Essay: Of Human Interest

Unidentified audience member listening to Umm Kalthoum singing on Cairo's "Voice of Arabs" radio show. Cairo, 1956. Photo: Howard Sochurek

During my first trip to Beirut, in 2009, I spent an evening at a theater on Hamra Street. Two women took the stage and read, in Arabic and English, from a book about to be released called Bareed Mista3jil (Express Mail). 

It was a collection of oral narratives from lesbian, bisexual, queer, and questioning women, as well as trangender people, in Lebanon. The stories were from across the country–rural and urban, women of different faiths and sects. Some stories were about the difficulty or impossibility of coming out. Some were by people who had immigrated to Western countries only to find homophobia replaced by anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.

One of the passages described the particular challenges that lesbians face in Lebanon..

“A lot more has been said about male homosexuality than female homosexuality. This comes as no surprise in a patriarchal society where women’s issues are often dismissed. And sexuality, because it touches on reclaiming our bodies and demanding the right to desire and pleasure, is the ultimate taboo of women’s issues. We have published this book in order to introduce Lebanese society to the real stories or real people whose voices  have gone unheard for hundreds of years. They live among us, although invisible to us, in our families, in our schools, our workplaces, and our neighborhoods. Their sexualities have been mocked, dismissed, denied, oppressed, distorted, and forced into hiding.”

The worse that Israel’s atrocities become, the more I think about the exquisite, the beautiful, the ordinary, and the day-to-day from which lives are stitched–lives that are destroyed, lives that are discarded, lives blurred into a  background, the easily diminished human toll of those atrocities.