Loading ...Furtive Outcasts of the Arab World
By SAM SACKS
Wall Street Journal
Early in Saleem Haddad’s “Guapa” (Other Press, 358 pages, $16.95), the novel’s narrator, Rasa, accompanies an American journalist to an interview with an opposition leader, acting as her interpreter. The setting is an unnamed Middle Eastern nation that could stand in for any of the countries convulsed during the Arab Spring. Rasa has taken part in the protests, but when he meets the opposition leader, a religious populist who wants to usher in a strict Islamic state, he’s flooded with doubts. For as well as being American-educated and reform-minded, Rasa is gay. “I joined the protests so that I would no longer have to wear a mask. What’s the point of risking your life to remove a mask only to have to wear a different one?”
“Guapa”—the title refers to a clandestine gay bar Rasa frequents—is about the furtive, outcast status of gay men in the Arab world. Mr. Haddad, who was born in Kuwait and lives in London, threads the book’s conflicts through both political and personal spheres. Just as Rasa is squeezed between Islamism and authoritarianism, his place in the household is thrown into doubt when his grandmother catches him sharing a bed with his lover. His fear of government reprisal is matched by his ingrained horror of violating the codes of eib, a word that loosely translates to “shame” and refers to Arabic societies’ strict rules of social conduct that deem homosexuality a perversion.
The spreading feeling that he has nowhere to turn for sanctuary outside the walls of Guapa lends a taut, controlled sense of panic to Rasa’s plight. Alas, this promising debut novelist doesn’t sustain it. A lengthy flashback to Rasa’s American education is hijacked by some postcolonial-studies boilerplate about otherness and agency. The book never recovers from the interruption, and its dramatic tension dissolves into a vapor of self-affirmation: “I’m done with your rules about what is eib and what isn’t. I have my own rules now.” What will happen to Rasa now that his mask has come off? We can only guess.
One answer is suggested by the life of Abdellah Taïa, a Moroccan writer who since 1998 has lived in Paris. In 2006, Mr. Taïa came out of the closet in a widely read newspaper interview. He was denounced by Moroccan officials, received death threats from angry readers and became further estranged from the family he had left when he emigrated. He is today an informal spokesperson for gay Arabs, and this reputation obscures the eerie originality of his stories.
“Infidels” (Seven Stories, 143 pages, $23.95), the third of his books to be translated into English, centers on Jallal, the teenaged son of a Moroccan prostitute whose own sexual initiation comes at the hands of men in bathhouses. This world is described in a succession of raw, polemical monologues spoken by Jallal and his relatives (all in a rough-and-ready translation from French by Alison Strayer). Jallal’s grandmother, who initiated the family trade, rages at the hypocrisy of being “damned, and so very much in demand.” The angriest voice is the boy’s: “For the tens of thousands of people around us, we deserve our pariah status, our grim fate, because we do nothing to change it, break out of it. Maman, one day you’ll be stoned to death by the very same people who creep to the house each night to ask for your forgiveness and a bit of pleasure.”
An outsider’s fury fuels Jallal’s coming of age, which takes him in exile to Egypt and then Belgium. There he meets and falls for Mahmoud, another disenchanted expat who introduces him to a mystical form of Islam based on ecstatic love and liberation. The planned endpoint of their febrile religious conversion? A suicide bombing in Casablanca.
Mr. Taïa unblinkingly recounts this folie à deux as it moves toward a “sublime explosion” designed “to make people see love. Through death. Through an extreme act.” Jallal’s testimony boils with resentment, self-loathing, vindictiveness and a flailing desire for personal salvation. “I understood that a huge sacrifice had to be made in order for the world to change,” he says, “for my heart to open and let in the light.” In view of the deadly attack in Orlando, Mr. Taïa’s unnerving portrait of self-radicalization feels all the more relevant.
Source: www.wsj.com