Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Mejdulene Bernard Shomali (MBS): Toni Morrison said “if there is a book you want to read, and it is not yet written, then you must write it yourself.” I wanted a book that spoke to my experiences as a queer Palestinian woman. I wanted to situate myself in a community with other queer Arabs, to look for traces of our histories, and to imagine our futures. It was particularly important to me to keep banat (women, femmes, girls) Arab at the center of this study because so often in heteropatriarchal economies (both Arab and otherwise) desire between women—in fact, the very lives of women—are rendered at best uninteresting. Alternatively, women’s bodies might become a battle ground for Arab nationalisms or the object of Orientalist scopophilia. At worst, women’s stories and intimacies are repressed, undervalued, or disappeared. Between Banat narrates women’s stories and desires without apology and independently of a masculine referent. Finally, I wrote this book toward our freedom, choosing to highlight moments of potential and pleasure over and against the relentless assault on (Arab) women and queer peoples’ lives and freedoms. I wanted—still want—to imagine a future where we are OK, where we are free.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MBS: The objects of this study include literature, art, and film produced by and about banat Arab and queer peoples. Between Banat takes as its central location “between”: desire between bodies, bodies between nations, nations between one another. Accordingly, the texts studied are produced in several languages and locations. For example, I look at Arabic and English language novels, transnational films, and multi-lingual comics as some sites where same-sex desire, challenges to normative sexualities, and critical political pedagogies emerge. In constructing this book, I approached the archive with curiosity: to what end is compiling a cache of queer Arab texts useful? To what extent might an archival project delimit the capaciousness of our sexualities? To what extent might a recuperative project impose names, ideas, or renditions that commit harm in the name of recognition? Because of these conflicting impulses, Between Banat maintains ambivalence and fluidity in its narration of its subjects.
Between Banat also participates in many ongoing conversations: how to think transnationally about queer and Arab communities; how to resist anti-Arab racism and Orientalism; how to challenge gender and sexual normativity within Arab (and non-Arab) communities; and how to understand and articulate the sexualities that sit at the convergence of these competing and conflicting dialogues. Between Banat seeks an elusive subject: queer Arab women, where each word in that triad is itself subject to multiple interpretations. Accordingly, it spends a lot of time with transnational and Arab feminisms, queer and queer of color critique, and ethnic studies.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MBS: My research has always concerned queer Arabs, banat in particular. I have also been interested in femininity and committed to multiple forms of queer freedom. The book is a crystallization of my thoughts about our community and our futures as I came to them over the past few years. In my poetry, I am also tracing concerns about queerness and femininity but situating them in a more personal, rather than scholarly, context. Though the book is transnational, my poetry more narrowly considers those questions in the context of Palestinian identity.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MBS: I hope queer Arab peoples will read Between Banat and find it useful, even if that utility is only as a point of departure or contention. I hope this book is one of many that queer Arab women want to read, that rather than the somewhat sparse landscape I faced as a young queer scholar, there is this book, and hopefully many more to come. The greatest gift I have received in writing this book has been the moments where queer Arabs reach out to let me know they are reading it and that it is resonant to their experience of self.
Between Banat was also deeply informed by queer and feminist work on/by Black, Indigenous, and people of color. I hope scholars in those fields see Arab studies as a rich and fecund ground for queer and feminist criticisms and view the book as a contribution to those conversations. Lastly, I hope scholars in Arab studies take seriously the promise and importance of centering queer voices.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MBS: Right now, I am thinking about forms of embodied and affective resistance in Palestine. I am interested in how practices of Palestinian resistance are gendered and sexed, and curious about the ways intimacy and pleasure are fundamental to Palestinian survival. There are so many places and spaces where Palestinians conjure pleasure, so many moments where our bodies alight with joy (for example, dancing at an impromptu sahra). Moments of pleasure can interrupt the pressure of the apartheid state. Of course, those moments do not override its violence or imagine a recess of suffering. Instead, sorrow and happiness operate in tension, and both leave bodily traces. My goal in this project is to think through those Palestinian embodiments and affects, and celebrate the importance of pleasure to our continued survival and resistance.
J: Tell us something about the book that not many people know.
MBS: A fun fact about Between Banat is that Arabic in the book appears in a font called “Scheherazade.” The first chapter of the book uses the figure of Scheherazade as an index of the competing discourses that foreclose representations of banat Arab and queers especially. When the designer shared style options including “Scheherazade,” I could not resist using it. It feels like a fun inside joke to me, a little wink to one of my arguments about Scheherazade’s endless enlistment by Arab and Arab diasporic artists.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 5)
The concluding pages of the book, which are located in its fifth chapter, on sahq. Sahq is a medieval Arabic term that refers to same-sex acts between women. In the chapter I argue that sahq could be a useful description of queer Arab subjects as well as a direction for queer Arab praxis.
I chose sahq as the concluding chapter of this monograph because it offers concrete strategies for imagining queer Arab futures. While the first chapter emphasized limiting discourses, the second recuperated queer pasts, and the third and fourth investigated our queer present, sahq envisions queers and their kin at the forefront of our new world. In this trajectory, the work of this book has been threefold: First, to outline the multiple discourses and obstacles that obfuscate queer Arab subjects, particularly banat, femmes, and women. For banat, the horizon of possibility is egregiously eclipsed by essentialisms and nationalisms that abject queerness from Arab culture, by ongoing Orientalist erasure of a mobile and shifting Arab culture, and by blatant anti-Arab, misogynist, and homophobic sentiment in the Arab world and its diaspora. Despite the discursive and material threats that impact queer Arab life, it persists. As such, the second aim of this book has been to catalogue how queer Arab life can be located in heteronormative spaces and how queer Arabs animate and narrate themselves. Between Banat creates a queer Arab archive from which to begin to ground our histories and present. The archive itself is ambivalent, fluid, and gestural, much as queer sexuality ap- pears in Arab cultures. Lastly, drawing on artists and creators who are both aware of the limiting discourses that frame queer Arab life and committed to representing it with joy and pleasure, the book offers sahq as the collection of the strategies and activisms necessary to hold and create a queer Arab future.
With its emphasis on transnational collectivity, sahq asks us to radically decenter the self and imagine a collective accountable to one another. In the midst of the ongoing violence and erasure visited on queer Arabs, we can use sahq to grind against heteronormative and national violence, to survive, and to imagine otherwise. For queer Arab subjects who already face disproportionate patriarchal and state violence, the mere act of existence is a radical and stubborn activism that enables futurity. With its rejection of respectability and authenticity, sahq urges us to not volley for tolerance, homonormativity, or heteronational inclusion. Homonormativity should not be the goal toward which queer Arabs organize. Arab national projects will sacrifice queer lives over and over. Western perceptions of queer Arab life will not hold us in our complete subjectivity, but rather will be overdetermined by new and old Orientalist tropes designed to other Arabs and Arab queers. Rather, our capacity to live and experience pleasure and joy are bound to one another, even and especially across a transnational spectrum. Our capacities to love and live rest on strident and unwavering interruptions of heteronormativity and its attendant respectability politics. Our capacity to imagine an Arab identity that does not rely on heteronormative exclusions is precisely the capacity to imagine a queer Arab future at all.
When we are stifled by limiting discourses, grow weary of the excavation process of our pasts, or continue to feel hemmed or unrepresented in the realities of right now, I suggest sahq can push us forward into a queer future. Following Muñoz, the future is itself a queer project. Queerness is the insistence of the potentiality of another world: a world in which queer Arabs not only survive but thrive. A world where Palestine is free. A world where we are at home in the world and the world is a home for us. In the face of receding horizons of possibility for minority subjects—in almost every nation-state is a nation that seeks to disappear us—the task of rewriting the future is an essential one. But as Muñoz reminds us, it is not an optimistic or simple endeavor. It is sahq, a grind, work. It is not easy to form and maintain transnational solidarity in an increasingly fractured and isolationist world order. It is not easy to free our bodies from the self-correction of respectability, and to reject visiting it upon others, when for so long it has seemed hopeful to strive for respect. It is disorienting (pun intended) to pursue our identities without recourse to authenticating measures, to imagine our lives and stories are enough without the erasure of others. Yet we can. The archive of work in this book, and the work of this book, are attempts to teach us how.