May the Weak Be Helped!: Accidental Camp and the Rehearsal of Irony

What Makes a Man? Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin is a peculiar book with an evocative title that seems to promise an answer to an all-too-allusive question, which theroughly 250pages some how circumvent by running the gamut from discussions about irony and colonialism to reflections on othering and heteronormativity. Nominally authored by two writers, the industrious Lebanese novelist Rashid al-Daif and the much less known German author Joachim Helfer, the volume is structurally based on a variety of texts. Central is an initial essay (originally published separately in Arabic) by al-Daif on the experiences that he or his alter ego (arguably the same) gathered during an exchange program held in Berlin and Beirut and organized by the German West-Eastern Divan.

The West-Eastern Divan project took place between 2002 and 2005 and was inspired in name by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1814–19 collection of lyrical poems. The project was intended to promote an understanding of what Germans like to call der Orient (the Orient) and its literatures in Germany and German literature and culture in the "East," namely, the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey. Al-Daif's partner in this exchange is Joachim Helfer, whom the program organizer presents as gay to al-Daif. This information quickly becomes the platform for the Lebanese author's compulsive deliberations about sexuality and cultural difference. Taking Günther Orth's German translation of al-Daif's original text, Helfer in turn republishes it interspersed with his own reactions to al-Daif's cogitations and to the exchange program in general.

The first part of What Makes a Man? is thus based on the English translation of al Daif's ʿAwdat al-almani ila rushdihi (The Return of the German [Man] to His Senses [i.e., His Maturity], 2006, rendered here as "How the German Came to His Senses") as well as Helfer's Die Verschwulung der Welt—Rede gegen Rede: Beirut–Berlin (The Gay-ification of the World—Speech against Speech: Beirut–Berlin, 2006, translated in this book as "The Queering of the World"). These Arabic and German translations are important, as is the fact that both authors essentially communicated in French, not in either of their native tongues. Besides, the translations indicate the reasoning that motivates their authors (and translators) and the potential fallacies of mistranslation and miscommunication.

For readers familiar with Rashid al-Daif's oeuvre, it is clear that most of his fictional(ized) texts include a protagonist named Rashid. This is no coincidence and is not only due to the author's inflated narcissism. The very meaning of the name in Arabic is intelligent, judicious, mature, prudent, rational, reasonable, sensible, and wise. Based on the same grammatical root, the noun rushd (without the possessive suffix) of al-Daif's original Arabic title indicates sensible conduct, sound judgment, and, evidently, a right path which the "German [man]" has "returned to" by allegedly embracing heteronormativity in having a child with a woman. Although technical, I use the term "gay-ification" and not "queering," for the adjective verquer (in reference to Verschwulung) actually denotes "outlandish,""awry," and "screwy." The latter translation opens the door for a whole range of other cultural and libidinal semantics that were most likely not intended by the publishers of this volume—the theoretical and practical potential of connotative meaning notwithstanding.

This brings me to the rest of the volume. Apart from short introductory notes, it consists of five essays written by literary scholars, all except one based in North America. They intend to engage critically with what they think is a controversial exchange between al-Daif and Helfer. At the forefront of this initiative is Simon Fraser University's Ken Seigneurie, the de facto publisher, who has dedicated much of his career to studying contemporary Lebanese literature. His reflections on irony and counter-irony are based first on...