Voices Against Disavowal, Obscurantism, and Exclusion The Year in Lebanon

Prologue: Dissident Voices in a Bleak Political Landscape

Life writing may have been acknowledged as an independent, if interdisciplinary, field in literary criticism in the North American and Anglophone European contexts in the 1990s, but in Lebanon the 1990s marked the end of a protracted civil war (1975–1990), and the country's staggering corpus of postwar literature, in Arabic, French, and English, has been mainly geared toward fiction, rather than nonfiction. Against the backdrop of considerable social and political censorship in Lebanon, real-life accounts have been engineered into fictional prose over the past three decades.

Since fiction is not assessed by the same "metrics of authenticity" (Smith and Watson) as nonfiction, fictional texts have provided a heuristic space for self-expression as well as social critique. Lebanese women authors, for example, have folded into their postwar novels "graphic glimpses into the tragic human consequences of violence," and have thus been able to "transcend confessional and political loyalties in order to concentrate almost entirely on the omitted stories of pain and suffering" (Khalaf 13). The repressive political climate that has spawned such narratives continues to date, even if life writing and its subversive voices are now becoming more audible.

A number of bitterly contested social media-related arrests of activists, accused of libel against leading politicians and party leaders, were widely criticized as infringements on free speech in 2018 and 2019 (Alami; Azhari). The country was also polarized over indie rock band Mashrou' Leila, which was accused of blasphemy, sedition, homosexuality, and devil worship—not sufficiently evidenced to warrant legal action but enough to galvanize sectarian mass protests. The subsequent threats of violence from Christian right-wing groups led to the cancellation of one of the band's concerts scheduled for August 9, 2019 in Byblos, Lebanon; what followed was an outcry in international media by Lebanese activists calling for secular freedom and civil rights (Hall; Kayssi).

The past year saw a rise in academic as well as public interest in life writing across different modes, namely digital, audiovisual, and onstage narratives, particularly among activists and cultural practitioners interested in the life stories of people who have had traumatic experiences or suffered persecution and stigma, such as refugees, LGBT people, veiled women, atheists, sex workers, gender non-conforming individuals, and prisoners. An atmosphere of growing unrest and discontent, and the relatively long production time for biographies, autobiographies, and other personal narratives in print form, may explain why the latter were not the main vehicles for life writing in Lebanon this year.

Life Stories Online: Veiled Atheists from Lebanon and Syria

The debate around veiling, whether forced or voluntary, gained renewed traction in 2017 with a dispute in the classroom between a hijab-wearing sophomore student and a retiring professor at the American University of Beirut ("AUB 'Hijab'"). Soon after, Sarah Harakeh, a high school English teacher, published an incendiary personal narrative titled "I Am an Atheist and I Wear the Veil" about how her wearing of the hijab was a collective family decision, rather than an emblem of personal conviction or faith, of which she was devoid after becoming an atheist.

One year later, Harakeh published the stories of ten Lebanese and Syrian atheists living in Lebanon. These women had reached out in response to her testimonial and wanted to express their own experiences of physical and mental abuse and their desires to emigrate:¹

We took off the black abaya after we left the ISIS-occupied area in Syria, but then my parents made me wear the veil in Lebanon, not taking my opinions or wishes into consideration. […] My views toward religion have changed drastically. […] I wish I can go live one day in a different country, where my choices are protected, where I can be free, and take my veil off. -Samah

Despite my age [29] and the fact that I hold a master's degree and I have a job, I still can't take the veil off. I still have to wake up every morning and put the veil on before going out. […] The last time I opened the subject with my parents, I got beaten up very badly. -Alaa ("We Are Atheists")

Harakeh cautioned that the predicament of pressuring young women to subscribe, at least outwardly, to beliefs not, or no longer, their own is exacerbated by socioeconomic factors that prevent women from leaving "their prisons," thus enabling their families to return them to the fold. Tayma's estrangement from her family after she de-veiled meant that she was alone upon losing her job: "The only condition for [my parents] to speak to me was that I wear the veil again. I eventually ran out of money and experienced hunger, a feeling I never thought I would have in my life."

The stories Harakeh collected are governed by the traumatic experience of forced childhood veiling, and in line with Cathy Caruth's notion of post-traumatic stress disorder (4), the women's narratives are alert to somatic manifestations of the latter—in the numbing sensations, cloying insecurities, recurrent suicidal thoughts, and rapid heartbeats.

I started getting regular checkups at a cardiologist, who diagnosed me with tachycardia. […] I had to start medications. All that and my father didn't bat an eye. -Rola

I attempted suicide by drinking chlorine […]. My dad thought I drank it because I wanted to be with [a] guy, but the truth is I did it because I lost my freedom. -Sally

My mom told me several times that she would bring me the poison, and all I had to do is to drink it. I tried to realize her wishes once; I tried to kill myself. I drank a medicine that I found, but all it did was make me sick. -Rana ("We Are Atheists")

That the poignant otherness manifest in these texts allows a collective narrative of hope for change to take root is a reality the writers are aware of. "I wonder how many out there are like me, or are still battling through their way to freedom," Harakeh concludes. "To all the veiled girls that are forced into it, I salute you. Stay strong and hang on. […] Remember, you are not alone in this" ("I Am An Atheist").

Plotting the Self on Stage: Drag and the Queer Refugee

A number of storytelling events in the form of sketches or vignettes, as well as art performances that interrupted gender norms, were staged in multiple locations in Beirut. These works tackled notions of home and citizenship for different minority groups in Lebanon: migrants and refugees, asylum seekers, youths with unconventional gender identities, and those with mental health issues. In plotting these various selves and subjectivities, the thought-provoking and cathartic life stories highlighted aspects of otherness and its divergent paths expressed through lived experience.

A group of LGBT Syrian refugees performed a set of vignettes, Story of a Journey: Vignettes by Syrian LGBTs in Lebanon,² about their poignant journeys from a doubly violent environment—the civil war and the homophobia it seems to have heightened in Syria (Reid)—to find a home through the Lebanese gay-advocacy group Helem.³ They have achieved this through civic engagement and activism, which have helped distance their interactions from the restrictive communities hostile to their presence in both their home and host countries.

Although dealing with homophobia is a struggle all LGBT people in Lebanon have to contend with, queer Syrians in particular bear the double brunt of queerness as otherness. Given the rising racism against Syrians in the country (Amro), itself a legacy of Syrian interference in Lebanese affairs after Lebanon's own Civil War ended in 1990 (Traboulsi), many of the actors in the play cited Helem as their safe, even healing, space and haven. As they await final decisions on their asylum applications in Europe, Helem's "thriving sense of a cohesive, mutually supportive community" (Zeidan)⁴ offers empowerment and capacity-building workshops, including drama therapy, from which the play emerged.⁵

A wide range of life stories were acted out in the scenes, but home for many of the "characters" was shown to be the comfort of like-minded individuals, whether in Beirut or Damascus, rather than, traditionally, through family. Aggressive, conspicuous ideas of masculinity and heterosexuality may be exacerbated in times of war (Bobseine), and these stories showed how several of the young men and women on stage were driven out of their family homes after their sexuality was revealed. Henceforward, they found themselves catapulted into even graver danger: either ISIS-controlled territory or, similarly risky, intercepted by Assad forces, who outdid one another, as well as sundry rebel and/or jihadist groups, in abusing, and blackmailing, those suspected of being queer, having arrested them at the checkpoints that mushroomed across the country.

One arresting scene, in particular, portrayed the deteriorating mental health of refugees.⁶ The vignette featured a lady-boy, beside himself with anguish and the many vicissitudes of life in exile, as he is harangued and abused before a cathartic reconciliation with a middle-aged Lebanese cross dresser who had given him temporary shelter in Beirut. In all cases, the immediate social circles of the LGBT Syrians back home, whether friends, family, or coworkers, were too detached to be sensitive to their plights, which often left them homeless and penniless, at best, or led to their further persecution, with invectives, harassment, and threats of death or violence, at worst.⁷

Similarly noteworthy in 2019 was the deployment of drag life narratives lambasting obscurantism in the face of increasing(ly) urgent calls for secularism and civil rights. In particular, twelve drag performers advocating for social reform through art took to the stage on International Drag Day, July 16.⁸ Knowing that expectations of normative sexual and gender behavior remain de rigueur in Lebanese society, the performances illustrated the various indignities of negotiating life in drag.⁹ At the same time, they challenged deep-seated, straitlaced attitudes to nonconformity, which supersede what Steven Seidman describes as the oft-vaunted Lebanese claim to an enriching cosmopolitanism. The full-fledged "formation of identity-based sexual communities" cannot, as Seidman notes, be assumed in Beirut, the same way it can in other cities such as New York and London (20), a reality acknowledged and challenged in all the performances.

The underrepresented yet vital topic of LGBT mental health in Lebanon was also featured in different songs, dances, and vignettes this year in a bid to raise awareness of the risks of youth depression and suicide.¹⁰ Impugned, and jettisoned in performance at least, was the negative emotional baggage associated with coming out in rural areas, seeking asylum, sexual harassment by non-LGBTs, and the stigma surrounding Beirut's sex workers. A drag king from the Bekaa Valley described the challenges of gender nonconformity as a cis woman amid strict boundaries mandating constructions of masculinity. Finally, bullying and othering in the queer community itself—concerns mapped in recent ethnographic research (Merabet; Moussawi, Disruptive Situations and "Queer Exceptionalism")—were present in the drag narratives that called for inclusion and acceptance, by both "straights" and "gays" alike.

Prisoner Texts: Reflections on Child Molestation, Destitution, and Sex Work

Life narratives in the past year also took the form of prisoner testimonials on film, part of the Aatel Aan El Hurriya (Freedom-Deprived) Program, aired by MTV Lebanon. Molested by the concierge of a neighboring building as an eight-year-old, M. N.¹¹ described coming full circle as a young adolescent, himself seducing other, often younger, boys, thus reproducing the traumatic experience of his childhood in the 1990s ("As Sajeen M. N.").

Speaking from inside his cell in Mabna Al Ahdath, the junior delinquency ward of Roumieh Prison, M. N. explained his predicament as a consequence of sex with minors (under 21 years of age) being treated by Lebanese authorities as rape or sexual assault, even when consensual. He became sexually active as a child and was caught in bed at a Catholic boarding school with another boy, incurring a beating by his father in front of his peers. Rather than question the roots of the behavior, and potentially treat it, his conservative family chose to chastise him. Even as he had felt comfortable enough to come out to his mother about his sexuality, he could not share the reason that, in his view, had triggered the orientation, and his family only learned of his childhood rape after he acknowledged it during police interrogations following his arrest.

After being maligned in the media in the early 2000s as a public risk to Beirut's children, M. N. said: "I'm now being treated for pedophilia, but I'm not 'Wahsh Beirut' [Beirut's monster] as one journalist described me back then. Victims and victimizers need rehabilitation alike, and parents should put their children first, not their communal image."

Like M. N., Jamileh El Jaroush grew up in a boarding school in Beirut. She returned to her village in the mountains after the civil war started, ceasing studies at age fourteen to work odd jobs helping her father support the family. Abducted and raped at seventeen by an acquaintance, she was shunned as a dishonorable woman by her community, who were unsympathetic to her experience of sexual assault and the subsequent trauma of being forced to marry her rapist. This would be the first of three marriages arranged "to restore her honor." "I was awash with blood after my second husband hit my head with a wooden cane, leaving a wound requiring 17 stitches; I became homeless after I was thrown out of my third husband's, and later my father's, homes," El Jaroush said: "We don't want a whore among us." At twenty, she was thrice-divorced ("Jamileh El Jaroush").

She was then drawn into prostitution by a dancer offering her a place to stay in Beirut, though she resisted at first. She described the challenge of reconciling men's demanding sexual transactions with the revulsion intrinsic to faking intimacy with strangers. Given the emotionally arid environment, a short-lived relationship with a seemingly kind amputee resulted in childbirth. After a quarrel, El Jaroush's best friend and co-worker tipped off the police about her, resulting in her arrest on charges of fornication; her baby was taken away, never to be seen again.

Regardless of the roots and routes of sex work, and the links between destitution, disavowal, and sexual coercion outlined in El Jaroush's story, she observed that it is always women upon whom public opprobrium is heaped, never their paying customers. She said, "I own my story; it is one of many. He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone."

Epilogue: Humanizing Nonconformity

Narrative theory may have cobbled together an understanding of "how forms of discourse in the natural and human sciences are themselves ordered as narratives," thereby inviting lifewriting critics "to think of all discourse as taking the form of a story" (Knoespel 100–101). However, where, when, how, why, and to whom a particular character tells his or her story are crucial factors, especially in the cases of prisoners, refugees, queers, and others, since their accounts remain largely eclipsed in research across the disciplines in Lebanon and the Middle East, despite the (often notorious) headlines they may occupy in mainstream media.

Common to all the narratives I have written about here is the struggle against hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, and citizenship. Revisiting the politics of the veil, Sarah Harakeh reveals how sharing her experience in 2018 motivated her to "become more open about my atheism" and to relinquish the hijab: "I still have a lot of struggles to overcome to become truly free, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step" ("We Are Atheists"). The disparate narratives this article considers show the emergent and timely subjectivities that, while still marginalized, are no longer wholly subdued by dominant discourses of disavowal and exclusion.

By vividly portraying the lived realities and daily struggles of culturally embattled groups and/or nonnormative people, such as refugees, LGBT individuals, prisoners, sex workers, and hijabi atheists, the texts, regardless of the medium, reveal and interrogate rhetorics of oppression and/or fearmongering, including sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia—pressing concerns in the aftermath of the Mashrou' Leila debacle the year culminated with. Neither menacing nor pathetic, as often depicted in patriarchal policy and obscurantist narratives, the voices examined here are notable for their very humanity.