This Arab Is Queer by Elias Jahshan 📚

Finished reading: This Arab Is Queer by Elias Jahshan

This Arab Is Queer by Elia Jahshan is an anthology of queer Arab stories told by Arabs primarily living in the diaspora. The book aims to reclaim the narration of Arab stories with Arab voices. Queer people in Western media are reduced to pawns in geopolitical games, a continuation of colonial white supremacy in the Middle East.

I wish I had read this book earlier, maybe in my teens. I wish this book had existed at the time. It wouldn’t have helped me see things any differently, rather I would’ve known how to go about them. It would’ve helped me feel seen, hear a story that was similar to mine, know I wasn’t alone with my queerness the way it is.

Social media is filled with queer stories and struggles, but very little that cover the Arab experience, the choice between racism (escaping) or homophobia (staying) faced by many Arabs, nor all the microaggressions uttered around them, the way there is no safe space for them because they are a minority everywhere they go.

The best part about life is community which we queer Arabs don’t have access to in the diaspora as much as other marginalized communities do. Or maybe I’m just generalizing and that’s only my experience. What matters to me is that I am alone and I’m in desperate need for finding community.

Much of my childhood began to make sense to me in a truly unprecedented way: how people told me I was gay before I even knew what that meant was actually just people decoding my gender expression and reading me as ‘not-man’; […] There were reasons why my queer assigned-male-at-birth friends and I took great comfort in using feminine pronouns when we addressed each other, or used women’s names for each other, reasons that can’t be (completely) written off to queer misogyny. Rather than trying to disprove that homophobic trope, we engaged in what Muñoz calls antisocial queerness, or a politics of negativity that embraced, reclaimed and weaponized the image that dominant culture has of queer life. (Hamed Sinno: Trio, This Arab Is Queer)

The homophobia I experienced here in Austria is nothing like Syria. This is to say that homophobia here was totally and wildly different. Much more aggressive when you’re not even aware of what the word “gay” means – not just as an unfamiliar word, but as a concept. I was called all kinds of slurs for being a bit effeminate, not fitting the gender stereotypes, talking the way I do, sometimes putting a hand on a male friend’s shoulder, all things I used to do in Syria as well, but nobody batted an eye for. Like no one said a word.

Boys my age used to fight and hit each other, while I didn’t. That was the biggest source of any slurs and it only happened from one boy who everyone hated anyway. He was very aggressive in every meaning of the word. He tried to beat me up after school once. But that didn’t feel like assault based on personal attributes. I just pissed him off enough that day that he wanted to beat me up. Whereas here in Austria, I would be called slurs unprovoked. It drove up my anxiety like crazy. What am I supposed to do? How do I behave “correctly”? This was a new war zone for me.

When I wore my mom’s high heels because I thought it was funny, she scolded me a little. When I acted like I was running down the runway like a Barbie model in front my dad, he scolded me really badly. When I shook my ass like a woman with a BBL, he got mad. When I catwalked in front of my grandparents, they laughed uncomfortably. When my mom painted my toe nails black because I had asked her to, she told me not to show them to my father or else he’d get mad.

The reactions were varied, but never fully supportive. I think my experience here in Austria in a school filled with other immigrants who had grown up with the same stereotypes and rigidities as me was simply a culmination of all the passive discrimination I’d felt in Syria.

I was possibly just becoming aware of it. Maybe it was the slurs used against me here that brought up shame in me for being me. I remember not wanting to be a “tanta,” which is the Arabic equivalent of “tranny.” Funny, cuz I’ve struggled with my gender identity for so long. This is not to say that I identify as trans because I don’t, not exactly. I just don’t feel like conforming to gender norms anymore.

Being queer and fully admitting it to myself came with many strings attached. With this admission came a lot of shame and denial despite the admission. There was still this inexplicably irrational desire to fit into what society wants me to be – whatever that was. I just don’t care these days. You want to excommunicate me? Fine, go ahead. You don’t like what I stand for? Whatever, live with it like I have to live with you.

I don’t see why I have to respect your opinion when you don’t respect my existence.