I Will Always Be Looking For You (excerpt)

Introduction by Ghiwa Sayegh

In 2022, I was invited to contribute to the anthology I Will Always Be Looking For You as a consulting editor. Edited by Yasmine Rifaii and Nadim Choufi and published by Haven for Artists, a Beirut-based, queer, underground art network, the collection hoped to “explore the set of political and aesthetic decisions that inform queer art making in the Arab region today and to think [...] how [artworks] can provide narratives and tools to understand queerness as a practice” and a queer way of life.

Little did we know the making of the book would unwillingly carry the burden of seeing our worlds shatter. Yasmine and Nadim’s introduction speaks to the economic crisis and the explosion of the Beirut port in 2020; the Sheikh Jarrah’s evictions of 2021; the war in Sudan and the full-blown onset of the genocide in Gaza in 2023; then the expansion of the colonial war to Lebanon in 2024. The abundance of labor that was put into the anthology infused it with this history, proving once more that even in terms of material production where our region is concerned, to work queerly is to not be bound by the colonially-defined borders. 

In this issue of Kohl, we have chosen to feature an excerpt from the introduction that traces queer genealogy through a shared culture of art across regional borders. Queer Arab art is everywhere; we just need to look at it differently to recognize it as such. In the same vein, one would be tempted to say that the book saw the light in spite of the annihilation wars of the past 5 years. But in many ways, it is because of them that our search for a world that paradoxically has always been, but is yet to be, remains a most urgent political endeavor. I Will Always Be Looking For You is a promise, a must, a lifelong commitment.

The anthology can be ordered at the following link: https://publicknowledgebooks.com/products/i-will-always-be-looking-for-you-a-queer-anthology-on-arab-art-1 

Excerpt from the Introduction to I Will Always Be Looking For You – An Anthology of Queer Arab Art by Yasmine Rifaii and Nadim Choufi

Picture a landscape. It’s the sea of Beirut. Light is shivering on the delicate surface of the water, kissing the horizon orange. You try to focus your gaze on a wave that does not hold still long enough to be remembered. Instead, it escapes the stillness of meaning as it races to its reckoning on the shore of the city. Imagine all of this beauty, the infinity of this moment, captured in a frame. The picture is but a fraction of the landscape, a part of it that can never encapsulate the view in its entirety.

I Will Always Be Looking For You is a picture of the queer Arab.

In the early summer of 2020, Dayna asked us, Yasmine and Nadim, if we would be interested in working on a research project that gathers a selection of queer art from the region. The conversation lasted the length of a cigarette: we accepted almost right away. What a pleasure it would be to publish an archival work that abounds with the talent and brilliance of the regional community! Before embarking on the research, we asked ourselves a few important questions: what will this archive look like, what should it do, and who will it be for? We wanted to present a body of work that came straight from the guts of the region—a book that looks into how Arabs have been producing queer works from within the homophobic smog of Arab cities (still preferred by many over the pinkwashed air freshener of the genocidal Global North). We wanted this book to look beyond an Arab’s gender or sexuality within art, and into the mechanisms and codes we utilize so that we may speak of such notions. I Will Always Be Looking For You centers in its methodology a refusal to comply, whether to the expectations of the readers, or to the traditional modes of research and publishing.

And so, this publication was created out of a desire to look for queer Arab art without attempting to seize it. It does not endeavor to define or legitimize it as a category, or examine its paradoxical framework as exceptional. Rather, it is an exercise in observing what the merging of queerness and Arabness can look or feel like in an artwork, and letting it take shape, dissipate, and transform.

To embark on such a research, we began by looking for our queer Arab ancestors. In our belief that they existed—in our conviction that, if they have lived like us, then they were probably many—we remembered them. We had the desire to find their names, faces, and locations, to try and “prove without doubt” that we have existed as long as any other Arab has on this land. After this initial desire came a transformative realization: our queer ancestors were not only forcibly absented from historical archives; they may have often willingly concealed their spatial and temporal contexts to ensure their survival. The act of “willingly hiding” was, and still is today, an indirect forced erasure. What is also true is that the expressions and languages of our ancestors, like ours today, were produced in duality with (and resistance to) this continuous erasure, and omitting that reality from the rendering of our lives would mean distorting the truth. Our search for these contextual indicators became trivial.

Love and queerness have a history of being tongue-tied around each other. To profess both can fulfill yet endanger what each holds. Self-combusting. It is also why much of queer love is hidden like “this kiss [that] marked our lips and left us” in Musa Al-Shadidi’s essay on Akram Zaatari and Mahmoud Khaled. Yet al-Shadidi shows us that, where it hides and who it hides from, is also its power in dismantling queerness from the western politics of visibility. If you want to search for the queer Arab in the archive, as you would in this book, you will always be looking for them. As such, if we were to look into queer loving/living, we needed not only to look away from the normative dominant narrative, but to also look differently. We could only reach our past by sifting carefully through history for queer remnants willingly left for us to find, without disrupting the mechanisms of protection that queers, before us, had utilized for their continuation.

With that methodology in mind, we took on the difficult task of curating what would be included in this publication, and we carefully selected a series of artworks that illustrate how versatile queerness can be. We conducted interviews with the artists, asking them how they viewed their works. Some of the artists in the book consider their work as queer, while some don’t, but all were generous enough to think with us about how the works portray a fragment of queer living in other people’s eyes. We then invited writers from 13 different Arabic- speaking countries to look at the visual artworks and artists we paired them with, and to respond with a written contribution, however they may like it to be. We received reviews, historical analyses, and academic essays, as well as fiction, poetry, scripts, dialogues, and even illustrations. Arab Queerness was presented to the writers as a theme to tackle and refute, and they have all made sure to do so with utmost pleasure and mischief. Their positions engage with Arabness in different ways: some self-identify as Arab, some reject it, some are shaped by the forced Arabization of their communities, and some twirl through all these identities. The contributors wrote not only of queerness, but queerly. They played with chronologies and geographies, with words and their meanings, names and even dates, and heavily leaned on imagination when looking at both the past and the present. They personalized the texts with nods to dark theatres, forgotten TV shows, bright exhibition rooms, cafés, markets, books and songs, beaches, towns, and cities. Spaces that have witnessed our passionate love and unwavering determination, where our queerness once was and still is possible. The result is a book where queerness is not always present, exposed, and interrogated, but it is constantly manifested, made to come alive in unexpected forms through the writings accompanying the works. What you get out of this book is a dance, and it changes every time. We hope you allow it to change with you.