar, published in English as Al-Daif, Rashid, Dear Mr. Kawabata, trans. Starkey, Paul (London: Quartet Books, 2000)Google Scholar; Khuri, Ilyas, Yalo (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2001)Google Scholar, published in English as Khouri, Elias, Yalo, trans. Theroux, Peter (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Archipelago Books, 2008)Google Scholar; and Huda Barakat's own Hajar al-Dahk and Ahl al-Hawa (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2002), published in English as Barakat, Hoda, Disciples of Passion, trans. Booth, Marilyn (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

31 Diana Fuss has noted that the polarized positions taken in the debate between constructionist and essentialist approaches have led to an impasse in feminist theory, and Eve Sedgwick has noted the same in relation to queer theory. Fuss, Diana, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar; Sedgwick, Eve, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

32 Barakat, Sayyidi, 19.

33 Ibid., 68.

34 Ibid., 49.

35 Ibid., 12.

36 Ibid., 8.

37 “But I'm starting to feel jealous of him, Wadiʿ . . . even though he's given us back ‘the family fortune.’ Samiya says this while gently patting my sex and rubbing it over through my clothes, looking at my eyes in an endearing, coquettish manner.” Ibid., 162.

38 Ibid., 143.

39 Ibid., 171.

40 Ibid., 191.

41 See Musʿad, Raʿuf, Baydat al-Naʿama (Beirut: Riyad al-Rayyis li-l-Kutub wa-l-Nashr, 1994)Google Scholar; al-Hirz, Siba, al-Akharun (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2006)Google Scholar, published in English as al-Herz, Seba, The Others, trans. Booth, Marilyn (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Barakat, Huda, Innaha Landan Ya ʿAzizi (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2001)Google Scholar, published in English as al-Shaykh, Hanan, Only in London (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001)Google Scholar.