Female Homosexuality and (Non)Performativity in the 21^st-C. Syrian Novel: Queerness as/at Home in Samar Yazbek’s Ra’ihat al-Qirfa (2008)/Cinnamon (2012)

ABSTRACT

Given the regression in empowering representations of queer women in the literary and, more generally, the cultural life of the modern Arab world, this article spotlights the hitherto under-researched literary portrayals of female homosexuality as a site of redemptive and/or reparative, queer(ed) home in 21^st-century Syria. Through a close reading of Samar Yazbek’s Ra’ihat al-Qirfa (2008), and, for added nuance, its English translation Cinnamon (2012), the study explores the novel’s curation of home in and through the protagonist Aliyah’s same-sex relationship with her employer Hanan al-Hashimi. Using Roberta Rubenstein’s and Sara Ahmed’s notions of fixing past homes, and of queer(ing) home, respectively, the article shows how the sense of home cushioned by the same-sex affair transcends social class and domination/submission binaries. I thus argue that even as the same-sex relationship in Yazbek’s novel may not be performative from a contemporary lesbian feminist perspective, it kneads hope, not desolation, into the plot and the real-life setting it extrapolates, since it responds to the local context the characters inhabit.

KEYWORDS:

• Female homosexuality
• Arab world
• arabic literature
• syrian literature
• same-sex relationships
• queer home
• non-performativity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The only novels cited here, which have been published in English translation, are by Hanan Al-Shaykh (1992), available as Women of Sand and Myrrh, and by Samar Yazbek (2012), available as Cinnamon. My translation of the other titles, in the reference list, is for illustration purposes only.

2. Hanan’s husband, despite his presumed impotence (as Hanan describes him), is sexually

aroused by Aliyah later in the novel.

3. For literary and critical explorations of the repressive socio-political setting of Assad’s

Baathist Syria, and/or the civil war this has spawned, see Samar Yazbek (2016) The Crossing and John McHugo (2014) Syria: A Recent History, respectively.

4. Unless indicated otherwise in-text, the translations that follow the transliterated Arabic

extracts are the article author’s.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.