Desire under conflict: The potential for queer in Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter

ABSTRACT

This article examines Hoda Barakat’s original rendition of gender and sexual otherness in The Stone of Laughter (1990), the first Arabic novel with a queer protagonist, Khalil. The analysis sheds light on pre-modern Arabic literature’s celebratory depiction of homoerotic desire vis-à-vis the dearth and negative connotations of the theme in modern Arabic fiction. The article explores Barakat’s implementation of surrealism in her portrayal of Khalil’s sexuality and the reality of his choices within the context of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). Khalil’s queer identity, which marks his dissidence, becomes a form of resistance that challenges the status quo of his hetero-patriarchal society and the unresolved sociopolitical issues that led to the War.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer identity
• sexuality
• gender
• modern Arabic fiction
• the Lebanese Civil War
• The Stone of Laughter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The demise of aesthetic portrayals of homoerotic desire in Arabic literature happened in the wake of the Nahda (renaissance/revival) movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A by-product of anti-Ottoman Arab nationalism, the Nahda assimilated certain European views on sexuality and resulted in censoring what came to be seen as immoral. See Khaled El-Rouayheb (2005), Joseph Massad (2007), Ibrahim Abu-Lughod ([1963] 2011).

2. See Al-Samman (2008) and Hanna (2016, 101–103).

3. The quotations from the novel (Barakat [1990] 1998) used in this article are my own translation of the original Arabic. The 2nd edition,published in Cairo in 1998, has been used, as opposed to the firstedition published in Beirut in 1990. An official English translation by Sophie Bennett (Barakat 1994) has been published.

4. The ethno-sectarian conflict was underpinned by brewing political, socio-economic and ideological clashes between the Lebanese Left, which supported the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Lebanese Right (the Christian Phalange Party); the growing Shia population of the country remained relatively impoverished (vis-à-vis the bourgeois Maronite and Sunni elites) and lacked political representation, despite becoming the largest single community in the 1960s (Harris 2012, 232). See Harris (2012, 232–276) for a detailed analysis of the Lebanese Civil War.

5. The novels in this series are: The Stone of Laughter (Barakat [1990] 1998), Disciples of Passion (Barakat [1993] 2005), The Tiller of Waters (Barakat 1998) and My Master, My Beloved (Barakat 2004).

6. As noted by Kifah Hanna (2016), all of Barakat’s protagonists in this series of novels are men suffering from various sexual and gender-related anxieties (105–107).

7. See Hanadi Al-Samman (2008) for an overview of the types of negative clichés associated with homosexuality in modern Arabic fiction.

8. This is not to suggest an anachronistic transposition of the contextual setting of the novel, whose particularities remain firmly the product of its era. Desire, on the other hand, transcends time and space; its sociocultural permissiveness and sanctioning do not, however, always follow suit.

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Notes on contributors

Feras Alkabani

Feras Alkabani is a lecturer and co-director of the Middle East and North Africa Centre at the University of Sussex. His monograph, Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence and the Culture of Homoerotic Desire: Orientalist Depictions of Arab Sexuality, will be published in 2020.