Autobiography matters: on swallowing kerosene and school bullying in Lebanon

ABSTRACT

This critically informed autobiographical essay draws on its author’s experiences of youth bullying to frame its discussion of the role of patriarchy in spawning new generations of bullies in Lebanon, and in shaping the queer perceptions that portend, and foment, the dynamics of bullying as a long-standing practice in Lebanese schools. I show how ‘queer’ in this context is a contingency not strictly mandated by same-sex inclination or desire, a reality examined in my lived narrative, and similarly evidenced by the proliferation of bullying testimonies in my students’ recent memoirs (2018–2022). The healing potential, and limitations, of life writing are also examined.

KEYWORDS:

• School bullying
• life narrative
• queer perceptions
• patriarchy
• Lebanon

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Names have been changed where relevant to protect the identity of individuals cited in this article.

2 Research on school bullying in Lebanon is largely limited to questionnaire-based empirical studies, which flag the issue quantitatively through charts, figures, tables, and statistics. See El Bcheraoui, Kouriye, and Adib 2012 and Khamis 2015.

3 See Alameddine 1999 and Al-Shawaf 2019. In Alameddine’s story, the Lebanese narrator’s queer Iranian classmate, sexually and racially bullied, eventually commits suicide at an English boarding school: a victim of the ‘exhortation to please … any subordinating patriarch,’ regardless the context (El Hajj 2014, 71). On the other hand, Al-Shawaf’s protagonist, the Iraqi Hunayn, reflects at length on his experience of politically motivated bullying at the American Community School in Rome, Italy, shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, 24-32.

4 In a study by Save the Children (2018, 6), 47% of surveyed adults admitted not being familiar with either the term or concept of bullying.

5 A derogatory term referring to a male homosexual.

6 Led by Samar Al-Hajj, three studies in the Lebanese and Arab contexts have, in the last three years, identified bullying as a factor contributing to physical school injuries, but none has reported poisoning with chemicals, accidental or deliberate, among its findings: ‘Child and Adolescent Injury’; ‘Child School Injury in Lebanon’; and ‘History of Injury’ (Al-Hajj et al. 2020, 2020, 2021).

7 For further research exploring the therapeutic dimension of life writing, see Pennebaker 2002.

8 Personal communication.

9 Patrick Gale had a similar reaction to his bully’s letter (Gale 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This article was written in part during the author’s appointment as Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, courtesy of a research grant, SRDC-S-2018-107, from the Lebanese American University.

Notes on contributors

Sleiman El Hajj

Sleiman El Hajj is Assistant Professor of Creative and Journalistic Writing in the Department of Communication, Arts and Languages at the Lebanese American University. His research interests include creative nonfiction, gender studies, narrative constructions of home, queer theory, and Middle Eastern literature.