Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist (New Texts Out Now)

Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist (New Texts Out Now)

Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist (New Texts Out Now)

By : Sinan Antoon سنان انطون

Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist. Maia Tabet, trans. (Hoopoe Fiction, 2017).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? 

Sinan Antoon (SA): I’d wanted to explore the relationship to home/homeland. The context I had in mind was my own hometown, Baghdad. I was interested in the ways in which history disfigures and devastates selves and material and imaginary spaces. And how one resists, copes, and survives (if and when one does). I was haunted by a story I’d heard about an Iraqi man, from Baghdad, who refused to leave the city despite the death and destruction caused by the sectarian civil war that followed, and was unleashed by the Anglo-American invasion. His entire family had left the country and he insisted on staying alone in his house in Baghdad. This was the seed around which I started writing the novel. Yusif, the main character in the novel, is a retired septuagenarian who refuses to leave the house he himself built. His entire family is in the vast Iraqi diaspora and he lives alone. He is unfazed by the violence of sectarianism and holds on to his identity as a secular Christian Iraqi. He refuses to internalize political sectarianism or to abandon his homeland.

As I was writing, an event took place and complicated the trajectory of the narrative. On 31 October 2010, The Islamic State of Iraq attacked the Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad, held the congregants attending Sunday mass hostage for a few hours, and killed fifty-eight of them. That was not the first attack on a church in the post-invasion chaos, but it was the most devastating and shocking. I knew that church very well and had attended it many times for funerals and weddings of relatives back in the 1970s and 1980s. Both the attack itself and the reactions by Christian Iraqis, especially in the diaspora, compelled me to add another character/narrator (and layer) to the novel. Maha is a young woman who grew up in the 1990s, during the terrible years of the genocidal embargo (1990-2003). The sectarian violence forces her family to leave Baghdad to `Ainkawa in Iraqi Kurdistan. She stays behind to finish her studies and moves in with Yusif, who is her distant cousin. Like many of her generation, her lived experience and memories of Iraq are at odds with Yusif’s, whom she deems to be a hostage to nostalgia and living in the past. She is hell-bent on leaving an Iraq that is no longer a homeland.

Was there a time when Christian Iraqis felt at home in Iraq and had no qualms or doubts about their status and belonging? Or did they always live as second-class citizens and destined to be hunted and chased out of Iraq?

J: What particular topics, issues, and ideas does it address?

SA: The primary subject of the novel is sectarianism and the formation of sectarian identities in Iraq in the last few decades. Although the main events of the novel take place over one day, the lives and memories of two generations of a Christian Iraq family are enveloped within that single day. Through them we get competing memories and narratives about Iraq’s recent history, from the monarchy until today, and the status and fate of its Christian citizens. Individual and collective memories intersect and suggest conflicting interpretations. Was there a time when Christian Iraqis felt at home in Iraq and had no qualms or doubts about their status and belonging? Or did they always live as second-class citizens and destined to be hunted and chased out of Iraq? Yusif and Maha live under one roof, but don’t see eye to eye. How and why did Iraq’s social fabric disintegrate?

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous work? 

SA: The thread connecting all of my novels is that they deal with the visceral reality of life in Iraq. The first one, I`jam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, was about a college student who ends up in prison for ridiculing the Ba`th regime’s discourse. It portrayed daily life under a totalitarian regime during the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988) and then in one of its prisons. The narrator resists insanity and psychological breakdown by writing, parodying the regime’s discourse, and reconstructing his shattered memory. My second novel, The Corpse Washer, centers on a young man who is born to a family of corpse washers. He refuses to inherit his father’s profession and studies art to become a sculptor. But economic hardships in the 1990s derail his plans. After the 2003 invasion, his only means for making ends meet is to take on his deceased father’s profession. The occupation and the sectarian civil war deliver plenty of corpses and a handsome income on a daily basis. But Jawad’s extensive exposure to death takes a toll on his psyche. His lack of faith and non-sectarianism in an increasingly sectarian society compound his alienation.

While The Corpse Washer focused on a Shi`ite family, the world of The Baghdad Eucharist (Ya Maryam is the original Arabic title) is that of a middle class Christian family. The latter book is also different structurally. I used three narrative voices and had an entire section in the novel devoted to family photographs. Also, unlike with the previous novels, I did not translate this novel myself.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SA: Ideally, everyone! But I live in the real world. I want its readers to be moved and challenged. In its Arabic version, the novel has had a very life and is still widely read in the Arab world (it’s in its seventh edition now). It received critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It was translated into Spanish by Mari Luz Comendador and published by Turner Kitab in 2016. Philippe Vigreax is almost done translating it to French and it is forthcoming from Actes Sud this summer. A Persian translation is also in progress.

Quite often, translated literature from the global south has to go through invisible checkpoints and gates before arriving in Anglophone reading spaces. It arrives bearing “marks” and “labels” that over determine the way it is read. It might even be forced by publishers to surrender its original title for a more marketable one. I hope it is read as a novel, first and foremost, and not a “document.” One can never control such matters of course, but I hope that Islamphobes and voyeurs stay away from it.           

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SA: I am putting the final touches on a collection of the poems (in Arabic, entitled كما في السماء) I have written in the past seven years. Dar al-Jamal will publish it in Beirut later this year. My own translation of these poems to English is currently under consideration. In terms of research, I have been working on a book about the late Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007), which I hope to finish by the end of the year. I have also started writing my fifth novel.

 

Excerpt from The Baghdad Eucharist    

On my way back, I passed by a house whose owners were obviously neglecting the date palm in their courtyard, neither pollinating it nor pruning it. I was reminded of Brisam, the saa'ud who'd pruned and pollinated our trees for more than thirty years. He would have been hopping mad at the sight. Brisam would wander along the streets of residential neighborhoods and ring the doorbell whenever he came across a date palm that looked neglected. He'd ring until someone answered the door and would then give them a piece of his mind, berating them for being heartless and mean. In his last years, when he was almost deaf, he went around declaiming at the top of his lungs: “All I have are God and the date palms … only God and the date palms!” Sometimes, you'd hear him shouting, “This one is a Barhi.” God loved him for sure: he took Brisam to his eternal rest one day around noon after the saa'ud had shimmied up a tree to pollinate it. Brisam's arms were wrapped around the tree trunk and his body was held aloft in a brace when his heart simply came to a stop. 

He died caring for a tree to which he spoke as if it were a human being. According to Jasim, who looked after our two trees after Brisam died, he had become a legend among the sawaeed, the date palm climbers. Jasim wasn't much of a talker. Whenever I asked how the trees were doing, he gave me a vague and terse reply. “Thanks be to God, sir! Everything is going as it should.” The only time he ever let loose was three years ago when he rang the bell and told me that he'd decided not to work as a saa'ud that season because he was going back to his village. I asked him why.

“I’m going back home, mister,” he said. “These days, when I knock, people I’ve never seen before in my life come to the door. Some of them say they’re relatives of the owners, that they’re looking out for the house, but that’s baloney. When I ask them where the owners have gone, they don't have an answer. Anyhow, it’s none of my business. Did you know that twelve of us sawaeed have been killed? Better for me to go home and work in the orchards down south. It’s safer over there.”

People had stopped giving him keys to let himself into their courtyards and tend to the trees while they slept, or when no one was home. Now, when the women and girls of the household were there alone, he couldn’t come in, and they would tell him to come back when one of the men was home.   

“Honestly, I was better off before the Americans came... I could go and come as I pleased. I could sleep under a tree or in a corner anywhere and no one bothered me. Now I have to get a room in a hostel or else get killed. And the massive concrete blast walls are suffocating us. I swear to God, mister, even the date palms are Sunni and Shiite now. I have to leave my bicycle at the checkpoint and I can’t take it in with me — and on top of it all, my bike was stolen.  The dates are wilted and dying of thirst. Do you know how many trees have been cut and burned so that the Americans can see the snipers and the snipers can see them? That is what it has come to. Ya haram!”  

I was pained by his words, but not surprised—I'd always maintained that the date palm was the weathervane for human affairs. The fortunes of the two were inextricably linked. What befell humans was a reflection of the tree's condition, and war didn't differentiate between the heads of men and the crowns of the tree: it decapitated them both. Had the owners of the house I had just passed fled? Were the current occupants indifferent to the trees? Was there such a thing as an Iraqi who didn’t love the date palm? I was certain that those who had no love for the date palm had no love for life or their fellow men. 

In that they are created male and female, humans resemble palm trees. Only after it is pollinated by her male counterpart does the female tree become fertile and hang heavy with fruit that is clustered in large and heavy bunches. Like an infant, a palm sapling must be protected from the cold and the rain in order for it to grow strong.

From a distance, the fronds of the two date palms towering above the garden seemed to me to be protecting the house — and I, too, was guarding it along with all the memories it contained. The house was more than a mere shelter, it was like a palm tree, which isn't a mere tree but a living being unto itself, joined with the earth beneath it, the sky above it, and the air around it which it breathed. So too the house, which wasn't merely a combination of bricks, mortar, and paint, but the assemblage of an entire lifetime. 

“It would be best to sell the house and leave,” Amal had said through her tears, when she called after Hinnah died. “Things are going to go from bad to worse. Why remain alone? You can come here or go and live with Salima in Sweden. Please Yusif, I beg you, leave.”

I responded the way I always had. 

“I'm not leaving,” I told her. “I'm not going anywhere at my age—I'm too old for such humiliation.” 

Many a real estate broker had been knocking on my door lately, to ask if I was thinking of selling. And my answer was always no. Our neighborhood was considered one of the safer and calmer areas in the city and prices were going up. A few upscale restaurants had opened and the nouveaux riches had begun buying up old houses that they tore down and replaced with ostentatious mansions. 

One evening, as we were watching TV, Lu'ayy asked me if I'd ever considered leaving.  

“At my age? Better suffer here than experience the humiliations of being a refugee. If I were young, I would consider it. It's different for you and Maha—your lives are ahead of you, you can go and start over in a new place. I'm not going anywhere. I built this house, and I've lived in it for more than half a century. How could I leave it and go?”

“Have you ever had the opportunity or the desire to leave?”

“I did once or twice. I got an offer from Abu Dhabi in the late '70s, and another one from Dubai in 1989. I turned them both down.”           

“Do you ever regret it?”           

“No. D'you know what al-Gubbanchi says?”          

“No. What?”             

Do not think that in leaving there is comfort

I see nothing in it but grief and weariness, 

All sleep was robbed from my eyes.

I never thought and no one knew

That it would be like this.

. . .

After translating the book, which the agency then published, I got a promotion and received a hefty raise. I dedicated myself completely to work and within three years, I had saved enough money to buy a good piece of land near Karrada where I wanted to build a new home for the family. Habiba had returned from Suleimaniyya to work in Baghdad and was betrothed to her first cousin on our mother's side. She moved in with him at his parents' in al-Sinnaq, and then they got a place of their own. She offered to contribute to the costs of building the new house as a gift to our father—she wanted him to be comfortable in his old age and to be surrounded by his sons and daughters, and any grandchildren that were on the way. Although we both agreed that his name should be on the deed, he objected vehemently, and so we registered the house in Hinnah's name.

Just as I recall the day I planted the palm saplings at opposite ends of the backyard, I also remember that there was nothing but the foundations back in 1955. I would come by every week to check on the progress of the work and Khalaf, the foreman in charge, would brief me. On one of my visits some months into the work, I was surprised to see that they had used palm fronds to build the arch that the architect had designed for the reception room. When Khalaf assured me that it was an old and time-tested technique, I remembered seeing pictures in the book about date palms that the inhabitants of the marshes built similar structures in their guest quarters and their houses.    

The house was on a lovely quiet street near the Opera Gardens that was later named after Jaafar Ali Tayyar, a prominent man who lived in the very first house to be built on the street. The main thoroughfare it branched onto became known as Street 42. This was because people called the next street over from the main thoroughfare Street 52, after the bus which plied that route, and that is the roundabout way in which the streets in the vicinity were numbered. 

I entrusted the design of the house to a friend from Baghdad College who'd gone abroad to study architecture and had come back and started his own firm. My main instruction was that the house had to be spacious enough to accommodate the entire family. Thus, we had six bedrooms, three on each of the two floors, a large reception lounge for entertaining guests and an everyday living room. The architect suggested having a fireplace in the reception room and I agreed enthusiastically. There was a small yard at the front of the house, and a very large one at the back.   

The blooms on the bougainvillea whose branches scaled the façade of the house came into view. Besides its heat hardiness and its ability to bloom year-round, I had chosen the bougainvillea for the beauty of its flowers, which looked like so many vermilion tongues licking at a fire. From the distance, I could also see the crowns of the three Seville orange trees that I had planted in the garden at the front. How I love the smell of those oranges! There's really nothing like it! Whenever the harvest season came around, I'd pick and juice the oranges in the kitchen, and Hinnah would freeze the juice to use in her cooking. I did this every year, even after she was gone. I would offer a container of frozen bitter orange juice to any visitors that dropped by. Nothing else flavors food like the juice of bitter oranges, I'd tell them, and I had no use for it.  

I looked up toward the upstairs bedroom windows. The curtains were drawn which meant Maha wasn't home. I noticed that the metal plaque hanging on the pillar to the right of the gate that had my name on it was so dusty that the Y was hardly visible. I wiped my finger across the plaque—it really needed polishing. I opened the gate and bent down to turn on the water spigot close by. I took out a pack of tissues from my pocket, pulled three out, wetted them with a few drops of water and stepped back out to clean the plaque. Although my lower back hurt, I was pleased that I had cleaned my name, and I cursed at the proliferation of dust and soot in recent years. I remembered that the myrtle tree between the garage and the garden needed pruning. I would ask Lu'ayy to do it when he could. Once inside the house, I realized how tired I felt and that I needed to make up for the previous night's broken sleep. I got undressed and went to bed.

[Excerpted from The Baghdad Eucharist (c) 2017. Translated from the Arabic by Maia Tabet.]

 

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New Texts Out Now: Mehammed Mack, Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture

Mehammed Amadeus Mack. Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Mehammed Mack (MM): I wrote this book out of frustration that was both of a personal and academic nature. As a Gender Studies researcher who investigates sexual alterity and homo-eroticism in the Arab diaspora, and more importantly, as a human being familiar with queer Arab spaces, I felt there were huge holes, as well as blatant mischaracterizations, in the Euro-American media portrait of Arab/Muslim men and women. They are always portrayed as either never queer, incapable of sexual liberation let alone pleasure, or sexually intolerant. I am particularly interested in the relative queerness of customary homo-affective practices among Arabs and Muslims in Diaspora, in relation to hetero-normative and homo-normative imperatives that govern gender expression and the disclosure of sexual orientation, in Western Europe and the US.

Most of the aforementioned media portraits determine Arab/Muslim sexual alterity to be inadmissible because of its comfort within religious frameworks of community, as well as its comfort within what seem to be virility cultures. This is visible in two figures that emerged as curiosities in the French media: the banlieue’s “girl gangs” and their embodiment of female virility, and the Arab and black “homo-thugs” (racaille gay) who see the homo-social spaces of the banlieues as prime cruising grounds rather than danger zones, who bypass the “gayborhood” altogether in favor of the internet. In this way, Arab/Muslim sexual alterity gets pushed off the spectrum of acceptable LGBT dispositions. Rather than try to articulate Arab and Muslim sexual diversity, almost all the scholarship and journalism I had analyzed during the research phase considered Arabs and Muslims “backward” in terms of sexual maturity, at an unbridgeable distance from the progressive present, seemingly always locked in the childhood of gay and women’s rights, and destined to repeat the steps—and only those steps—that Euro-America took to combat sexism and gain standing. In this literature, it was inconceivable that the Middle East or its Diaspora could ever teach a queer lesson to Euro-Americans. Could Arabs and Muslims “queer queer theory,” to borrow an expression from Jarrod Hayes? Within the patronizing structures of one-way lessons in sexual liberation going from North/West to South/East, it did not seem possible to answer this question. I felt that many notions of what progressive attitudes toward gender and sexuality “should” be really needed to be updated and questioned in light of the pressure that the Arab/Muslim diaspora brings to bear on normative understandings of homosexuality. This is especially the case in a post-colonial France where the immigration debate has seen gayfriendliness and sexual tolerance become politicized as values supposedly not shared by Muslim immigrants.

Queer Franco-Arabs for example are seemingly always portrayed in mainstream journalism  as schizophrenically living a double life (one for their families and one for their secular and gay friends): they are locked in the closet and have sometimes given up coming out entirely. This characterization is connected to the wider portrayal of Franco-Arab men as macho misogynists and Franco-Arab women as submissive victims with no possibility of agency. In this arrangement, Franco-Arab sexual minorities must become sexual refugees who flee immigrant neighborhoods and housing projects for the more sexually enlightened city-center and its gayborhood. In contrast to these representations, I aim to show that Franco-Arab men’s behaviors that might be seen from the outside as exceptions to the (heterosexual) rule are actually quite widespread in the very spaces where multi-ethnic “macho” men are said to dominate: for example, homo-social affection that sometimes but not always blends into homosexuality, bisexuality, or an engagement sexual and affective with trans persons. I argue that many banlieue and immigrant sexual minorities withdraw from the imperative to “come out of the closet” not always because they are “trapped” by their home cultures, but rather due to reasons that have little to do with sexual oppression. Namely, I argue that living in areas and in communities which are constantly scrutinized by the security apparatus and pressured by the larger culture to make themselves visible, changes one’s attitude about the need to “come out” and makes privacy newly attractive. In this way, the underground of immigrant economies and the sexual underground of discreet, closeted, “down-low” men of color are connected. These persons would be opting for the “closet” not because of a backward culture that holds them back, but rather for contemporary reasons that have to do with dense, urban living, and the impact of the surveillance state.  I suggest that Franco-Arab and Muslim subjects who may not sign up for Stonewall-style liberation especially frustrate the self-appointed guardians of sexual progressivism, because these subjects opt for seemingly regressive gender expressions even when the option exists for them to come out of the closet, adopt a metrosexual identity, or be “open” about their private lives. I argue that we need a new terminology—“pro-regressions”—to describe the way that ethnic minorities in France opt for seemingly “old-world” gender expressions because of opposition to a homo-normativity and hetero-normativity that now correspond with national assimilation.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

MM: The book discusses how in contemporary France, sexuality has been politicized in the immigration debate. While in the past, immigrants were judged according to whether or not they were integrated at the level of civics and language, now it is their attitudes about gender and sexuality that matter. This shift in the testing of integration happens because the most recent waves of immigration to France are comprised of Muslims who presumably have regressive attitudes about sexuality. Thus, gender and sexuality would present the best platform for rejecting immigrants, and their descendants born in France who are already French. It creates a new integration crisis where there was none before, as descendants of immigrants from North and West Africa are already integrated according to most relevant indicators. This testing, of course, does not seek to actually find out if Muslims both (French and foreigner) are in fact sexually intolerant, rather, it assumes this to be true and latches onto confirming cases. Such surveying of populations according to religion would be illegal under French law: and thus the question “Are Muslims homophobic?” can find no answer other than “yes.”

Unlike some existing social science studies, my intervention explores how this sexual demonization and othering happens at the level of cultural productions: the book takes a Cultural Studies and discourse analysis approach to investigate five fields in which I think the sexualization of immigration and the politicization of sexuality have been the most significant: LGBT activist rhetoric about the banlieues, psychoanalytical commentary presenting the sexual menace of Muslims to French civilization, literature which investigates inter-racial and inter-religious relationships, films which expose the Arab/Muslim body and private life, and pornography which most explicitly channels sexual anxieties about Arab/Muslim immigrants and their descendants. I argue that the sexual demonization of Franco-Arabs and Muslims goes to such extremes that, by the end of the process, the banlieues, immigration, and especially Islam itself obtain a gender: the universal masculine. Gendered Islam threatens a France symbolized as feminine, where a delicate equality between the sexes has supposedly been reached, despite many apparent failures.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MM: It is my first book! Previous to entering academia, I was a journalist, and I am embarrassed to say that I once held many of the views about the sexual “backwardness” of Arabs/Muslims that I currently interrogate. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MM: It is my hope that those who subscribe to the idea that Arabs/Muslims need to become “sexually enlightened” in order to rejoin the progress of western civilization, would read the book. This applies not just to members of the gay and lesbian mainstream, but especially to allies who may use gay friendliness and sexual tolerance as an exceptionally legitimate means to discriminate against Arabs/Muslims: I say “exceptionally legitimate” because, while it is politically incorrect to generalize about Muslims in relation to national security, it is still somehow acceptable to generalize about Muslims when it comes to sexual tolerance. I am interested in amplifying queer voices, both Arab/Muslim and not, who call out and resist this manipulation of gay-friendliness, and who spell out how sexual nationalism and homonationalism operate in Europe and the US. It is also my hope that young people--who may have grown up feeling like their religious, ethnic, and sexual ethnicities were irreconciliable—will pick up the book and discover how constructed and politicized this incompatibility actually is. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MM: My next book project, tentatively titled Eurabia: Visions of Reverse-Crusades in European Culture, studies dystopian fiction that imagines what would happen to Europe if current demographic trends and patterns of immigration remain unchecked: permeable borders and “exploding” birth-rates would result in a nightmare scenario of Arab invasion called “Eurabia.” This project extends from my previous research in the way it makes contemporary use of the “Rape of Europa” trope (originally culled from Greek mythology), using it as a tool to make intelligible current anxieties about Arab immigration, which have only been amplified in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission is a starting point, as he imagines an Islamized France overly concerned with cultural sensitivity being led by a Muslim President. Houellebecq’s vision emerges, however, in a political climate that has seen Marine Le Pen and the far-right National Front party make their biggest electoral gains in France. One of Eurabia’s chapters looks at school manuals and the ways they teach the Battle of Poitiers (732 AD), a battle which saw Charles “The Hammer” Martel turn back Muslim invaders who had already made their way through Spain. Some have historicized this battle as the decisive moment when Europe saved itself from a Muslim destiny, cementing its Christian identity in the process.

However, I’m interested in the ways that Arab/Muslim students “heard” this lesson in the contemporary French classroom, and how they responded to their ancestors being portrayed as threats to the existence of a France they now call home. Franco-Arab writers and rappers often return to classroom scenes as sites of trauma and humiliation: they remember the feeling of seeing depictions of barbaric Muslim invaders as one of the first moments they were viewed with suspicion by teachers and classmates. This us-versus-them narrative builds upon historically misleading lessons that used to be prominent in French schools, by which teachers would describe the Gaulois or Gallic peoples as the common ancestors of all Frenchmen (no matter the composition of their classrooms). I started to notice a gradual trend, spanning the last few decades, by which the battle of Poitiers seemed to take up less and less space in school textbooks, perhaps, according to my hypothesis, in response to the current demographics in French classrooms, changing views of the importance of the event in French history, and the difficulty of teaching this particular lesson without alienating students.

History lessons for French children have often been the subject of politicization. In the recent past, right-wing forces sought to emphasize the positive “contributions” of colonialism in the curriculum, and today, the far-right wants to resurrect the fading Charles Martel, because it deems him a national hero who battled today’s “enemy” albeit in a different time period: Martel must be saved from the forces of political correctness that would seek to reduce his influence. Importantly, Charles Martel is resurrected as a decidedly Christian national icon, very different from the more secular revolutionary figure of the Marianne, and his male warrior status is seized upon because, I contend, his maleness is counted on to battle back against the presence of an Islam gendered as male.

In another chapter, I return to the field of rap music once more as an antidote to these bleak visions.  I examine lyrics, manifestos, music videos, collaborations, and subcultural spaces which result from exactly the demographic changes most feared by cultural guardians who warn of the imminent Islamization of Europe. The cultural richness of the rap world answers the dystopians who equate the presence of non-Europeans in the banlieues with intellectual regression and loss, who equate cross-pollination with cultural dilution.

 

Excerpt from Sexagon

Sexagon explores the broad politicization of sexuality in public debates about immigration and diversity in France and traces said politicization in French discourses and cultural productions in an attempt to challenge common perceptions that Muslims maintain unmodern attitudes about sexuality. Specifically, the book focuses on examples from literature, film, psychoanalysis, ethnopsychiatry, and pornography, as well as feminist, gay, and lesbian activist rhetoric to examine where sexualized representations of communities of immigrant origin take a political turn. The book also examines the rhetoric of French establishment figures who have expressed their frustrations with the changing demographics in their “familiar” France by questioning the “Frenchness” of Arab and Muslim minorities born in France—not because of linguistic or civic barriers, but because of perceived conservative attitudes about gender and sexuality. This frustration, I argue, gravitates around the concept of virilism—that is, a mixture of toughness, hardness, unruliness, assertiveness, and sometimes aggression which is projected onto male and female immigrants and their offspring. In the eyes of many French observers and commentators, virilism not only animates the “difficult” Arab, black, and Muslim boys featured in sensationalized newscasts, it also defines their neighborhoods in the suburbs or banlieues,their religion of Islam, and the notion of immigration itself. This virilization of the Arab other naturally requires a feminization, and in some cases an androgenization, of the host country: France, which has been called the hexagon (because it has six distinct sides), increasingly has come to resemble what I term a sexagon, because of the way its borders increasingly have come to be defined through values such as gay-friendliness, secular feminism, and metrosexuality, on the one hand, and the condemnation of immigrant and working-class machismo on the other. This perceived virilism is seen as all the more dangerous as it appears to include citizens who are often targeted as ideal candidates for cultural assimilation because they are thought to be antagonistic to virilism: women and homosexuals. The official discourses under investigation here are crucially inflamed by a defining element of these virility cultures: their clandestinity. Mirroring the secret and underground qualities of “illegal” immigration, both gay and straight proponents of clandestine cultures choose to withdraw from social scrutiny into ethnic shelters that are anathema to the French Republic’s desire for universalism and transparency. One of the most prominent and damning books on the subject of homosexuality, homophobia, and the multiethnic banlieues—journalist Franck Chaumont’s Homo-ghetto—establishes in its very title that banlieue homosexuals are the unassimilated “clandestines of the Republic.”

Attitudes about women’s liberation, sexual violence, homophobia, excision, polygamy, youth sexuality, the hijab (or headscarf), and family size have emerged as flashpoints in recent debates about immigration to France, leading many self-appointed guardians of French culture, as well as cultural chauvinists, to assert a stance of sexual enlightenment over France’s Arab and Muslim communities. At a time when French citizens of Arab and Islamic descent—French for generations—can no longer be accused of non-assimilation on linguistic grounds, they appear to have been subjected to a new form of citizenship test that is predicated on the perceived fitness of their views on sexuality. Thus, a cultural divide, once bridged when these children of immigrants became French citizens, seems to have reemerged with political and sometimes legal consequences. This type of cultural xenophobia, however, ignores the many ways through which African and Arab minorities in France have queered or deviated from normative French understandings of sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual.

Indeed, sexuality has emerged as a new battleground in the public debates about whether postwar immigration from the former colonies has eroded French identity. Since the 1990s, long-standing concerns about religious or ethnic diversity increasingly have been accompanied by a sexualized rhetoric that accuses Muslim immigrants of advocating rigid gender norms and being intolerant of homosexuality. Sexagon pushes the conversation into the cultural arena of representations and explains how sexuality constitutes a prism through which to establish the existence of non-European difference, which is often expressed in terms of being uncomfortable with gender fluidity (for men, not women), effeminacy, transparency, and “being out.” The integration of immigrants and their descendants within the national fabric increasingly has been defined in terms of a set of “appropriate” attitudes toward gender and sexuality that have been proclaimed to be long-standing French values, but which in reality have been embraced only recently.  (1-3) (…)

The Banlieue as Laboratory

My study identifies two cultural formations emergent in the banlieues that exceed the traditional parameters of both homonationalism and sexual nationalism: nongendered virility and chosen homosexual clandestinity. These formations are attached of course to figures who exemplify these notions in practice. The discreet “homo thug” (often referred to in French parlance as caillera gay) and sexually clandestine Arabs and Muslims reject an openly gay lifestyle (even when it is available to them) and public (but not private) effeminacy, as well as the draw of the city center; instead, they may prefer to explore their sex lives in ethnic enclaves and banlieues. The female gang member, the female “soldiers” of Islam, and the preponderance of banlieue women who adopt clothing styles and manners of speaking that the dominant society at large associates with masculine swagger, all exemplify how virility has been divorced from men and identified with immigration. These banlieue figures are interrelated in the sense that they ostensibly reject as culturally other what some might find to be progressive advances in the domain of women’s and sexual minorities’ freedoms, for reasons of identity-based demarcation and sometimes Islamic affirmation. These figures, immediately rejected as backward and patriarchal, are in my argument the main examples of a queer of color backlash against homo and sexual nationalisms that has less to do with the MENA region than with the cultural and social dynamics of contemporary France. For this reason, these formations might be better seen as proregressions in their forward-thinking embrace of sexual dispositions misunderstood as regressive by critics who believe them to incarnate old forms of patriarchy, rather than contemporary reactions to a feminist and gay rights movement that does not always include minorities. On the one hand, this is evident in how some banlieue and Muslim women trade in, master, and also contribute to a virility traditionally associated with men, making the association between the male and the virile irrelevant. On the other hand, banlieue and Muslim men indicate proregression when they purposefully choose to enter clandestine worlds removed from the scrutiny of openly gay life for reasons that have little to do with internalized homophobia and more to do with contemporary desires for the affirmation of cultural difference in a world of increasing gay homogenization. Internet possibilities of selective disclosure have informed this proregression, allowing participants in banlieue subcultures to craft their desired degree of outness, which is often influenced by a Franco-Islamic view of the public and the private (see chapters 1 and 2). These are not formations produced by nostalgia for Islamic or North African ways of understanding sexuality but arise in the specific conditions of dense urban living in Europe.

Choosing clandestinity as an object of analysis naturally presents certain epistemological problems: how does one study that which is meant to stay hidden? Is it disrespectful to expose sexual subcultures to a harsh outside atmosphere that might lead to their endangerment or extinction? What to do in the face of this subculture’s indifference to how it may be perceived by those critics who find that secrecy is a thing of the past? Who can stand to represent these subcultures when most participants choose anonymity? This conundrum calls for a cautious and nuanced approach that requires the researcher, on occasion, to break with conventions of academic distance and access private spaces to gain “insider” knowledge. This approach respects the right to indifference and anonymity, but intervenes when this subculture’s participants are criticized in media forums where, for privacy reasons, they refuse to appear and are therefore unable to mount a defense. Though part of this respect involves not telling a story about banlieusard sexual subcultures when disclosure is demanded (so as not to play secondhand native informant), at times, only alternative storytelling can quell the one-way stream of unanswered critique that colors so many representations of clandestine subcultures. (23-24)

[Excerpt from Sexagon published with permission (c) 2017.]