27ky ya Shahrazade - Long long time ago (1)
Below is a note that I was asked to write about a story-telling queer ongoing event. I will be posting something every session, just to keep a mindful watch and see how things progress.
I know I promised I would write a note almost two weeks ago, but there never seems the right moment to "compose" oneself and compose a text!
There are many reasons why I felt the need to initiate this event and bring together all those people, to sit, talk, think, exchange, laugh and engage in battles of wit and ideas, and to share their 'stories'.
There are many 'threads' that together make up this fabric, this very textured process.
I have been lately weighed down by the rigid and established modes of socialization in the gay community. It is starting to wear me out, it is starting to lose whatever sense of novelty, excitement or wonder that it used to inspire in me. It has become a dreary and dull process that I participate in, not because it fulfills any function rather than to remind myself that I am a gay individual and there are gay people like me.
And here comes the first thread, the thread of acknowledgement and recognition.
Aside from the philosophical, sociological, anthropological considerations of what is kinship and what does it entail and how can we define it and how is it formed and how is it sustained, and whether or not the gay community in Egypt proposed a model that can fit within any of those definitions, for the sheer fact of practical considerations, there is a certain form of kinship for gay people in Egypt.
And I have been witnessing how it is evolving over time, the effect of context and change on this form, on this social configuration and I am certain, I am not alone when I feel that there is a fundamental absence of awareness of this kinship and what it means and how it is evolving.
Despite the fact that there were (and there are) several attempts by many people to foster this awareness and create this acknowledgement, it is still in its infancy.
And those who are trying to initiate alternative social formations (mainly through cyberspace) are completely oblivious of the history of the gay community in Egypt. (And I say 'history', because more than a decade in the gay scene, makes me not only old, but Jurassic in fact)
I fear that disregarding this accumulation of experience and histories, risks creating this amputated and distorted perception of who we are and what we are in our immediate context (we are certainly not the first gay people to who have lived along the banks of the Nile, and certainly will not be the last). And it forces younger and younger people to use and appropriate points of reference that are not necessarily representative and in many cases meaningful to them.
Maybe I am just growing old and I am scared of the process, but I know that I recognize that there are others whose stories and histories need to be told.
Which brings me to my second thread, the thread of memory.
It is not secret, I am obsessed with memory. Like any self-respecting Arab, growing in post-colonial world, memory and stories about the past occupies a central place in my mind. The amount of historical distortions and fictitious myth construction that has been fed to us Arab people, is sickening and funny at the same time.
We were never told the truth, pure and simple. We are never allowed to know the truth. We are never allowed to know our past. We were never allowed to keep our memories.
They were constantly being suppressed, erased, manufactured under the guise of 'nationalism', 'progress', 'modernity',....etc.
We have been indoctrinated ever since we could read with an endless series of mythological narratives about what is our homeland? how do we fit in? what is our role? who are we?
And none of it was true. None of it was about 'us'.
There is so much noise in my head, for the sheer amount of memories that are all purely fictitious. And I am sick and tired of it and for once I would like to listen to other stories and other narratives.
I remember watching Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman), not a long time ago, and you can see that I used the word thread, as they do, to describe those elements that come together and form a story. Or in that case a quilt.
What struck me the most was those who died of AIDS back then were not allowed to be buried in normal cemeteries (and sometimes not at all), many churches will not hold service for a person who died with AIDS, their long-life partners were sometimes denied to visit their lovers or to care for them, they were literally erased off the face of the planet.
This erasure, this systematic elimination of a whole group of people resonated with something that I was feeling.
And maybe it explains my frantic attempt to 'document' and 'record' this history through blogging.
And this is the point where it comes together; it is documentation, it is acknowledgement, it is recognition, it is collective memory being activated and shared with a group of people, who might have different stories, but all face the same unfair context, that erases and suppresses them.
I was very happy by how our first meeting went and I will write a very brief summary of what was exchanged:
I know I promised I would write a note almost two weeks ago, but there never seems the right moment to "compose" oneself and compose a text!
There are many reasons why I felt the need to initiate this event and bring together all those people, to sit, talk, think, exchange, laugh and engage in battles of wit and ideas, and to share their 'stories'.
There are many 'threads' that together make up this fabric, this very textured process.
I have been lately weighed down by the rigid and established modes of socialization in the gay community. It is starting to wear me out, it is starting to lose whatever sense of novelty, excitement or wonder that it used to inspire in me. It has become a dreary and dull process that I participate in, not because it fulfills any function rather than to remind myself that I am a gay individual and there are gay people like me.
And here comes the first thread, the thread of acknowledgement and recognition.
Aside from the philosophical, sociological, anthropological considerations of what is kinship and what does it entail and how can we define it and how is it formed and how is it sustained, and whether or not the gay community in Egypt proposed a model that can fit within any of those definitions, for the sheer fact of practical considerations, there is a certain form of kinship for gay people in Egypt.
And I have been witnessing how it is evolving over time, the effect of context and change on this form, on this social configuration and I am certain, I am not alone when I feel that there is a fundamental absence of awareness of this kinship and what it means and how it is evolving.
Despite the fact that there were (and there are) several attempts by many people to foster this awareness and create this acknowledgement, it is still in its infancy.
And those who are trying to initiate alternative social formations (mainly through cyberspace) are completely oblivious of the history of the gay community in Egypt. (And I say 'history', because more than a decade in the gay scene, makes me not only old, but Jurassic in fact)
I fear that disregarding this accumulation of experience and histories, risks creating this amputated and distorted perception of who we are and what we are in our immediate context (we are certainly not the first gay people to who have lived along the banks of the Nile, and certainly will not be the last). And it forces younger and younger people to use and appropriate points of reference that are not necessarily representative and in many cases meaningful to them.
Maybe I am just growing old and I am scared of the process, but I know that I recognize that there are others whose stories and histories need to be told.
Which brings me to my second thread, the thread of memory.
It is not secret, I am obsessed with memory. Like any self-respecting Arab, growing in post-colonial world, memory and stories about the past occupies a central place in my mind. The amount of historical distortions and fictitious myth construction that has been fed to us Arab people, is sickening and funny at the same time.
We were never told the truth, pure and simple. We are never allowed to know the truth. We are never allowed to know our past. We were never allowed to keep our memories.
They were constantly being suppressed, erased, manufactured under the guise of 'nationalism', 'progress', 'modernity',....etc.
We have been indoctrinated ever since we could read with an endless series of mythological narratives about what is our homeland? how do we fit in? what is our role? who are we?
And none of it was true. None of it was about 'us'.
There is so much noise in my head, for the sheer amount of memories that are all purely fictitious. And I am sick and tired of it and for once I would like to listen to other stories and other narratives.
I remember watching Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman), not a long time ago, and you can see that I used the word thread, as they do, to describe those elements that come together and form a story. Or in that case a quilt.
What struck me the most was those who died of AIDS back then were not allowed to be buried in normal cemeteries (and sometimes not at all), many churches will not hold service for a person who died with AIDS, their long-life partners were sometimes denied to visit their lovers or to care for them, they were literally erased off the face of the planet.
This erasure, this systematic elimination of a whole group of people resonated with something that I was feeling.
And maybe it explains my frantic attempt to 'document' and 'record' this history through blogging.
And this is the point where it comes together; it is documentation, it is acknowledgement, it is recognition, it is collective memory being activated and shared with a group of people, who might have different stories, but all face the same unfair context, that erases and suppresses them.
I was very happy by how our first meeting went and I will write a very brief summary of what was exchanged:
- My dear friend from college, who gave us all an extraordinary insight into how it feels being part of an ethnic minority (Nubian) and the amount of racism she had to face, not only because of her skin color, but also her sex (female) and the erasure she faced of her past, and the oppression she faces in her present
- The cultural context and how it evolves with time, specifically in dealing with our immediate families and how they would accept our sexuality (stories about torture, physical violence, acceptance, homosexual reparative therapy,....etc)
- What do we mean by memory? How is the past important? How does it factor in creating our present? How do we envision the future? And why is passing our stories around important? Are memories constitutive or inhibiting? What happens in oblivion?
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