By N.D. Plume
-I don't like these so called friends of yours; go find yourself a girl to date!
-Mom, the reason why I don't do that, is simply because I'm gay.
-No, don't say that, you have to get married and have kids otherwise your father in his tomb and God will curse you.
-Mom, don't bring God and my father into this; I'm talking about my sexuality, my taste in bed for God's sake!
At this point, my mother, quoting our Armenian friend Zaza, stands up to provide us(me) with the wisdom of the day...
-A man without a family dies like a dog.
One might read my mother's "death", her usage of the term that is, as the period preceding the fatidic moment, better known as one's last days, last years, his last scruples, almost always without any. When do we begin the count? at fifty? after fifty? at sixty? sixty-five, or is it "Al-aamar bi-yaddi-llah?"(lives are in the hand of God)
My mother's reaction to my coming-out declaration tells me more about the way a culture represents itself, rather than about her emotions and anger at the time. In what follows, I will "sketch" the broad lines of an argument (I may develop it later) which attempts to account for non-heterosexual unions in Middle-Eastern societies. If you bear with me this historico-philosophical briefing, I will explain what I mean in minimal ellipses, promise.
The word nation comes from the Latin word nacere/nascor, "to be born." Citizens of a nation, in the traditional sense, are determined by their birth, i.e., their umbilical cord and all the blood ties and titles filtering through it to our poor bloody babies. Suffice it to go over our high school Biology books to recall that the gene "identity",citizenhood in the political context,is a Y gene, transmitted exclusively by the father. As a citizen, your family name, thus, defines you at both social and political levels, regardless of the mother's cultural input to your advent to being_excuse the jargon. In other words, it doesn't really matter where you are born, or who is your mother, as long as you are the son or the daughter of a Beiruty man from Y family; you automatically benefit from the "privileges" of the patriarchal lineage, i.e., a lebanese passport, a family mountain lunch every Sunday, and at least a paragraph in the Nahar's obituary when you hit the bucket. You are the son or the daughter of Mr.Y, Mr. geneY (I think I'm getting carried away, no matter). My contention is that family constitutes the grounding network of identity's predominant concept in such places as our part of the world. Family provides the individual with the necessary social stability: it defines him or her by determining the way their identity gets defined. The familial security overrides the western social security with which the state provides in that context. Your wife and kids support you in your last days the way the state in Europe, for instance, is expected to help and support senior citizens, a difference I will address shortly.
Since birth determines us, accomplishments of any kind are ineluctably viewed along familial lines. That goes without saying. The family is the origin, the name and the telos, the finality (aboutissement), the perpetuation and the legitimation of the individual's father/family name. Those who don't get married they ruin(the "F" word, God forbid!) their lives and are left with the guilt, insurmountably.
How does a gay man or woman fit into this scheme of events? Well they don't. They can't. The socio-familial structures simply do not account for such unions_they are counter (re)productive. The name, unless reproduced in an overdetermined biological way, falls short of significance. And it might be interesting to include a religious note on this note, by going back to the beginning, when was the deed. Monotheistic religions trace their origins to the logos, the "word" be it Moses' commandments or the Koran. The divine miracle always lies in the word(s). Hence, the family name has to persist to legitimize the father's name, his authority, the patriarch's God's. By not participating in the familial cycle, not only do we defy the father's authority_the law by stripping the name from its claims to perpetuity,but also God's, i.e., his Sunna, which is Sunnatou el-Hayat_marriage.
In modern nations, however, and given their secularization after the French Revolution and the various Enlightenment's-produced (in a way or in another) liberation movements in Europe, the familio-religious authority was displaced onto that of the state, thereby rendering the latter the absolute representative of authority. A citizen in France or in England is defined ideologically as well as biologically. His or her family ties are accounted for in the presence of the law, and are legitimized accordingly. These states are founded or at least represent themselves as being founded on the basis of a contract, where citizens agree to live together and accept the law_the state's constitution_as the ultimate guarantor of their community formation. This contract_in France, especially_organizes their biological ties, as well as their geographical proximity, i.e., the fact that "so it happens" they live on the same land together. It is no longer the family or the tribe that legitimizes one's socio-political being, but rather an overriding notion of citizenhood which provides the family with its necessary legitimization. At this level of the argument, I do not wish to suggest that one version of the state_the "western"one_is more appropriate or less problematic than ours. My interest pertains to the ways in which a none-heterosexuality, by means of narrowing down my analysis, is accounted for given both versions of social organization.
It is conceivable for a western woman or man to bring about a social stability outside the marital/familial institution, i.e., through a career and friends, and may be a partner be it Homo or heterosexual, to bring it about by choice and at some level of agency rather than through the quasi absolute determination by lineage in our case. My mother's comments, therefore, explain how she can not conceive of my social well being and security as a professional gay man with caring friends around me. These attributes fail to satisfy her cultural requirements. The fact that I have chosen my friends, my job, my lover, and the fact that, in other words, "I" define myself ideologically based on some biological/cultural givens, is simply inconceivable for her. The cultural formula is clear in her mind: me+wife (as a fertile couple) = family name+security = Ridah l-walidayn (the parent's blessing and God's thereof).
Two systems of belief clash at this level: the way I conceive of myself as a gay man given the so-called modern western standards, and the way I am conceived of as Y's son_a deviant refusing to reproduce the legitimizing structure.
I realize that my analysis remains incomplete, and that I have to argue further for the claims I make . But for the purposes of this essay, I choose to end on this note.
-Mom, you have to realize that this isn't a mere phase I'm going through, this is the way my life is going to look like until further notice. If you fight me over this, you loose me, and that is quite unfortunate because you know how much I love you.
-No, you have to promise me you will change; I want to see Elham(her name for "my daughter"). I know you'll have beautiful kids, and besides, every time I attend a wedding, people come up to me and say: "B-farhet Tarek."
Tarek.
August 15, 1996
Rochester, New York