BY ISKANDAR ABDALLA
PROLOGUE
"الدنيا الربيع والجو بديع،
قفلي على كل المواضيع"
سعاد حسني
In school, we learned that the year has four seasons and that spring is the most beautiful one; flowers bloom, nature shimmer in a colorful joy and a scent of freshness travels around. I never questioned such an image despite the hot windstorms sweeping the city of Alexandria for weeks every spring; packing the air with heat and dust. I never cared to look for the shiny blossoms growing, nor to see whether their colors have really gotten vibrant. Soad Hosny’s yearly appearance on TV, dancing and singing in the midst of colorful flowers “It is spring, and the weather is beautiful, everything else falls away” sufficed as a validation.
It was May when I arrived to Germany. Heavy rains drenched the vast meadows in front of my eyes. Armies of raindrops knocked the surface of my train’s window, railing together in infinite tiny rivers running with no prospect of an end. I did not notice it when he came. I first smelt a scent of coconut mixed with raw tobacco before realizing his charming presence in the opposite chair. His eyes were dark and big, his smile made them look even bigger, letting them sparkle with an enduring flare. I smiled back notwithstanding my embarrassment that probably made me feel colder than how I really was. “Your jacket is too thin ...German spring is treacherous.” I felt a whiff of embarrassment in his voice, even if his face remained confidently warm. I chatted with him for a while filling the gaps of my broken German with English words. Was it like 10… 20... 30 minutes? I do not know, and I do not remember what we talked about, but I do remember how his farewell’s smile made him shine in an ultimate beauty. He wrote his number on the back of my train ticket. “My name is Luis. Please write to me when you get a German number. Hopefully it will be warmer soon and we can go for a walk.” He left his coconut scent behind. It did not stop raining until the next day.
LOST HOME
I struggled with sleep since my arrival and until summer. I first thought I should try to make my bed familiar; I replaced the white bed sheets with colorful ones that would surely appeal to my mother’s taste. Every night as usual, I buried my head in the narrow rift between the bed and the wall, I covered it with a pillow or two and tried tentatively to listen to my breathing rhythm. But all in vain; my mind would not shut up.
I only fell deeply asleep weeks later when I learned to sleep differently; when I learned to accept the crowd in my head as an everlasting night company cordially invited to partake in my dreams.
***
I then started to dream very often. Some dreams faded away as soon as I wake up, others never went away. One of those later dreams was set in the interior of high-rise building with an indefinite number of floors and corridors. I learned that my mother has just moved there. I remember seeing myself lost between the corridors searching for the apartment. I went up and down the stairs, but all the doors and corridors looked alike. I decided to strain an ear behind each door as I knew that my mother will probably be talking loudly on the phone. But suddenly one of the doors opened and my uncle came out in his military uniform yelling at me: “You are not supposed to be doing this … You are not supposed to be here.”
It was still night when I woke up. My room was terribly hot and humid. I was so scared, that I wished my sleepless nights would rather return.
***
I spent my early childhood surrounded by women; my aunts, my mum, my grandmother and her female neighbors whose visits never break off until her death. Home was an intimate universe of love, tenderness, freedom and above all, hundreds of imaginary shows. In those days, I would namely dress up like my aunts; put on their high heels and lipsticks, eyeshadows and blush on, towels would then pass as long hair. In those early days, men’s presence at home was presumed but not real. My father was only present by the virtue of the letters he sent from Kuwait. My mother used to read them out loud avowing promises of future vacations. My uncle was present in many family photographs hanging on the walls; the most ubiquitous one was of him standing in an officer’s khaki uniform with a reticent smile and a glossy shaved beard. It hanged straight under an old poster of president Sadat, who was also to be seen in a splendorous military uniform adorned with honorary badges and medals. “The hero of war and peace” was written at the bottom of the signed poster. Will my uncle be a hero of war and peace as well? I thought about that every time I looked at the two pictures hanging.
In one of August dog days, my uncle came back home after three years of conscription. I was dressed-up as usual, busy with my role as Soad Hosny in an interview, promising the masses of a new comeback. When I heard my aunts’ welcoming cries, my heart thuds with excitement about meeting the “hero.” I waited for him to come in and when we finally met, he responded to my nervous smile with an unsettling gaze that left me for a while shivering in cold, unable to continue the interview nor to stop it. Few minutes later, he picked the stick I used as a microphone and fiercely beat me up. “You are not supposed to dress like that.”
This was the first time to get beaten up and the last time to dress up like a diva.
LOST LOVE
Even in the coldest nights, when Luis and I made love, spring arrives. I could sense it in the sweetness of the air we breathed together, in the redness of flowers of his blushing cheeks, in the exquisite felicity his smile unravels. I would take advantage of the inexhaustible warmth of his body and clench myself joyfully within to take it in. Later, when we were about to part, recalling those memories made me clueless; how could it be that my body was porous to his warmth and his was opaque to my love? Luis and I were lost in translation. He read my love as helplessness, my daydreaming as negligence and disrespect, my fears as cowardness and my desires as irresponsibility. He said he loves me, but real love is deeds not words and I have been always desperate for love words. I said his silence made me insecure and he thought of my insecurity as an obsessive act of self-pity. We spent a whole autumn in admonitions and then we parted in the winter that followed. Since then, the night’s cold became harsher, whether I slept alone or with company. I waited for him to visit me in dreams, but he never did, or I cannot not say if has done. Sometimes though, I wake up sensing his coconut scent in the bed sheets.
LOST LANGUAGE
“To speak is to exist absolutely for the other” Frantz Fanon
My German teacher told me once, I shall master the German language as soon as I speak German in dreams. After so many years in Germany, I cannot tell if I ever had a dream in German. In dreams, language seems of little importance. What one usually recalls of a dream is not what one said, but rather what one saw and how one felt.
I daydream in German though. In exile, reality sometimes appears like a dream; things are not in their place, faces are blurry, events are unpredictable, space and time are out of joint despite the fact that in Germany, everything has its season and each season is distinctively different. A life in exile is a life in translation; coping with reality is like decoding a dream. You constantly try to make sense of peculiar words and worlds; and you are constantly urged to make sense of yourself in terms that are not yours, in ways you are unfamiliar with, in a language whose sign of mastery corresponds to your ability to accept its limits; to discern its impotence in articulating certain things, its incommensurability with your pain and fears. In the midst of translations, I realized that I am stuck in a perpetual condition of liminality; between seasons; between here and there; between dream and reality hunting a moment of arrival that will never come.
Epilogue or Queering Endings
Luis often loathed my inability to let go; to free myself from the specters of the past and embrace the ideal of happiness in a new home, where I can finally be myself. When we broke up, he could not come to g rips with how I dealt with pain and memories, he wondered how my present’s quintessence seems to lie in mirroring the past, how my sense of tomorrow manifests itself in sheer reminiscing; how all places are occupied with dust of time and shadows of loss, as if life is a huge mosaic of temporal fragments and living is nothing but a perpetual ritual of scrutinizing every tiny piece of it thoroughly. Melancholia is another word for the obsession of not letting go, of persistently lingering on ruins, of holding on lost homes and objects; another word for the failure to move on. Melancholia is a feeling with a bad reputation. Melancholic migrants are seen as incapable of integration, melancholic Queer migrants as ungrateful; hated, persecuted in their countries and nevertheless mournfully holding on their loss rather than showing gratitude for the freedom of present. This “stuckness” in something that should be rather left behind breaks with the proposition of linearity, of happiness as a promise projected onto the future and exclusively guaranteed by the host gay-friendly nation for those who embrace its values. Melancholia kills the joy of co-opted gayness perceived as an ideal that can be happily attained and lived out when certain defined conditions are fulfilled. Melancholia however restores queerness as obliquity, as a critique of conventional scripts of progress, happiness and arrival. Exile for Queers is never a happy end, but always an open one.
1. I am indebted in this passage to Sara Ahmed’s reflections on melancholia. See “The Cultural Politics of Emotions” (2004) Edinburg University Press, 159-160. “The Promise of Happiness” (2010) Duke University Press 138-148.
BY ISKANDAR ABDALLA
PROLOGUE
"الدنيا الربيع والجو بديع،
قفلي على كل المواضيع"
سعاد حسني
In school, we learned that the year has four seasons and that spring is the most beautiful one; flowers bloom, nature shimmer in a colorful joy and a scent of freshness travels around. I never questioned such an image despite the hot windstorms sweeping the city of Alexandria for weeks every spring; packing the air with heat and dust. I never cared to look for the shiny blossoms growing, nor to see whether their colors have really gotten vibrant. Soad Hosny’s yearly appearance on TV, dancing and singing in the midst of colorful flowers “It is spring, and the weather is beautiful, everything else falls away” sufficed as a validation.
It was May when I arrived to Germany. Heavy rains drenched the vast meadows in front of my eyes. Armies of raindrops knocked the surface of my train’s window, railing together in infinite tiny rivers running with no prospect of an end. I did not notice it when he came. I first smelt a scent of coconut mixed with raw tobacco before realizing his charming presence in the opposite chair. His eyes were dark and big, his smile made them look even bigger, letting them sparkle with an enduring flare. I smiled back notwithstanding my embarrassment that probably made me feel colder than how I really was. “Your jacket is too thin ...German spring is treacherous.” I felt a whiff of embarrassment in his voice, even if his face remained confidently warm. I chatted with him for a while filling the gaps of my broken German with English words. Was it like 10… 20... 30 minutes? I do not know, and I do not remember what we talked about, but I do remember how his farewell’s smile made him shine in an ultimate beauty. He wrote his number on the back of my train ticket. “My name is Luis. Please write to me when you get a German number. Hopefully it will be warmer soon and we can go for a walk.” He left his coconut scent behind. It did not stop raining until the next day.
LOST HOME
I struggled with sleep since my arrival and until summer. I first thought I should try to make my bed familiar; I replaced the white bed sheets with colorful ones that would surely appeal to my mother’s taste. Every night as usual, I buried my head in the narrow rift between the bed and the wall, I covered it with a pillow or two and tried tentatively to listen to my breathing rhythm. But all in vain; my mind would not shut up.
I only fell deeply asleep weeks later when I learned to sleep differently; when I learned to accept the crowd in my head as an everlasting night company cordially invited to partake in my dreams.
***
I then started to dream very often. Some dreams faded away as soon as I wake up, others never went away. One of those later dreams was set in the interior of high-rise building with an indefinite number of floors and corridors. I learned that my mother has just moved there. I remember seeing myself lost between the corridors searching for the apartment. I went up and down the stairs, but all the doors and corridors looked alike. I decided to strain an ear behind each door as I knew that my mother will probably be talking loudly on the phone. But suddenly one of the doors opened and my uncle came out in his military uniform yelling at me: “You are not supposed to be doing this … You are not supposed to be here.”
It was still night when I woke up. My room was terribly hot and humid. I was so scared, that I wished my sleepless nights would rather return.
***
I spent my early childhood surrounded by women; my aunts, my mum, my grandmother and her female neighbors whose visits never break off until her death. Home was an intimate universe of love, tenderness, freedom and above all, hundreds of imaginary shows. In those days, I would namely dress up like my aunts; put on their high heels and lipsticks, eyeshadows and blush on, towels would then pass as long hair. In those early days, men’s presence at home was presumed but not real. My father was only present by the virtue of the letters he sent from Kuwait. My mother used to read them out loud avowing promises of future vacations. My uncle was present in many family photographs hanging on the walls; the most ubiquitous one was of him standing in an officer’s khaki uniform with a reticent smile and a glossy shaved beard. It hanged straight under an old poster of president Sadat, who was also to be seen in a splendorous military uniform adorned with honorary badges and medals. “The hero of war and peace” was written at the bottom of the signed poster. Will my uncle be a hero of war and peace as well? I thought about that every time I looked at the two pictures hanging.
In one of August dog days, my uncle came back home after three years of conscription. I was dressed-up as usual, busy with my role as Soad Hosny in an interview, promising the masses of a new comeback. When I heard my aunts’ welcoming cries, my heart thuds with excitement about meeting the “hero.” I waited for him to come in and when we finally met, he responded to my nervous smile with an unsettling gaze that left me for a while shivering in cold, unable to continue the interview nor to stop it. Few minutes later, he picked the stick I used as a microphone and fiercely beat me up. “You are not supposed to dress like that.”
This was the first time to get beaten up and the last time to dress up like a diva.
LOST LOVE
Even in the coldest nights, when Luis and I made love, spring arrives. I could sense it in the sweetness of the air we breathed together, in the redness of flowers of his blushing cheeks, in the exquisite felicity his smile unravels. I would take advantage of the inexhaustible warmth of his body and clench myself joyfully within to take it in. Later, when we were about to part, recalling those memories made me clueless; how could it be that my body was porous to his warmth and his was opaque to my love? Luis and I were lost in translation. He read my love as helplessness, my daydreaming as negligence and disrespect, my fears as cowardness and my desires as irresponsibility. He said he loves me, but real love is deeds not words and I have been always desperate for love words. I said his silence made me insecure and he thought of my insecurity as an obsessive act of self-pity. We spent a whole autumn in admonitions and then we parted in the winter that followed. Since then, the night’s cold became harsher, whether I slept alone or with company. I waited for him to visit me in dreams, but he never did, or I cannot not say if has done. Sometimes though, I wake up sensing his coconut scent in the bed sheets.
LOST LANGUAGE
“To speak is to exist absolutely for the other” Frantz Fanon
My German teacher told me once, I shall master the German language as soon as I speak German in dreams. After so many years in Germany, I cannot tell if I ever had a dream in German. In dreams, language seems of little importance. What one usually recalls of a dream is not what one said, but rather what one saw and how one felt.
I daydream in German though. In exile, reality sometimes appears like a dream; things are not in their place, faces are blurry, events are unpredictable, space and time are out of joint despite the fact that in Germany, everything has its season and each season is distinctively different. A life in exile is a life in translation; coping with reality is like decoding a dream. You constantly try to make sense of peculiar words and worlds; and you are constantly urged to make sense of yourself in terms that are not yours, in ways you are unfamiliar with, in a language whose sign of mastery corresponds to your ability to accept its limits; to discern its impotence in articulating certain things, its incommensurability with your pain and fears. In the midst of translations, I realized that I am stuck in a perpetual condition of liminality; between seasons; between here and there; between dream and reality hunting a moment of arrival that will never come.
Epilogue or Queering Endings
Luis often loathed my inability to let go; to free myself from the specters of the past and embrace the ideal of happiness in a new home, where I can finally be myself. When we broke up, he could not come to g rips with how I dealt with pain and memories, he wondered how my present’s quintessence seems to lie in mirroring the past, how my sense of tomorrow manifests itself in sheer reminiscing; how all places are occupied with dust of time and shadows of loss, as if life is a huge mosaic of temporal fragments and living is nothing but a perpetual ritual of scrutinizing every tiny piece of it thoroughly. Melancholia is another word for the obsession of not letting go, of persistently lingering on ruins, of holding on lost homes and objects; another word for the failure to move on. Melancholia is a feeling with a bad reputation. Melancholic migrants are seen as incapable of integration, melancholic Queer migrants as ungrateful; hated, persecuted in their countries and nevertheless mournfully holding on their loss rather than showing gratitude for the freedom of present. This “stuckness” in something that should be rather left behind breaks with the proposition of linearity, of happiness as a promise projected onto the future and exclusively guaranteed by the host gay-friendly nation for those who embrace its values. Melancholia kills the joy of co-opted gayness perceived as an ideal that can be happily attained and lived out when certain defined conditions are fulfilled. Melancholia however restores queerness as obliquity, as a critique of conventional scripts of progress, happiness and arrival. Exile for Queers is never a happy end, but always an open one.
1. I am indebted in this passage to Sara Ahmed’s reflections on melancholia. See “The Cultural Politics of Emotions” (2004) Edinburg University Press, 159-160. “The Promise of Happiness” (2010) Duke University Press 138-148.
