March 2000

I found I am not a fallen angel, but an angel whose wings were clipped in his sleep. It was a gag of sorts. 

My mother and I are still in the midst of our passive-aggressive dual. It's predictable and ridiculous, but we insist on following the patterns we have etched for ourselves, wearing garments of ill-humor. Sure, this will lift and in the aftermath there will be no apologies, no mention of why and how, and life will go on smoothly, pleasantly, lovingly until the next episode. 

This week I faced my resentment for my mother. It made me moody and miserable, but I faced it. All these years I have said, 'It's not their fault for turning me away because of my sexuality. It is how they were raised...' But this week, as an adult, I allowed the child within to vent, to lay blame, to stand up and say, 'You should have fought your cultural beliefs for the sake of your own son. You did not believe in me but sided with your fears. You abandoned me. My life suffered, I suffered because you did not support me. It could have been so much better, but I am scarred. I am not a freak because I'm gay. I am a freak because I felt unloved and rejected by you.' I wept for days. In the car. While walking to class. In my room. I became nauseous. The blame overwhelmed me, but it washed me with hot tears. Now I feel a little better, and in time I know I will feel stronger. Much lighter. I hope to have forgiven my mother. I needed to blame her, to give shape and form, tangible texture to my rage, so that I could stagger through the darkness solely by feeling, by touch, by being pricked, burned, and tickled. I became mad in this sense. But I did not doubt that I would emerge. 

Can I arrive at peace by holding imaginative dialogue with my mother, maybe even through writing? In real life it is impossible to talk to my mother. All my life I have tried. But I was being "American". It is not "Assyrian" to communicate on such an open and emotional level. It is just as hard at twenty-six as it was at sixteen. It is impossible. My reticence is bigger than my heart, than my soul, than my instinct to save. 

Patterns. Shadows of rod iron bars, through which loving words slip unheard. A hand extends, bends, fails to touch. We are both on the outside, my mother and I, but the illusion is that we are on opposite sides. It is only a trick of the mind, a deficiency of the eye. Phantoms trip us. 

It's like I'm caught in one terrible moment and I do not want to hurt others, but when I am driven to hurt my family I am in fact twisting the knife into my own heart. 

I have been faithfully reading Emil's diary for the past several days, every free moment I get. I would greatly appreciate it if you would forward this e-mail to him or let me know how I might contact him. His diary has been very revealing and reminded me so much of some of the confused thoughts I also had at that age (having also come out at 16). I would love to thank him personally for posting it. Thank you, Sean

Habibi, you can come to Austin for as long as you like. We'll feed you food for your belly and for your soul and for your beautiful eye. And you will return. And we will have created our own Tariq-Emil Palestine-Assyria narrative of Return. The bridge of return shall be the bones of my back for you to walk across, or as Mahmoud Darwish suggests, a bridge woven for you from the lashes of my eyes. Emil, my eyes, I love you. You are growing into an outrageous desert flower. Outrageous because she keeps flowering and flowering and throwing herself over mud-brick walls like a madwoman for all in the street to gaze at. Her beauties will not be hidden. She wears bells on her ankles and walks like a pharaoh's daughter while all the other desert flowers look on shyly. When am I going to see you, you crazy girl???


Huh??? Gay Assyrians??? You people are a disgrace to Assyrians! Did you know that Assyrians were among the first Christians on earth! And now you people disgrace the name Assyrian. How dare you say that you are Assyrians... What kind of Christians are you? Did you know that Assyria was the greatest civilization in history. There were no gay Assyrians. Our ancestors weren't gay! If there is more gay Assyrians today how can we have many generations of young Assyrians after us? As far as our population goes... we are not a lot compared to other groups. How can we even be notice. Some people don't even know that Assyrians still exist! 


I'm in my car. Dark highway. No home of my own to go to. No bone. I'm empty. The car could crash, you'd find no body. Music and stars. Temperatures. I masturbate. I throw my head back and the length of my body stretches. I exist. I do exist.