Sex and the Perils of Traveling Authors and Notions

The Lebanese novelist Rashid al-Daif asks the German novelist Joachim Helfer to help him schedule and interpret an interview in Literaturhaus, a distinguished literary institution in Berlin. Al-Daif would like to interview not Günter Grass or Herta Müller but an unnamed German porn actress (13). Al-Daif's unlikely object of interest triggers one of many conversations about heteronormativity, sexuality, and masculinity that the two writers will entertain in the "East-West Divan," a nine-week exchange program set between Berlin and Beirut and hosted by the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg. Presuming that intellectual exchanges enhance cross-cultural dialogue and understanding, the organizers asked both participants to write an account of their experience.

Al-Daif (2006) published in Arabic How the German Came to His Senses, a novella in which the main character, Rashid, ponders the homosexuality of his German interlocutor, Joachim. German and Lebanese literary circles alike panned al-Daif's work because it was perceived to sabotage universal values such as liberty and dignity. Having agreed to the Arabic publication of al-Daif's account, Helfer responds point by point to his interlocutor's narrative in his own essay published in German, The Queering of the World (Helfer and al-Daif 2006). Ken Seigneurie translated al-Daif's essay, and Gary Schmidt translated Helfer's response. Both texts were published in a critical edition conceived by Tarek El-Ariss at the University of Texas at Austin as What Makes a Man: Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin, including essays by Seigneurie, Schmidt, Rebecca Dyer, Michael Allan, and Andreas Krass. The essays contextualize and problematize the encounter between al-Daif and Helfer, reflecting on the role of literature, irony, orientalism, and fantasy in the cross-cultural encounter.

Parodying the World

The riddle is a characteristic narrative device in al-Daif's oeuvre. Rashid, the diegetic narrator in his novella, opens his testimony with puzzled questions: Why did Thomas Hartmann, the director of the West-Eastern Divan project, warn him about the homosexuality of Joachim? Why did he make it a point to mention the sexuality of his German interlocutor? This seemingly trivial piece of information is for Rashid a concealed invitation to scrutinize Joachim's sexuality and ask the unthinkable: Is Joachim a real man? How can his homosexuality and masculinity coexist? Is homosexuality a choice? If so, can Joachim renounce it? So begins Rashid's journey to the world of the other. In a unilinear account of his role as both Joachim's guest in Berlin and his host in Beirut, Rashid delves, not without ambivalence, into the sexual mores of his interlocutor.

Rashid confesses his outright ignorance about the nature of the emotional attachment between two homosexual men. He has always believed, he admits, that a relationship between two men means sex or, in his own terms, "asswork" (14). Rashid then begins to reflect on masculinity and manhood: masculinity is a mustache and hairy arms and chest; it is heterosexuality restricted to sexual penetration; it is fatherhood; and finally, it is the unequivocal and essential opposition to and distinction from the feminine—the clean, domesticated, available, concealed, and pure female body (14). To sustain this confessional tone, Rashid will have to stand his traditional ground. He firmly identifies with the "we" in what he suggests are fixed Arab and Eastern identity structures. "For us," he writes, "the homosexual act is disgraceful, shameful, and must be suppressed"; it is like "calamities" such as using drugs (3).

Rashid is resolute on setting his interlocutor straight. He tries, to no avail, to set up Joachim with an androgynous woman from his circle of Beirut friends (33). Rashid cannot conceal his excitement when Joachim begins dating a German woman in Beirut (48). He is ecstatic when Joachim confesses his desire to conceive a child with her: "Oh my God, what's happening? Has Germany been restored overnight? So has the...