Of Paint Strokes and Words Underlined
As Syrian queers, we grew up living in secret, afraid and in hiding. But with time, I discovered that I was not the only one who was different, I and others were each in his own shell. After all these years, I decided to paint about the Syrian literary texts that were written about the different, their private details and their secret battles. I chose two texts .The first text was a poem by NIZAR QABANI the syrian poet who has written
The first is “The Evil Poem” by Nizar Qabbani, written in Arabic about the love between two women.
When love fails to conform to the stereotype of a legally, socially, and religiously accepted relationship between a man and a woman, it must first overcome an uphill battle with the lover’s self and many stages of denial. When a woman unbuttons another woman’s shirt, for example, there is a clear acknowledgement of the truth of desire, of love beyond the sexual act. It is an implicit and explicit confession to the other that the relationship has crossed the line of deniability, it is a love that casts away the cloak of friendship. That moment of confession is precisely what I wanted to paint, the moment in which my fingers reveal that I left my heart there with you. I want you.
The second text I propose to you is the play Rituals of Signs and Transformations, which was written in 1994 by playwright Sa‘adallah Wannous, impressed me even more. I had to take many breaks while reading to pace the room and let the words I had consumed flow back out before they consumed me. The dialogue scenes were daring, sad, and so very real. I was completely unaware that this play had existed prior to searching for and reading it for this article. One must acknowledge just how well authorities and censorship succeeded in occulting true art which could address people’s lives. Thus so, our streets grew ignorant and lacked the words we should have discovered in literary pages, and with which learnt to better see ourselves. Wannous’ book brimmed with the depth of sincerity and description of al-‘Afsa’s falling in love with and confessing his feelings to Abu al-Fahd, and the psychological, social, and material consequences thereof for al-‘Afsa in a conservative Syrian setting.
To every era its hands, eyes, and nomenclature. We, as queer Syrians today, are at the gates of a new era, circling our own identities, gazing at them to better decipher them. We explore ourselves and others with new words and colors which will be written about and analyzed tomorrow. Years from now, someone will sit in a coffeeshop as I do now in front of my computer and write about texts penned by queer people, and perhaps their hands will shake, not with fear this time, but in the deep understanding that the butterfly effect will never end.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
the full article is at this link
https://syriauntold.com/2023/05/26/of-paint-strokes-and-words-underlined/
