From the early 20th century and up to the 21st century, gender and sexuality have occupied a prominent position in Arabic literature as registers of the national, colonial, and neocolonial struggles of Arab political agency and cultural identity. While numerous Arab writers have effectively tackled gender oppression as an essential dimension of political crisis and cultural stagnation, treatments of sexuality have generally been less open to the spirit of radical critique, remaining in thrall to the weight of heteronormative binaries and their logic of complementary opposites.Footnote 1 Because of the threat it poses to dominant constructions of masculinity, homosexuality—and passive, male homosexuality in particular—has frequently been allegorized in modern Arabic literature as a symptom of political and social emasculation and corruption.Footnote 2
Surveying representations of male homosexual desire in modern Arabic literature, Frederic Lagrange places them in three broad categories: those that treat it as an antiquated remnant of tradition to be ignored or condemned in favor of an enlightened, “modern” heterosexual norm; those that frame it as a pathological condition leading to malaise, suicide, and death; and those that figure it as a symptom of the traumatic relation with the West.Footnote 3 In “Out of the Closet: Representations of Homosexuals and Lesbians in Modern Arabic Literature,” Hanadi al-Samman identifies an ideologically motivated constructionism in modern Arabic literature, where homosexuality appears as the byproduct of political and economic oppression—that is, as a response to the anxieties of Arab masculinities alienated from the political process. Seeing a corrective potential in a more biologically based approach to sexuality, al-Samman argues that “more attention must be given to the biological essence of sexual differentiation, to the body politics rather than gender politics, if the emergence of a recognized, outspoken Arab homosexual or lesbian identity is ever to be realized.”Footnote 4
While an approach foregrounding the biological basis of sexuality can, in certain contexts, counter the homophobic deployment of constructionist representations, both essentialist and constructionist approaches can, and do, come laden with homophobic inflections in modern Arabic literature. Indeed, the collective pressure to marginalize homosexuality—and male homosexuality in particular—is so strong that it even appears in writings that approach it as a subjective reality with legitimate claims to identity and as a local reality that demands accommodation from Arabic systems of sexual knowledge (i.e., sexual epistemes). In contrast to Joseph Massad, who implies in his Desiring Arabs that homosexuality in the Arab world should confine itself to local sexual frames of reference, I view these frames of reference as ultimately antagonistic toward homosexuality, particularly toward its right to enjoy wide-scale social visibility and legitimacy, and toward the freedom to choose a person of the same sex as a life partner.Footnote 5
Whether treating homosexuality as an innate, biological condition or a socially inculcated one, most contemporary Arab writers have obeyed an implicit cultural mandate to define homosexuality as a minoritarian phenomenon with more or less clear borders and/or causes. In the theoretical framework of Eve Sedgwick, such representations would resonate with the “minoritizing view” that manifests in academic and popular approaches to homosexuality. In this view, the attempt to define the boundaries of homosexuality is seen “as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority.” For the most part, the minoritizing view assumes that gay is gay and straight is straight. In contrast, the “universalizing view” sees homo/heterosexual definition as a continuous and malleable process and “an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities.”Footnote 6 While the minoritizing view stresses solid boundaries over porous ones, the universalizing view rejects a clear demarcation line between homo- and heterosexuality and refuses to delimit, a priori, the potential trajectories along which sexuality may develop. In this sense it can reconcile essential, biological determinants and constructed, social determinants within one explanatory framework—without prohibiting ambiguity. While a homophobic or gay-affirmative position can't be attributed a priori to either of these views, the universalizing view, which I adopt in my argument, seems less susceptible to the homophobic mechanisms of isolation and containment than the minoritizing one. It is the effort to restrict the meaning of homosexuality to a set repertoire of genders, desires, and explanatory narratives—what I call “epistemic closure”—that I take issue with in this article, reading it as a form of social control.
In the first part of the article, I discuss Saʿd Allah Wannus's play Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat (Rites of Signs and Transformations), first published in 1996,Footnote 7 as an essentialist paradigm of epistemic closure, whereby a psychological approach to desire as the essence of subjectivity is mobilized to identify male homosexuality with passive desire and femininity. As a result, the novel secures the position of masculinity as the gender of sexual and social dominance. In the second part of the article I read ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani's ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan (2002)Footnote 8 as a constructionist example of closure, where the gender anxieties provoked by the increasing visibility of homosexuality are diffused through a narrative of developmental deviance. Finally, I read Huda Barakat's novel Sayyidi wa-Habibi (My Master and my Beloved, 2004)Footnote 9 as a promising text that resists the exigencies of epistemic closure, disturbing the disciplinary distribution of center and margin by locating male homoeroticism within the wider domain of male homosocial desire. In this light, Sayyidi wa-Habibi may be said to adopt a universalizing view of homosexuality. I borrow the concept of “male homosocial desire” from Sedgwick, who defines it as follows:
To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire,” of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted. . . . “Male homo-social desire” is the name this book will give to the entire continuum.Footnote 10
As my readings will demonstrate, the constructionist and essentialist paradigms are not mutually exclusive, and there are moments of slippage when the contrasting paradigm displaces the paradigm dominant in the text; of importance, these slippages reveal the inherent difficulty of limiting sexuality to one paradigm. In view of the unstable boundary between the biological and social determinants of sexuality, I select the universalizing perspective, which, as discussed previously, accommodates both essentialist and constructionist narratives in a productive space of ambiguity. Moreover, by situating the aforementioned texts within broader trends in modern Arabic literature, I hope to demonstrate that a countermomentum to the marginalization of homosexuality in representation is necessary in order to unsettle teleological, binary, and hierarchical understandings of sexuality and cultural identity.Footnote 11 Unless otherwise specified, I will use “homosexuality” in the minimally psychologized sense of a compelling sexual attraction to members of one's own sex, thus bracketing the question of whether or not the characters and narrators under discussion consider themselves “homosexual.” When such attraction appears in especially diluted or oblique forms, or in conjunction with desire for the other sex, I will refer to “homoeroticism” as a more diffused expression of same-sex desire.
SECRET DESIRE, OPEN SECRET: TUQUS AL-ISHARAT WA-L-TAHAWWULAT
The play Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat by the leading Syrian political dramatist Saʿd Allah Wannus—a work that may be considered pathbreaking in its attempt to articulate and legitimate homosexual desire as a distinct identity—epitomizes the danger of closure attending an overly essentialist approach to homosexuality. Set in late 19th-century Damascus, where members of the nobility maintain close ties with the ruling authorities and are protected by their own groups of henchmen, the play stages a multifaceted critique that identifies the repression of female sexuality and the repression of male homosexuality—particularly in its passive form—as two disciplinary mechanisms of the same male-dominated aristocracy. Unfolding in the background of a rivalry between the mufti of Syria and the head of the Damascene nobility, ʿAbd Allah Hamza, the plot breaks into conflict when the chief of the Ottoman local police, as a token of loyalty to the mufti, takes it upon himself to arrest Hamza while he is carousing with his mistress, the courtesan and professional entertainer (ghāniya) Warda. The public exposure and humiliation of Hamza, who is paraded with Warda around the city on a mule before both are imprisoned, precipitates a crisis in the city's symbolic order that extends beyond Hamza to threaten the authority of all the city's notables, pitting them against the Ottoman imperial authorities.
Amid a series of measures and countermeasures taken to restore the balance of power between the notables and the Ottoman administration, three characters find themselves compelled to transform in ways that challenge the masculinist, aristocratic, and imperial distribution of power highlighted in the aftermath of the arrest. It is from these “transformations” and the “signs” presaging them that the novel takes its peculiar title. Hamza, whose experience of humiliation alerts him to the volatile nature of the male homosocial alliances underpinning his feudal station, interprets his downfall as a sign of his true calling: to become a radical Sufi ascetic who eschews power and embraces humility, and even humiliation, as a means of approaching God. Hamza's piously named wife, Muʾmina (“believing woman”), embraces the plot hatched by the mufti to redeem Hamza's reputation and smooth the political tensions that develop in the wake of his arrest; she takes Warda's place in prison in order to convince the public that Hamza had been carousing legitimately with his wife. However, Muʾmina goes beyond the plot's original purpose, seeing in her voluntary transformation into a ghāniya the potential to claim the sexual and social agency denied to her as a respectable woman. Finally, al-ʿAfsa, the mufti's secretly homosexual henchman, transgresses the code of secrecy by which he had hitherto abided, after his passive homosexual desires are discovered by his fellow henchman and subject of attraction, the ultra-macho ʿAbbas. Following ʿAbbas's discovery, al-ʿAfsa prefers to claim his desires and have an open relationship with ʿAbbas over pursuing them in secrecy and shame.Footnote 12 With al-ʿAfsa's transformation into an authentic homosexual via the language of interiority and essence he deploys to express himself, the play's representational logic reaches an aporia. In claiming a homosexual identity based on a negative, stereotypical inversion of hegemonic masculinity, al-ʿAfsa confirms this masculinity as the natural outcome of male sexual development. Thus, while initially moving to dismantle the cultural logic sustaining male dominance, the play ultimately reinforces it.
In the first place, the ground is laid for this aporia by a fundamental discrepancy between the play's 19th-century Arab setting, where homosexual desire cannot be taken to imply homosexual identity, and the 20th-century, Western-derived discourse of identity that infiltrates the novel. The parameters available for the expression of homosexual desire in the play's historical context clearly follow the pederastic model outlined by Khaled El-Rouayheb in his insightful study of male homoeroticism in the Arab regions of the early Ottoman Empire. This is a heavily phallocentric, age-differentiated, and religion-regulated model where the tolerability and/or intelligibility of homosexual relations depends on several factors: whether a suitable age difference exists between the partners; whether they assume the active or passive role in sex and courting; and how explicit the sexual dimension of the relation is compared to the romantic, aesthetic, or spiritual ones. Crucially, homosexual sex in this model isn't seen to derive from a distinctly homosexual preference, much less an identity, but is seen rather as an extension of the adult male's sexual prerogatives into the male homosocial domain. A certain sexual typecasting, however, can be seen in two exceptions to the model: the adult male who enjoys being penetrated and the young male who actively seeks the sexual encounter instead of letting himself be wooed into it by the older male. In these cases homosexual desire is marked as a particular, pathological condition (ubna) that often affects its bearer (maʾbūn) as part of a broader, typical form of gender deviance (takhannuth); this femophobic conjunction between passive desire and gender deviance counteracts the disruptive potential of homosexual desires that don't conform to the pederastic model. However, insofar as ubna is seen as a physical/psychological condition afflicting a male who would otherwise be “natural,” it cannot simply be equated with homosexual identity.Footnote 13
Throughout the play, al-ʿAfsa's relationship to ʿAbbas unfolds within the limits of the pederastic model. Abbas agrees to have sex with al-ʿAfsa only on the condition that their nonconforming relationship remain secret and that the active/passive dichotomy in the relationship be rigidly maintained. More important, ʿAbbas's discovery of al-ʿAfsa's secret—which evokes the scandalous condition of ubna—automatically places the latter under the former's power, imbuing the relationship with a coercive element from its inception. The dialogue immediately following the discovery clearly demonstrates the power of duress that ʿAbbas holds over al-ʿAfsa through his knowledge:
al-ʿAfsa: (brokenly) Have I fallen from your eye?
ʿAbbas: By my life and that of my father, I had my doubts. No . . . you're now my beloved girl [ḥabbūbatī], and I'll honor you. Drink . . .
al-ʿAfsa: (slurping a large draft) Such words wound me . . .
ʿAbbas: You've been exposed to me as my own rightful property [ḥalālī]. So there's no need to feign modesty [ḥayāʾ].Footnote 14
No sooner is al-ʿAfsa's ubna disclosed than he becomes ʿAbbas's ḥalāl or “rightful property,” following a phallocentric logic that encodes the imminent penetration as an act of possession. Moreover, al-ʿAfsa's desire for the phallus becomes lascivious simply by being expressed (hence ʿAbbas's admonition to him not “to feign modesty”). The skewed distribution of shame in the relationship draws on a cultural logic in which sexual initiative is a strictly masculine prerogative and genuinely masculine desire must be active and dominant. According to this logic, ʿAbbas perceives al-ʿAfsa's sexual honesty as a sign of shameless promiscuity, in the same way he might perceive the sexual forwardness of a woman. However, the power dynamics framing the relationship connect ʿAbbas's desire to al-ʿAfsa's through a common eroticization of phallic power; ʿAbbas subsequently admits to al-ʿAfsa that the primary appeal of the relationship to him lay in conquering, through penetration, al-ʿAfsa's virile persona as one of the mufti's henchmen.
ʿAbbas: The thing between us was an appetite that fades with the satisfaction of need. And it delighted me to mount a man counted among the toughs [al-zgurtiyya] and to see his stature break and dwindle between my thighs. But now, what pleasure can I derive from mounting a shameless sissy [mukhannath]!Footnote 15
In spite of his exclusive preference for the penetrative role, ʿAbbas's sexual attraction to the social connotations of the masculine body—which include physical strength, aggression, and access to distinguished social status—resonates with al-ʿAfsa's desire. The main distinction between his sexuality and that of al-ʿAfsa aligns with the distinction between the constructionist emphasis on a socially determined, malleable sexual orientation and the essentialist emphasis on a physically determined, irreducible sexual identity.Footnote 16 Because ʿAbbas's desire is to dominate a male body culturally inscribed with masculine qualities and prerogatives, his desire lends itself to a constructionist model where different desires are not mutually exclusive and where a particular sexual orientation need not be clothed in a particular embodiment of gender. In al-ʿAfsa's case, the desire for a virile body is yoked to a “true” feminine softness and passivity; this makes him a stereotypical, heteronormative image of the homosexual male, easy to brand as marginal and therefore easy to contain. While the desire to contain the self-conscious homosexual cannot be traced back to the author, whose voice makes no explicit appearance in the text, it may be attributed to the “implied author.” Coined by Wayne Booth, the term “implied author” refers to a center of consciousness—distinct from the real author, the narrator, and the characters—that renders the textually dominant values and ideologies from a common focal point.Footnote 17 Comparing ʿAbbas's sexuality to al-ʿAfsa's, one may infer that the implied author conditions the manifestation of homosexual desire as an identity on a reductive, essentialist model of sexuality. Nevertheless, the more flexible constructionist model suggested by ʿAbbas's sexuality intrudes into the text's dominant sexual logic; as a result, the implied author's attempt to isolate homosexual identity, in a male body (al-ʿAfsa's) that secretly harbors a female soul, is undermined.
The fact that Wannus furnishes al-ʿAfsa with the discourse of sexual identity within nonreciprocal, phallocentric terms means that little is gained by his identity's emergence into visibility: while he is free to be himself, this “self” is a recycled parody of femininity that confirms the authenticity and power of phallocentric masculinity. In the sense intended by D. A. Miller in The Novel and the Police, al-ʿAfsa's secret desire is an “open secret,” a pseudoprivate interiority comprehensively defined and contained by the prevalent social system, such that its disclosure only reinforces the system's governing episteme.Footnote 18 After Muʾmina requests ʿAbbas's services as her bodyguard, he starts to draw away from al-ʿAfsa; sensing this, al-ʿAfsa attempts to feminize his body in order to maintain ʿAbbas's sexual interest. In addition to shaving all the hair on his body short of his head—including his moustache, a highly cherished token of masculinity in 19th-century Damascus—al-ʿAfsa moves and speaks in a manner specified in the stage directions as a purposeful emulation of takhannuth: “Al-ʿAfsa enters with his moustache shaven and his face soft, deliberately affecting effeminate gestures and words.”Footnote 19 An ironic tension thus develops between the hackneyed typology indicated in the stage directions and the “true” language of interiority al-ʿAfsa uses in an attempt to make his transformation appeal to ʿAbbas:
Al-ʿAfsa: . . . I have become like water in its purity and clarity. However you look at me, you shall see me as one. My form is my inner self, and my inner self is my form. Did you not say that you recoil from those who have one outer appearance and another inner nature? What I have done is to show my inner nature, and I no longer have anything to suppress and hide.Footnote 20
Although presented as a sacrifice of social status for love, al-ʿAfsa's heroic assertion of identity is at odds with the fact that the gender embodiment with which he expresses himself is a carbon copy of the mukhannath, a figure whose symbolic function is to police the borders of acceptably masculine behaviors and desires. In other words, the conjunction between al-ʿAfsa's confession of homosexual love and his transformation into the mukhannath type is not coincidental. On the contrary, it marks the author's deferral to the representational imperatives of the pederastic model, where homosexual desire is conceived as something like identity only through the feminized and pathologized figure of the mukhannath.
In Desiring Arabs, Joseph Massad highlights the epistemic disjuncture in the play, between sexuality as identity-bound desire and as custom-bound practice, and assigns to this disjuncture the responsibility for al-ʿAfsa's tragic self-erasure. Although I concur with Massad regarding the violence inherent in forcing a sexual episteme based on identity onto a geohistorical context with a different sexual economy, I take issue with the way he frames the sexual-epistemic violence at work in the play. Reading the logic of intrinsic sexual identity, and gay rights discourses that draw support from it, as imperial constructs advanced by the Western “Gay International” (a totalizing term that reflects Massad's totalizing critique of Western-based gay movements), Massad proposes the following: that the logic of intrinsic identity in the play turns the stereotypically effeminate desires of al-ʿAfsa into the latent truth of his body and exerts pressure on this latent truth to become a vocal, legitimate identity in a social context where identity is not an organizing structure for sexuality. Massad then holds this epistemic discord chiefly responsible for the tragic consequence of al-ʿAfsa's “coming out.” By demanding recognition as a valid identity with a right to reciprocally romantic same-sex relations—a gesture that, from Massad's perspective, represents a foreign and violent intrusion into the local (and presumably organic) sexual episteme in place—al-ʿAfsa was basically asking for it.
The fact that al-ʿAfsa lived in a society that for the most part respected the private . . . and did not condemn what it did not know, was unsatisfactory. Simsim [a socially visible and acknowledged mukhannath who is a constant source of amusement to the “real” men who fuck him] therefore can remain part of the order of the comic. But in the world of “sexual freedom,” where the sexual “self” is conceived as the “true” and “authentic” self, sexuality becomes tragic.Footnote 21
According to this logic, the vocally homosexual man—particularly when effeminate in the gender he embodies—necessitates tragedy when he ventures out of the “respected” private domain and dares to speak himself, as a full social agent on an equal footing with the real (or secretly unreal) men, in the public domain. The problem with this homosexual is that it is “unsatisfactory” for him to inhabit the two modes of existence that the masculinist episteme allows him: the socially invisible private domain, where society would be spared the sight of “what it did not [want to] know,” and “the order of the comic,” where Simsim and others like him, who keep the boundary between machismo and effeminacy intact, can live without fear of the arbitrary power of normatively masculine men. It never occurs to Massad to question why homosexual relations, as a potentially livable sphere of love, reciprocity, and agency, have no right to expect accommodation from the patriarchal status quo, while heterosexual relations bearing this potential are required to be visible and functional through the venerable institution of marriage.
My argument here is virtually the inverse of Massad's. I criticize al-ʿAfsa's confessional posture and discourse not because their reification of identity, and the individualistic prescription they make that inside and outside should be one, exert violence on a sexual economy based on practice and custom. Rather, I criticize al-ʿAfsa's self-presentation because its particular use of the language of interiority essentializes sexual identity in accordance with the masculinist and phallocentric terms of this same sexual economy. To be more specific, the play draws on an essentialized language of interiority to circumscribe the potential for diverse homosexual subject positions, trapping them within the historically specific pederastic binary of the admirably virile penetrator and the safely effeminate or nonadult penetratee. In this light, it comes as no surprise that al-ʿAfsa's response to ʿAbbas's rejection is suicide. Having drawn al-ʿAfsa as a faithful reflection of the dominant symbolic order in his innermost desires, Wannus can only translate the symbolic death occasioned by ʿAbbas's rejection into a literal one.
On the one hand, Wannus's decision to give al-ʿAfsa a conscious sexual identity is strategic, in view of the continuing stigma attached to homosexuality in the Arab world today. On the other hand, his essentializing deployment of the discourse of sexual identity within the pederastic limits of the novel's historical setting reinforces the abjection of homosexuality, depriving it of more liberating and empowering possibilities of representation. In reifying the conjunction between homosexuality and the biological/psychological anomalies of ubna and takhannuth, Wannus's play deploys an essentialist framework in the service of epistemic closure. Other texts that follow a similar pattern, with similarly phobic consequences, include Najib Mahfuz’ novel Zuqaq al-Midaqq (1947), where the coffee shop owner Kirshah's pederastic desires are portrayed in terms of an unnatural, pathological obsession; Jamal al-Ghitani's novel Waqaʾiʿ Harat al-Zaʿfarani (1976), where homosexual identity is likewise confined to the typologies of passive desire and effeminacy; and Huda Barakat's Hajar al-Dahk (1990), where the narrator presents the protagonist's homosexuality and its encompassing gender liminality as effects of an arrested biological development.Footnote 22
CONSTRUCTING DEVIANCE: ʿIMARAT YAʿQUBYAN
Alaʾ al-Aswani's bestselling novel ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan may be considered a typical example of epistemic closure enacted through a constructionist framework. On the one hand, the hype around the novel's controversial nature is in large part due to its detailed coverage of Cairo's underground homosexual subculture and the ostensibly objective, journalistic stance that the narrator assumes toward it. Moreover, the considerable narrative space devoted to the character of Hatim al-Rashid, an intelligent and accomplished homosexual journalist who is not flamboyantly effeminate, goes some length toward identifying homosexuality with mainstream masculinity, thereby deflating some of the stigma surrounding it. On the other hand, the novel's omniscient narrator pretends neutrality without achieving it, as his observation of the homosexual subculture takes for granted the idea that homosexuality is a deviance from the norm. This stance is reflected in the narrator's designation of homosexuality as al-shudhūdh al-jinsī (sexual deviance), a term that first gained currency among early 20th-century Arab intellectuals as part of a broader absorption of Western heteronormativity.Footnote 23 In this light, the narrator's view of homosexuality as deviance may also be attributed to the novel's implied author; indeed, insofar as the narrator is undramatized in the text, he and the implied author may be considered as one mind.
Reproducing as it does the logic of sexual deviance, al-Aswani's survey of Cairo's homosexual underground effectively legitimizes the culture of shame and secrecy surrounding it. We are told, for example, that the owner of Cairo's token gay bar Chez Nous is “afflicted” (musab) with sexual deviance and that “the deviants” can be compared to “burglars and pickpockets and all groups contravening the law and the norm” in light of the argot they have developed to accommodate the need for secrecy—a comparison that aligns homophobia with criminal law and endorses it as a prohibition necessary for maintaining social order.Footnote 24 Indeed, the negative typecasting through which the author translates the homosexual scene is particularly insidious because it assumes the neutrality of the journalistic point of view, a privileged position that enables it to subsume within its marginalizing momentum the local typologies through which Cairo's homosexuals establish relationships and a common subculture.
An important distinction must be made here between the narrator's typecasting and the local typologies that circulate among Cairo's homosexuals. The local subculture's terms for “top,” “bottom,” and “sex”—burghul, kudyāna, and waṣla, respectively—serve to facilitate connection between homosexuals in a coded language that shields them from external scrutiny and allows them to communicate their different desires to each other. Al-Aswani's typecasting, however—particularly in its association of homosexuality with deviance, criminality, and unseemly effeminacy—effectively consolidates the marginal position of homosexuality in Egyptian society. Accordingly, the elegance of Hatim al-Rashid's appearance and the discriminating nature of his aesthetic judgments are presented as traits that, while attributable to his typical effeminacy, set him a notch above the more vulgar manifestations of effeminacy in the larger homosexual scene: “Hatim eschews the vulgar feminine look contrived by many of the deviants: he doesn't place powders on his face or wear women's night gowns or artificial breasts, but he strives with expert touches to exhibit his beauty as an effeminate man [mukhannath].”Footnote 25 Accepting Hatim's effeminacy as an attenuated expression of an otherwise morally offensive trend, al-Aswani's narrator performs a double gesture whereby he invites his implied heteronormative audience to withhold judgment while confirming their prerogative to judge.Footnote 26
Although negative typecasting draws on essentialist assumptions about homosexuality, particularly its relation to femininity, it is through a constructionist narrative that the novel decrees its death sentence against homosexuality. In order to understand this point, another distinction needs to be made: between typecasting as a marginalizing approach and essentialism as an explanatory framework. While the narrator's typecasting takes for granted many assumptions about homosexuality, most of which are negative, it does not present these assumptions within an elaborate explanatory framework as an essentialist representational paradigm would. It is not through typecasting, but through a detailed narrative of childhood sexual abuse and parental neglect, that al-Aswani's narrator actively seeks an explanation for the unfortunate homosexuality of Hatim. Attributing it to a damaging childhood environment, this narrative isolates and contains Hatim's desires through a constructionist view of sexuality that subordinates nature to nurture. After going to some lengths to legitimate Hatim's (not too homosexual) lifestyle, al-Aswani turns around and attempts to blame it on a childhood history marked by sexual exploitation and parental neglect. The explanatory power of this narrative gains additional authority on account of its focalization through Hatim. Thus, after a typically desperate and disappointing experience of cruising, when he would “degrade himself with shady people and riffraff to pick from among them a lover with whom he would fulfill his need for one night and whom he would not see again,” Hatim would recall with bitterness a lonely childhood spent under the sexually exploitative care of the family's male servant Idris. Hatim himself cites his unfortunate childhood as the origin of the homosexual desires that deprive him of the exclusively heterosexual opportunities for romantic fulfillment and social recognition.Footnote 27
By attributing to Hatim this feeble narrative, which strives to locate an explanation for homosexuality while presuming that heterosexuality needs none, al-Aswani manages to dissimulate the homophobic pressures that necessitate the marginalization of homosexuality. In so doing, al-Aswani demonstrates that cultural homophobia can reconcile the conflicting epistemologies of essentialist types and constructionist narratives—when the shared impulse is isolation and containment. Thus, when the visibility of homosexuality becomes offensive, it can be typecast as a vulgarly effeminate yet inexplicably ubiquitous gender; when its very existence becomes an issue, it can be narrated as an exceptional, yet avoidable, developmental deviance.
Caught as he is in this pincer movement between essentialist and constructionist strategies of marginalization, al-Aswani's Hatim, like Wannus's al-ʿAfsa, concludes his short and unfulfilled journey of desire with the most violent consequence of epistemic closure: death. The fact that this death occurs at the hands of ʿAbduh, the poor Saʿidi whose working-class masculinity and religious morality are unsettled by his de facto status as Hatim's prostitute, represents the ultimate deferral to the homophobic imperatives animating the text. Getting accosted and taunted by Hatim, who tries to prevent him from returning to a life of sexual, social, and religious legitimacy with his wife on the strength of the economic favors he has lavished on him, ʿAbduh loses control and beats Hatim to death, paying him back for being both a corrupting seducer and a calculating exploiter. Having no robust background of character development to fall back on for either Hatim or ʿAbduh, the narrative segment covering the lead-up to the murder is hurried and contrived, suggesting that homophobia is the unspoken cultural imperative that necessitates the murder of the homosexual. The phobic logic motivating Hatim's violent ejection from the narrative stands in sharp contrast to the celebratory spirit infusing the marriage ceremony that concludes the novel. Appearing at the semantically strategic position of the conclusion, the marriage between the déclassé yet still respected aristocrat Zaki Bey al-Dasuqi and the hard-pressed working-class Buthayna restores the heteronormative equanimity that has been threatened with contamination by Hatim's homosexuality.
Other texts that emphasize a constructionist slant in their management of homosexuality's disruptive force include Muhammad Shukri's autobiographical novel al-Khubz al-Hafi (written in 1972, published in 1982), where the narrator–protagonist's occasional homosexual experiences don't help him to understand homosexuality as a dominant preference or identity, in view of the wide sexual availability of women; Jamal al-Ghitani's short story “Hadha Ma Jara li-l-Shabb alladhi Asbaha Funduqiy” (This Is What Happened to the Boy Who Worked in a Hotel, 1988), where male homosexuality appears as a form of prostitution with which Egyptians lure the purses of Western and Gulf Arab tourists; Hanan al-Shaykh's Misk al-Ghazal (1988), where female homosexuality is portrayed as a secondary effect of gender segregation and associated with tribal primitivismFootnote 28; and Sunʿ Allah Ibrahim's novel Sharaf (1997), where homosexuality is part and parcel of the neocolonial machinery threatening Egyptian masculine/national honor.Footnote 29
CRACKING CLOSURE: SAYYIDI WA-HABIBI
As one of the few works of contemporary Arabic literature that resist the cultural mandate for epistemic closure on homosexuality, Huda Barakat's Sayyidi wa-Habibi makes a highly significant contribution. Joining the torrent of Lebanese postwar novels haunted by the civil war's long shadow, Sayyidi wa-Habibi distinguishes itself by locating male homoeroticism within the broader economy of male homosocial desire, a network of relations that spans the friction between jealousy and desire, rivalry and camaraderie, and enmity and alliance, all within a hierarchical framework where men compete over agency and status with other men.Footnote 30
Rather than inscribing homosexuality in a precultural body, an approach she followed in Hajar al-Dahk with decisively othering repercussions, in her latest novel Barakat writes sexual desire and gender identity along the unstable boundaries between body and culture. In this sense, she gives no priority to essentialist or constructionist paradigms as explanatory frameworks for homosexual desire.Footnote 31 While the protagonist's childhood experience of sexuality seems more or less intrinsic, the trajectory of his sexuality as he grows up against the background of the Lebanese civil war links it to the elaborate complexities of male homosocial desire. By adopting a “universalizing” perspective that locates the homoerotic within the homosocial, Barakat avoids the epistemic closure enacted in the novels analyzed earlier, a closure that constricts the meaning, causes, and boundaries of homosexuality. By queering the desires, identifications, and exchanges that constitute the masculinities dominating the civil war's terrain, Barakat's novel strongly undermines the center/margin framework wherein male homosexuality's difference from heterosexual masculinity is reified and secured. Moreover, given the wartime context in which the novel is set, Barakat's deconstruction of masculinity acquires a pronounced historical significance: masculinity gets queered at the very historical moment that is expected to consolidate its conventional connections to aggression, power, and ruthlessness.
Beginning with the title, Barakat directs the reader's attention to the co-implication of an aristocratic class hierarchy and male homosocial desire that will mark her sociological mapping of the civil war. As revealed on the very first page, the beloved master serves as the narrative motivation for the narrator–protagonist Wadiʿ, who relates his coming of age experience as an obsessive preoccupation with the physical and monetary requisites of socially dominant masculinity. Although the narrator's attraction to his beloved master never impels him to claim homosexuality as an identity or sexual preference, the gravitational pull of this attraction continually unsettles his heterosexual self-knowledge, frequently pushing him toward the necessity of its reaffirmation.
Born to a poor father who works as a chef for a wealthy landowner and a mother afflicted with a kidney failure whose treatment the father can't afford, Wadiʿ experiences his father's masculinity as compromised by his class position. Thus, from early childhood his attachments and identifications center on his mother. Because the social environment doesn't favor them, Wadiʿ's class position and gender orientation make it difficult for him to negotiate a stable sense of self. Investing in his considerable intellectual capacity in order to become a model student and maintain his self-esteem and morale, Wadiʿ finds that his project is consistently undermined by his daredevil male peers, back-row boys who practice their aggressive masculinity against the smart students of the front row and their meek, overweight female instructor. As related by Wadiʿ from the mature vantage point of adulthood, the juvenile masculinity vying for ascendancy in the classroom carries the seeds of the male struggle for power on the civil war terrain. From early childhood, tacit codes orient male behavior against thoughtfulness, empathy, and emotional spontaneity, producing masculine predators and feminized victims. In this gender-polarized and hierarchical environment, Wadiʿ cannot help feeling ambivalent about his identification with his plump and timid female instructor, who is both a source of motivation for his intellectual strivings and a projected reflection of his submasculine body and his emotionally indulgent, thus feminized, attachment to food.
The back rows . . . The back rows. My dream was to join the back rows, in spite of my pitiful luck. I knew that, as a precondition, I would have to stop eating. As a precondition . . . Then, I'd have to stop studying . . . to stop following her as she talked to my face, making the lessons enter forcibly into my brain, in spite of myself. But I knew that all of that wouldn't help to push me to the back rows, due to my short stature. And if I were to grow lean, to become lazy and negligent, I would still remain by her side because of my short stature . . . Then I would return, sooner or later, to studying . . . and to eating.Footnote 32
Attesting to the deep infiltration of masculinist gender codes into the various dimensions of self-definition, including body language, affect, and intellect, Wadiʿ initially experiences his body as a submasculine body that poses an obstacle to his desire to assimilate. This difficulty in fulfilling the requirements of conventional masculinity is imprinted in Wadiʿ's name, which means “mild tempered, meek.” However, in his late teens Wadiʿ yields to the pressures of assimilation and abandons the feminized eating habits and learning goals associated with his childhood and early adolescence, rejecting them in favor of an emotionally detached, physically disciplined, and intellectually apathetic masculine persona.
As Wadiʿ demonstrates in his description of their cavalier attitude to school, the gang of back-row boys, whose leader he eventually becomes, represents a microcosm and preparatory stage for the violent masculinities of the militias and the sectarian leaders guiding them.
The arena of their desires [high school] was ready and peopled in wait for them, and they would prove their strength in it every day, along with their challenge to the norms, by breaking any rules at any time. However this challenge might end, they would register a victory. They know that their game cannot end in a defeat, as their expulsion, ultimately, would only be a coronation for their power and their immunity to subjugation and domestication, as well as a hopeless concession of defeat and surrender by their opponent. Their emergence from high school to the city would be the beginning of a new manhood and a path whose main features they had already chosen, prepared, and practiced for.Footnote 33
In a war environment where violence is animated by a masculinist rejection of civic ethics and its rules of reciprocal recognition and obligation, Wadiʿ and his peers ultimately treat high school as a testing ground for their ability to participate in the war economy and accrue some of the symbolic prestige attached to it. While the common working-class status of Wadiʿ and his peers restricts the potential of their war-intensified strivings for masculine power, the camaraderie they establish is a hierarchical order where ascendancy is determined through an interminable, theatrical contest over the physical and sexual signs of masculinity.
While the class distinctions that inflect male homosocial desire in the larger political sphere don't play a marked role in the interactions of Wadiʿ's group of equally disenfranchised young men, Wadiʿ's transition to delinquent masculinity enables him to repress his early sense of gender liminality and his frustrations with his unprivileged class position. Moreover, class distinctions are boldly highlighted in his emotionally and erotically charged relation to Ayyub, his poorer yet physically more masculine childhood friend. In spite of the strong inflection class difference casts on the gender dynamics between the two friends, Wadiʿ cannot overcome the feeling that Ayyub's body surpasses his in masculine virility. As we shall see, the animus of rivalry permeating the relationship, coded in terms of class as well as gender, enables Wadiʿ to express his sexual attraction to Ayyub as a feeling of sexual jealousy, thus shielding himself from cognitive dissonance concerning the homoerotic dimension of his sexuality.
After undergoing surgery to bring down an undescended testicle, a condition that he feels he must hide from all his peers (with the exception of Ayyub) due to its potential association with a deficient masculinity, the young Wadiʿ visits the seaside with Ayyub and studies the latter's body as he emerges from the seawater, paying an eroticized attention to its virile details. Drawing on sexual jealousy as both impetus and smokescreen for sexual desire, Wadiʿ describes Ayyub's body as a paragon of virility that puts his own submasculine body to shame and necessitates its protection from visual scrutiny.
And when Ayyub comes out of the water I see once again how much his body has outstripped mine.
For in the bright glare of the sun the little filaments of hair that had grown on his chest and under his armpits are clearly traced . . . and the muscles of the thighs and legs appear, in their little rotundities, like buds leaning toward tumescence and efflorescence. The breadth of his shoulders and the leanness of his hips seem like an authentic version, minimized yet complete, of what his body will become at a time not too far away. And the little ball that appears between his thighs, under the tight swimsuit dripping water, reminds me once again of the dearth of what I have in the same place . . . and of the continuing feigned ignorance of Ayyub and his abstention from asking me about the success of my surgery. I attribute that to his shyness, and I draw the towel over all of my middle.Footnote 34
While the lavish physical detail of Wadiʿ's description betrays the erotic motivation of a scopic drive, his paranoid fear that the maleness of his body might be found inadequate in relation to that of Ayyub registers both his discomfort with his gender liminality and the diffractive effect of jealousy and rivalry on the intensity of his desire for Ayyub. The necessity for this diffraction lies in the multiply conflicted nature of Wadiʿ's desire, where a self-compromising attraction to a more masculine body sits ill at ease with the power dynamics that regulate male–male relations. In such a fraught relational dynamic, even Ayyub's polite reticence about the surgery is perceived by Wadiʿ as unspoken scorn, a “feigned ignorance” that he needs to interpret as “shyness” in order for him to shore up his sense of masculine self-mastery. In spite of his attempt to reassure himself, Wadiʿ still feels the need to “draw the towel over all of [his] middle.”
Indeed, Wadiʿ's identification with dominant masculinity remains shaky even after he abandons his relation to Ayyub for the predatory and stridently heterosexist circle of the back-row boys (initially led by a boy nicknamed “Rodeo”). Although encouraged by his verbal demonstrations of sexual power; his relatively late yet strong experience of heterosexual awakening; the transformation of his gender-liminal body into a lean, taut, more polarly masculine one; his success at replacing Rodeo as the leader of the gang; and his small-scale participation in the smuggling of weapons and drugs, Wadiʿ remains painfully aware of the inefficacy of his bid for masculine power on the larger stage on which the civil war unfolds.
While in Lebanon, Wadiʿ sinks deep enough into the mire of male power politics to plot the murder of his lover Samiya's uncle. Wadiʿ feels threatened when the uncle attempts to expand his weapons-smuggling operations beyond the geographically limited scope that Wadiʿ, as a pretend militia man, promises him he can secure in return for small commissions. Once the real militias ruling the streets get wind of Wadiʿ's involvement with Samiya's uncle, they mark him for assassination in order to assert their monopoly over the smuggling routes; thus Wadiʿ's involvement in power mongering grows until it comes full circle to threaten his life. Wadiʿ's estrangement from masculine power begins when he learns from Rodeo (now his henchman) that Ayyub is the one who betrayed his smuggling activities to the militiamen—and that Rodeo killed Ayyub in retaliation. At this point Wadiʿ undergoes a psychic meltdown that leads him not only to isolation, apathy, and inertia but also to a dread-filled alienation from violent manifestations of masculinity. It is in this highly gender-specific context, where ascendancy in a Hobbesian terrain of violence appears as a cornerstone of masculinity, that Wadiʿ develops his infatuation with his “master and beloved,” the Lebanese man he meets while in exile in Cyprus. This man comes to represent to Wadiʿ another, safer chance at securing his position in the male homosocial hierarchy that gives his identity the bulk of its meaning.
Escaping by sea from Beirut to Cyprus with Samiya (now his wife) after the incident with the militiamen, Wadiʿ goes through a long period of intense despondency and social and sexual inactivity before allowing himself to be persuaded by a former member of his juvenile gang (nicknamed “Habbak”) to take up a nominal position in an export–import company based in Limassol and owned by Habbak's relative. It is there that Wadiʿ meets the company's new director, Tariq, a Lebanese man recently arrived at wealth and status. In effect, Wadiʿ's relation to Tariq reverses the class dynamics that had played a defining role in his relation to Ayyub. Whereas Wadiʿ's relation to Ayyub was eroticized by the former's relatively higher class position and the latter's more virile body, the situation is partially reversed with Tariq. Although Tariq occupies a higher social position than Wadiʿ, he also reminds him, through his softer, more rounded body and his gentle manner, of the gender liminality of his own childhood and early adolescence, a period of relative safety during which his proximity to Ayyub and to his mother shielded him from the brutality of the civil war. Moreover, Tariq appeals to Wadiʿ as a gentler, more lenient boss than the former boss he had worked under in the same company. The latter's arbitrary use of power, which struck a resonance with the civil war militias in Wadiʿ's mind, drove Wadiʿ back into his cowering, cataleptic shell. In other words, Tariq represents to Wadiʿ a softer version of masculinity, which nonetheless occupies a secure position within the male homosocial hierarchy due to its access to wealth and status.
From his earliest descriptions of Tariq's allure, it appears that Tariq's masculinity is attractive to Wadiʿ due to its gentler coding of the power loudly and bloodily proclaimed by the militias and the propagandists of sectarian hostility in Lebanon. Thus, describing his feelings upon meeting Tariq for the first time, Wadiʿ is anxious to draw a distinction between the gentle managerial power wielded by Tariq and the dictatorial power wielded by the former director.
I would feel reassured by the slight awkwardness [Tariq] felt in his new position. That would bring him closer to me to the point that I wouldn't feel power issuing from him. The kind of power that would ooze out of the bodies of men behind big desks. A power that takes you in one fell swoop and paralyzes your body faster than the strongest anesthetic.Footnote 35
It is clear that the attraction, comfort, and trust that Wadiʿ experiences for Tariq are organically linked to the terror and paralysis that he associates with more conventional manifestations of the boss position. It is because Tariq is entitled to the subjugating power typically associated with his position—but doesn't use it—that Wadiʿ feels so strongly attracted to him. Through comparison of Wadiʿ's relation with Tariq to his relation to Ayyub, the textual conjuncture established between male homosocial desire and the feudal-like class structure in Lebanon gets reinforced. Rather than moving him in the direction of subversion, the flexibility of Wadiʿ's identifications in terms of gender and class serves to reinforce the dominance of male homosociality and its hierarchical modes of relation. Whether master or slave, Wadiʿ can only come into his own in a hierarchical relation with other men. As Wadiʿ's relation to Samiya illustrates, the hegemony of male homosociality means that women and heterosexual relations are, to a certain extent, relegated to a triangular and secondary position within male homosocial exchanges.
Although he never consciously expresses it as a homosexual attraction, Wadiʿ's preoccupation with the admirable qualities of his master and beloved acquires the intensity of a long-term obsession, thus inviting not only the doubts of his wife but his own doubts as well.
In the beginning of my acquaintance with him, I would never stop talking about him. And if it weren't for my wife, who had come to light up my life again, the issue would have posed a complication for me, and I would have believed that I had a passion for that young man. And Samiya my wife would repeat, sarcastically, that if it weren't for the intensity of my lust and the increased frequency of my lewd dalliances, as she would describe them in loving jest, she would have suspected that my attachment to him was the start of a journey toward the other bank of desire.Footnote 36
Although it relies for its credibility on the heterosexual sensibility of the projected narratee, Wadiʿ's disavowal of his “passion for that young man” only confirms that passion, not only because of the anxiety that motivates the disavowal (the passion threatens to pose a “complication”) but also because of the role that Wadiʿ's sexual relation with Samiya plays as a buffer against his potential identification with “the other bank of desire.” Indeed, Samiya's own attraction to Tariq, which develops under the accumulated weight of her husband's obsession with him and eventually turns into an affair, confirms her function as a triangular focal point that diffuses the homoerotic intensity of Wadiʿ's passion for his boss. Samiya's triangular function is further reinforced when she expresses jealousy regarding Wadiʿ's continuing infatuation with his boss—even while she acknowledges that this infatuation has restored Wadiʿ's sexual appetite for her.Footnote 37
Crucially, Barakat does not present this homosocial triangulation of desire without the context cues needed to undermine masculine self-knowledge and mastery. In the first place, Wadiʿ's attempts to distance himself from the erotic intensities of his desire for Tariq are, as discussed above, attempts to ward off cognitive dissonance. In the second place, Wadiʿ's neglect of Samiya's sexual and emotional needs in the period following his mental breakdown, besides being influenced by his depression, draws on a sense of male entitlement that he hypocritically dissimulates as a disillusionment with virility: “And continually, day after day, month after month, I wouldn't sleep with her. And I stopped bothering with defending myself. I stopped bothering with the prospect of losing my manhood forever. My manhood. They call that thing's erection ‘manhood’!”Footnote 38 Although appearing in the guise of a psychological disconnect from masculinity and its sexual requisites, Wadiʿ's embrace of asexuality actually belies his frustration with his loss of male homosocial status following his exile from Lebanon. Without a secure position in a male homosocial hierarchy, Wadiʿ cannot find his sexual desire for Samiya. More, he doesn't feel particularly obligated to. Being a woman, Samiya is more important for Wadiʿ as a detour to homosocial desire than as a subject of desire in her own right.
Indeed, due to the unbridled, slavish admiration characterizing his feelings for his boss, Wadiʿ finds it necessary to adopt a defensive stance when describing these feelings. He loves his boss like a dog loves its owner, but other men are also dogs in thrall to their owners; the difference is that Wadiʿ's boss is superior to all the other dog owners:
Like a dog. Like a dog I loved him.
Like the genuine, beautiful dog loves his owner, without recompense . . . and to spite the base, bastard dogs, the stray dogs that scavenge and walk their way. And to spite the owners of the base dogs, who cast down the crumbs, kick, and walk on. And no matter what they say, I'll hand him the rope tied to my neck so that he can lead me wherever he wants, while I wag my tail right and left in decisive evidence of my joy.Footnote 39
Although extremely self-abasing, representing the opposite of his aspirations for domination during his late adolescent years, Wadiʿ's imagined role as his boss's guard dog lies on the same hierarchical continuum of male homosocial desire that includes his abortive teenage ambition to rule the streets of Beirut. His faith in his own masculine power shaken by the incidents that drove him to exile, Wadiʿ settles for a subordinate position vis-à-vis a more powerful man, a position that affords him a good measure of symbolic capital, empowering him to flaunt his closeness to his master “no matter what they say.” Ultimately, in spite of his sexual attraction to Samiya, Wadiʿ's jouissance remains more responsive to homosocial than heterosexual relations.
To his ultimate detriment, however, Wadiʿ undergoes another crisis of identification when the superior masculinity he attributes to his boss turns out to be implicated in the same networks of civil war violence that occasion his first mental breakdown. As revealed by Samiya, to whom Barakat devolves the role of narrator in the novel's final pages—a crucial move in terms of the sexual politics shaping the text's narrative structure—Wadiʿ gets summoned with his boss to the office of the company's owner, where he witnesses the latter severely reprimand the former for crossing the tacitly agreed-upon limit on embezzlements. Soon thereafter, the company is investigated by the Cypriot police for its suspected involvement in the smuggling of weapons to Lebanon. While none of the rumors that reach Samiya through the grapevine, concerning Wadiʿ's involvement in the company's smuggling operations and his subsequent disappearance, satisfy her need for answers, these rumors situate Wadiʿ in a gray zone between active complicity and gullible exploitability. Of importance, this gray zone matches the sexually, emotionally, and ethically conflicted history of his relations with other men.
In spite of Samiya's rejection of these distasteful rumors, which cast her in an unfavorable light by association, Tariq's own account of his last encounter with Wadiʿ confirms them. Shaken by the company owner's verbal abuse of Tariq, Wadiʿ recovers the sense of animal terror that had seized and paralyzed him during his few encounters with the company's former director, becoming completely mute and unresponsive to Tariq's subsequent attempts at communication. Wadiʿ's unstable relation to masculine authority, expressed through the polarities of terror and adoration, shifts decisively to paranoid terror once he realizes that his own boss is merely a link in a hierarchical chain of powerful men whose actions have destroyed the stability of both Lebanon and Wadiʿ. In this context, one rumor in particular becomes especially plausible: that Wadiʿ was being duped by Tariq to sign accounting documents authorizing his embezzlements and laundering the weapons-smuggling operations under the deceptive cover of the export–import business. Considering that the conjuncture between masculinity and the predatory relations of war bears a particularly traumatic network of associations for Wadiʿ—not least of which is Ayyub's betrayal of him—the reappearance of this conjuncture in his trusted master and beloved could easily be what pushes him over the proverbial edge.
Assuming we can attribute the text's ideological gestalt to an implied author, the perspective of this author may possibly be identified with that of Samiya, Wadiʿ's unfailingly supportive and self-effacing wife. Through the secondary position she occupies in Wadiʿ's emotional life and the narrative space allotted her in the text, Samiya calls attention to the marginal position of women in a society dominated by male homosocial bonds. Moreover, in the limited, final portion of the text that Barakat devotes to Samiya's narration, allowing her to explore the possible scenarios and motivations behind Wadiʿ's sudden disappearance, Samiya voices her compassion for Wadiʿ and the gender and sexual ironies of his subject position as a man who constantly tries, yet fails, to secure a meaningful position for himself within male homosociality.
Whereas Wadiʿ's time on the narratorial stage sees frequent and relatively guilt-free expressions of emotional disconnect and sexual aversion on his part toward Samiya, particularly following the traumatic dissociation from masculine power attending his exile from Lebanon, Samiya's entry onto the stage sees a pivotal reversal of their relationship's power dynamics. While divulging to the reader the work she undertakes as a hostess at a hotel bar—a necessary means of financial support for her and the mostly unemployed Wadiʿ—as well as her frequent liaisons with Wadi's master and beloved Tariq, Samiya conjectures to herself that Wadiʿ knew about her sexual activities with other men but feigned ignorance. By associating him with the position of the willing cuckold, Samiya deals a strong blow to the façade of masculine honor that Wadiʿ jealously guards for most of his life. Furthermore, Samiya contrasts the verbal attestations of sexual prowess that Wadiʿ would occasionally indulge in during sex to her more sexually rewarding experiences with her clients at the hotel bar, thus undermining his theatrical performance of virility.
However, the most decisive blow that Samiya deals to Wadiʿ's masculine persona—indeed, to all his investments in male homosocial status—occurs in the novel's final passages, where she appraises these investments as worthless, self-indulgent delusions. It is at this concluding moment, when the implicit critical orientations shaping the narrative coalesce in a marginalized yet resourceful female character, that the implied author's voice is most clearly audible. While Samiya adheres, in her final monologue, to the ethos of the self-sacrificing, devoted wife, thus establishing a continuity between her roles as narrator and character, the condescending compassion with which she sums up Wadiʿ's life trajectory casts an ironic, critical spotlight on male homosocial relations and values.
A small and isolated player, in the margin of the margin. The other players never sensed his presence, due to the sheer smallness of his size—not due to his cleverness at maneuvering and fortification and concealment.
I learned all that in Cyprus, and yet I continued to love him. Or perhaps my love for him increased due to that knowledge. Love, not pity, a passionate love that made me hold everything in light esteem for his sake. I, as well, have no one but him.
For his sake, my companion, my husband, my master and my beloved.Footnote 40
In the space of friction between “love” and “pity,” which Samiya tries to smooth out in favor of love, the presence of the implied author can be sensed as a critical will, one that guides attention to the pitiable nature of a heterosexual masculine identity based on obeisance to male homosocial power and the repression/diffraction of homoeroticism. Furthermore, this critique is clinched on Samiya's tongue through her description of Wadiʿ as her “master and [her] beloved,” a purposefully ironic mimicry of Wadiʿ's slavish adoration of Tariq and the secure access to masculine power that he represented. By mimicking this adoration through a female voice, the implied author alludes to the second-degree marginalization of women as a necessary corollary to the first-degree marginalization of men in the hierarchical order of male homosocial culture. Of more importantance, by deconstructing the gender and class politics of this culture, Barakat's novel unsettles hegemonic masculinity and expands the question of desire and identity beyond the reductive and oppressive binaries of masculine/feminine, hetero/homosexual, and nature/nurture.
In conclusion, I note that in the past two decades, a few other Arabic works of fiction have appeared that disobey the cultural mandate for epistemic closure on homosexuality and destabilize the boundary between hetero- and homosexuality. Among these are Raʾuf Musʿad's prison novel Baydat al-Naʿama (The Ostrich Egg, first published in 1994), where sexual encounters among male political prisoners in the Nasir era are shown to involve reciprocal recognition, empathy, and emotional as well as sexual fulfillment; al-Akharun (2006) by Siba al-Hirz, a novel of bodily discovery that explores female homosexuality in the context of gender segregation, the pressures of marriage, and the marginalization of the Shiʿi minority of Saudi Arabia; and Innaha London Ya ʿAzizi (2001) by Hanan al-Shaykh, a novel that sets crossings of gender and sexual boundaries within the context of Arab immigration to the postcolonial British metropole and the divergent opportunities available there for the translation and mistranslation of desire and cultural identity.Footnote 41 If these promising contributions are any indication, one may hope for more and more literary engagements of homosexuality in Arabic that resist the mandate for epistemic closure, treating homosexuality as one aspect among many of the symbolic ambiguity and multivalent relationality of desire and identity.
