I strongly suggest that you always buy your books from Bookshop.org or Biblio.com or Alibris.com or from the original publisher, and only buy from the sinkhole Amazon when all else fails.
The attentive reader will remember that I have a bench, actually an old wood and steel stool, next to my bed where I pile the books with which I am currently engaged … and that from time to time I will invest you, my readers, with what I am learning from and thinking about in these tomes. I deeply love books, and am surrounded by great piles and endless bookshelves of them every day. Retirement has led me, as I had hoped, into constant encounters with my library. So the book bench groans as I exult.
There are themes in these scribblings … post-post-colonialism, as I like to call it, and homoerotic poetry and life and art. And ambivalence and theory. O, and a little crankiness on my part, but I can be forgiven that, please, given my nearly seven decades on the only planet that we have.
Indonesia: Peoples and Histories
I undertook to read Jean Gelman Taylor’s 2003 book Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (Yale, 2003) as a review of a history in which I am thoroughly grounded. (I remind the reader unfamiliar with my personal history that I hold a doctorate in South and Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley 1998, focused on May/Indonesian literature.) I would certainly recommend it to the non-expert as a broad and very readable introduction to a subject which few have undertaken.
The book is thematic rather than linear in its approach, and the author’s use of “capsules” of informative background certainly would appeal to the non-expert reader. That said, the eminent Indonesianist M.C. Ricklefs, while lightly praising the book overall, took the view that it had many errors in its claims concerning Javanese babad … think of those broadly as chronicles. I had significant issues with how she represented the start of and reasons behind the advent of Islam in the archipelago, a subject of my doctoral work. But in a work of this scope, even these critical themes are necessarily reduced and, again, the non-expert would hardly notice or suffer.
Frankly, I did not learn much that I did not know from my long studies of Indonesia. That’s how it should be, I suppose, given my background. But I was intrigued by her light but clear questioning of the “colonist-bad, colonized-good” pure dichotomy. We’re going to see a lot more of this, mostly covert given the penalties that the pure inflict upon anyone who questions the now almost archaic postcolonialism discourse. She argued throughout that colonialism itself was not a monolith, and that it developed into different forms over time; it had different impacts in different places. Most importantly, local populations interacted with it seeking their own benefit. The ruling classes especially sought to use it to their own ends and for a very long time succeeded in that endeavor. Most critically, the current Indonesian state is in essence a reproduction of the final form of the colonial enterprise.
Indonesians like to say that the Dutch colonized Indonesia for 350 years. That is just not true in any sense. The Dutch arrived roughly 350 years before independence, but their impact changed over long twisting periods from minimal to maximal both in terms of geographical extent and in terms of political power over individuals and communities. More importantly, there was no Indonesia 350 years ago. There was roughly a Malay-sort-of-world, primarily defined by the use of Malay especially by coastal peoples as a lingua franca, and then later as a language of Islamic expansion.
We have to break out of a strictly reductive anti-colonial, sometimes called postcolonial, mindset to look at the fullness of the human experience if we want to understand what actually happened in colonial history As I have noted before, I am slowly writing a piece on post-postcolonialism in which I will examine this issue rather more closely. But intellectually, preconditioning the mind with set theories against which there is no argument is a sure road to lack of dialectical understanding.
In that sense, Gelman’s book hints at a fecund future.
Gay Travels in the Muslim World
After I finished the Gelman book above, I needed something easily readable if still compelling. I’ve been meaning to read Michael T. Luongo’s 2007 collection of stories Gay Travels in the Muslim World (Harrington Park Press, 2007), for some time, and that time became now. It is a collection of 18 stories, highly variable in narrative approaches as well as in literary merit. Each one of them, however, is sufficiently compelling on its own, and the entire collection in its variosity,* to make the work worth spending time on. I highly recommend it. (It is very expensive on bookshop.org, so the link is to biblio.com where used copies are more within the pocketbook, I figure, of my readers.)
I suspect that this book could not be published now. Given that its subject matter is gay men, nowadays, of course, it would have to have a bunch of non-related stories about women and trans people and what not in order to past muster. Pardon my crankiness, but the decades-long campaign of the ultraleft, what Lenin called the infantile left, to erase the category of gay men from their meticulously manicured list of the approved oppressed is pretty much complete at this point. I may well take a metaphorical valium some day and write out my again cranky view of the long history of this lugubrious development. But it is now entirely true that the subject of gay men is only approved as a subset of a larger laundry list.
Moreover, nowadays we’d also have to endure in a book like this a long, painfully tedious, jargon-laden introductory lecture on something like the colonized body of the other. A careful reading of these stories shows that, contrary to any deep-theory recipe for literary boredom, they describe in deliciously lively fashion, from a variety of vantage points, asymmetrical negotiations of power and intercourse and love and sexuality between asymmetrical individuals in a real asymmetrical world. Asymmetrical and sometimes but not necessarily always unequal or repressive.
The stories have a “truthiness” about them. They feel real. The David C. Muller piece “The Galilee” leaves the reader with the distinct sense that the narrator is at best a schmuck, at worst a callous backstabber. (May I discreetly remind my readers that the narrator and the author are not necessarily identical, a distinction sometimes lost when we get too pure.) The Desmond Ariel piece “Little Stints” describes rich young Saudi men as predators upon pretty much any mobile male. Ethan Pullman’s piece “My Intifada” describes the wrenching process of a young Palestinian gay man severing himself from family and past by coming out, a process so filled with the threat of death that he changed his name and hid his location from anyone he had ever known. Each one left me sitting back, gasping for air, savoring the humanness.
The problem with any censorious attitude, or for that matter with any pre-determined memes of any kind, is that “truthiness” by rule must be sacrificed to correctness. The notion of truthiness points to a narrative that fills the reader with a sense for a reality that does or did exist, irrespective of whether it seems okay or correct or even moral. You have that uncanny sense that you are inhabiting a felt experience, however messy or contradictory or ambivalent or magical.
Theory can be a curse in literature and art; like most curses, it may be by turns unavoidable. That said, I know of what I speak … I do hold a literary doctorate, after all, and I have acquired thereby one groaning bookcase overstuffed with the theory that I mined in that endeavor. The theory to which I still subscribe is the “truthy” theory … the stuff that digs at why and how literature works in stoking the mind to grok† anew a truth.
Naturally, my current scratchings can only give a hint of a scent of what I might later endeavor to outline in regard to “theory” and “ideology”. But when I read a collection like the one under present consideration, I am reminded of battles past, and the battle we are fighting right now for a forward-thinking theory of action and storytelling not trapped in pre-ordained memes. Liberalism is lacking a clear headed approach to crafting a future; that’s what motivates me, frankly, to write this blog. Everything I read, I read in this light.
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*As I have noted before, it staggers me that I appear to be the only person who uses the term “variosity.” The spell check keeps changing it to varicosity, which makes me giggle. I think it is a word, and I plan to use, the OED be damned.
†“Grok”, meaning understand, is too wonderful a word to disappear by reason of generational change. It was a common hippie word, but my investigations suggest that no-one more than a few years younger than me knows it. I plan to use it as if everyone understands what it means.
Carousing with Gazelles: Homoerotic Songs of Old Baghdad
Speaking of crimes against “pre-ordained memes”, we have the Arab poet Abu Nuwas, ca 756 - ca 814. Parvez Sharma mentioned him in his piece in the Luongo book above, inauspiciously entitled “Work in Progress: Notes from a Continuing Journey of Manufacturing Dissent.” I know that somewhere around this apartment I have a volume of translations of homoerotic Arabic poetry, but damned if I can find it. (My searches did uncover some other tomes which I will discuss briefly below.) But I found online this slim volume of translations, Carousing with Gazelles (iUniverse, Inc., 2005), ordered it from bookshop.org, and it appeared magically at my door in a very slim envelope a few days later. I have only one complaint; I truly wish the publisher had included the Arabic poems. I have sufficient Arabic to mow through them, but more importantly, I’d love to hear the poetic structure, albeit in my own barely passable Arabic voice.
Abu Nuwas is widely regarded as one of the greatest Arab poets. He lived a more or less openly gay life in the early Abbasid period, doing well under the justly renowned caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd, the greatest of all Arab rulers who famously exchanged gifts and ambassadors with the equally epochal Charlemagne. But, after Hārūn’s death, Abu Nuwas perished in prison under mysterious circumstances soon after the end of a civil war, the Fourth Fitnah. His prolific poetry ranged over topics such as hunting, poetic contests, and especially wine. His wine poems and his homoerotic poetry have made him a pariah in modern Arab states. There have even been book burnings.
I could not find any information about Jaafar Abu Tarab, the translator. He published a short gay novel, A Shadow in a Dream, around the same time as this book was published. I wish I knew more about him. I’d love to meet him.
This volume has translations of 17 poems out of a known homoerotic oeuvre of 500. Some are decidedly bawdy, some downright blunt in the description of sex. Others address longing for the lost lover. Here’s a taste of one of the less graphic of them.
The Lovers Blessed indeed are these two loving friends, They sleep through the night, in an embrace without end. They have loved each other since birth, so they say, With strong, equal loves, alike all the way. When Love came to them, they told him what to do: "Do the right thing, Love, and split love in two." So Love split himself, in two equal parts, Hard work! But no thwarting those strongly-knit hearts. Their two souls became one soul, and then That one soul lived in the two loving men. These two don't quarrel; they avoid any strife; They guard their love as more precious than life.
Ancillary reads to come
As I browsed searching for that volume of homoerotic Arabic poetry that I apparently do not have, I came across a number of reads that I may well take up shortly .
Arno Schmitt and Jehoeda Sofer’s Sexuality and Eroticism Among Males in Moslem Society (Harrington Park Press, 1992) is as far as I recollect a classic gay historical book of its time. Again, unlikely it could be published now for the same reasons as I argued above concerning the Luongo compilation. As with the translator above, there was no online information about either of these editors.
Abu Nuwas appears in Gay Tales and Verses from the Arabian Nights, edited by Henry M Christiansen (Banned Books, 1989). I bought my copy in 1989, and I am glad I did as I could not find any way to buy this now. Abu Nuwas appears in a number of other stories in the Arabian Nights apparently not included in this anthology. This should be a fun read.
A perhaps less fun but certainly deeply engaging read will be some of the essays compiled by J.W. Wright Jr. and Everett K. Rowson in Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (Columbia, 1997). This book was a gift from my third husband, Richard. A professor of mine, now emeritus, James T. Monroe has a piece “The Striptease Blamed on Abu Bakr’s Son: Was Father Being Shamed, or Was the Poet Having Fun”. For reference, Abu Bakr was the first caliph after Muhammed’s death, one of the so-called Rāshidūn or the rightly-guided first four caliphs. Monroe liked an essay I wrote; I regret that I did not take his advice and seek to have it published; or, broadly, I regret that I did not pay a lot more attention to him. There are some other notable names in this book including the eminent Franz Rosenthal. I will probably also mow through the generically named “Hierarchies of Gender, Ideology, and Power in Medieval Greek and Arabic Dream Poetry” if only because the author, Steven M. Oberhelman, does a nice description of the competition between social constructionism and essentialism in theorizing about homosexuality. He, though, seems to take a third, feminist moral position that the penis is merely and always an instrument of domination; what this means for homosexuality we’ll just have to see. Perhaps I’ll need another valium. (Dr. Oberhelman might profitably study Abu Nuwas’ poem quoted above.) Regardless of the probably moralistic conclusions, this would be a good deep dive into a controversy which torments us, leastwise those involved however tendentiously in theory, to this day.
And lastly, Robert Aldrich’s Colonialism and Homosexuality (Routledge, 2003) seems encyclopedic, deeply historical in its methodology (as opposed to the pointlessly theoretical), and sufficiently unjargonistic to appeal to my tastes. It is a massive tome, weighing in at almost four hundred pages of tiny type. I can get bogged down in books like that, but they remind me that retirement was supposed to involve a lot more reading and a lot less getting bogged down in gigantic books.
Maugham’s Malaysian Stories
Just a quick note on this collection of six short stories by the incomparable Somerset Maugham (Heinemann Asia, 1969). I bought my copy in 1986 in Singapore, fittingly enough. These stories are all set in what I would call the late high period of colonialism, all written before WWII, and they focus on unfortunate failings in the dreary sameness of the lives of lesser colonialists. There is a soft sorrow throughout. I think I will return to read the introduction by Anthony Burgess, my “favorite” author. Maugham in his personal life was a wild character, much given to lots of sex, most of it with men. But it is neither wildness nor lust that he portrays so effectively in these stories. It is tristesse, melancholy, resignation.
Real Dreams
For some reason I have at least four photo books by photographer Duane Michals (born 1932), acquired from the 70s through 2012. Curiously, one of them was a gift of my first husband, Gaetano, and another of my second husband, Nic. So these present scribblings include gifts from each of my three husbands. Nic and Richard are alive and well and married off to evidently more suitable partners than I. Gaetano died of the plague in 1993. I have a Polaroid of him sitting askew on the bookshelf to my left at the dinner table. A day does not go by that I do not think of him.
Michals is still active. He specializes in dreamy, story-like sequences of photos on which he handwrites notes and cues. His remarkable portaits, albeit of known characters, have the same dream-like quality.
I took a moment a few weeks ago for the first time to read the handwritten introduction to Real Dreams (Addison House, 1976). And it rather disturbed me.
I say that I have at least four Michals photo books because none of them has the sequence that most moved me; so there must be another one somewhere. That sequence concerns the precise moment when a young man passes his prime. It is burned in my mind, but damned if I can find the thing. It is so illustrative of the artistry with which Michals captures the human experience; his subjects are mostly gay or gay-ish, but they are nonetheless universal. I find a great soulfulness in the notion that each human experience is universal even in particularity. Everything human belongs to all of us, and anything that happens to one of us happens to all.
That is how I have read Michals’ poetic photography.
So I was a little taken aback at the studied, almost apathetic ambivalence of that introduction. There is a lot of depth, much that parallels what I have seen in his work. But there is also a retreat from responsibility that I found a little alarming. So, on the one hand, he says “We have a way of making the most extraordinary experiences ordinary. We actually work at destroying our miracles.” I find that challenging; it actually equally works the other way because we often make miraculous that which is ordinary. But, on the other hand, he says “Anyone who defines photography frightens me. They are photo-fascists, the limiters. We must struggle to free ourselves constantly, not only from ourselves, but especially from those who know.” Yes to free ourselves from our own limitations, but we free ourselves from knowledge and knowing and knowers, even as they constantly evolve and change and even morph into their opposites, at our own peril.
More to this point, I found a piece about him in a 2008 archive of the Philadelphia Weekly, in which he discusses his gay-themed work; unfortunately the archive only allows you to see the first page of the interview. He was asked whether he attended gay liberation events, and he replied “Oh no. I was too uncivil. I was very uncivil, and the gays rejected me and didn't want me to march. Apparently I gave them a bad name. No. I wasn't at the barricades. I wasn't invited, so I didn't show.”
I’m calling BS. Back in the gay liberation days prior to the AIDS epidemic, there was always a cohort of out gay people, both men and women, who held that attitude. That “the gays rejected them.” What the hell does that mean? Nobody needed an invitation; in fact, we were pointedly uninvited through the entire duration of our movement. Just as now with the infantile left and its pouting petulance, so then we were strident and demanding, likely quite annoying in our rigid certainties. But we had no friends, we only had ourselves. And we created a movement with only ourselves. Perhaps there is some personal episode behind Michals’ pissy statement. But what made gay liberation happen was the willingness to be publicly out of the closet. Openly. We needed you, Duane. You were invited! His words have the reek of a weak excuse. It sounds very much like he made that “most extraordinary experience” of gay people rising up to claim our humanity into something “ordinary”, a little fit of personal pique to undermine our miracle. Gay liberation and Michals’ quote above happened at the precise same moment in time and place and history.
In the end, though, I have to grant that Michals’ ambivalence overall is a gift. The artistic vision that still haunts me when I review his work is still there. And it is clearly built on that studied ambivalence. A comfort with, or leastwise a willingness to be immersed in, ambivalence is at the core of listening to our inner human, notwithstanding that sometimes certainty — or knowledge — is the tool for the job. I’ll let Michals’ words close this lengthy ramble:
“I once thought that time was horizontal, and if I looked straight ahead, I could see next Thursday. Now I think it is vertical, and diagonal, and perpendicular. It’s all very confusing.”