Other Storytelling and the New Frontier

Abstract

Ashraf Zanati (see Figure 7.1), a former teacher and one of 52 men arrested in Cairo, Egypt, for ‘debauchery’ in 2001, in an incident which would stimulate worldwide attention concerning gay identity in the developing world, tells us (in the documentary Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World (John Scagliotti, 2001, US)):

I stayed in prison for 13 months. I tried to make myself quite useful, I adapted myself. I thought that I am there for a reason so I started to teach people in prison, English. I taught about 50 people in prison…. Now I am leaving [my home] behind. I am leaving everything behind me, even my memories. My mum is very attached to me, and when I told her that I am leaving, she couldn’t believe it, and she said to me ‘try again to be here’. But I couldn’t.

Zanati’s testament reveals the vulnerable nature of sexual nonconformity within the developing world.¹ Not only was he arrested for simply attending a social event, and inordinately punished as part of a government campaign to limit gay visibility within Egypt, but also the context of imagined democracy within the Western (developed) world plays a significant role in his identity expectations. Unable to resolve the oppressive situation within his own country, in order to find a more fulfilled sense of self (as a gay man) he must leave for the West, eventually becoming a refugee in Canada.