Abstract
Like Ghādah al-Sammān and Saḥar Khalīfeh, the Lebanese writer Hudā Barakāt is deeply invested in questions of gender and sexuality during times of war and national crisis in the Levant. Further, she shares their inclination toward unconventional serialization. Recalling al-Sammān’s Beirut tetralogy and Khalīfeh’s West Bank series, her novels Ḥajar al-Ḍaḥik (The Stone of Laughter , 1990), Ahl al-Hawā (Disciples of Passion, 1993), Ḥārith al-Mīyah (The Tiller of Waters, 1998), and Sayyidī wā Ḥabībī (My Master, My Lover, 2004) neither develop linearly nor return to the same characters, yet they constitute a series that cumulatively explores a mutual set of social, political, and cultural themes.1 It is precisely these themes, though, that distinguishes Barakāt from her peers. While on the one hand al-Sammān and Khalīfeh address male identity and subjectivity primarily as a foil to their more pressing emphasis on Levantine women, Barakāt, on the other, chooses to position the male psyche as central to her intricate investigations of the human in response to trauma and violence. Focalized around marginalized male anti-heroes as embodiments of the contradictions of gender and sexuality during the Lebanese civil war, her novels, by necessity of this thematic, employ a surrealist rather than an existentialist or critical realist aesthetic, another distinguishing feature of her work.
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Notes
See Sibylla Krainick, “A Surrealist Trip to Paradise and Back: The Iraqi Author Abdalqadir al-Janabi,” in Arabic Literature: Postmodern Perspectives, eds. Angelika Neuwirth, Andreas Pflitsch and Barbara Winckler (London: Saqi Books, 2010), p. 343.
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1974), p. 26.
Cited in David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 21.
For a detailed account of the relationship between surrealism and psychoanalysis, especially in France, see David Lomas, “The Omnipotence of Desire: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis and Hysteria,” in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
J. H. Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 3. For Breton’s views on the conventional novel as an inferior genre, see Breton (1974), pp. 14–16.
Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, eds. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 173.
Briony Fer, “Surrealism, Myth and Psychoanalysis,” in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, eds. Briony Fer, David Batchelor and Paul Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 171.
Dawn Ades, “Afterword,” in Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research, 1928–1932, ed. José Pierre, trans. Malcom Imrie (London: Verso, 2011), p. 193.
Jennifer Mundy, “Letters of Desire,” in Mundy (2001), p. 50.
As might be expected from the foregoing account, the surrealists’ symbolic identification of women with irrationality, madness, and desire has been subject to critique on the grounds of anti-feminism and sexism. For the first full-scale attack, see Xavière Gauthier, Surré alisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
For detailed discussions of the role of gender in the surrealist movement, see Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E Kuenzli and Gloria Gwen Raaberg (eds.), Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991) and Mundy (2001).
Natalya Lusty, “Surrealist Masculinities: Sexuality and the Economies of Experience,” in Modernism and Masculinity, eds. Natalya Lusty and Julian Murphet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 108.
For detailed analyses of the conflicts and contradictions in the surrealist discussion of sexuality, see Lusty (2014), pp. 105–108 and Ades (2011), pp. 186–190. Given his views on homosexuality, contemporary scholars have gone so far as to accuse Breton of an orthodox attitude toward sex. For such readings, see Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” in L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, eds. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston (Washington, DC: Abbeville Press, 1985);
Susan Suleiman, “Nadja, Dora, Lol V. Stein: Women, Madness, and Narrative,” in Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (New York: Methuen, 1987);
and Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
Robin Adèle Greeley, Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 2.
For introductory accounts of Ẓurafa’ literature, mujūn literature, and the ghazal form, see Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 821–822, 546–548, and 249–251 respectively.
Notable examples include Ibn Ḥazm, The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love (Ṭawq al-Ḥamāmah; ca. 1022), trans. Anthony Arberry (London: Luzac Oriental, 1996);
‘Umar Ibn Muḥammad Nafzāwī, The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight (Ar-rawḍ al-’āṭir fī nuzhat al-Khāṭir; ca. twelfth century), trans. Jim Colville (London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1999); and
Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf al-Tifāshī, The Delight of Hearts, or, What you will not Find in Any Book (Nuzhat al-Albāb ftmā lā Yūjad fī Kitāb; ca. 12th century), trans. Winston Leyland, E. A. Lacey, and René R. Khawam (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1988).
For a detailed investigation of sex in the One Thousand and One Nights, see Daniel Beaumont, Slave of Desire: Love, Sex, and Death in “The 1001 Nights” (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002).
See Dror Ze’evi, “Hiding Sexuality: The Disappearance of Sexual Discourse in the Late Ottoman Middle East,” Social Analysis 49.2 (2005), passim and Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 149–166. For further analysis of changing attitudes toward homosexuality in nineteenth-century Arabic culture, see As’ad AbuKhalil, “A Note on the Study of Homosexuality in the Arab/Islamic Civilization,” The Arab Studies Journal 1.2 (1993).
Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 416. The literary afterlife of the Abbāsid mujūn poet Abū Nuwās, infamous for his bawdy lyrics, provides us with a telling example in support of Massad’s Saidian reading. Massad shows that the Arab scholars who, in the nineteenth century, denounced this poet for his licentiousness were directly influenced by their orientalist precursors. See Massad (2008), pp. 54–90.
Garay Menicucci, “Unlocking the Arab Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in Egyptian Film,” Middle East Report 206 (1998), p. 35.
See Stephan Guth, “The Function of Sexual Passages in Some Egyptian Novels of the 1980s,” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick, and Ed de Moor (London: Saqi Books, 1995), pp. 124–125.
See Frédéric Lagrange, “Male Homosexuality in Modern Arabic Literature,” in Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb (2006), p. 177 and Massad (2008), pp. 272–288.
For detailed discussions of such representations, see Menicucci (1998); Massad (2008); Tarek El-Ariss Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (New York: Fordham, 2013); and Hanadi al-Samman, “Out of the Closet: Representation of Homosexuals and Lesbians in Modern Arabic Literature,” Journal of Arabic Literature 39.2 (2008).
See Ḥanān al-Shaykh, Misk al-Ghazāl (Women of Sand and Myrrh; Beirut: Dār al-Adāb, 1989);
Nuhād Sīrīs, Ḥālat Shaghaf (A Case of Infatuation; Ḍubbīyah: Dār ‘Atīyah, 1998);
Ilhām Manṣur, Anā, Hiya, Anti (I Am You; Beirut: Riyād al-Rayyis Place, 2000); and
Saḥar Mandūr, Mīnā (Bayrāt: Dār al-Ādāb, 2013).
Cited in Brian Whitaker, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 99.
Hoda Barakat, The Stone of Laughter, trans. Sophie Bennett (New York: Interlink Books, 1995), p. 68.
Ibid., p. 69. See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Macmillan, 1913), pp. 403–404.
Hoda Barakat, Disciples of Passion, trans. Marilyn Booth (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005a), p. 1.
Hoda Barakat, The Tiller of Waters, trans. Marilyn Booth (Cairo: The American University of Cairo Press, 2005b), pp. 14, 15.
Hoda Barakat, Sayyidī wā Ḥabībī (My Master, My Lover; Bayrūt: Dār al-Nahār, 2004), p. 121.
Samira Aghacy, Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), p. 137. Monā Fayaḍ, “Strategic Androgyny: Passing as Masculine in Barakāt’s Stone of Laughter,” in Majaj, Sunderman, and Saliba (2002), p. 162. Barakāt, although she acknowledges the generosity of such critics, has herself explicitly contested their readings of Khalīl in a recent article for Al-Akhbar: “Literary critics were very generous with me, more than I expected. Perhaps because of the prize. But some of the criticism went almost in the opposite direction of the content of the novel. At first, I thought it is the lack of professional experience on my part that critics will miss my point to the extreme of praising a piece of writing that was meant to be condemned. Then I decided to consider myself “not understood” because of the uniqueness and novelty of my pioneering writing. For to create an Arab gay man, and take his side, making his pains and estrangement a fence to protect him from social and religious criticism and a tool to grant him innocence of his sexual deviance where he morally falls when he finally manages to get rid of his homosexuality, his handicap . . . all of this in addition to other literary “considerations,” was not easy to accept. Then with a little of humility I started thinking that before this novel nobody has heard of my existence all together from the ocean to the gulf and that I should be happy with it. And so I became happy with it until another man forced himself upon us. By that time I have started writing my second novel Disciples.” Hudā Barakāt, “The Stone of Laughter,” Al-Akhbar , No. 2438, 7 Nov. 2014. Translation mine.
David Halperin, “How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6.1 (2000), p. 99.
I employ “homosocial” here in the terms first articulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as descriptive of “social bonds between persons of the same sex,” but distinct from what might be considered the “sexual bonds” implied by “homosexual.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 1. I also acknowledge, and seek to move beyond, what Fedwa Malti-Douglas sees as the tendency among Western critics to read instances of homoso-ciality in Arabic literature as “indexes of latent or overt homosexuality.” In Arab-Islamic culture, she rightly asserts, “homosociality” actually “takes precedence over heterosexuality” on the levels of both “social practice [and] mentalit é s,” and thus must not be reduced to or confused with sexual motive.
Fedwa Malti-Dougals, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 15, 110.
Hanadi Al-Sammān, “Out of the Closet: Representation of Homosexuals and Lesbians in Modern Arabic Literature.” Journal of Arabic Literature, 39.2 (2008), p. 296.
My discussion of “masculinity as masquerade” here draws strongly on Judith Butler’s extension of Joan Rivière’s thesis on “womanliness as masquerade” to all gender identifications, and similarly sees such as produced and reproduced performatively. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 63–72.
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), p. 9.
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1997), p. 117.
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. 404.
For Lacan’s account of the law or name of the father, see Jacques Lacan, On the Names-of-the-Father, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
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© 2016 Kifah Hanna
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Hanna, K. (2016). Gender Dialectics: Hudā Barakāt’s Aesthetics of Androgyny. In: Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545916_5
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