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We started working on this issue a mere few months ago, but from where we stand right now, it feels like that took place during another lifetime. A world completely far removed from the one we inhabit right now. A world that was turned upside down, rattling us about violently, before we got used to our new conditions. The fact that the publication is being released in 2020 already implies what we, as editors, writers, and translators, went through while working on this joint (romantic) project. The more pressing and difficult questions were imposed on us this year, about politics, justice, revolution, public health, production, class privilege, and gender-based violence, the more we remained committed to the completion of this project of ours.
This issue includes work from feminist writers and poets from Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, and Sudan. On the public and personal level, we have faced, as you did, major struggles and pain, all taking place in an intense moment of time. We will probably spend several years attempting to process what happened during this period and the impact it has had on us. A global pandemic; isolation; seclusion; changes to everyday routines, work, and family relationships; revolutions; economic crises; fires; and devastating corruption-induced explosions, all of which happened directly to us or near us to different degrees. We experienced loss and pain with the death of relatives and acquaintances we lost to a cursed disease that appeared seemingly out of thin air, and with the death of those we lost to suicide, our companions who were at their most vulnerable in the face of the current climate of depression.
One of our writers lost her father and then reached out to us again after a few days. Another received our feedback as she sat by her sick mother’s beside at the hospital, staying there until she recovered. Another was detained while on the sidelines of a frustrating revolution. She sent us her apologies, withdrawing her participation in this issue. She later rejoined us the moment she’d had a moment to breathe. Those of us who were grieving would disappear for days or weeks, then would resume communication, discussion, writing, and opening up. We, the editors of this issue and the larger Ikhtiyar team are incalculably grateful to each writer, translator, and illustrator who took part in this, despite the weight of the current circumstances, and gave a part of their souls and time to produce this equally serious and entertaining production of knowledge. Hopefully it will give our readers something valuable to carry with them, something to lighten their load in the midst of these end-of-world times. We are extremely proud of all of you.
This issue sparks a discussion on identity and literature. We search for the possibility of the existence of a feminist, emancipatory, queer literature capable of shattering the patriarchal and heteronormative hegemony over our Arabic literature. We wonder what this literature looks like and how to determine its criteria and draw representation politics into it. For this reason, we scrutinize literary works in which we can make out glimpses of familiar faces and bodies, and reflections of lives, desires and narratives that are often marginalized, erased, and denied to us. We are looking for roots, for history. Or we create them with fresh new writings.
Literature has always been a mine of lost, hidden, and runaway identities. In literature, we see people who are similar to us, even if just in minor details that we thought were uniquely ours to carry and hide. We eavesdrop on the lives of the protagonists of stories and poems, hoping to find a trace of something that represents us, to find in their words something to describe our complex feelings that we are unable to reveal no matter how many times we’ve tried. Hoping against hope, even if for a mere few minutes or hours, that we are not alone. We search between the lines for us. We dig up and remove the layers upon layers of ambiguity imposed by censorship on writers, to find the underlying messages that touch us, and we hope our interpretation of the text did not stray too far from what the writer intended, that we managed to cross the bridge of human communication and understand the embedded texts and hidden underlying messages. Even if we did stray too far, what of it? It’s our interpretation and our reading experience.
So, we are discussing them here. The act of writing and the act of reading, and what they represent for the identity, the identity of whoever writes and the identity of the one who reads. Many writers, poets, and theorists—usually feminists—have left us with works that they wrote about themselves and their feelings towards other women, feelings that were not necessarily permissible in patriarchal societies that feared women and their energies. They eloquently wrote about the world, their worlds, about hidden experiences, and about those loud inner voices. They worked many secrets into their texts: secrets of fragility, strength, and strategies of stubbornness and resistance. Secrets that reveal their identity, but hide them from the eyes of censorship boards. These secrets are received only by those who understand and experience them.
They played with metaphors in different ways, leaving telltale signs for those who have been repeatedly told that they are crazy, hysterical, sick, deviant! We listen to the lines attentively, but the meaning is hidden and the writer’s intention is encrypted. We examine literature and history, and hate that we sometimes come up with nothing but a yawning void. They write, giving their suppressed identities the chance to breathe, and we read, giving our identities breath. We look for ourselves in those stories, memoirs, and letters. We are the ordinary, the real, the non-heroines, those who were not created out of the fantasies of men: an image reduced to unconditional sacrifice and giving. We are not the love interests of their songs. We are not angels nor demons. And our identities most certainly cannot be reduced to the roles of the mothers, wives, and daughters of men.
At the beginning of this issue, we present analytical readings, either a review of a famous literary work or an engagement with the life and works of a particular writer. In some of these writings, female writers weave essays that are a combination of criticism, poetry, and personal fiction, as if creating conversations they often had with their favorite female writers, delivering messages that are extremely delicate, sensitive, and personal in nature, and never not political.
This is followed by queer Arabic literary and poetic texts, which we publish in belief of the importance of breaking the numerous barriers of publishing and participation, in the modest hope of providing spaces for literary publishing that are more open to all. We conclude the publication with an inspiring translated text, which collects responses from feminist and lesbian writers to the question “Who do you write for?” Let us enjoy delving into their brains and getting a glimpse of their imagined audience. Let us learn about the richness of the writing experience, especially feminist writing, from female writers who preceded us by four decades in far-off countries in the North.
In conclusion, we would like to sincerely salute and celebrate those texts that have not yet been born, that were buried before they could see the light of day, or were born only to be hidden away, or lost their connection with their writer prematurely. Texts that were supposed to be part of this publication, ideas we received and believed in, but did not make their way to final draft form—yet. We hope to someday see them published and read. To witness their impact.
Celebrating unfinished and unpublished texts may be unconventional. Some may believe that they should not be celebrated in an introduction, that that might take away space away from introducing already completed texts. But we believe otherwise. We realize that we suffer from systematic structural discrimination and violence, which deplete us and rob us of our energies and our time. This systematic discrimination threatens us all the time with harsh punishments. Just the thought is enough to make one want to kill their imagination themselves, before it takes its rest and reveals itself and reveals us. How many women have wanted to write but couldn’t? How many feminists, lesbians, bisexual women, transwomen, and transmen have been possessed by their own demons or the demons of others and were prevented from expressing what they saw?
When we explore the possibility of producing queer literature and creating spaces to publish and distribute it, do we think about how that intersects with class, race, and gender? Do we think, when we discuss the possibility of producing queer literature and creating spaces for its dissemination and distribution, of the intersections of class, race, and gender? Do we ask ourselves with all honesty and seriousness why we don’t read more works by poor writers? Dark-skinned writers? Writers that don’t abide by heteronormativity? Is it because they don’t exist, or we believe there’s a lack of talent, or that they’re lazy? Or for reasons more structural, rooted, and complex than that? We believe that a discussion like this is at the heart of the topic at hand.
To write is to have a voice, an existence, a presence, a present, and a documented history. For all of this to be erased, is for us to be wiped out and future generations deprived of any connection to a group of humans who shared their worries and aspirations. It means they will suffer as each of us has suffered for years without hope or desire in a fake world, in which we have to pretend to be something other than our true selves. We write to tell our truth, to water our roots that have been clipped and continue to be systematically clipped in front of our very eyes. They do this, so that no seed will burst forth. They ban us, and if we resist, they erase the traces that we left behind. We write and publish in order to revive these traces, and because we refuse to stay and not plant our roots.
The editorial team
