A loyalty oath. The beautiful ‘civilian’ governor of the West Bank, an academic, thought up a plan to make West Bank intellectuals answerable to Israel. (Actually there is no ‘civilian’ Israeli. Every Arab citizen between sixteen and sixty enlists in the Army. This is true of women and gays, as well.) It was decided no one will sign up; Israel will expel foreign faculty refusing to fall in line with it but the PLO will reward them with a bonus totalling the year’s salary. I was wilfully kept in the dark. I was given a paper in Arabic and Hebrew. The same officer who had once before questioned me told me in broken English: ‘Say you don’t like the PLO!’
—Wallahi! I don’t! I protested. (I detested Arafat for his dictatorship.)
—Then sign here.
I signed.
My fate was sealed.
‘Traitor!’ No one would talk to me. From the mosque they emptied a basket of used toilet paper on my head as I passed under their window. A child threw a stone at me which barely missed me, landing at my feet. Police bundled off the Arab teachers who’d refused to sign on back to the Trans-Jordanian Eastern bank of the river. One made as if to slap me but was restrained by others. I left for India and my contract was torn up by Rashda Masri.
My sister came to my rescue: ‘How can you be a traitor to Palestine? You’re not even Palestinian!’
‘What you want is freedom’, she added.
Besides the boys, I had other good friends in Palestine. Crissie and Steve were Mennonite volunteers. As kids they could not smoke, drink, curse nor fornicate. On a date they’d rub each other standing up on the dance floor in Indiana because ‘Dancing is not allowed!’ They gave me food and friendship. I suspected the husband was bisexual: he had a Black Arab lover (‘a mystical friendship’) from their sports club from a previous stint (before his marriage) in Jerusalem. The wife saw through my masochism: ‘Because you can’t get a screw out of these puritanical Arab boys you let the Israeli authorities screw you. You want to be screwed,’ she said to me angrily at seeing me hurt myself.
Kamel Al-Muganni, the Arab painter of Palestine, was another friend. His mother sold her gold bangles and sent him to Cairo Art School when the father was powerless to wrest his land back from the Israelis at Lod, where Ben Gurion Airport now stands. Instead, he was pressed into the chain gang laying the airport tarmac. An older woman in Egypt taught him sex and love. He worshipped his mother. She was a sprightly woman, though heavy of build, with a twinkle in her blue eyes. Swaddled in white muslin she seemed to waft in the hot afternoon haze like a Madonna. Kamel often asked her to sit for his portraits of Gaza women. ‘He wants to sell me,’ she’d joke when those portraits found buyers. He introduced me to his wife and children. The wife cooked me fish from Gaza. The children were amused by my drama. Little Ramzi, the middle child, was my favourite. The littlest one was chubby but fell ill often. The painter would spend sleepless nights. ‘Every child suffers an occasional fever!’ his wife would try to pacify him. He would sketch me as I ranted and raved alternately at the PLO and the Israelis. Next day his sketch of me would morph into an Israeli face in his Goyaesque crowd-scenes of the Revolution! But he broke our friendship the day I signed Israeli’s loyalty oath. Kamel was loyal to the PLO though he left politics for art. He hated other Arabs, ‘We’re from Crete,’ he’d say, meaning ‘the sea-peoples’ conquered by Ramses II.
Kamel used women’s embroidery patterns in his paints. This was ‘turath’ (tradition). A way of keeping old Palestine alive. Another tradition was the ‘Dabki’ dance performed at harvest by men.
Another friend Hani, a librarian, walked out of my birthday celebrations the minute he knew I kept cordial relations with my boss, Rashda. He was a fellah, and Rashda of the haute-bourgeoisie, a class enemy. Politics had the Arabs divided; occupation bred paranoia. Hani’s mad mother was walled up in a room and they fed her food through a hole in the wall. They would not let the father remarry because they wished to keep the property themselves, away from any future heirs. In spite of cruelty to the mad and to animals the East is very kind to its children.
Mme Abdul-Hadi was a patron of Mughni’s revolutionary art. I once stole into an Abul-Hadi orchard and stole an orange. ‘You are a thief !’ intoned Mme. Hadi in mock-tones of accusation.
Fadwa Touqan, my sequestered neighbour, I met once in the marketplace. She took off her glove to shake hands with me. Hers is the softest hand I’ve ever touched. After the Occupation she intoned a pious hope that just as the West Bank had made peace with the British they would also eventually accommodate the Israeli settlers. This infuriated the radicals, she was branded an accomplice of Israel, and forced into self-imposed exile. Her voice was silenced. Palestine was the poorer for it because of the loss of the pained poems she had once written lamenting Palestine’s fate as a virginal bride-to-be who’d lost her man on her wedding day. She never married and lived with her gay brother until he predeceased her. I lament never having known Fadwa but she lives for me in her poems.
My last friend in Nablus was a student from Til, a village famed for its figs which went all over the Roman Empire. Cleopatra’s basket of figs came from Til! He brought me two fresh figs from his tree each morning, dripping with sap. He played volleyball and had an athletic body. I desired him. ‘Rishi!’ ‘Samaki!’ ‘My feather!’ ‘My fish!’ the boys would exhort the players. He took me home and offered me his elder brother, a labourer in Israel, thick as a brick, who sent my friend to school. They fed me sparrows and the famished youngest girl in the family hungrily eyed my repast as I ate. I saw his class notes and each time I mentioned the word ‘sex’ in my lecture the notes had a dash or a blank space! He was so modest. We slept separately that night. When I left for India I left some money with the school so that he could complete his education. I pined for him for many moons and then I forgot him: my moon seen from behind my arms, leafless, like a fig tree’s.
I had some noble Communist students. One, a girl, had placed a bomb in a women’s toilet at Hebrew University when only eight. She had come out at eighteen, in a prisoners swap after ten years in jail. She was rumoured to have become gay in prison. After marriage she discarded jeans and dressed in more feminine skirts. Another, a man of thirty, told me a copy of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ had kept him sane in jail for five years.
A young woman dentist who had studied in Pakistan liked people from the subcontinent. I lent her 100 dinars which she paid back ten dinars at a time over ten months. But she was honest. The artist Kamel had set up an assignation with her, he told me, and she arrived with a schoolteacher known to both of them! He was left red-faced. She too got married and all that talk about being married to Palestine evaporated.
‘And the dogs go on with their doggy lives.’
—Auden
A volleyball player was brought home to me by my students. He had a manic habit of going through his host’s house like a whirlwind opening every cupboard, drawer and trunk. I thought he looked sex-starved and was looking for pornography. May be the children had set him up to finding some evidence incriminating me as a gay. That condom, or this lube tube! Nothing was found. He ran about in silk boxer shorts and just as easily slipped out of them. He could have been Samson from Gaza: The brute as lover.
Sami was my ‘minder’ from the Party. I realise this only now. He was there when I slept with the music teacher. He was also present in the Israeli Traffic Court where I had taken a rash Arab taxi-driver for negligent driving. He made me and the errant driver make peace with a handshake. The school never forgave me for this. Sami had a girlfriend, Nabila, but she was his ‘beard’. He was gay and known to haunt the gay garden in Jewish Jerusalem looking to fellate his tormentors. My informant from the mosque he roughed up badly. He took me to his native Gaza. Everyone was impressed with my simplicity calling me ‘Gandhi’! Except an uncle who saw through my mask and banned me from the wedding feast.
I have four big notebooks on my year in Nablus. Those books I had to hide at friends’ houses from the prying
eyes of both Palestinians and Israelis. Freny in Paris preserved all my poems.
II
Jerusalem (1983–84)
Across the river
Is a boy
With a bum like a peach
Too bad I cannot swim
—British Army Marching Song
One soldier dead
One cock and two balls gone waste, I say
Two soldiers dead
Two cocks and four balls wasted
Three: Three cocks and six balls…
(And so on…)
—An Israeli Gay Poet
Israel is a melting pot. ‘O Jerusalem, if I forget thee/Let my right hand forget my cunning.’ The British evenly divided Palestine; the Arabs went to war and lost everything. Deir Yasin, a massacred Arab village, now is an Israeli joggers park. No trace of Arabs. In the streets the South American, Russian, Ethiopian Falasha, European jostles for space with the Orthodox Jew. The Orthodox believe this is only an Earthly Garden. They await a Celestial Jerusalem. They, like Arabs, wish to annihilate this modern-day Sodom. Men solicited me in the street: the Italian superstitiously touched his holy trinity when I cast an evil eye on it; the South American opened his right eye with his right forefinger in a gesture meaning ‘Come, fuck me’. There are more Jews in New York than here and those here all have dual passports. Every Israeli village has an Arab history, which in turn hides an Old Testament history. The Zionists were overjoyed when they got the Holy Land instead of Kenya to settle displaced European Jewry. I did see an old Jew in a bus hiding his Nazi number tattoo on his forearm that ran into thousands. When I became hysterical at Bertolucci’s 1900 depicting Fascist slaughter of Jewish kids, an old Jew hushed me up. The Hebrew University on Mt Scopus and the Kiryat Arba settlement are defences.
Walter Benjamin discussing Paul Klee’s painting of the Jewish Angel of History says that the angel flies and blows an apocalyptic trumpet (remember, the walls of Jericho fell!) but s/he looks backwards as she flies ahead. Benjamin explains that this double vision of a future/past had been the fate and history of all Jewry at all times. Even Martin Buber, for all his Jewish humanism lived in a Jerusalem home stolen from Arabs. When I told Palestinians I too am homeless they tittered.
‘Home is a place in the heart/Without it you cannot build/with stone.’
—Brodsky
Jerusalem is an open city. One could move between Arab East Jerusalem and Israeli suburbs to the West. In between lay the old Arab cemetery used by both Arabs and Israelis as a gay garden. It was a meeting point of desire between victim and victimiser and the roles were easily reversed in acts of gay sex performed under the public gaze.
Then, we could go between and between as Shakespeare’s Pandarus would say in Troilus and Cressida. I lived at the edge of West Jerusalem on Naomi Street overlooking the Valley of Thieves, the same where Ruth stood ‘amid the alien corn’ remembering home. The Arab village of Abu Dis lay across the valley where I worked. Now Abu Dis is separated by the Jewish Claw which they infamously also call the Wall. Conversely, Abu Dis Science College calls itself the National University of Palestine where Arafat’s erstwhile Foreign Minister is University President. In my day Zohair Karmi, BSc (Imperial College, London) had hired me. He spoke softly and carried a big stick. He unsuccessfully asked me to do likewise.
The Dead Sea: I visited with Imad. I had made love to Imad when I stayed one night at his place, with his father already stirring in the next room preparing for dawn’s Fajr prayers. The Dead Sea is the site of ancient Sodom. God sent a beautiful angel to the Sodomites to warn them of impending destruction unless they changed their wicked ways. The Sodomites seduced the angel instead. Sodom was destroyed. Sown with salt. Lot’s wife looking back at her home became a pillar of salt.
Eilat on the Red Sea, Aqaba on the other side where Lawrence of Arabia met Faisal. The seeds of today’s conflicts sown deep in history.
At the submarine sea life museum we saw strange sea creatures: reefs, anemones, sea cucumbers. Also, creatures of the dark, luminescent themselves, who lived by their own lights and could brook no daylight, so deep down under did they live that indeed no light shone there. A predator, ugly, black tentacled: A threat to all other life forms.
Imad was initiated into sex by a crippled priest of the Greek Orthodox Church. His football coach had warned him: ‘Those who do, will be done one day.’ Imad remembered this prophecy when in bed with me. He was thin, tall and wiry but hung like a horse. To put an end to his male chauvinism I kept him in bed one day, all day at Eilat until he was exhausted and begged for mercy.
At the graveyard people made love athwart graves. Love and Death.
Taraboom di-day
I’m sitting on a tomb
di-day
Tara-boom!
I chanced upon Sabtai, Ran’s married neighbour, there. He would leave the park if he saw me there. But he accosted me at the Tubs. Instead of rejoicing at my good-luck, I asked after his wife. He left me standing there helplessly with an erection.
An Israeli soldier fellated me. He was a good kisser but he gave me mumps he had picked up from his little nephew. A kindly Arab doctor treated me for orchitis (my testes had grown to the size of a small grapefruit) but it left me sterile.
An Ethiopian priest would come to the gay park dressed only in a black cassock. We could not see him in the dark: black on black. He would spring a surprise upon us in the bushes; throw up his cassock over his head, bend over and offer his glorious black bum to any passers-by.
At the Ethiopian Church, a white St George lancing the dragon (of rumour) in the ear!
Just down from the orthodox Jewish Quarter is the Mikvah or the Ritual Bath. Jews use it on Saturdays, Arabs on Fridays; the gays congregated there Mondays and Tuesdays. Golda Meir had the old Arab hamam in the Walled City blown up to kill an Arab terror-leader. Arab and Jew and gay found solace in Mea Shearim’s Mikvah. It had a sun roof, hot and cold baths, a steam room with old stone beds, a windowed vault which let in daylight, an Arab room with rugs and cushions. It was owned by an Arabic-speaking Jew from Baghdad who valued me as long as I had a job as a teacher. Mikvah students came there to fellate Arabs. Israeli soldiers came there to bugger the Arab boys who worked there as cleaners. Israelis tired of bearing the whip willingly became sex slaves to Arabs momentarily in bed. Orgies ensued in the basement boiler room at dusk on Tuesdays when the proprietor obligingly delayed the switching-on of lights. Sex and politics/sex and death. An intense searchlight was turned on by conducting our privatest of acts in public spaces. And in the dusk at the bathhouse with shades searching shades, it seemed as if bodies begged for souls.
At the Baths I met Mike, twenty, a New York Jewish Portnoy transplanted to Jerusalem. He lived with a fat Israeli girl but was gay. He fellated me and took me home to his water bed when his girlfriend wasn’t home. He lived in the labyrinthine old Jewish quarter besides Jaffa Street, the line dividing east and west Jerusalem.
I met a South African Jewish lawyer. He was married. He carried a ‘brolly’ and always talked of making some ‘lolly’. He was tall, thickset, bald, married and vegetarian. He ate young men with a relish. Wrote poetry. His wife accused him of trying to be ‘interesting’. She, too, was fat and did not mind him being gay.
Ran Shinar was another South African by way of Delhi. His engineer father, of Moroccan Jewish descent, had built the Bhakra-Nangal Dam and had died of exhaustion in India. Ran learnt Kathak and befriended Hindu boys. ‘Yeh to hamari galli ke Krishna aur Balram hai,’ the Hindu housewives would say of the gay boys in their neighbourhood. Ran restored old arks at the synagogue. You lay gold leaf on wood and polish it in with a horn. Hard work. He lived behind Jaffa street in an old Arab house hung with textiles from India. He was into young boys. He had another South African friend whose Indian ‘ayah’ had converted him to Hinduism. He called himself a ‘Hinjew’! Trying to illegally cross overland into India from Pakistan he was jailed there for three years. He and an Anglo-Indian boy f
rom Goa made love for three years in jail, which made it bearable. I sought paying-guest lodgings with his mother.
She was an embittered, fat, lonely woman. Her drunk ex-husband would come home and sing in the shower:
I don’t want her
You can have her
She’s too fat for me!
When provoked she called all Indians ‘coolies’. ‘The British drowned Jewish refugee boats,’ she’d say.
I was unemployed. I brought immigrant Jews from all over the world to my bed by day while my landlady worked. I remember a beautiful Sephardic Jew from Brazil. I gave him lice picked up at the sauna. Both of us had to cut our beautiful hair and delouse ourselves.
A British ‘hajja’ at school was after my job. She lived in a ‘zwaita’ with a Sheikh. The Sheik had finger-fucked Ran’s dancing partner during her stint as a Moslem convert from American Jewry. So I too had something on them! Consider it a ‘tahara’ (purification), the ‘hajja’ had advised the offended woman. Her son, a convert to Islam, took my job and taught ‘God’ in the English Department. They had links with the old Mufti of Jerusalem, who was our Chancellor. When I shook hands with the old, frail man I did not know I had shaken a firebrand’s hands who’d shaken hands with Hitler. Politics! My enemy’s ( Jews’) enemy (the Nazi) is my friend, the Arabs said.
I was an agnostic then. The Moslem science students talked of a static, creationist universe. I taught them ‘entropy’. Science had answers. Some Arab scientists accepted them. As for faith, that was ‘supra-rational’.
Shaul Shaked was the Zoroastrian scholar at Hebrew University. He said all the three great Western religions learnt Abraham’s monotheism (actually, Akhenaten’s). Once I met him at the movies with his friend, the ‘civilian’ Governor of the West Bank who had returned to academics. Shaked told the Arabist how the loyalty oath introduced by him, the Arabist, during his governorship had caused my job-loss. And both laughed heartily at me.
The Man Who Would Be Queen Page 9