January 2000

Tariq writes:

Emil, it's OK to run to me. I am a willing participant, so don't feel like it's inappropriate. I hope I can weep with you. I usually weep alone, though Deana (my sister) and I cried together on Sunday before my parents arrived. I didn't think I would cry, but I was afraid of losing her to the world of her dreams because of how closed our community is and how much pain she fears she will cause the family by loving someone outside the community. She asked, "Why can't we have both family and free lives?" 
I have been asking myself the same questions for years. 
Last time I wept intensely with someone was with my ex, the summer we parted (June 1998.) Actually, he didn't cry, so you could say I wept alone. We had a huge fight the night before we moved out of our house and both left town in different directions. I was so furious and emotional. It scared me. Then we made up and parted the next day, and again I cried. He says he can't cry. I wanted to see him shed tears. We saw each other last night. He's in town visiting his family. So we had dinner and exchanged family stories and laughed about them. 
Usually, I weep alone, in bed when I can't sleep or in the car when I'm driving long distances and my mind starts spinning scenarios. I need to write too. Something, anything. I also feel robbed- I feel like I have expended so much energy on just surviving as queer, as Palestinian, as an abuse survivor, as an alienated American, as a disenchanted socialist, that I could have been using to create things- writings, films, new realities. The joy is there, though, and the intense and passionate curiosity for life. I sense it in you too. The challenge is to find out how to appease our demons while feeding our joy. Last year, after my departure from Columbus I came to Cleveland, moved in with my sisters, and started rebuilding my relationship with them. I came out to Deana. She was ready and supportive. Sunday she told me that she had wept for me after I came out to her, thinking how isolated and hurt I must have felt all those years. 
I had come out to Raida (who is two years younger than I am) seven years ago. She was also supportive, but more afraid for me and sad about the loss of the kind of older brother she always imagined, married with children, a full part of the family. 
Then I left for Palestine in October. I stopped in London to see a friend of mine, Mervat, whom I had met in Palestine years before. We had a great time together. It was my first time in London, and I felt completely renewed and so curious and so happy to be seeing a new city, new faces, new books, more immigrants. I sent Anita and Fred a postcard from the British Museum, where they have the most precious Assyrian art in the world, plundered from Assyria/Iraq. I was so amazed and enraged at the same time. I especially liked the hair on the warriors and gods of the stone carvings- their curly leg and beard hair was familiar. Your curly hair reminded me of them. 
Palestine was intense. I helped a friend work on his video as soon as I got there. And we worked every day for the next month and a half, interviewing Palestinians who have gone through everything from imprisonment to bone breaking to home demolition to expulsion to denial of education to to to... I was overwhelmed again with the loss of Palestine. The new "Palestinian Authority" was also corrupt, dictatorial, controlled by the Israelis behind the scenes. I love that place... I was willing to die for Palestine... but now wonder what I would be dying for. When the work ended I was home with my parents, surrounded by relatives. I enjoyed them but hated it at the same time. I was made to feel like a failure for not being able to explain why I took a leave of absence from my grad school, why I was thinking about not finishing, why I wasn't interested in making a lot of money, why I wasn't looking for a wife. 
My friend Nuzhat came from Toronto to visit me and she and I left for Cairo, where I felt free. A big city, chaotic, dusty, loud, unbelievable traffic, and Ramadan. It was lovely. My queer self came out. Tourist policemen flirted with me. It was exhilarating to see Arabs that weren't under occupation, even if they had their own set of problems. Then we left for Damascus, travelling to Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Singapore. I lived on $5-$10 a day. I stayed with friends where I had them. I didn't care about not having a job or health insurance or an income. But there was some madness to it. People thought I was crazy and kept wondering how I could afford to do all of this (not realizing how cheaply I was able to live because they are so middle class now that they couldn't imagine staying in some of the places I stayed in). But you have to be crazy to survive in this world if you are sensitive. Being normal is not an acceptable option. Avoid it at all costs. Sometimes I am forced to impersonate normality, but I can only do it for short amounts of time. 
I saw your sensitivity when I met you at Wael's. It's beautiful. 
My mother woke me up at 4:45 a.m. to eat a predawn meal (called suhoor), so forgive this rambling e-mail. 
Can I hold you when you weep? I promise not to try to salvage you or talk sense into you. 
Salaam,
Tariq


Emil, Tonight is Laylat al-Qadr, or Night of Destiny/Power/Honoring. It is usually celebrated on the 27th of Ramadan. The heavens are open and receive all sincere prayers tonight, which is said to have the power of one thousand months of nights. I went to the mosque with my mother for prayers. I was moved but also felt alien. I made up alternative prayers at some parts of the service. I told my mother in the car that I believed that atheists and idol worshipers could be righteous and are entitled to heaven. She muttered something about that being "too much". 
So, even though we have only met once, I miss you. I miss you because I just read the piece you sent me, (There Are Sharks In My Bed.) And last night I read your other message, and I want to hang out and talk to you. I don't know where to begin- but I feel like we have so many hours of talking to do. 
Your story reminded me of so many things from my experience. Of coerced departures and uninvited arrivals, of having to make home in a place that we never wanted to be and being unwelcome in the place we wanted to be. Of being harassed as "Iranian terrorists" during the hostage crisis, the nationality changing every time there's a new crisis. Of diaspora, desire, guilt, mother. Longing for language, straight Arab men. The excitement of the possibility of anonymous sex. I'm feeling encouraged to write, despite my fears. Thanks for sharing this last piece with me on Laylat al-Qadr.
Did you know that in Arabic the word poet (shaa'ir) literally means "one who feels or senses"?
Sending you the smell of coffee and cardamom,
Tariq


I feel inside as dark as the sky. I want to die. I do not want to struggle anymore when I have not even moved an inch toward any sense of accomplishment. My days are empty. I grow complacent. The past haunts me. The future terrifies me. I am not healthy. My imagination takes me to possibilities I would rather not contemplate. I question everyone and everything. Nothings stands as true or solid. Everything crumbles at closer glance...

Math is beautiful. You can do it. It's just a matter of releasing your resistance, then working at it block by block. One thing builds on another. If you miss any of the blocks you will have a hard time moving on. I used to love math, algebra, calculus, then something happened my second year in college and I nearly failed calculus. I think I was sabotaging myself. That year I also failed History of the Vietnam War, taught by a retired colonel who was a fascist. Most of my classmates were ROTC guys who romanticized war. I was so rebellious in that class. 
Yes, Ramadan is nearing its end, and I have to admit I'm tired. It has given me a chance to develop a certain routine, to be mindful of what I put in my body, what some of my privileges in life are, what some of my duties are, how to renew my resolve. It has also renewed my distrust of organized religion, even as I am amazed at the colossal unity of the effort of Ramadan- so many people in so many places fasting, praying sincerely, feeling for the hungry by experiencing hunger. Fasting can make people more sensitive, more aware, more vulnerable. The greatest strength of Islam is its passion for justice and mercy. Its greatest weakness, though, is in the recent trend to dogmatize its teachings and to discount the more mystical and poetic interpretations of it. You asked me once why I fasted this year. I am still not sure. I think part of it is nostalgia over last year- I was in Aleppo, Syria, with a new friend who was fasting and we fasted together the last ten days and prayed in old, beautiful mosques. His neighborhood mosque in the Old City of Aleppo was a Hittite temple in ancient times (before the monotheistic religions even existed.) We went to a Sufi mosque on Laylat al-Qadr and heard the most beautiful songs in praise of God, sung by teenage boys who were in training. There was such longing and vulnerability in their voices- something I didn't hear in the reciter's voice two nights ago at the Cleveland mosque. My friend in Aleppo, Saher, said that he could tell I was moved and he was happy, implying that I had finally come back to Islam. I wanted him to know that I have been just as moved by gospel singers. I wonder if he ever got it. He was religious and encouraged me to pray. I came out to him and it didn't seem to phase him, except to make him tell me that actually engaging in sex outside of marriage was a sin, though he was confident that if I sought forgiveness I would receive it. 
I was always honest with Saher and told him I didn't believe that everything in the Quran was true and good, and that I wasn't even sure that I believed in God in the way Muslims, Christians, and Jews do. To me it's more abstract and not really about God as a personality in the way He is in the three Abrahamic faiths. 
Last night I told my mother that it wasn't the end of the world if a woman has sex with someone before she gets married. She retorted that it was the end of the world and that I was going too far. I guess I'm pushing her, and also testing her. I don't know how things are going to be with us, how open I can be with her. My level of openness to her translates into my level of openness in public. Maybe it doesn't. I don't know how to have a conversation with my parents about me. The words don't make sense to me either. I can say I'm gay, but I don't really mean it. I don't identify with gayness or gay culture. And I'm not even sure "queer" does it either, though I'm more comfortable with it. Maybe it's better not to say anything. 
Emil, my hunger is making me weak. I need to sink into a soft heart. 
Yours,
Tariq


My dear Emil, happy Orthodox Christmas and end of Ramadan Eid. I just got back from Toronto. I had a lovely ride with Abu Ahmad, the man I drove to the Toronto airport. Abu Ahmad told me stories of how he became a refugee from Palestine in 1948, the path he and his family took, and how they ended up in the Ain al-Hilweh and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. He had a family of nine children, his wife, and two parents to take care of. He's 80 years old and he composes poetry. He wrote a 175 verse poetic memoir of Palestinian experience, through his eyes, which he had to burn when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, for fear that they would find it and put him behind bars. He was a fisherman in Palestine and continued to work as one in Lebanon, and during his visit to Cleveland he and his son went out with the fishing nets to Lake Erie and caught 40 kilos of fish. I feel lucky to have met him and have the chance to talk for five hours. I was impressed by him. 
I am so tired. I have been sexually wired, having strange unending fantasies about some of the men I met in the Middle East in the last year. Mostly straight men who engaged me in homoerotic cruising, touching, propositioning. The three most intense fantasies are of course with people I did not have sex with. 
A hug to you, 
Tariq


Living in a small space between total fear and moments of immovable highs, when I know nothing and no person can harm me. I prefer the latter but find that the contradictions and the transitions are essential. I assure you I will overcome my fears, all of them. Even the neurotic ones. I'm twenty-six. A man. My identity has waited in the margins of life for too long and it screams for acknowledgment. It is a time of revolution and reformation. There will be pain and many deaths- many dreams will be sacrificed, many illusions, innocence. But I will emerge from the shadows with my identity, my talents, my dreams. I know this. Whatever I dream happens.
I'm going back to school.
As well, I would like to come to terms with the truth that I am not the most talented being on the planet, that I may never be recognized as a writer/artist, but that this is not the end of my life, or a reason to stop trying. Instead, I am driven to try even harder.
Why can't I be simultaneously artist and practical? Why should my future be made to shuffle in the shadows of others' successes?