8 - 14 February 2001
Issue No.520
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 February 2001 Issue No.520 |
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The business of becoming a man
Imagined Masculinities, edited by Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb, London: Saqi Books, 2000. pp294
With gender books, particularly about the Middle East, invariably dealing with the status of women, it is a welcome change to find a volume devoted to aspects of being and becoming a man. The various contributors discuss the processes by which male identities are constructed and by which desirable versions of masculinity are achieved. Thus the role of circumcision, "both as a promise and a guarantee of a future genetic life", as Abdel Wahab Bouhdiba puts it in his "Circumcision and Making Men", is discussed from the religious point of view where, he points out, it is not accorded major importance, with no reference being made to it in the Qur'an.
Military service is seen, in certain societies, as being an important stage in achieving manhood. There is thus a piece by Emma Sinclair-Webb, one of the editors, about military service in Turkey where it is regarded as "a rite of passage to manhood" but one which no less than 200,000 men living in Turkey -- and a further 226,000 living abroad -- attempted to escape from by ignoring their call-up papers, according to official figures. The experience became all the more unpleasant with the possibility of having to serve in units sent to fight against the Kurdish PKK.
More interesting, however, is the piece by Julie Peteet, an American anthropologist, about "Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada". The beatings to which Palestinian boys are subjected constitute this unique "rites of passage" to manhood. They wield one of the most primitive forms of weaponry against their occupation by a major military power -- stones -- and for this they are punished by being arrested and taken in for interrogation, which invariably includes being beaten and humiliated in various ways. That civilised men can behave with such callousness towards young boys can be explained by "Holocaust theology" being coupled with loyalty to Israel, thus making empathy with Palestinian suffering difficult for the average Israeli soldier. The writer, who visited many of the refugee camps, gives numerous examples of the way in which young boys are beaten up. (It is interesting to note that the Israeli military, when announcing injuries or deaths of Palestinian children, does not employ the Hebrew word for children: thus a ten year-old boy shot by Israeli forces is described as "a young man of ten"!) While most of the stone-throwing and other activities against the occupying forces is the work of children or young men under the age of 25, women have come to play an increasing role against the humiliations of the occupation. In the camps they intervene on behalf of boys being beaten up. They hurl insults at the Israeli soldiers, asking: "Aren't we human beings, too? What kind of a people takes the land of another and then beats them when they protest?" Such action by women often creates a diversion that allows boys to escape; it also casts public shame on the soldiers, many of whom are already aware of the ignominious nature of some of the tasks they are called upon to play.
The experience of young Israelis undergoing military service is the subject of a study by Danny Kaplan, an Israeli occupational psychologist. Its title, "The Military as a Second Bar Mitzvah", indicates the central place given to military service in Israeli society. In the three years of military training the state seeks to refashion the recruit, whatever his background, into the sort of man required by the State of Israel; the emphasis is on manliness, endurance, professionalism and aggressiveness, in contrast to images of "otherness" such as femininity, homosexuality and the Arab enemy. We are told of the experience of a young soldier, unlike most in that he is not religious and is "gay". After rigorous training in an elite corps, he is first deployed in the occupied territories and finds embarrassing the experience of having to face stone-throwing boys when all he wants is "to get the hell out of there and leave them to have their own state." Later he is required to take part in action against Hizbullah guerrillas. He finds the experience scary. He is asked what he felt when he saw the bodies of the men he'd killed. "When you stop and think about it," he replied, "he is a human being too. Was a human being a minute ago... But you know it's either you or them."
Two further pieces which make for lighter reading than some of the heavily footnoted academic studies are by distinguished novelists. Hassan Daoud writes with engaging humour on the subject of moustaches, "those two heavy wings of manhood", while Moris Farhi contributes a delightfully voyeuristic account of his visits as a young boy to the women's hammam in the company of their servant in Ankara. Having acquired certain rudimentary facts about the female body from Gypsy children who were their neighbours, the boy makes of his visits to the hammam an opportunity for confirming the truth or otherwise of what he has been told by his young Gypsy informants. Then comes the sad day when he is suddenly deemed to be too "grown-up" and is ignominiously shooed off the premises and forever barred entrance to that paradise of which he was a sort of honorary member.
Another entertaining piece is by Mai Ghoussoub, one of the editors of the volume. In it she brings together three different stories: the report that Israel was importing into the Arab world a chewing gum that caused impotence, the recent reissue of classical Arabic texts relating to sex and its pleasures, and an examination of an Arabic film entitled Muhimma fi Tel Aviv about an Egyptian beauty who succeeds in infiltrating top Israeli security. In these three episodes from today's Arab media the writer sees the meaning of masculinity being thrown into question.
Perhaps, though, it is the long, well-researched study of "Male Homosexuality in Modern Arabic Literature" by Frederic Lagrange that is the outstanding contribution to this collection of essays. His treatment of the subject is given an extra dimension of interest by comparing the taboos attached to the subject in contemporary society, and to its relatively rare occurrence in modern Arabic literature, with the openness with which such matters were discussed in previous times in that genre of classical Arabic literature known as adab. As the writer puts it, "literature proves much less eager to discuss pleasure in all its manifestations than it did until the first half of the nineteenth century." He notes that classical works such as Ibn Al-Hazm's Tawq Al-Hamama and Ibn Al-Jawzi's Dhamm Al-Hawa deal with man-to-man passions little differently from heterosexual ones, while today there is no modern Arab equivalent to Wilde, Proust and Gide. Though seeming to lament the lack of homosexuality as an ingredient of modern Arabic fiction, the writer nonetheless gives us a formidable list of writers who have in fact at least included homosexual characters in their work.
In his opinion, the first such character is that of the mu'allim Kersha in Naguib Mahfouz's Zuqaq Al-Midaq. He then goes on to quote other writers who, in one form or another, have portrayed homosexuals in their work, among them some of Egypt's leading writers such as Gamal al-Ghitani, Sonallah Ibrahim, the playwright Mohamed Salmawi, and Yusuf Idris and Yahya Taher Abdullah in some of their short stories. He also deals with a novel by the Lebanese Hoda Barakat and a striking play by the late Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous. The Moroccan Mohamed Choukri's well-known autobiographical novel is naturally mentioned.
The writer of this study makes the point that while the Arabic novel, starting from Haykal's Zaynab, has been in essence realist, it conspicuously lacks one whole aspect of realism, namely that of the sentimental and erotic life. The reason for this, he suggests, is that
in life as lived in Arab societies, sexual desire, whatever form it may take, has to be concealed. On this subject it is interesting to read what Naguib Mahfouz had to say in a personal interview with the writer in 1998 when he makes the important point that classical adab literature was restricted to conversations between friends in private salons and was not meant for publication. He concludes by saying: "the modern diffusion of works provokes self-censorship. Publishers want the authors to respect public opinion and religious values."
Whereas it is clear that the writer deplores the rigours of censorship, Naguib Mahfouz's remarks about respecting public opinion and religious values indicates an attitude that has something to be said for it. Maybe not all the liberties enjoyed by the West are for the best.
Reviewed by Denys Johnson-Davies
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