The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East

208 Pages·2014·1.41 MB·English

by  Dina Georgis

THE BETTER STORY

The
BetteQueerr Affe cts from the Middle East
Story
Dina Georgis
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
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Marketing by Kate McDonnell
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Georgis, Dina.
The better story (cid:29) (cid:84)ueer a(cid:895)ects from the Middle East (cid:18) Dina Georgis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4583-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Gays—Middle East.
2. Homophobia—Middle East. 3. Minorities—Middle East. 4. Discrimination—
Middle East. I. Title.
HQ76.3.M628G46 2013
306.76'60956—dc23
2012015505
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
A Family Portrait vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction
What’s in a Better Story, or Listening Queerly 1
1. Two Stories in One 27
2. When the Subaltern Speaks and Speaking of a Suicide 49
3. Terrorism and the Aesthetics of Love 69
4. Postcolonial Revolt: An Antihero in Search of Self 95
5. Discarded Histories and the Adjectives of Queer Pain 117
Epilogue
The Story Never Ends 145
Notes 153
Bibliography 161
Index 171

Preface
A Family Portrait
At a family dinner a number of years ago, Zara, my niece who is now
nearly 18, shared a very remarkable dream about my father, her grand-
father. Unbeknownst to me, she had been taking a keen interest in her
father’s past, demanding that my brother tell her bedtime stories about his
childhood. Since her father’s “origins” have untidy multiple locations—
ancestral roots in Iraq (a place she knew to be troubled), displaced and
eventually driven out of Lebanon during the civil war, and then further
displaced in the UK before (cid:192)nally arriving to (cid:38)anada—there is no easy
way for her to understand her father’s experience. This dream, it seems to
me, rewrites her father’s stories by organizing and narrativizing the mud-
dled fragments of our family’s past and her emotional place in it. My niece
had never met my father because he died of cancer a few years before she
was born. A family photo of her parents’ wedding, notably positioned in
the house, shows my dying father sitting at the forefront of the picture in
his bathrobe looking frighteningly emaciated, nearly dead. In the dream,
she is in (cid:38)anada, also separated from him, who, it turns out, is dying in
Iraq. She travels to Iraq to see him with her father and her three aunts, my
sisters and me. When she gets there, he is among thousands of dying bod-
ies in glass boxes lined up in rows: a frighteningly modern image of death
and genocide. When she (cid:192)nally spots him among the masses, he is being
carried from the middle rows to the back. The bodies that are classi(cid:192)ed
nearly dead are placed at the very back. My father, the warden reports,
vii
viii Preface
is now nearly dead and therefore cannot be seen. On the journey home
back to (cid:38)anada, we are driving on a highway. As we go under a tunnel,
my niece sees my father suspended and hanging on a cross and becomes
certain that he is now completely dead.
My father, who coldly cut himself o(cid:895) from Iraq after witnessing the
end of colonialism with the fall of the monarchy and then subsequently
the fall of the communist government, would not share stories with his
children. He, however, came alive in the company of relatives and friends,
but to his children he spoke very little of his life and his political views. His
silence, which is echoed in all of us, returns transgenerationally in Zara’s
dream. It elaborates her frustration with not knowing her grandfather, but
also in not knowing the story of where she has come from or how she has
come to arrive in (cid:38)anada from a history of events that brought her father
to this place. Her dream leads me to think that she is concerned with how
her life in (cid:38)anada is situated in a past that she cannot fully understand.
It perhaps enigmatically elaborates the political nature of the fact of her
existence. What is more, it would seem that her wish for insight about the
past is located in the political present. The Iraq that is represented in her
dream evokes an Iraq in carnage. The dream’s collision of past and pres-
ent suggests that the past’s confrontation with the present is shaping her
existence and the meaning she might make of her location.
But her dream not only summons the speci(cid:192)c political circumstances
of her ancestry, it symbolically expresses the historical residues of world
events and the cosmopolitan nature of group identities and histories of
belonging. Diasporas, Lily (cid:38)ho writes, “do not emerge in isolation, but are
de(cid:192)ned through di(cid:895)erence” (2007, 21). The image of the masses of dying
(presumably) Iraqi bodies organized neatly in rows is uncannily modern
in its highly ordered and sterile representation of mass carnage. Indeed,
Zara’s dream conjures the implicit strategies of the Jewish holocaust: to
kill and remove humans cleanly and e(cid:895)ectively, which has become the
archetypical modern social imaginary of genocide. The state of present-
day carnage in Iraq is imagined by my niece through a similar modern
strategy that ties her ancestry to Jewish ancestry in historical repetition of
racial hatred. Zara’s dream might express what Paul Gilroy calls the work-
ings of conviviality, which he de(cid:192)nes to be the “processes of cohabita-
tion and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social
life” (2005, xv). (cid:38)onviviality is “the ordinary experiences of contact, coop-
eration, and con(cid:193)ict” (2005, xii)—a working through, if you will, which
a(cid:895)ects how groups come to imagine themselves across racial, ethnic, and
Preface ix
civilizational divisions. In Zara’s dream, civilizational con(cid:193)ict and con-
nection come together in how she imagines her ancestors. For me this
gestures toward not only, as Gilroy would argue, the cosmopolitan origins
of groups, but their a(cid:895)ective relationship to otherness and to the traumas
of relationality, especially in political con(cid:193)ict.
But though Zara’s dream enigmatically expresses the trauma of iden-
tity groups in her vision of a death camp, it also expresses a fantasy of
mastery against death and loss. For the bodies in the dream are visible
through the glass boxes: it is as though death is something we can hope to
see plainly and know. Zara’s wish to know and understand however is not
satis(cid:192)ed in the dream. My father’s body slips away from her just as she
(cid:192)nds him. The dream ends with the recognition of death but with no other
answers. Interestingly, the cruci(cid:192)xion imagery (undoubtedly in(cid:193)uenced
by her exposure to Roman (cid:38)atholic and Syriac Orthodox (cid:38)hristianity),
suggests a fantasy of redemption that would (cid:192)ll the gap of unknowability.
Zara’s dream seems to suggest she is in search of a story of belong-
ing. But more than that, she wants a better story than the one she has. My
niece knows the facts of her mixed-race ancestry: Arab and Italian. But
Zara is not simply an Iraqi-Italian-(cid:38)anadian: a hyphenated identity that
constitutes itself from the harmony of various traditional practices and
sets of beliefs. The o(cid:896)cial story of (cid:38)anadian multiculturalism, which she
has undoubtedly absorbed, even at 12 years of age, does not re(cid:193)ect the
complexity of her life. Her dream suggests that her selfhood might have
more to do with what she cannot name than what she can name. With a
name like Georgis, often mistaken for Greek or European, Zara could eas-
ily live her life as an assimilated second-generation immigrant. She is not
so racially marked. And though I am sure she enjoys the privileges that
come with a relatively passable body and a passable name, she seems to
su(cid:895)er from transgenerational haunting.
Zara is troubled by a legacy of loss for which she has no words. Her
grandfather, though never a political prisoner, as she seems to represent
him in her dream, was indeed a victim of ethnic and religious hatred.
But this is not a topic that has ever come up in a family dinner, probably
because it is a site of unworked-through loss. My niece knows nothing
about how some of her Georgis ancestors were anticolonial communists,
targeted and threatened by the rising Ba’ath Party for their counterrevo-
lutionary activism in the 60s. She knows nothing about why my father felt
that Iraq was no longer a safe place for his family. She also does not know
that his past would return to haunt him in Lebanon, the place he (cid:193)ed to