Ref: ADS-32
Summary: a brilliant anthology of images, essays and slang locates and embraces Arab queerness and defines the urgency of resistance to oppression, arbitrary force and to the Gaza genocide.
Today we continue our all new top ten podcasts countdown. Sitting at #5 is Marwan Kaabour’s The Queer Arab Glossary first broadcast 6 September 2024.
Marwan is a Lebanese graphic designer, artist and writer based in London. He is the editor of The Queer Arab Glossary a collection of essays and gay Arab slang acutely and wryly illustrated by Haitham Haddad.
When we launched the podcast five years ago we had no idea what sort of reception to expect. Now more than nearly 300 podcasts later we are delighted they have been listened to a quarter of a million times in countries right around the world. The response is a measure of the outstanding quality of our contributors. We are fortunate and very grateful to have them.
In today’s newsletter we publish a short excerpt from the podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here.
What was the impetus for The Queer Arab Glossary?
I think there’s a few but the most obvious answer is it being the first born out of Takweer, the platform that I launched in 2019. Takweer is a research archival platform that is trying to create an archive of queer narratives in Arab history and pop culture and I’ve been doing it for just over four years. The idea behind Takweer is to go digging in Arab history and pop culture and try to find these instances where a queer narrative of sorts makes an appearance, whether it’s a person who operates or identifies as queer, an event, a piece of literature, a meme, whatever it might be. I go through history and I go on a scavenger hunt, trying to find these moments and then I collect them in the archive that takes the form of the Instagram page, and I recontextualise them with queerness in mind, present them back to the followers in both English and Arabic. And the idea with Takweer has always been that the page is very broad, a wide ranging exploration from which I try to observe threads or commonalities emerging and then out of those threads the idea is to explore in a more focused way and to realise more theme or subject focused projects. The Queer Arab Glossary is the first realised project to come out of Takweer, with language being the focus.
Elias Jahshan has been on our podcast with his wonderful collection of essays that he edited ‘This Arab is Queer’ and he talked about the language of resistance. You write in your introduction “when the language we inherit does not equip us with the tools to speak about ourselves, we create our own”. I look at that and think that’s an act of resistance too. So I wonder, where do you place The Queer Arab Glossary in the resistance?
I think it’s a matter of making sure that certain stories or the stories of a certain group of people are not erased, are not eternally relegated to footnotes but are firmly positioned into the collective histories when we learn about a certain region or a part of the world or a certain community, wherever that might be. So I think of Takweer as a broad project that engages in archival practices and is aimed to ensure that queer narratives are considered as part of the more general history, or histories, of the Middle East and by publishing a book that explores the linguistic landscape around queerness, I am also producing a physical document that will hopefully exist on bookshelves, in homes and libraries and in personal collections and with individuals perpetually into the distant future. So that, in my opinion, it’s an act of resistance in the fact that a young queer kid who, despite access to the internet, still feels that they might be alone or lonely but that their moment in history begins now. I hope my work, or this book specifically, allows them to extend and have a footing in the distant and the near past, as well as the present, and to say, look, we’ve been here for quite a long time, here is a snapshot of our stories and our histories. You don’t have to start from zero. Here’s the starting point. You can learn about it and then move forward, instead of continuously having to excavate to find our ancestors.
I love the drawings. They’re cheeky, they’re outrageous, and they’re so much fun! Talk a little bit about the illustrations by Haitham Haddad.
I’m a graphic designer by practice. The biggest portion of my design practice is comprised of book design. So when I started thinking of this project as a book, I knew immediately I needed a visual element, specifically one that references the old glossaries that I grew up with or have come across during my research where every other word would be highlighted with an illustration. But then these (slang) words don’t conjure up very realistic or real visuals. We needed to imagine, we needed to almost reach into the furthest corners of our imagination and try to see what visuals it might conjure. And I needed someone for this task. I needed someone who is clearly aware of this language, of the experiences queer people face and can have sensitivity to the pop culture references as well. And for that I really only had one name in my mind, which is Haitham Haddad, the incredible Palestinian illustrator and tattoo artist whose work I’ve been following for a while and I knew that he would be perfect for the task. So the idea was to mythologise these personalities, these characters that the words refer to and populate the queer imaginary with these queer mythological creatures that can allow us to dream or think through.
The other part of the book that I was really, really gripped by is the essays. They’re all powerful, and all of them coming at Arab queerness with perspectives and insights that I think many readers will find both startling and provocative. What do the essays say to you and what do you want them to say to the reader, whether the reader be gay, straight, or otherwise?
I mean, on that point, and I say this in my intro, that despite the specificity of the book’s title, it is truly universal in its reach, you are able to enjoy and learn and indulge in this world even if you are not Arab and/or gay queer, you could enjoy this book. For the essays, it was another factor alongside the illustrations that almost soon after – to go back to the beginning of the process – I really envisioned it as a small artist book glossary but as soon as I started to delve into this world and to find so much knowledge out of researching the meanings of these words, so much historical, political, cultural, linguistic, social, artistic, poetic references that each word would take me on all of these tangents, I felt it would be such a shame not to allow and not to give space for these tangents to be explored a little bit further. And this is where the idea of the essays came from. It is to situate the glossary in today’s world and give it all of these complex, contradictory, but highly nuanced spaces that could make us understand that I’m not just telling you these are the words that we use in the street, fine, but what does it mean that we’re doing that? What does it mean, for example, that the language used by trans Syrian refugees in Lebanon, the language these women use amongst themselves is in stark difference to the language they are obliged to learn to go and apply for aid from aid organisations and NGOs? What does that tension in language mean? Or what does it mean that the language used by Zionist forces in the early days of the establishment of the Zionist entity was used to demonise Palestinian men who have sex with men, versus the pinkwashed language of today used by the Zionist entity that aims to demonise Palestinian men or Palestinians in general, for supposedly not being able to embrace queer people. So yes, we can talk about the fun part of the glossary, the tongue-in-cheek part. But what do all of these questions this glossary conjures up mean in today’s world? The essays are an attempt to expand on that. So what I did is I collated the glossary and then I gave a rough version of it to eight different writers, poets, artists, researchers, social organisers, translators and I asked them to reflect on the findings of this glossary from their own point of view, from their own area of expertise. It constitutes the second half of the book and it contextualises and positions it firmly in today’s world.
Marwan in one of the essays ‘A Pedagogy of Rumours’, Sophie Chamas writes, “can homes, can belonging be built not merely atop the consequences of violence, but from that violence itself?” And when I read that, I thought immediately of Palestine and the ongoing genocide, how Palestinians are othered by Israel and their Western friends and allies, treated as subhuman as this genocide persists. As a final question, can I ask you about Palestine and the future for the Palestinian people?
We cannot talk about anything today or for the last eight months without acknowledging the horrific genocide going on and going on in Gaza right now. Even though the book was developed and was basically sent to print prior to October of 2023, it was born in a moment where the genocide was already happening. If I want to just take one small element from the book that can apply to what’s happening – going back to this idea of archiving – the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza burned down the Gaza Central Archives. They did that for a reason. They did that to erase the memory and the trace of the people who lived there, of Palestinians from Gaza. And when they do that, it is their ludicrous attempt to try and destroy the past, or traces of the past, because they can then supposedly control the narrative of today and of the future. Archival practices that try to retain and continue documenting our stories and narratives are very much an act of resistance to defy that erasure, the erasure that not only the Zionist entity wants but its European allies want as well. The plight of the Palestinian people is one that should be firmly positioned in all of our struggles, because what’s the point of queer liberation? What’s the point of feminism, of decolonial theory, when we are living in a world where the humanity of a Palestinian is up for questioning? All of our Pride marches and diverse marketing campaigns and elected queer officials, what’s the point of all of these supposed acts of progress when we are being forced to live in a world where a genocide is televised on our phones and the people who are being subjected to this genocide, Palestinians, are seen as disposable flesh? So us as queer people or those who are struggling or striving for another cause, what are we fighting for, exactly? Do we not know that we are next? That whoever they finish demonising now there’s someone next on the list? So the fight for a free Palestine, the fight for Palestinian liberation, is one that concerns us all. The only thing I have to say is we must centralise Palestine in these causes and we must commit to doing anything we can to support Palestinians and their right to defend themselves and resist Zionist subjugation.