Queerness as Unknowing

Text contribution for A Book On A Proposed House Museum for the Unknown Crying Man, DAAD (with the support of AFAC), 2022

By Ismail Fayed

If we imagine that there is a historical thread connecting different notions and traditions of what love or desire is, creating a web of texts, that is spun out of the very pages of the books we see in this library. One part of the thread can lead to third century BCE Greece or maybe first century AD Arabia. For now, let us pivot a bit, and trace the Greek thread, led by Plato’s text, the Phaedo, parts of which animate some of the texts we see. We will discover that many of our ideas about humans and who they are were gradually emerging from the ashes of idealized political communities back then. The questions about bonds between people, what are they and what guides them were at the very heart and center of those debates in ancient Greece. Contrary to what we might think, the Greeks did not idealize any particular emancipated sense of sexuality or desire. The personification of desire, Eros, was always seen as bitter (sometimes sweet, sweetness always an afterthought) and always representing a lack. Something that remains unfulfilled, imperfect just like humans are. Plato, would go on to say, only humans are capable of love, the gods need not love anything, because they are perfect, they are absorbed in contemplating their own perfection. Humans on the other hand, turn their gaze, their thoughts, to those fleeting appearances of possibilities. The absence always pointing out to a potential present/presence.

Now lets turn our gaze back to our contemporary moment. We discover that Eros is still very much a disruptive force. Still very much an absence. The lack, lacunae, the omission that can be though of as the very definition of queerness. Much to the surprise and chagrin of many, nothing speaks to erotic and the homoerotic as this self-denied, self-censored tilt, desire, that is always subdued, suppressed, transmuted and constantly redefined as anything but. In thinking about the library of this museum, the UCM understood queerness before needing to read anything about it, or even knowing the term itself. For it is in absence, in the fraught space between what is sanctioned and what is maligned, that queerness exists.

The experience of queerness teaches us a lot about exile, rejection, and time. And the tension between what we know, what we understand and what is written, is very much akin to an erotic tension that Eros creates. Writing stories always points out to the potential presence of an absent character. And all the stories and texts in this library can be thought of as nothing more but an erotic interplay between a fraught absence and a desired, yet to be, presence. Perhaps if there is any meaning to knowing queerness, it is the unknowing of what is there, for that which might be.

If one tries to unearth a bit of this unknowing, this queer unknowing, through the library of this museum, a few stories and texts would stand out. They would emblematize the realization we have inherited since Plato -- love and desire are only meaningful in displacement or absence. In being haunted by specters of other spaces and other times, the Unknown Crying Man amassed this library, building on and extending the experiences of others who had been forced into exile—a definitive aspect of difference—before him: Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood and many others. Together with the space he exquisitely designed and decorated, the Unknown Crying Man can also be said to have constructed a haunted architecture of displacement and ghostly presences. We can think of it as the library of loss retrieved: a network of stories and experiences, fictive presences, all bound by motifs of escape, exile and memorialization, the latter always embedded in various acts of forgetting. 

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

The Unknown Crying Man owned several copies of Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, another exile who would flee to Istanbul, in 1961. Baldwin would live near Kabataş, not far from Cihangir, and, like the Unknown Crying Man, would make Istanbul his home for a decade. In both instances, the search for a space, a room (etymologically, the two are the same), where one is able to place aspects of what one is—aspects that are censured, persecuted, maligned—becomes a defining feature of the experiences of Baldwin and our protagonist. Baldwin would constantly create spectral spaces within spaces, his “outsider” status keeping him at a distance from his new-found homes (first Paris, then Istanbul). The Unknown Crying Man would do the same, hibernating in his villa and ruminating on the experience of trauma and the meaning of loss, as an outsider, away from the politics of the city and the more crude manifestations of its power. Always longing to create that space Baldwin so longingly wrote about.

Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness, of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow’s-feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The present is nothing more than a constant re-invoking of the past, and a secret wish for it to continue somehow into the future. It is the realization of finitude, of a mortality that drives the persistence of this wish. Another erotic tension? Perhaps. Hanging on the wall of the Unknown Crying Man’s dining room is an oil painting of decomposing fruit. It is tempting to think of it as mirroring the process of materializing forgetfulness; the fruit withers away in a manner akin to how forgetting eats away at our memories. Once again drawing on the metaphor of splitting projections of the self on canvases. An essentially queer truth, the self that always has to hide its shadow. A truth so shockingly captured in another library text, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde’s story shows how the mirror image assimilates the traumas of time and we remain intact. Wilde imaginatively reframes the embedded narcissism we harbor and pushes it to an extreme conclusion, a visual reminder that does exactly the opposite of what it is meant to do: it sustains the weight of time, so we don’t have to bear it. 

I turned my head to answer the person who was talking to me, and he swung his hand, slapping me on my cheek. I lost my balance from the shock of the slap and almost fell to the floor but another informant caught me in his arms and the officer chastised me saying: Look at me and answer quickly.

Sonallah Ibrahim, Sharaf

Lets for a moment shift our lens a bit, and go back to first century AD Arabia. The texts and stories we have from that time, are embedded in the much contested pre-Islamic poetry, which conceptualized love and desire, as suspension of the ordinary. A state so otherworldly, it can only be perceived in madness or sickness. The Arabs may not have Eros, but they have spirits that possess and cause ‘lovesickness’. Love and desire, are again the insatiable longing for that which can never be quenched. And although throughout its history since the first century AD Arabic poetry longed for many things, it too, reached a point of silence, a queer silence. Hence, the very few Arabic books in the Unknown Crying Man’s library. Is persecution and exile not part of the Arab experience of difference? It most certainly is, but it is never thought, never sounded off, never imagined and never spoken of. Arabic, as a language, in its modern form, is filled with many ruptures and silences. A myopic view, sometimes Victorian, sometimes religiously inflected, has limited and continues to limit what the language has said and what it should say.

One of the few Arabic texts in the Library, Sharaf or Honour (1997) by Sonallah Ibrahim, is such exception. Ibrahim, among very few other Arab writers, manages to infuse his protracted leftist diatribe with profound homoerotic and homosocial experiences that sit awkwardly in the midst of his materialist analysis. His protagonist, in search of beautiful clothes, falls victim to same-sex assault, and through the trials and tribulation of the (in)justice system, ends up in prison, where he becomes involved in intense same-sex experiences. In an exquisite poetic reversal, Sharaf, the protagonist, develops tender affection toward an inmate, a Sa‘idi, with honey-colored eyes, calloused hands and a galabeya—someone equally as marginalized and oppressed as he is. Their relationship blossoms in spite of himself and his initial fear and disgust of same-sex experiences. A poetic reversal, that is more poetic than it is queer.

I don’t do anything—much. Oh, please don’t think I sit around doing nothing! My glass collection takes up a good deal of time. Glass is something you have to take care of. 

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie 

The UCM’s library not only manifests queer unknowing but many of his most prized objects do as well. And nothing speaks to the idea of empty referent as poignantly as the Unknown Crying Man’s collection of crystal trophies displayed in his study. The trophies, representing accomplishments he would have liked to achieve, stand there on a shelf, at once shiny and solid but also blank and fragile. They constitute another fiction that, in the Unknown Crying Man’s isolation and longing, connects to another story: Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, a text that also sits in his library, not far from the trophies.

The Glass Menagerie, Williams’ first major successful play, is modeled after his own autobiographical experience, indulging in that exercise of exorcising one’s own sense of guilt and confinement. It can be read as an imagined resolution for conflicted feelings of attachment and separation, from family, from home, from himself. We create fictions that not only preserve the past, but also liberate us from the weight of these longings. The same way that Baldwin reconstructed that room, in Giovanni’s Room, outside time and space. In Williams’ play, Laura, the sister of the protagonist, Tom, escapes her world through a collection of glass figurines. Her favorite among them is the mythical unicorn, another empty referent to unfulfilled wishes. Laura spends her days polishing and attending to her menagerie, in the same way that Unknown Crying Man spends his days maintaining and admiring his crystal trophies.

Somewhere between myth-making and materializing hope and desire, our longings manifest themselves, heavy and fragile, clear and obscure, setting their presence against our absence and our absence against their presence, in an exquisite erotic tension. Only when the Unknown Crying Man disappears, the ultimate act of queerness, do the blank trophies finally stand for something: a celebration of all the wonder that could have been.