"Queering the otherness in the Middle East"

Some people who have known me for some time will immediately understand the subtle sarcasm in the title of this post, and hence the quotation marks in which they were enclosed. In February of 2005 I attended, along with my friends Jeff and Michael Friener, and my boyfriend at the time Keith, American University's annual conference on Lavender Language and Linguistics. Together we invented our ironic little sub-language drawing from the titles of some of the talks we had heard, in which adjectives like 'queer' and 'other' took the morphological forms and syntactic roles of verbs, gerunds, nouns and other unexpected parts of speech. I think that in addition to our astonishment at the perceived linguistic novelty of these usages, we were also somewhat confused as to the true meanings of some of what we had heard at the conference. Since I have no clear idea of my ideological goals, if any, in reporting what I am about to report, I thought this would be a good way to begin. Perhaps this linguistic vagueness will help disentangle the vagueness of the situations I will be describing below.

Between May 27 and May 31 of this year, I had the following exchange with Danielle Briscoe, a former student of mine at UT Austin, who was furthering her study of Arabic in Cairo at the time.

Danielle wrote to me with the following query:

ok, what is the best way for me to express "gay" in arabic? anything simple? stick with "a man who loves men" or "woman who loves women"? my teacher was giving us some words, but i wasn't sure if what i was repeating was anything i'd ever say the equivalent of in english, especially when she said something about "half-man, half-woman" and that hetero men were "natural men."

help!

Since the answer was not obvious even to me, a gay linguist specializing in Arabic, I responded at some length as follows:

Well, first of all, it was nice of your teacher to raise the issue. Or did you just ask her about it?

Secondly, how did you know that I of all people would have the following page bookmarked: http://www.bintelnas.org/10muqadeema/transl-eng.html?

As you'll see, the table at the top of the page provides what the author calls "positive expressions," though what they really are is non-negative ones. At the bottom there's a narrative listing some of the more pejorative phrases that are in common use in the Arab World.

The basic term for 'gay' (or literally, homosexual) is مثلي الجنس, which can be shortened to just مثلي. Add a taa' marbuuTa, and it means 'lesbian.'

If you want something really really simple, what the cab driver who tried to hook up with me in Cairo a couple of months ago said was simply اولاد بيحبوا اولاد. A simplistic way of looking at things, or an idiosyncratic euphemism? Time will tell.

Help! indeed...

To which Danielle responded:

Thanks! This is great.

Basically, the conversation came up when my classmate Rob was talking about his visit to the Florida Keys, which involved going to his (gay) friend's birthday party at a drag club, and getting called on stage and taking his shirt off. So we were trying to explain that drag shows are not about having sex, that Rob does not feel like his gay friend is trying to date him, that he felt it was humorous and not scary that he got called on stage, that the US gay rights movement is considered to have started in 1969 (her comment: "Such a long time...!"), and that some reasons she might be able to understand for gays to have the right to marry in the US relate to inheritance, hospital visitation rights, and health insurance (beyond that, she was having a hard time). Naturally, I can't say we convinced her of anything, but she found it "very interesting" and she was glad to have the chance to ask us questions, since we "know many gay people." She also shared that her friend's boss is gay, and she likes going there because he is a man she doesn't have to feel uncomfortable with in that molestation/harassment way. alhamdulillah for small blessings.

Some of my more cynical readers will surely comment along the lines of, "See? That's what you get from these backward Arab countries! In Israel, gays live a life of milk & honey (oops, no sexual pun was intended)."

Now I'm not claiming that gays in Israel are in many (if not most/all) aspects better off today than they are in Egypt or Jordan, the two Arab countries I have visited in the past few years. But there were a few things I read and saw today that gave me some hope. In essence they show that some thirty years ago, lesbians and gays in Israel were as oppressed and shunned by society as they are in some of the "darker" countries today.

A dear dear man named Nitzan Aviv, whose résumé as an activist puts many other veteran activists to shame, both on the Palestinian-Israeli peace movement front and the queer rights front, to mention but two domains of political activism, recently wrote a guest column in Israel's foremost LGBTQ web portal gogay.co.il. If you read Hebrew, I recommend that you take a break from reading my blog and go here for a few minutes: http://www.gogay.co.il/content/article.asp?id=8320

Nitzan tells us of the first pride parade held in Israel in 1979 and of a group who put together what was probably the first Israeli queer theater performance. If you take a few more moments to read the comments at the bottom of the page, you'll see how some dude who hides behind the handle "the historian" accuses Nitzan and the left – in particular communists and Palestinians – of all sorts of things that Nitzan, in his online responses, demonstrates are completely false.

One online commentator (only identified as "the Tel Avivian") refers us to some footage from an Israeli TV news story from 1979 about the group mentioned in Nitzan's article: http://www.glbt.org.il/contentItems.php?sectionID=670&itemID=828. Nitzan himself, by the way, appears (in a mischievous Jewfro and open-buttoned shirt) in the second segment, which is part Hebrew, part English).

Finally, and back to present-day politics, I recommend that you watch the video in http://makore.6tzvaim.com/node/403, where we see excerpts of the June 2009 parasession if the Israeli Knesset commemorating Pride Month. The session was convened by MK Nitzan Horowitz (don't worry; not all Israeli gay men are named Nitzan), after a few years of hiatus, before which former MK Yael Dayan (featured in the video speaking following Horowitz) used to convene it annually in June, despite outcries from some of the Knesset's extreme religious members (both Orthodox Jewish and Muslim). The discussion is in Hebrew, but I think even a non-Hebrew speaker can appreciate the 4-odd minutes of parliamentary discussion on LGBT rights.

I am still unsure what my goal is here. One goal, I suppose, is exposing an audience (albeit, I admit, a minuscule one) to some facts and opinions others, not I, have expressed in the short history of LGBTQ visibility in this region. I also think that it shows how unstable things are. Not to say that homophobia is an issue of the past in Israel, but we have come a long way in a not-so-long period of time. And while it needn't be the case elsewhere, it also needn't be the opposite. At least one of my readers will surely accuse me of unjustly expecting non-Western societies in the region to adopt Western definitions of fairness and equality. I don't. Though I do believe some such values ought to be universal.

Another thing that bugs me about the Israeli case is that far too many in this country's LGBT (I hesitate to include Q here; you'll see why) community are so proud of things like "Israeli gays are allowed to serve in the military," that they forget that in fact Israeli gays are required to serve in the military (if they're Jewish and so on and so forth), where they are expected to (a) forfeit 2-3 years of their lives (and sometimes sacrifice their lives altogether), often in order to (b) engage in horrendous crimes against humanity.

I'll end here and allow you to ponder the complexity of all this.

Nine wise people?

I am referring to the nine (or in one case eight) Israeli Supreme Court justices who overturned the decision to ban two predominantly Palestinian parties from running in the February 10 elections.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057497.html

In a previous post, I joined many others in commenting that "[g]iven its track record, it is likely (though there is no guarantee) that Israel's supreme court will overturn the decision of the highly politicized Central Elections Committee." I am somewhat relieved that the court had the wisdom to do so, but it is not healthy for an alleged democracy to rely on appointed officials to "do the right thing." In fact, it is one of the factors that leads a democracy to being merely an "alleged" one...

I have pretty much hashed this issue in my January 12 post, so I'll leave it at that. It was just important for me to post an update today.

Two and half films

Despite the war and the need to protest, and before traveling to Jordan, I had a few opportunities to spend some quality time with my mother. That usually means driving her to the doctor (and in one case, the ER; she’s all right now), going with her to IKEA – and other furniture stores – and an occasional trip to the movies. If memory serves me right, we saw three films. The first was a new Israeli feature called hakol matxil bayam ‘It All Begins at Sea.’ It is a tender family drama, which could have been set anywhere in the world really, except it is set in Ashkelon, one of the cities at which – a day or two after we saw the film – Hamas began aiming some of its rockets in retaliation for the criminal acts of the Israeli government. I actually remember the chills I felt when they announced these firings on the news. Ashkelon has usually been a quiet town, far from the spotlights, and here I was, within days, watching a movie set there and then hearing about it on the news.

But I really wanted to write about two other films we saw in Tel Aviv. One of them I had wanted to see as soon as I saw the previews for it at one of the Ritz theaters in Philadelphia. The original title is Entre les murs ‘Between the Walls’, though in English it’s distributed as The Class. The second is an American film called The Visitor.

I knew much more about the premise of the French film than about the American one. It’s set in an inner-city Paris school, in which immigrants and offspring of immigrants outnumber ethnic French kids. It follows their homeroom and French teacher, an attractive thirty-something single guy (of course both the students and yours truly wondered whether he was gay; I won’t spoil it for you with an answer to that question), who was not really trained or mentally prepared for such a diverse – and critical – audience. What I didn’t know about The Visitor was that it, too, revolved around a teacher, or rather a professor in a small college, and that there was some (a lot, in fact) of Middle Eastern content in it.

So both Entre les murs and The Visitor turned out to be very relevant to my own life. And while the protagonists of both films were very different from one another, I couldn’t help but finding bits and pieces of myself in both of them.

At first glance, Entre les murs promises to be yet another To Sir, with Love or Lean on Me. I, however, was relieved to see very little trace of Sidney Poitier or Morgan Freeman in the character of François (actor/co-writer François Bégaudeau). I have nothing against either of the two educational maverick precursor movies, but To Sir is a classic that was good for its time and place, and one Lean was enough. What we see in Entre is the real deal. My mother commented after the credits were over – virtually all the characters share the first names of their respective actors – that it was almost a documentary. We’ve all heard about racial and ethnic tensions in Western Europe, but few of us – in Israel or the US – have had the chance to be the flies on the walls of these tense communities. Entre allowed us a shot at that.

Entre also “keeps it real” by depicting a non-heroic teacher. Some kids like and respect him; others hate his guts; many others couldn’t give a damn. He’s intelligent, has good instincts and responds with wit and respect to his students’ mischief and skepticism, but also gets himself and others in trouble doing the clumsy things that most of us might easily find ourselves doing under pressure. Watching him, I kept waiting for the magic moment in which he’d shine in all his glory and win the proverbial Teacher-of-the-year trophy, but was delighted never to witness such a development.

The Visitor is perhaps a bit more complex. Just this week I had brief discussions about it with two colleagues. With Susan Dicklitch, who teaches a course at F&M titled Human Rights/Human Wrongs, dealing extensively with the issue of political asylum, the title of the movie came up, since it, too, has asylum at its core (or one of its cores). Alan Caniglia, who is a senior associate dean of the faculty at F&M, brought the movie up while we were riding a van from a workshop we attended last weekend at Gettysburg College. The focus of the discussion with him was the personality of the professor (played exquisitely by Richard Jenkins of Six Feet Under fame; he was the dead father).

One of the opening scenes reminded me how ridiculous we can be with all our rules and regulations. A timid student enters the professor’s office with a late paper. The professor refuses to accept it. The student “reminds” the professor that he has yet to distribute the syllabus for the class. “I know,” replies the professor. Plagiarism comes up, at least covertly, when the professor reluctantly agrees to present a paper that carries his name as a co-author, even though his junior colleague had written it all by herself. Somehow we (well, not all of us) allow ourselves the luxury of this double standard. Until we realize we’re hurting ourselves as much as we’re hurting our students. Hmm, do I see an analogy to the war on Gaza? The war in Iraq?

Here, too, immigrants are part of the picture –  “illegal” immigrants, in this case. I’d like to say undocumented, but it is precisely because they chose a certain form of documenting their presence in this country that poses a problem. I’ll say no more. Go rent the DVD (Alan tells me it’s on Netflix).

So there you go, two films (three if you count the prologue). If you’re a teacher or a professor or a linguist or care about human rights, I recommend you watch them. They’re both complex in their simplicity and will leave you thinking – but also feeling (my shrink would be proud of me for making this distinction) – for a long time.

Just a couple more words on translation:

1. I would have preferred that the first film be translated ‘It All Begins at the Beach,’ though there is some merit to the current translation.
2. I find it curious that the Israeli distributors decided to give the French film a Hebrew title faithful to the original: ben ha-kirot.
3. The Visitor: who is visiting whom? The answer is up for grabs. Of the four main characters, any and all could be deemed as such. Hebrew suffers from a deficit in that it is a gendered language. Thus, the Hebrew ha-oreax (literally, ‘the visitor/guest–masc.’) inherently misses the point and precludes at least the two female characters from being candidates for the title role.

The most undemocratic democracy in the Middle East

In case you haven't heard, "The Central Elections Committee on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month's parliamentary elections [in Israel]." (Ha'aretz.com)

This is the Israel that keeps claiming that it is "the only democracy in the Middle East." The reason for the ban: these parties are allegedly guilty of "incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel's right to exist." (ibid.).

Let's briefly explore these three accusations:

1. Incitement. This means, in this context, denouncing Zionism, opposing the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinian lands and persons, opposing human rights violations, such as the current war on Gaza. 

2. Supporting terrorist groups. What this really means is: calling upon Israeli authorities to negotiate with Hamas, Hizbullah and other groups in neighboring territories and countries, which are in dispute with Israel.

3. Refusing to recognize Israel's right to exist. This allegation pertains specifically to the argument that if Israel deems itself a true democracy, it must be a state of all its citizens rather than a "Jewish state." After all, if they were really not willing to recognize the state as such, would they be running for elected office in such a state?

If the views promoted in number 1 on this list are forbidden, this means that official Israel must never comply with United Nations resolutions, as Zionism, the occupation and the current war on Gaza were all denounced by the UN, some more than once.

Number 2: The PLO was once considered a terrorist organization. Some people still can't forgive assassinated  prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Shimon Peres for having negotiated with the late Yasser Arafat, but at some point in time their bold position won them extreme popularity – locally and worldwide – and a Nobel Peace Prize.

As for number 3, All i have to say is, gimme a fuckin' break!

Given its track record, it is likely (though there is no guarantee) that Israel's supreme court will overturn the decision of the highly politicized Central Elections Committee. But the mere fact that even Labor Party representatives voted in favor of the measure is alarming, angering, saddening and for me, yet another source of deep deep shame.

And let us not forget the 900+ murdered in Gaza in just over a fortnight by the strong army of this democratic state, of whom some 40% are women and children, who no one – even on the rightmost edge of the Israeli political spectrum – claims were ever guilty of anything. Except, perhaps, being part of a society that voted – in free, internationally overseen elections – for a party Israel loves to hate. 

Ironic? Or just evil?