7 Arabic literary narratives on homosexuality Jolanda Guardi This chapter examines three contemporary Arabic literary texts, published in Egypt and Lebanon between 1983 and 2005, that present either female or male homosexual characters. The three works delineate the parameters of Arab li erary discourse on homosexuality over the last few decades. Specifically, I dis- cuss Allfa Rif'at’s short story “My World of the Unknown” (1983), Mus‘ad Basta’s novel The Ostrich Egg (1994), and Hoda Barakat’s novel The Stone of Laughter (2005). All are in print and available in the Arab world, and I refer to the Arabic editions (Barakat 2005; Mus‘ad 2000) except for Alifa Riffat’s short story, which has only been published in Denys Johnson Davis’s English translation! Only The Stone of Laughter has been the subject of in-depth scholarly work (e.g. Winckler 2014); Rifat's work has been the subject of some academic articles while nothing has been published on Mus‘ad Basta’s novel. In this chapter, I study the treatment of homosexuality in these liter- ary narratives, an aspect of them that has either not yet been investigated or to which previous works, in my opinion, only allude without analyzing it in depth? T aim to show on the basis of analyses of these literary texts how a body that docs not conform itsclf to the heteropatriarchal norm can function as a subversive political body in a system that defines gender and gender rela- tions strictly. The works that I shall present exemplify the evolving treatment of homosexual characters in contemporary Arabic literature, In her book Epistemology of the Closet, Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990, 33-80) deconstructs through heranalysisof literary texts the idea of a society based on binary oppos- itions. As she claims, this society is the result of codified socio-sexual models within a heterosexual matrix. Following the recipe of Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique, I shall reveal the binary constructions present in the three texts I have chosen in order to determine if they are manifestations of a malestream dis- course that reproduces patriarchal heteronormative models, Overcoming binarism in the analysis of literary works helps us, first, to deconstruct the category of gender when discussing cultural specificity and to describe the dialectic between economic and political states and symbolic constructions of ‘gender. Second, it underlines the effectiveness of literary analysis as a tool for sociological research because it can reveal certain discourses that are passed122 Jolanda Guardi on through literature that mirror the relationships among “language, social institution, and power” (Weedon 1997, 45; 1987). Third, addressing social and cultural issues more generally while doing literary analysis can help overcome the social sciences’ neglect of Arabic literature (Said 1978, 291). Gender is an important dimension of any society’s images of the self and others, images that are permeated by and reproduce existing power struc- tures but which also may become sites that serve to subvert those structures. Against this background, I shall show that there is a new LGTBQ genre in contemporary Arabic literature and address the question of whether this genre moves from the margins to the core of the literary canon and modifies it. Joseph Massad (2007, 270) maintains, “Every Arabic novel, short story, or play (indeed every novel, short story, or play) is steeped in questions of desire.” In contemporary Middle Eastern and North African countries, liter- ary representations of desire and, more specifically, homosexuality are often perceived as allegories of ruling powers’ brutality, class differences, or power differences among Arab countries. Activist scholars of such works stress the significance of homosexuality in Arabic literature (Habib 2007; Amer 2008a, 2008), but in my contribution to this area of scholarship, I suggest that this kind of literary production may constitute a change in the Arabic literary canon. This hypothesis will need to be tested in more broadly based future research, believe that this reassessment is necessary because to “alienate conclu- sively, definitionally, from anyone on any theoretical ground the authority to describe and name their own sexual desire is a terribly consequential seiz- ure” (Kosofsky Sedgwick 1990, 26), and this seizure was the first step toward homophobic oppression and violence in Western countries from the nine- teenth century onwards. Applying literary analysis in a conceptual framework broadened by the contributions of Kofosky Sedgwick, Said, and Massad “will bbe most useful for our analysis in ways that laws, police reports, official histor- ies, school textbooks, private letters, scholarly publications ~ the usual archive of the social and intellectual historian — are not” (Massad 2007, 271). What matters is being conscious of the “hermeneutical circle” and staying in it only when interpretation has understood that its first, constant, and last task is not to let fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception be given to it by chance ideas and popular conceptions, but to guarantee the scientific theme by developing these in terms of the things themselves. (Heidegger 1996, 143) In this case, the hermeneutical circle allows the analysis of single text units or sections by inserting them into a broader context and, thus, situating the section or text in the narrative production frame of the author’s work. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 50) remind us, the disjunction between hetero- sexuality and homosexuality (and other forms of sexuality) should bringArabic literary narratives on homosexuality 123 to light their reciprocal inclusion and their transverse communication in the “decoded flow of desire.” Female homosexuality in “My World of the Unknown” The existing scholarship on homosexuality in Arabic literature usually approaches the topic either in a philological-descriptive way, which locates texts and discourses in an “aseptic” environment (Allen, Kilpatrick, and De Moor 2001; Wright-Rowson 1997) or in a way that, although highly inform- ative, is no more than a detailed description (Al-Samman 2008) that does not consider the relation between the homosexual character and the author’s literary strategies. Literary text analysis has often denied the salience of patri- archal heteronormativity and often bound its criticism to a binary way of producing and receiving knowledge in what Massad (2007, 171) calls the “epistemological complicity of the critics.” In Alifa Rif'at’s’ “My World of the Unknown” (Rifaat 1983, 61-77), the protagonist, who is in search of a new house following her husband's change Of job, is fascinated by an abandoned villa on the river which no one wants to rent because “there are all sorts of rumors about it — the people around here believe in ginn and spirits” (Rifaat 1983, 64) As she approaches the house, a woman named Anisa tries physically to prevent her from entering. The hus- band calls the police, who arrest the woman upon their arrival. She does not resist but tells the protagonist, “I leave her to you.’ ‘Who?’ ~ I cried. ‘Who Anisa?” Pointing [...] at the foundation of the house, she answers, “Her” Rifaat 1983, 67). This episode is a prelude to the appearance of a snake, described as color- ful and attractive, in the villa’s garden. When the protagonist sees the snake ona tree branch, she is enchanted by it. At this moment, she falls into depres- sion and no longer wants to see other people, preferring to stay in bed all day long. The cause of this change is clear to her: “Could it be that I was in love? But how could I love a snake? Or could she really be one of the daughters of the monarch of the ginn?” (Rifaat 1983, 70). She wonders how she could possibly have a romantic relationship and sexual intercourse with what the translator explicitly presents as a female snake (and thereby implies that the author deliberately declined the Arabic word for “snake” in the feminine in the original Arabic text): There was no doubt but that the secret of my passion for her, my pre~ occupation with her, was due to the excitement that had aroused, through intense fear, desire within myself; an excitement that was sufficiently strong to drive the blood not only through my veins whenever the mem- ory of her came to me, thrusting the blood in bursts that made my heart beat wildly, my limbs limp. And so, throwing myself down in a pleasur- able state of torpor, my craving for her would be awakened and I would