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State University of New York Press - Dina Georgis

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110 pages

English

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Finalist for the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the GLBT category

With a focus on aesthetic texts that narrate stories about or from the Middle East, The Better Story offers fresh insights into political conflict. Dina Georgis argues that narrative is an emotional resource for learning and for generating better political futures. This book suggests that narrative not only gives us insight into social constructs, but also leads us into understanding the enigmatic processes by which we become and give our "selfs" over to collective memories, histories, and identities. Stories link us to queer "forgotten" spaces that official history has discarded. The Better Story argues that feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies have not helped us think about lives that do not neatly fit into the valorized logic of resistance and emancipation.
Preface: A Family Portrait
Acknowledgments

Introduction: What’s in a Better Story, or Listening Queerly

1. Two Stories in One

2. When the Subaltern Speaks and Speaking of a Suicide

3. Terrorism and the Aesthetics of Love

4. Postcolonial Revolt: An Antihero in Search of Self

5. Discarded Histories and the Adjectives of Queer Pain

Epilogue: The Story Never Ends

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Middle East

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	19 février 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438445854
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1598€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Better Story
Queer Affects from the Middle East
Dina Georgis

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Ryan Morris Marketing by Kate McDonnell
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Georgis, Dina.
The better story : queer affects from the Middle East / Dina Georgis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4583-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Gays—Middle East. 2. Homophobia—Middle East. 3. Minorities—Middle East. 4. Discrimination—Middle East. I. Title.
HQ76.3.M628G46 2013
306.76'60956—dc23
2012015505
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Preface
A Family Portrait
A t a family dinner a number of years ago, Zara, my niece who is now nearly 18, shared a very remarkable dream about my father, her grandfather. Unbeknownst to me, she had been taking a keen interest in her father's past, demanding that my brother tell her bedtime stories about his childhood. Since her father's “origins” have untidy multiple locations—ancestral roots in Iraq (a place she knew to be troubled), displaced and eventually driven out of Lebanon during the civil war, and then further displaced in the UK before finally arriving to Canada—there is no easy way for her to understand her father's experience. This dream, it seems to me, rewrites her father's stories by organizing and narrativizing the muddled fragments of our family's past and her emotional place in it. My niece had never met my father because he died of cancer a few years before she was born. A family photo of her parents' wedding, notably positioned in the house, shows my dying father sitting at the forefront of the picture in his bathrobe looking frighteningly emaciated, nearly dead. In the dream, she is in Canada, also separated from him, who, it turns out, is dying in Iraq. She travels to Iraq to see him with her father and her three aunts, my sisters and me. When she gets there, he is among thousands of dying bodies in glass boxes lined up in rows: a frighteningly modern image of death and genocide. When she finally spots him among the masses, he is being carried from the middle rows to the back. The bodies that are classified nearly dead are placed at the very back. My father, the warden reports, is now nearly dead and therefore cannot be seen. On the journey home back to Canada, we are driving on a highway. As we go under a tunnel, my niece sees my father suspended and hanging on a cross and becomes certain that he is now completely dead.
My father, who coldly cut himself off from Iraq after witnessing the end of colonialism with the fall of the monarchy and then subsequently the fall of the communist government, would not share stories with his children. He, however, came alive in the company of relatives and friends, but to his children he spoke very little of his life and his political views. His silence, which is echoed in all of us, returns transgenerationally in Zara's dream. It elaborates her frustration with not knowing her grandfather, but also in not knowing the story of where she has come from or how she has come to arrive in Canada from a history of events that brought her father to this place. Her dream leads me to think that she is concerned with how her life in Canada is situated in a past that she cannot fully understand. It perhaps enigmatically elaborates the political nature of the fact of her existence. What is more, it would seem that her wish for insight about the past is located in the political present. The Iraq that is represented in her dream evokes an Iraq in carnage. The dream's collision of past and present suggests that the past's confrontation with the present is shaping her existence and the meaning she might make of her location.
But her dream not only summons the specific political circumstances of her ancestry, it symbolically expresses the historical residues of world events and the cosmopolitan nature of group identities and histories of belonging. Diasporas, Lily Cho writes, “do not emerge in isolation, but are defined through difference” (2007, 21). The image of the masses of dying (presumably) Iraqi bodies organized neatly in rows is uncannily modern in its highly ordered and sterile representation of mass carnage. Indeed, Zara's dream conjures the implicit strategies of the Jewish holocaust: to kill and remove humans cleanly and effectively, which has become the archetypical modern social imaginary of genocide. The state of present-day carnage in Iraq is imagined by my niece through a similar modern strategy that ties her ancestry to Jewish ancestry in historical repetition of racial hatred. Zara's dream might express what Paul Gilroy calls the workings of conviviality, which he defines to be the “processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life ” (2005, xv). Conviviality is “the ordinary experiences of contact, cooperation, and conflict” (2005, xii)—a working through, if you will, which affects how groups come to imagine themselves across racial, ethnic, and civilizational divisions. In Zara's dream, civilizational conflict and connection come together in how she imagines her ancestors. For me this gestures toward not only, as Gilroy would argue, the cosmopolitan origins of groups, but their affective relationship to otherness and to the traumas of relationality, especially in political conflict.
But though Zara's dream enigmatically expresses the trauma of identity groups in her vision of a death camp, it also expresses a fantasy of mastery against death and loss. For the bodies in the dream are visible through the glass boxes: it is as though death is something we can hope to see plainly and know. Zara's wish to know and understand however is not satisfied in the dream. My father's body slips away from her just as she finds him. The dream ends with the recognition of death but with no other answers. Interestingly, the crucifixion imagery (undoubtedly influenced by her exposure to Roman Catholic and Syriac Orthodox Christianity), suggests a fantasy of redemption that would fill the gap of unknowability.
Zara's dream seems to suggest she is in search of a story of belonging. But more than that, she wants a better story than the one she has. My niece knows the facts of her mixed-race ancestry: Arab and Italian. But Zara is not simply an Iraqi-Italian-Canadian: a hyphenated identity that constitutes itself from the harmony of various traditional practices and sets of beliefs. The official story of Canadian multiculturalism, which she has undoubtedly absorbed, even at 12 years of age, does not reflect the complexity of her life. Her dream suggests that her selfhood might have more to do with what she cannot name than what she can name. With a name like Georgis, often mistaken for Greek or European, Zara could easily live her life as an assimilated second-generation immigrant. She is not so racially marked. And though I am sure she enjoys the privileges that come with a relatively passable body and a passable name, she seems to suffer from transgenerational haunting.
Zara is troubled by a legacy of loss for which she has no words. Her grandfather, though never a political prisoner, as she seems to represent him in her dream, was indeed a victim of ethnic and religious hatred. But this is not a topic that has ever come up in a family dinner, probably because it is a site of unworked-through loss. My niece knows nothing about how some of her Georgis ancestors were anticolonial communists, targeted and threatened by the rising Ba'ath Party for their counterrevolutionary activism in the 60s. She knows nothing about why my father felt that Iraq was no longer a safe place for his family. She also does not know that his past would return to haunt him in Lebanon, the place he fled to in August of 1966, 40 days after I was born. Though promised to be a pluralistic society and free from political conflict, Lebanon, from a history of percolating religious and political tensions, rose to full-blown civil war in April 1975.
My father would never recover from the trauma of being forced to protect his family from bombs and trigger-happy teenagers. He would also never discuss the past with any of us. When we left Lebanon, silence became an unspoken rule in our family. What he did talk about incessantly, especially later in his life among his friends, was his conviction and rationale for why the Georgises were not Arabs. Stories of origins offer diasporic people consolation from the brutal realities of racial violence and diasporic existence. Gilroy makes this point in The Black Atlantic when he argues that Afrocentric discourses of origin recoup so-called ethnic roots, all the while foreclosing more recent events of history, such as slavery. The effects of such historic traumas on diasporic subjectivities, he argues, far outweigh the residues of anachronistic traditions. Indeed, definitions of identity that elide “difficult knowledge” ( Britzman 1998, 117 ) of loss have the effect of defending us against the violence. They seal us together, shield u