Better Than Sex: Queer Auteurship in the Age of Mass Media

An opinion formed too early in the game of life is no where nearly as valuable as a studied, carefully considered context. Ok, so preamble complete, what was the purpose of that? Simply that I am just now getting to write to you about the L-Word. And what a waste of film stock that was! I don’t know what I was thinking though, when in 2009 I was directing photography for a documentary filmmaker, and we were in Hollywood interviewing people involved in The L-Word. The show’s final episode had literally just aired days earlier. I would wax lyrical to anyone polite enough to listen about how people with talent don’t have the money to make good TV while the people with money don’t have the talent, and the L-Word was my favorite example. My gripe with the show, I would continue with the grace of a cactus, was that with that much responsibility and resources at their fingertips, it was a huge flop to see the discontinuous narratives, the incomplete character and story arches, the gratuitous stylization, the multitude of loose ends, the lack of vision and cohesion. Sadder than this was that when The L-Word came on the scene there was virtually nothing else for lesbian viewers to consume and the show developed a cult-following that remains with us. Viewers were so desperate for anything that remotely appeared to reflect us, our lives and our (supremely superficial) desires, that we lapped up the poor writing without so much as a wince.

I walked away from that experience wondering why I had, in the space of 24 hours, put my foot in my mouth more times than I could count, by telling people money doesn’t buy talent. Even if I was right, what was the point in pointing that out and hurting people’s feelings? But over the next six years I started to wonder what was really wrong with The L-World structurally, as a plotted and narrated television spectacle like every other. I came to the conclusion that it lacked an auteur and it was this that resulted in putrid chaos. I did rummage my brain and found a theoretical argument by Jacques Derrida that can help The L-Word’s epic narrative failures; we could say this is a feminist, de-constructionist anti-narrative that is rebelling against the patriarchal structures of beginning, middle and end or against the phallic, linear arrow of time. We could go down that vindication path if we so wished. I’m not going to, but please help yourself.

Instead, I want us to think of filmmakers who have managed to give us strong, queer female characters with very small budgets. And probably it was precisely because of those small budgets that they were able to produce compelling work. The success of these productions can be attributed, in large part, to the spirit of the author that pervades the text. I am going to take for example two queer filmmakers who have given us consistently cool, thoughtful content, and who also exhibit some old school auteurship that reminds us that filmmaking is an art.

The word auteur is simply the French word for author, and in film theory it refers to a filmmaker who has achieved a special status. A filmmaker becomes an auteur by virtue of signature techniques that can be identified, iconically, across their filmic work. Usually, an auteur is someone who has been making film over the course of a lifetime. We think of Stanley Kubrick as an auteur, we think of David Lynch as an auteur, or for TV, how about Joss Whedon? The status of auteur is not often relegated to women filmmakers and I’m really not sure why that is, beyond basic, institutional sexism. To deal with this omission is partly why I am taking a quick look at the auteurship of Fadia Abboud, an Australian-born filmmaker with Lebanese heritage, and Rolla Selbak, an American filmmaker with the complex origin-story of a Palestinian.

I am going by letters of the alphabet here, so let’s start with Abboud. I have to say that I was lucky enough a decade ago to watch some of Abboud’s earliest films. Experimental shorts, that included transgressive, queer oddities that juxtaposed something quintessentially Lebanese-Australian (of the late 90s/early naughties) with female homoeroticism. Abboud had shot these very short shorts with a queer Lebanese-Australian performance artist, whose stage name, if I remember correctly, was Wife. In one film, we see Wife hang out her laundry on the iconic Hills Hoist you find in most Australian backyards. Among her laundry items (which were also stage props) are a strap-on dildo and a bomber jacket with the words “Leb Dyke,” emblazoned on the back. Years later, in episode four of her web series I Luv U, But…, Abboud takes us back to the Hills Hoist, where an Arab lesbian couple are having a conversation about coming out to family, which changes into a flirtatious exchange. While the couple returns to the house, we’re left to visually contemplate the lingerie that’s blowing in the wind for a few seconds more. When the (fake) husband returns and we hear him say “Habibi, I’m home,” Abboud pans across to his neighbouring underwear, appropriately branded “Aussie Bum” (i.e. the erotic climax is deflated by a bummer! The bummer being the husband’s arrival. Don’t know what a bummer is? Ask an Australian).

Abboud captures Arab-Australian suburbia brilliantly in I Luv U, But… and her mise en scene is a fertile field of Lebanese-Australian cultural history. For example, if you are Arab and lived in Sydney in the late 90s, then you would know what the Bessemer cookware joke in Season 2 episode 1 is and you would have appreciated sighting Bessmer throughout season 1. Your mother would have been visited by that family friend who sells those orange, Teflon-laced pots and pans. You two would have heard your mother declare that they “last forever,” in justifying spending hundreds of dollars on the pans, and maybe you too overheard her complain, five years later, that forever was only five years. Abboud’s trademark is to take Arab things to do: smoking argileh, rolling vine leaves, drinking coffee and turn them into visual signifiers of ethno-racial identity in an Australian landscape. She then successfully infuses these images with (often comedic) homoeroticism. For example, in another one of Abboud’s very early shorts we are shown how to brew Arabic coffee as we see Wife’s butch lover prepare it. The rising and waning of the coffee being boiled can be suggestive for those who read between the lines. The scene ends with butch drinking the coffee by licking the rim of the coffee cup.

Speaking further of Abboud’s auteurship, few people know the story behind her use of an archival photograph of two Lebanese women in English suits with ties and Tarabeesh in her 12-minute short In the Ladies Lounge. Abboud found the picture in a store along Gemayzeh Street in East Beirut, much like the two protagonists of her short film, who stumble upon the poster in a shop in Sydney’s Western Suburbs. She later discovered that the picture was taken by Marie el-Khazan, whose work is archived by the Arab Image Foundation. Filmmaker Akram Zaatri, a co-founder of AIF, further illuminated that el-Khazen shot this picture in Zgharta in 1927. el-Khazen never married and died at the age of 80. Most of her photographs, all unpublished work, are of other women, Abboud had been told. When we get to her web series I Luv U, But…, we notice that same photograph, this time printed on large canvas, hanging in the background wall of one of the scenes in episode 3 of season 2. This is a moment of auteurship at its finest, when one quintessential artifact from one film migrates its significant way across to the next body of work. Thematically, the photograph ties Lebanese women who (seemingly) loved women, to their Lebanese-Australian counterparts eighty years later, while they struggle with similar social and familial pressures. Abboud renders this queer Lebanese history seamless rather than disjointed and Lebanese identity and culture as fluid and adaptive, even when hybridized in diaspora.

Abboud’s Club Arak exterior shot (at the end of season 1) is of The Imperial Hotel in Erskinville, where scenes from Priscilla Queen of the Desert were also shot. Club Arak, an actually queer Arab dance night, had been held at Sydney University’s Manning Bar before migrating to the more appropriate Erskinville location in its later incarnations. When cultural history is needed to decipher the mise en scene in this way, then we know we are dealing with an auteur. When the films are thematically in dialogue with each other, across a decade of production, then we also know we are dealing with an auteur.

Rolla Slebak is also a queer auteur to watch out for. At what at least appears to be a very young age, Selbak has already mastered a range of inter-related production skills. From directing to creating original movie soundtracks, to editing, script writing, producing and who knows what else, Selbak is a quintessential auteur with a very long career still ahead of her. In 2003, Selbak wrote, edited, directed and produced the feature-length Making Maya. Three Veils, released in 2011 again brought to life her own script with directing and editing credits to boot. In 2013 and 2014 Selbak wrote, directed, edited and co-produced the two-season web series shorts Kiss Her, I’m Famous. Let’s take a closer look at the distinctive features of these works.

Kiss Her, I’m Famous is a perfect, mainstream lesbian production, and is what The L-Word should have looked like had it had a creative brain behind it. Selbak’s auteurship seldom seems nostalgic, though, like Abboud’s is. In fact the lens filter of ethnicity with which the filmmaker oversaw Three Veils in 2011, is entirely suspended, retired even, for the making of Kiss Her, I’m Famous in 2013/14. Had the show done otherwise, it would not have convincingly simulated the object of its satire — reality TV in which whiteness is coded as universal.

There are so many competing signature moments across Selbak’s works that, like Abboud, entire chapters could be spent unpacking cultural histories and theories of representation. But for the sake of this argument, let’s look for traces of singularity across Selbak’s major works. When we do so, we find that the transmigration of the auteur from Making Maya, to Three Veils and onward to Kiss Her…, occurs at the site at which an unconscious sexuality seeps, surfaces, or begins to emerge. In Making Maya, which is a wonderful Indie film (up there with All Over Me and Personal Best), and in Three Veils, and again in Kiss Her…, Selbak’s same-sex encounters are always fresh, first-times. I don’t mean we are dealing with adolescence or virginity even if those are present. I mean this in a more literal sense, as an experience so immediate that the experiencer has not yet had time to mediate the rawness of what is experienced with concepts and constructs. There is a quasi-Zen encounter with the immediate, before one has had a chance to articulate the is-ness of what is (as lesbian, as sexual, as anything at all). Selbak’s characters encounter these moments of self-realization at different stages of their lives, and the homoerotic seems to be the gateway to these ritual passages. Repeatedly, Selbak captures the liminality between the homosocial friendship and the homoerotic attraction.

What’s more, the audience is never treated to prurience. In Three Veils, for example the encounter between Nikki and Amira is depicted as remedial, with Amira literally licking Nikki’s wounds, which we later find out were caused by a violent scuffle with her father. Without evacuating the erotic value of wound symbolism, this is not lust, this is not the desire that appeals to the voyeuristic gaze of a mass consumer. The same mass consumer who was very upset that they watched all of Making Maya “for just one lousy kiss.” (Let us ignore what it must mean for someone to wish to see actors that young do anything more than “one lousy kiss,” but let’s not ignore that the narrative simply did not require any more than what was depicted.) Meanwhile, Selbak’s web series Kiss Her…, is not at all shy about showing two seasoned adults having a good time on screen. Nonetheless, even so, the viewing pleasure is undermined when these sex scenes are repeatedly interrupted by a manic and incognito director, played by Selbak herself, whose concern is the composition of the shot. The “director’s” intrusion into the set, points to the constructedness of the images, inviting the viewer out of a potential stupor of fandom in which fantasy cannot be gleaned from fact. Such is the stupor induced in cult-following of celebrity and reality television, and at whose expense the show is making a joke. To succeed in Making Maya and Three Veils at capturing sensuousness without voyeurism and objectification is easier than the achievement of the same in Kiss Her, I’m Famous. If only because the latter, at least aesthetically, belongs to the genre of prurience. But with the “director’s” pointed interruptions, sex is depicted as work without it quite being sex work.

This is something the L-Word was not able to pull off, not even with Gloria Steinem making a guest appearance, or the numerous plot-line moments that cried “foul” at the voyeuristic male gaze, because the L-Word cashed in on this as much as humanly possible. And at least from a funding perspective, there was an implicit understanding that this contractual assurance between consumer and production studio must be observed if the show were to continue. And it continued, for seven seasons, even in the absence of palatable story-telling. And just in case you can’t remember what I’m talking about, I will leave you with the poster for the show’s final season. Yes, because we do spend most of our lives naked, with our eyes closed and heads thrust back slightly enough to reveal our necks but not too far back like someone who has fallen asleep in a chair.

*Originally published on August 23, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/better-than-sex-queer-auteurship-in-the-age-of-mass-media/  now discontinued.

Eye of the Beloved: An Excerpt

                                               A 9th century, Abbasid anatomical drawing of the human eye                                               From Justin Marozzi's Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (Penguin, 2015)

The following is an excerpt from Eye of the Beloved, which is a work in progress and the sequel to Rughum and Najda. Rughum and Najda is a ficto-historical novel set in 9th century Baghdad. It was published in West Hollywood, by Oracle, in 2012. Listen to this on Soundcloud.

A gutted envelope from which protruded a terse hand-written letter lay in the open bedroom doorway. The forlorn author had been left deeply wounded by the desertion which had befallen her so suddenly and inexplicably, and she made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the addressee was the single most awful calamity to have ever entered her life. And the addressee, who was lying in bed, eyeing the letter with the eye that was left open, while the other was smashed up against the mattress, did not entirely disagree with her assessment. In fact, at this low point of the addressee’s existence, the Dead Sea shore* of low points, she agreed wholeheartedly that she was a dream destroyer and a despicable failure. How she became instrumental in causing great suffering to a deeply good and patient being was something that her conscience would not permit her to turn away from. She genuinely believed that all good-natured people, among whom her former spouse was one, deserved to have their desires fulfilled. If she had wanted a lifelong marriage between them – as the addressee had always and repeatedly indicated was the only worthy goal of a relationship – then she deserved this. But, alas, our protagonist fell apart at a critical juncture in her life. At this point in her crisis she had turned the blame squarely inwardly. She felt that she had not been strong enough to weather the pressures that came with her career choices and the jeers of ruthless homophobes and racists. A childhood spent in the alleyways of a brutal civil war had made her particularly sensitive to injustice and oppression, the hint of which would cause her to react in heroic, albeit futile fashion against an insurmountable institutional wall. She was now, however, in the midst of shedding her sense of righteousness and coming to question whether her own intolerance for bigotry did not in fact contribute to bigotry and intolerance themselves. Books of Buddhist teachings and philosophy lined her reading cabinet, Lao Tzu’s soft philosophy of little (if not no) action was beginning to crystalize as an alternative to sleeve-rolling, fist bearing confrontation. The stoicism of the Greeks inspired her to seek redemption for a short fuse she had acquired through hereditary means and a childhood observing disinhibited violence. Scripture from every world religion, past and present vied for her attention, including the recent and the obscure, among them was the Book of Mormon, Rael’s Extra-Terrestrials Are Real and Ron L. Hubbard’s Dianetics.
                                                                         ***
The moment the knife pierced Najda’s sleeping heart was also the moment her consciousness was disconnected from her body. She saw herself in Rughum’s bloodied arms and saw Antar drop his weapon and flee in a panic like a raging river. For years she dwelled as a constant companion with Rughum, and there were fleeting moments when she was able to make her presence and love felt  in symbolic ways that Rughum sensed but eventually dismissed.  They continued to meet in Rughum’s dreams and whenever she submerged her body with water, Najda was able to encircle her with warmth. But the sudden and most violent severance of Najda from her earthly vessel caused her to shoot out of the earth’s orbit, past the sun, and to travel into the furthest reaches of the galaxy where she spent the equivalent of a thousand years in solitude. She wandered the universe and sought answers to questions she had long held. She spent centuries alone on planets uninhabited by mobile life and created an extensive breach between her soul and her last incarnation. Of her previous lives on earth she seldom thought, only the last had left an indelible wound that remained tender to the touch. That wound, in part, was Rughum’s absence, but with her presence came a reminder too painful to bear. A thousand years of solitude and wandering the galaxy opens one up to the deepest insights, and she hit upon the realization that she could not run away forever. It would become necessary to return to earth.  Little did she know, that once returned to earth, she would spend an adult life gazing back at her cosmic hermitage in longing, through telescopes and at planetariums and observatories around the world which she would come to travel extensively. Little did she know as she gazed at the infinite spectacle of creation to which she was drawn, that it had once been her home and her playground.  Entire nebulae were nothing but wisps of smoke between her constellar fingers once; she had rolled out solar systems like puffs of smoke and played billiard with comets and black holes.

 Rughum lived with the horror of Najda’s absence for a lifetime made mercifully bearable by a gentle death. There was nothing or anyone who could take the place of Najda or compensate for that kind of loss. But with patience and submission you learned to live without breathing and to even make good of it. When put before circumstances such as these you cease to matter – care of others becomes your motive for continuation – bearing your pains with patience and acquiescence makes a great soul out of you. The suffering does indeed have some kind of purifying effect and you leave behind you a trail of great deeds that bring light, hope and joy into the lives of others, even as you might remain miserable.

 When Rughum was separated from her earthly vessel, she scoured the entire earth for Najda. She looked in every bloom, under every tree and in the river-ways. She searched the newborns and the young with dogged determination. But she could not find her. She decided she would resume human form again in the hopeful search for Najda. She did this across a millennium of lifetimes. And every time she reached dis-incarnation and regained knowledge of her soul’s memories, she returned to the lifetime where she met Najda and to the resolve she had made to find her. A thousand years of loves, of joys, of births and deaths, a thousand years of incarnating in diverse locations, in multiple genders and understandings, a thousand more years of accumulated experiences were not enough to put out the fire of that love – for in fact this was an eternal passion. This was a soul, a singular particle, that had long ago been split into two and when the disconnected parts had briefly joined each other, the cell memory was set ablaze with rapture. It must not be thought that because they had once been one that they were the same. In fact, each was very different from the other and not in some symmetrical opposition either. Their reconnection was now at risk for the changes each had undergone since their time apart. But it is said that the nature of a split particle is such that when one half undergoes a change so too does the other undergo a complementary change, irrespective of the amount of time and space that may separate them.

 A thousand years of reincarnations and Rughum’s resolve never waned, her love never faltered, though the same cannot be said of her hope. And yet she reached a point where she realized that even though her hope was weak and sometimes non-existent, she could not help but continue to do what she was doing across lifetimes, because her desire was unchanging. Sometimes all she could do was acknowledge this desire and acknowledge the absence of hope and wonder at the purpose of such an impossible stagnation. This was essentially her experience in the time she spent on earth in the physical absence of Najda. Her logic was rather more substantial than the effect of her despair. Her despair was caused by the trauma that desires are unfulfillable. But her logic fathomed that in the unfolding intricacies of time, the return to elegance was the inevitable outcome. Her logic knew just how tenacious Najda was and it told her that she would come to find her one day too and that therefore it must be – that to think otherwise would be illogical. 

Najda sat perched along the horizon, watching the sun turn over the equator as the earth spun its cosmic metronome. She could see the elements of life spread before her – from the tiniest particle to the largest land mass. She was aware of the ants, and the seeds and the blooms and the thoughts and dreams of the inhabitants of the cradle of souls. She had all but completely forgotten earth, with its wars and devastations. A thousand years of solitude and the tender spot of where her last wound had left its indentation had remained soft. She knew that what lay before her was a challenging lifetime to try and resolve the horror that had calcified around the tenderness and the only place in the universe where she could carry out the now pressing purification had to be here – here, at the site of an unresolved trauma; a trauma she had suspended in a vacuum of distance and space. She knew that once she entered the realm of molecules and particles, she would undergo a process of forgetting… Everything. The learning always begins from the darkness of the womb and outward into the light. This seemed the nature of things. Only an unconscious encryption of all that is, that was and might be could remain with her, in the cells of her body and the neurons of her brain. How deeply that vast ocean of all-knowing would be missed. Not even a thousand years around the sun were enough to answer the questions she had searched. She was hesitant to relinquish the peace and freedom of body-less-ness and the penetrating wisdom that comes with being free from ties to a time and place. How everything changes the moment you enter the world – how limited your understanding, how predetermined most of your actions become. But we come here to seek answers to questions that require experience and subsistence within the confines of the most lamentable human condition.  Soon everything will be looked on as though for the first time.

*The Dead Sea is the lowest point below sea level on earth

Sarkhat Untha and The “TIQ” in LGBTIQ

Sarkhat Untha (A Female’s Cry) is an Egyptian TV series made for Cable TV that first aired in 2007.  It has not received much by way of LGBTIQ-friendly media attention. Perhaps,  the “I” in LGBTIQ has never been anything but tokenistic, or perhaps,  at some stage, activists dropped the “I” and the “Q” out of LGBTIQ, citing irreconcilable political differences in their dogged pursuit of inclusion in hegemonic normativities.

Frankly, the “I” is extremely important in any discussion on gender and sexual diversity that is to take place in the Arab world, and particularly in the Egyptian context. Detractors often taunt gender and/or sexual minority persons with claims that their way of being, desiring and acting are contrary to the natural. Religious discourse wields great power and exerts tremendous influence over people’s lives, and I’ve often heard religious devotees desperately point out that God doesn’t make mistakes and that “He” made men and women to be together. The biology of intersex categorically frustrates this simplistic worldview, which holds many LGBTIQ people hostage (religious or otherwise). When they factor the existence of intersexuality, with its own set of variances, LGBTIQ believers can tell other believers “you’re wrong. God doesn’t just make male and female people, God makes all sorts of human beings who confound this general rule.”

According to seasoned scholar, Paula Sanders, Muslim exegetes from the medieval period allowed an intersex person to reach a certain maturity before designating them with a sex identifier (male or female). What this meant, was that an individual whose biological sex could not be discerned at birth, was raised without designation until such time that the person was able to decide on whether to live as man or woman. Until they reach this particular maturity, it was decreed that they should pray in front of the women but behind the men, in a kind of no-man’s land liminality (no pun intended).  Sanders is critical of the notion that a person still had to choose either a male of female designation, when the intersex body confounds and explodes this binary. While the biological ambiguity was noted and accommodated by these scholars, it was not intended to last a life time, how else were you going to arrange worldly affairs like marriage and inheritance? My understanding is that the exegetes saw gender (in instances of genital ambiguity) as not residing specifically in the body, but in the roo7 (the soul or spirit) of an individual. They were about a thousand years too early for the neither/nor queer morphology in which you are neither man nor woman or are either man or woman. That does not mean that the system did not produce exclusions (i.e. individuals who could not be accounted for systemically, like we have now with homosexuals who want to marry), it most certainly did, but it shows evidence of theological accommodations of people who existed outside the simplistic purview of the male/man and female/woman.

Thank you for bearing with me through my devotion to scholarship, back to popular culture. Popular Culture is where this struggle is at. Sarkhat Untha made it possible for millions of viewers across the entire globe to learn of and think about the difference between transgender and intersex, as doctors try to figure out which one of the two the main protagonist, Afifi, is. Night after night the spectacle of Afifi’s life would unfold, while a global Arab audience was consuming with tremendous curiosity. How many people were persuaded to empathize with an intersex child, who through no fault of her own was born with ambiguous genitalia; and who was socialized as male, after the midwife designated “his” sex according to the father’s wishes? I can’t think of anything more integral to initiating a discussion on homosexuality and transgenderism than intersexuality. What better way to re-educate ourselves about the gender and sexual continuum than this, where TV becomes pedagogy?
Still, the TV series has several dark sides, most important of which is the story of the real person on whom it was based without permission. Sally Mohamad Abd Allah sued the producers for stealing the details of Afifi’s plot line from her autobiography with the same title as the series. Abd Allah was a medical student at al-Azhar, while Afifi studied psychology at university. Both undergo a surgical procedure and subsequent gender transformation, which results in their expulsion from university prior to issuance of their degrees. Both become professional dancers and are attacked and vilified. Abd Allah should have been compensated by the producers who stole her life story and simply capitalized on her suffering.

Since her surgical procedure in 1988, Abd Allah has managed to obtain a court order permitting her to return to al-Azhar to complete her medical degree as a woman. She has also appeared on a number of television talk shows, but you know how poor the quality of journalism is on that level of mass media. For example, Sally appears alongside an intersex Lebanese woman, Antonila, on Wafa al-Kilany’s talk show al-Hakam, and you can watch an excerpt without subtitles here . You can see the prurience with which the typical talk show host from our region pursues LGBTIQ guests on their talk shows. They are interested in our most intimate and mundane details. When did we fall in love? What did we wear? And all those value judgements flying out across the globe, determining how we’re not quite human. It seems, for now, the subject under exploration in mass media, still reduces us to spectacles. We sacrifice something of our dignity and right to privacy (which is not a Western concept, please) when we come out publically to talk about gender and sexual diversity on our television and radio networks.

It won’t always be this way and I won’t leave you on this miserable note. So, I found something slightly less miserable to end on. I really did appreciate Amr Ellissy’s episode on Transgender and Transsexual persons for his program Be Wudooh, which aired in October 2014. Dr. Ellissy, however, still cowers to the conventional explanations when dealing with Sandy Ahmad’s Transgenderism, citing that her transition began after she had been sexually assaulted. It probably began with pre-historic fish that change biological sex in the course of their lifetime, but any way. Sandy Ahmad is a soft-spoken, articulate young woman and has created a facebook page quietly seeking to confound what we think we know about gender and sexual minority persons and the place of the sacred in their lives. There is still a great deal of confusion publically speaking over the differences between intersex and transsexuality, as is evident in the beginning of Ellissy’s episode, which is all the more reason why we need to be having these uncomfortable conversations until they cease to be uncomfortable.

I know why you are still here. Before you say something, I just want you to know that I know. I taught students like you. I have not just read what you read, I taught it. Intersex and Transgender are categories of a western scientific taxonomy that should not and cannot be imposed as an ideal of classification elsewhere in the world. Ok, got it, thank you.

*Originally published on August 8, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/sarkhat-untha-and-the-i-in-lgbtiq/  now discontinued.

Teaching Empathy and Compassion: Nahr el-Bared and the Plight of Palestinians in Lebanon

Nahr el-Bared, 2013.

The story of the destruction of Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in 2007, at the hands of the Lebanese Armed Forces, is one among so many atrocities, that it is no wonder that we have moved on from it with haste. But I firmly believe that in history, rather than the current event, lies a greater capacity to understand the world.  Today, I want to impress upon my colleagues who teach courses about the inhumanity of warfare or military oppression across history, the importance of using filmic documentary, oral histories and testimonies of victims, in their classrooms. The war front of the Palestinian struggle for survival has never been a green line or the shifting and changing imperial alliances. Now more than ever, it is a public relations contest. 

There is tremendous power in simply showing who the victims of aggressive government policies are. I have taught students who are so far removed from the reality of war that it had never occurred to them that a simple affirmation of support of military action translates into someone’s nervous breakdown or a woman’s own familial holocaust, or a child’s lost limb, or an adult’s lifetime of displacement and post-traumatic stress disorder. Of the millions of children who perished in the Nazi holocaust, we keenly feel the loss of Anne Frank more so than the others. Why? Because human beings do not have a capacity to sympathize with faceless, anonymous masses. We need to be shown individuals, we need to have the horror of war translated into a singular, personal experience. And this is exactly why I taught the Diary of Anne Frank alongside Mahmoud Darwish’s diary, Memory for Forgetfulness, and why I taught Art Spieglman’s graphic masterpiece, Maus, alongside Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, Palestine. In doing so, there was no escaping the collective humanity of the victims and the individual horror of people caught in machinations of extraordinarily unnecessary loss and destruction. 

Some of you may remember that the university where I taught made the decision to excise the Palestinian content. I walked away from that battle because, put simply, the insidious psychological warfare had by that point ravished and decimated my soul, and had taken such a toll on me that I, in the absence of collegial, personal and institutional support,  was not able to stand up and fight. I admire the likes of Steven Salaita who did, and won. I did not win, but I have survived and I can still write and I still have the privilege of a voice that is heard and words that are read.

Much talk of Israeli apartheid exists but we have yet to name the Lebanese apartheid, we have yet to just as loudly acknowledge the depth and breadth of Lebanese oppression of Palestinians. Nahr al-Bared Talks Back is an important documentary film that collects oral histories from survivors and gives a palatable context to the depth and breadth of the oppression that students will be able to relate to and find palatable. The film has all but disappeared. Its official website http://www.nahrelbaredfilm.org/ is no longer in use and the Norwegian institution (CMI) which funded the project offers no viewing or institutional purchasing options. For this reason, I choose to discuss some of the film’s content here.

The film tells us that Nahr el-Bared refugee camp was founded in 1949 and is located near the Lebanese Syrian border, in the far north, some fifteen kilometers beyond the city of Tripoli. The camp was and is home to Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948, most of whom had fled Galilee at that time. The film does not tell us that Nahr el-Bared is actually two camp sites, the original one and another that began to be settled in nearby rural plains as the refugee population increased. Like other camps in Lebanon, Nahr el-Bared, prior to its destruction, was organized into suburbs that reflected the names of the locations from which various people come. For example, those who were displaced in 1948 from Sa3sa3, now lived in a neighborhood called Sa3sa3, and those who had once lived in Safad now lived in the Safad neighborhood of the camp.

Palestinians have an extraordinary way of preserving the Palestine they were forced to flee in 1948 in a relentless and tenacious collective memory. I recall one woman from Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut telling me how she had visualized the Palestinian village she came from, because her grandmother had given her such vivid accounts of the place. One day, she said, a news report was showing images from the village and she was able to recognize it even before the reporter named the location. She said the experience felt surreal -- to have known a place she had never been was spiritually elevating.  After the Lebanese Armed Forces destroyed the old camp and with the new reconstruction underway, these old neighborhoods have been erased; the social and cultural fabric of a people numerously displaced, faces further potential erosion. It is a little known fact that the Lebanese Armed Forces targeted the original campsite in their relentless 4-month destruction, when the alleged reason for their bombing, to destroy an Islamist group known as Fateh al-Islam, should have targeted the newer campsite where the two hundred or so fighters had taken fort.¹

One resident of the camp with whom I found myself in conversation, had lived there all his life and was now working in Beirut. He reminisced that after the end of the Lebanese civil war, Nahr el Bared experienced a time of commercial prosperity.  He recalled that in those days the best road from Tripoli and across to the Syrian border actually ran through the camp, leading to an influx of traffic, and by consequence, commerce. What’s more, the resident added, merchandise was competitively priced, making camp merchants the more desirable resource for shoppers from outside. This was due to the camp’s proximity to the docking ports near Tripoli, he added. The Lebanese Armed Forces completely razed the camp to the ground. Gone was that commercial stretch of highway and even as late as 2013, when I visited six years after the battle, the roads had still not been repaved. Much of the destruction was not even yet removed. An UNRWA School had been built, a modest facility, which stands in sharp contrast to its surrounds. A new school is to be found but no reasonable roadway leading to it or any of the infrastructure one would normally associate with a brand new school building. Looking out of the window from one of the classrooms, another one of my companions pointed to the skeletal remains of ghost buildings in the distance. “I had an apartment in that building over there. Every time I look at it, I get angry,” she said. 

Nahr el-Bared, 2013

Nahr el-Bared residents did not take up arms to defend the camp, because no one felt that this battle was theirs. No one had any desire to defend Fateh al-Islam who were a foreign militant entity, seeking to establish an Islamic emirate,² spilling out of the conflict in Syria and into Lebanon’s north. For this reason too, the then Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Signiora, declared that the Palestinian people were not the target of the military’s assault and had regrettably been caught in the cross fire. While this was symbolically all nice and fluffy, the actuality on the ground couldn’t be far from the truth. The behavior of the Lebanese soldiers was remorseless in many instances, as the film Nahr el-Bared Talks Back recounts through survivor testimony. A young man tells us how he and a group of other young men were detained and stripped naked, while some were beaten, and all were interrogated for no legitimate reason other than that they had remained in the camp when most others had fled. In his soft, evidently traumatized voice, he tells us:

When [the soldier] asked me why I was still in the camp, I told him, “why, where do I live? I live in the camp.” He asked me “why didn’t you leave with the people who left?” I told him “ I didn’t know things were going to get this bad. I was sitting in my house. In the end I’m not Fateh Islam.” He asked me what I did. He was asking every single guy what he did for a living. So for example, one of the young men told him “I’m a mechanic.” The officer told him “you worked as a mechanic, or did you fix machines and tools for Fateh al-Islam? Another guy told him “I’m a baker,” and so he said to him “so you used to bake and make food for Fateh al-Islam?” When he came to me he asked me what do I do for a living. I told him “I’m a musician, I play at parties and weddings.”  He went quiet. What could he say, when I tell him “music,” of course he couldn’t say to me “you used to play music for Fateh al-Islam.”

Another survivor, recounting his detention also wonders how, given the military restriction under which the Palestinian camp exists, was it possible for Fateh al-Islam to nest in the camp and to bring in so much arsenal with which they were able to fight the Lebanese army. When every Palestinian has to enter at a military checkpoint, showing a residential ID and when every outsider or foreigner must have a permit to enter the camp, how did Fateh al-Islam manage what they did? Sociologists Ismael Shaykh Hassan and Sari Hanafi contend that the origins of the group can be traced back to the allegedly secular Fatah al-Intifada, a militarized faction that was armed by the Syrian regime in Lebanon’s far north in the 1980s in opposition to the remaining PLO fighters who had withdrawn from elsewhere in Lebanon.³

An off-screen man curates the graffiti left by Lebanese soldiers on the ruins, among them are: “Thank you Shaker al-Abbsi [one of the three leaders of Fateh al-Islam, responsible for a contingent of fifty Palestinian fighters, predominantly hailing from Syria⁴] because you allowed us to enter Ali Baba’s Grotto.” The reference to Ali Babba’s Grotto must be in relation to the looting and ransacking that took place, given that the mythical grotto was full of untold riches.  Other graffiti reads “In revenge for al-Abbas.” And “In revenge for al-Damour.”  While al-Damour references a Lebanese coastal town that saw fierce fighting between al-Kata’eb and the PLO during the Lebanese civil war some two decades earlier, al-Abbas may be in reference to Mohamad Zeidan, the Palestinian political leader who founded the Palestinian Liberation Front in Lebanon. Off screen, the graffiti’s curator passionately tells us that this graffiti demonstrates that “this was a war programmed not against Fateh al-Islam but against the Palestinian people.” Given the final statistics, one can see the off-screen curator’s reason for believing this. In eliminating less than 250 Fateh al-Islam fighters, the Lebanese Armed Forces managed to kill approximately 40 Palestinian civilians as collateral damage and to displace and further impoverish 30, 000 camp residents. Many of them, to this day still live in the neighboring camp of al-Badawi, still awaiting reconstruction of their homes, eight years later. The Armed Forces’ brutal decimation of Nahr el-Bared was not met with condemnation. In fact, the heavy handed assault was hailed as a victory against global terrorism. Nahr el-Bared Talks Back tells a more important story, it tells the story of those whose voices are actively muzzled, preventing us from hearing their dignified and very human call for justice. As one man, speaking to a foreign camera, in the midst of the siege, says:

We are a people who have been unjustly treated (mathloomeen). If they want to exterminate us and kill us, let them kill us, but before they kill us they shouldn’t also be unjust toward us. Please convey to the international general public that we are trapped here with our children, and we can’t find water, and we can’t find bread, and we can’t find medicine. 

Notes

¹This point is illuminated by Ismael Shaykh Hassan and Sari Hanafi in their critical and in-depth study “(In)Security and Reconstruction in Post-Conflict Nahr Al-Barid Refugee Camp,” published in the Journal of Palestine Studies XL(1), 2010: 34.

² ibid, 33

³ Briefly after the end of the Israeli invasion in 2006, Hassan and Hanafi contend, that a “large group of Salafist militants arrived in Nahr al-Barid camp during that period as part of the well-established and ostensibly secular Fatah al-Intifada faction through the intervention of its Damascus-based general secretary, Abu Khaled Amleh. The newcomers initially remained within the faction’s military bases, supposedly as members, but it appears that an internal coup had taken place in which the Salafists had essentially taken over Fatah al-Intifada’s bases for themselves. On 26 November 2006, the man subsequently revealed to be the group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, announced the creation of Fatah al-Islam” (ibid, 32).

⁴ Fatah al-Islam’s “decidedly nonlocal character was confirmed by the Lebanese Judiciary Council, which listed its composition as follows: 69 Lebanese nationals, approximately 50 Palestinians (the vast majority from Syria), 43 Saudis, 12 Syrians, 1 Tunisian, 1 Algerian, 1 Yemeni, and 1 Iraqi” (ibid, 33).

Filmmakers Who Feature Arab Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Characters

Yes, I dared to use “Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual,” partly because the films themselves depicted identities, not simply behaviors, and partly because I have never really found it epistemically pernicious to engage in cultural translations and historical equivalencies. A lot has happened since the publication of Chapter 6 of Female Homosexuality in the Middle East. That was the chapter in which I discussed a number of mainstream Egyptian films that depicted some form of queer text, character or subtext. Here are some films that came out in the last decade that are just waiting for some serious analytical attention.

Tool ‘Omri/All My Life (2008)
Made on a shoe string budget, with a non-professional cast and crew, this is one of my favorite gay Arab films. Don’t be put off by the independent-film budget, pay attention to the dialogue and rejoice in the power of a community-driven production. Set before and during the Cairo 52 case that rocked the Egyptian homosexual underworld in 2001, filmed in Egypt and San Francisco, the film is written and directed by Maher Sabry, himself an Egyptian exile who had to flee state persecution
Just in case you have been living in a hermitage in the Himalayas for the past fifteen years, the Cairo 52 case was an incident in which Egyptian police raided a gay nightclub, a show boat named the Queen Boat that was moored on the Nile. The police arrested 52 Egyptian men predominantly from the impoverished classes. The arrests were followed by a pernicious trial which was covered extensively in the media (and John Scagliotti’s documentary film Dangerous Living). Sabry was one of the whistle-blowers who alerted LGBT rights organizations to the arrests and for this he won the Felipa De Souza award in 2002. Maher Sabry was interviewed, albeit briefly, for Scaglioti’s film and also appeared in the short documentary I Exist (2003), although the depth and breadth of his creative intellect is yet to be explored in a feature interview.

There is a lot to love about Sabry’s film! I am not in the least deterred by the allegation that it contained “gratuitous nudity,” making it “just another gay film.” Nor am I deterred by the occasionally grainy acting or low budget filming, because there is a consistent intersectional critique throughout the film, the intelligence of which you are not likely to see in “just another gay film.” For example, I love that Sabry, probably in the tradition of Ihna Btoo’ il-Otobyss (1979), shows police brutality and torture in Egyptian prisons. That he is able to tell the stories of men persecuted by the state in this way, alone deserves a mark of respect.

I also admire how Sabry is able to demonstrate the privileges accorded to Western citizenship and/or socioeconomic status, which translate into being “above the law,” since state police seem to invariably target men who cannot pay their way through the system or who do not have the right connections to protect them. Sabry also shows that exclusive homosexuality can operate without epistemological and identitarian tentacles, just as we see in the case of the country boy, Atef (played by Maged), who lacks the pretension of his modernized counterpart, Rami (Mazen Nassar). Atef’s character stands in sharp contrast to Abd Raboh, the “he’s not really a homosexual” character, played by Bassem Samra, in the blockbuster film, The Yacoubian Building (2006). Abd Raboh, also a peasant from the country, is depicted in a such a way as to reinforce the stereotype that homosexuals are passive parties and whose active partners are, if anything, hypersexual heterosexuals, because their penetration of other men makes the latter women.

One gripe you could have with Tool ‘Omry, which I don’t really share, is that there are no real female characters in the film. Dalia, Rami’s best friend, is a virginal, sexless angel, more or less. But Jwana, the actor who played Dalia and the film’s co-producer, passionately disagrees. “Dalia….grew tired of fighting and struggling on a daily basis in a religious society. After she moved to San Francisco, [and] like so many other free-thinker women of al-mahjar, she wanted to do something to change the miserable state of our Arab world. We all know the rest of the real story and what happened to hundreds of Dalias in Tahrir.”

In light of the renewed persecution of gay men in Egypt (following Mona al-Iraqi’s TV exposé of an alleged gay bathhouse in Ramsys in 2014), the film needs to be seen by audiences worldwide, now more than ever. The recent Egyptian law permitting the state to deport foreign nationals for homosexual activity, also changes the landscape since Sabry’s film, which was critical of the privilege accorded by the State to sex tourists hailing from the West. Unfortunately, as vital as this film is to international discussions, an English release of the DVD has not yet transpired. And since the film is predominantly in Arabic (YouTube preview not withstanding), it is now out of reach to English-speaking audiences. The great news is, seven years later, the English-subtitle DVD release is due this year, according to the film’s co-producer (and co-actor), Bassam Kassab. On an interesting side note, the French subtitles of the film were written by Remi Lange, the writer and director of Tariq il Hob/The Road to Love (2001), another excellent, low-budget independent gay film we are going to be having a look at below. Rémi Lange is also the distributor of the French DVD version of Tool ‘Omri in France, Belgium and Switzerland. The film has also been released with German sub-titles in Germany and Austria. I cannot stress it enough, this is not a film to be missed.

If you find Sabry’s work compelling, you might be happy to learn that he and Bassam Kassab teamed up on another feature-length, Sin Visa, which was directed by Ana Simões and premiered at the landmark Roxie Theatre, in San Francisco, earlier this year. Sin Visa contains a gay Arab couple and sees Kassab’s return to the big screen as writer and actor sporting that same infectious grin we see in his role as minor character, Hatem, in Tool ‘Omry.

Tarik il-Hob/The Road to Love (2001)

Tariq il-Hob predates Tool ‘Omry by six years, and it was co-written and directed by the French Filmmaker Remi Lange and released in 2001. With the exception of one word (I believe, it’s “inshalla”) the entire film’s dialogue is in French. It is set predominantly in Paris, with perhaps the last twenty minutes of the film being shot in Morocco. Lange does a very interesting job of telling the story of Karim (played by Karim Tarek), a sociology student who decides to do one of his assignments, a video documentary, on homosexuality among men of North African descent in Paris. At that point, Karim has a girlfriend named Sihem (played by Sihem Benamoune) and hasn’t really given much thought to exploring his sexuality beyond his relationship with her. He soon meets one of his interviewees, a handsome young man named Farid (Riyad Echahi) and the story line unfolds predictably around Karim coming to terms with attraction to a patient, yet unrelenting Farid. If Tool ‘Omry was ever criticized for brandishing too much nudity, surprisingly, Tariq il Hob abstains from gratuity. On the contrary, it approaches male homosexual attraction with an unusual emphasis on emotions, and the need for bonds of certitude, and does not depict male sexuality in the usual fast-pace-disposability we see in gay male cinema generally speaking. At the same time, it does not represent gay men as the typically castrated homosexuals suitable for mainstream consumption—the film finds a healthy and invigorating balance. Lange’s films are not for mainstream audiences, and Tarik il-Hob made the rounds in the LGBT film festival circuit, so there is something to be said about his choice to resist giving the stereotypical film viewer what they came for (no pun intended). The DVD of Tariq il-Hob is available for purchase, along with English subtitles, it also includes extra footage that didn’t make it into the final cut.

My personal delight in this film is seeing a very young Abdallah Taia after the release of his first book, which, he complains elicited no response from his home country, Morocco. Of course, fast forward thirteen years and Taia is writing editorials in the New York Times, publishing critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical works and even making a directorial debut as a filmmaker himself. It is Taia also who discusses the homosexual marriage contracts found in the Egyptian Oasis of Siwa at the turn of the twentieth century, and it is from him again that we hear about a city in Algeria, which in the 1950s, is said to have also had a tradition of homosexual marriage contracts. I also felt that the inclusion of references to Rumi and Jean Genet were both particularly apt endeavors on the part of the writers to claim culturally-specific same-sex sexual encounters, histories and personages, contrasting them with a more contemporary violence, particularly targeted at the so called “passive” homosexual man. Like Tool ‘Omry, it’s not surprising that women are represented by one minority character and in this instance it’s Sihem, Karim’s girlfriend, who makes a gracious and early exit that allows him to further explore his sense of self.

Sukar Banat/Caramel (2007)

Nadine Labaki’s debut film is gorgeous. It was the film chosen for the Arab Film Festival’s opening night in Sydney, where I first beheld it in 2008. In his opening remarks about the film, University of Melbourne Professor of Anthropology, Ghassan Hage, said that it was a film whose critique of Lebanese social ills was “made with love,” and he was right. It’s nice enough watching a film made by a woman director, but the film also has a soft spot, an open wound—the dull, subtle pain of which, lingers long after the film has ended. To trivialize it, we can call it a “chick flick,” since it centers on the lives of a group of women who are brought together in humorous scenes at Leila’s (played by Labaki) hair dressing salon. Leila is dating a married man, whom we never see because he stands her up. We see her trying to book a hotel room in Beirut, having no luck, since she doesn’t have proof of her marital relationship, a restriction I was not aware was still observed in cosmopolitan Beirut. Her assistant and friend, Nisrine (Yasmine al-Masri), has a hymen reconstruction procedure because she cannot bring herself to tell her fiancée that she is not a virgin, while her other friend, Jamale (Gisèle Aouad), is a single mother of two and an actress, who fakes her menses and actively lies about her age in an effort to remain competitive with younger, more beautiful women in an industry of substantial cruelty to women.

If it weren’t for Leila’s co-worker at the salon, Rima (Joanna Moukarzel), the film would not make this list. Rima is an interesting character in a film that endeavors to catalogue the tragic restrictions imposed on women socially, whether that they must compete for beauty and youth or feign chastity or be treated like play things by married men. Enter Rima who, we are shown, is not interested in the young man who clearly wants to initiate some kind of romantic involvement. She is also lovingly chastised by her friends for her lack of self-beautification. We see her get mobbed by her friends and subjected to waxing of her body hairs in anticipation of Nisrine’s wedding. We also see Rima give what may seem like a look of longing, an expression of both loneliness and alienation, when a woman sits next to her on the bus. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much get communicated without words about sexuality in an Arabic-language film before. No one ever says that Rima is a lesbian, we don’t see her go out on dates with women, she never articulates the reasons for her seeming alienation, but it’s further intimated in her interaction with a salon patron who comes in regularly to have her hair washed. At the end of the film, that patron asks to her have her long hair cut short, which for some reason or another, is a symbol for breaking away with society and tradition.

Placed in context of the film as a whole, it’s clear that Rima is another archetype of woman who is not being given the space to assert individuality or to live comfortably, according to her desires. She is a likeable character, albeit marginal to the film, and her depiction is a safe one. There’s nothing confronting about her; mainstream audience members may not even have it register on their radar that she may be anything other than a quiet, shy and lonely girl. But, I think that kind of sensibility is effective; it’s not pushing the envelope too far, it’s not starting a conversation about a subject, which for many, remains unspeakable, but it is acknowledging the subject’s existence and the silences that are built up around such existences.

Bidoon Raqaba/Uncensored (2009)

Anyone who has read enough of my work probably notices that I am not a fan of critique for critique’s sake. I find that kind of pompousness tiresome. It’s like we academics have to find something lacking in everything we see in order to justify our salaries. But frankly, I did have to suffer through this film to give you this little note on it. But before we get to the suffering, let’s focus on the joy. The film was entertaining, in part, because it was a film about university students in their final year of their law degrees, and the film contains so many party scenes involving disaffected youth getting drunk or high, that might invoke, for some, memories (or lack thereof) of misspent youth. I also liked that all the sex that is had in this film is defiantly non-marital in a country experiencing a religious backlash. The God-fearing character, Ibrahim (played by Bassem Samrah from The Yacoubian Building and Sarkhat Untha), who spends much of the film sermonizing to his “lost” friends about abstaining from sex and alcohol, and observing prayer, turns out to be human after all, with the same desires as his peers. He is depicted as reprehensible and hypocritical by the end of the film, no doubt a critique of the Muslim brotherhood and their discourse. This connects comfortable with Sabry’s depiction of his repressed fundamentalist character, Ahmad, in Tool ‘Omry.

There are a lot of elements in the film on which its makers ought to be commended, but I found the 4 or 5 music video clips interspersed throughout this film excruciating to sit through. For example, seemingly out of nowhere, the main character (played by well-known Egyptian singer, Ahmad Fahmi) suddenly bursts into song. The filmmaker, Hani Georges Fawzi, was perhaps trying to capitalize on Fahmi’s fan base, but sitting through the sudden music clips was definitely a first-world problem I would have been happy to fast forward through.

I’m also slightly, but not very, disappointed in Shareen (Alaa’ Ghanem), the resident bisexual character in this film. I am glad she made it on screen and was given some unapologetic, self-asserting lines that we have never heard on the Egyptian cinema screen before. I am not glad that she is depicted as a sexual predator of innocent women, and that her background story is that she had been preyed on in seventh grade by her cousin who initiates her into homosexual behavior. I know the film, which is ironically titled Uncensored, was in fact censored several times and there were many compromises that had to be made with the censorship board for its release to be allowed, so I do wonder what the authors had to compromise on and whether Shareen’s character was different from what she ended up being. Nonetheless, despite the depictions of her predatory behavior of uninitiated women, Shareen delivers some lines for which one is infinitely grateful, given the context of the film’s audience and the pernicious stereotypes that permeate about same-sex desire and behavior. And given the film is not accessible in English subtitles, we will wrap up this article resolving that accessibility issue. Enjoy!

After Shareen sleeps with a male friend of hers, Karim, he asks her “when you’re with a girl, which one of you is the man and which is the woman?” To this she replies: “What stupidity is this? Are we in a group of morons or what?”

“No, but seriously, you two are the same, how do you do these things?”

“Like what you and I were doing now.”

“But that’s natural. A man and a woman.”

“And when I’m with a girl, I’m acting according to my nature.”

“Ok, what do you feel when you are with them?”

“What you feel when you are with me.”

“Well, then, which one are you? The man or the woman?”

“I’m both.”

In a scene a little later on in the film, we see Shareen with her new love interest, a girl procured for her by a friend, who says to her that she is not comfortable with what they are doing together. “This is haram [forbidden]. I heard a sheikh say this is haram.” Shareen replies: “Oh, and you didn’t hear the Sheikh who said eating cucumbers was forbidden?” Shareen is not joking, absurd fatwas (religious decrees) are released intermittently, and the forbiddance of eating cucumbers, since they resemble the phallus, is not an invention of her own imagination. But perhaps my favorite line by Shareen is when she is speaking to Ibrahim, the religiously observant character who asks her to repent and stop defying God (but is actually interested in sleeping with her). “We both defy God, but I don’t lie to myself, while you don’t know how to lie to people.” These comments are particularly powerful in light of the renewed popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a country that has been grappling with its social and cultural identity, oscillating between liberalism and religious conservatism, since independence was attained in the 1950s.

Finally, I appreciate this film and its Shareen because she does not die at the end! Nor does she turn out to be a vampire! Two usual endings that the Hollywood celluloid bisexual still meets with.

*Originally published on July 25, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/filmmakers-who-feature-arab-gay-lesbian-and-bisexual-characters/  now discontinued.

What Not to Wear: On Growing Up a Girl

My mother made sure that each one of her children had a photo album that tracked their growth from infancy to early adolescence. This is more challenging than you might at first imagine. Not only are we talking about analogue photography and exposure, but we are talking about the context of a hell of a civil war, and like almost all Palestinian refugees in Lebanon we were always financially challenged. But she did it, she managed it. Fortunately for me, I can trace the evolution of my dressing style with ease due to this fabulous photo album. I also happen to have an unusually strong set of early childhood memories.

My first memory had to have happened prior to August 1982 because the persons in it perished in the Israeli bombing of a building in Sanayeh (a suburb in Beirut), at that time. This must mean that I was less than two years old when I registered and retained my first memory. I can also guess the timeline of other early memories due to this kind of location. I know that we left the Southern Suburbs when the Amal militias made life for Palestinians impossible during their siege and wars on the camps in the mid eighties. In the streets of Beirut, they would round up Palestinian civilians and execute them, going door to door, looking for those of us who did not live in the camps. When I revisited and relived Lebanon, twenty years later, I had the misfortune of taking a ride with a taxi driver who got a bit sweet on me. When I told him I was Palestinian he was surprisingly undeterred but went on to tell me how he was once mistaken for one, and before he knew it, lay virtually unconscious on the floor and was moments away from execution, when they decided at the last moment to check his ID card before pulling the trigger. But I digress. Let's go back to building that timeline alongside the photo album that I am not going to show you. In the mid-eighties, my family fled this context of murderous persecution and left behind yet another house, home and belongings, and we relocated out of the Southern Suburbs to the coastline, near Hamra. At the time I was between four and five years old.

The transition in my dress code takes place well before our move to Hamra, as can be evidenced in the location of the photographs. My guess is that this took place between the ages of three or four.  The early photographs present me in dresses, very cute dresses mind you! And shortly thereafter, when I develop my own consciousness of what clothes allow or inhibit, you cease to be able to see me in a dress. And I can tell you how that happened. You can't climb trees or ladders or play soccer or kick bullies in a dress. At least that was my reasoning. I remember it, clearly, dresses inhibited my desire for motion, they revealed underwear all too readily and I was not amenable to such restrictions. My transition from wearing dresses to pants, in those first instances was purely on a practical rather than an aesthetic basis. There was also that added problem of the way I liked to sit. I didn't do legs together when I sit. It was just not appropriate for me to sit with my legs together. And thus began a lifelong tradition that I would attempt to undo in my early teens, in a self-conscious effort to fit into the final years of all-girls Catholic schooling in Sydney, Australia. Those last couple of years of school were so torturous, but you can't say I didn't try. But whenever I did, I felt like I was pretending to be someone else, I felt like a cross dresser. But that doesn't mean that I ever felt like a man in women's clothes, or like a woman in men's clothes. These were the value judgements imposed (and are still being imposed) on me by the gender police wherever I may be in the world.

When I was a child, I never had any confusion about being a girl, I never desired to be anything other than what I was biologically. I knew I was a girl. I loved it. Had I been born a boy I would've been like every other boy, and if I wore dresses like all the other girls (yes, there was no one else around like me growing up), then I would have been like every other girl. I liked being different. I liked who I was. I remember being in a car on the Syrian border, talking to my older sister and my mother, so this would have to have been in 1989 when I was 9 years old. I remember telling them this: "I love being a girl, and a strong girl, I don't want to be a boy." I remember them congratulating me on this and quickly moving to another conversation topic and I remember wishing that they'd spent a little bit more time discussing this with me.

Throughout my entire childhood, I have had to convince people that I am what my biological sex designates me as, despite the constructed phenomenology to the contrary. More often than not, people did not allow me to assert this individual truth. I was always told either "you are a boy" or "you want to be a boy" or "you're a tomboy." I think it is for this reason that I can really feel for transgender children. By 'transgender' here I mean an individual whose biological sex is distinct from their  psychic experience of themselves. Both transgender children and I have spent our childhoods trying to get people to understand who we really are and have had the problem of being told that we are NOT what we know ourselves to be. My problem is the inverse of that of the psychically transgender child. I always felt like I had to fight for being recognized as biologically female, whereas my transgender counterpart has to fight for being psychically male or female in contradistinction from the outward manifestations of biological sex.

While Palestinians in Lebanon of the 80s suffered such horrendous persecutions on every level of society, from the purges at the hands of the Kata'eb or 7arket Amal or Israeli brutalization, to name a few, my persecutors were the gender police at the Lebanese Catholic school I attended. But despite this, I didn't just survive, I thrived. In the marketplace and on the street and whenever I came in contact with the dense mélange of West Beirut's cosmopolity, I thrived. I doubt I would have received an equally enthusiastic reception if I had been an effeminate boy. I also thrived because while the gender police were actively trying to destroy my spirit at school, the situation at home afforded me such tremendous acceptance and love. Sometimes I wonder, would I have been able to write the books I have written and speak on the topics I have broached with the courage that is required to do so, if it weren't for that early unconditional love and acceptance? I think not.

When my first sister got married, this was in 1991 and I was ten years old. I hadn't worn a dress in at least 5 years at that point. I wasn't forced to do it either. I obliged. I obliged because I was implored to do so, so that I could be in my sister's bridal party. We all wore these hyper-cliched girls' mini-wedding dresses that have frills and layers and ribbons, etc., etc. I still think I looked ridiculous in it, with my short scruffy hair, but it was a fun costume. I felt kind of like children in the US must feel when they dress up for Halloween. Between the time I walked out of our apartment building and the time I arrived at the church,  I had my mini-wedding dress caught on so many edges, like car bumpers and stair rails, that in the space of a half hour, the frills were almost entirely ripped off. It wasn't something I did consciously, not at all, I just wasn't used to my clothes being so far away from my body. Once again, dresses proved to be an impractical restriction of motion in tight urban spaces and I would retire the dress until a further five years, when it would finally dawn upon me that people hate you, really hate you for who you are, and you should try to conform. I did, for a couple of years, where I would occasionally wear a dress. Eventually, however,  I came to the re-realization that the problem was not me. It was them.