Cease-fire with my Father
by Mubarak S. Dahir

A gay Palestinian ponders peace, both political and personal

I talk to my father every time war breaks out in the Middle East.

Before this past weekend, I hadn’t spoken to him since the Gulf War in 1991, almost a decade ago.

But now there is a new war, and with it, I place another phone call.

War is exactly what’s going on right now in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel. Newspaper reports refer to it as "violence," and the Palestinians use intifada, the Arabic word for "uprising," to signal that it’s a revolt against occupation.

But in clear words, it is war.

A friend, a gay priest who lives in Arab East Jerusalem, where I was born, describes in an e-mail to me the scene he sees from his doorstep soon after the latest battles begin. Two brothers, men he knows, are among the hordes of protesters chanting slogans for Palestinian independence and hurling stones at nearby Israeli soldiers.

When the soldiers open fire into the crowd, a bullet pierces one of the brothers in the head, and his brains literally ooze out onto the streets. My friend describes in anguish how he watches the surviving man scoop up his brother and run, presumably for medical help. As he retreats carrying his wounded brother, a bullet hits him in the back, and the two of them fall to the ground together.

As of the writing of this column, somewhere around 200 Palestinians have been killed, many of them teenagers. At least another 6,000 have been wounded. About a dozen Israelis, mostly soldiers, have also died.

As a Palestinian, I had been watching the situation as closely as one can through the television screen and newspaper photos available to a New York City apartment. Partly, of course, I was watching the developments as anyone would whose country is being torn apart by war.

But I am also watching and thinking of another war, a more private one between myself and my dad, between a gay son and his tormented father.

It’s been 12 years since Sabir, my father, retired from our suburban Pennsylvania home to live out his final days in the land where he was born. My entire life he talked about returning to the Middle East. Despite 37 years here and an American passport, his dark skin and slight accent were enough to mark him forever by our small-town neighbors as "the foreigner," and I know he always felt like an outsider. When I was a teenager, he even moved the whole family to Jordan, where we lived for four years.

But it was not the permanent relocation he had hoped for, and we’d hardly stepped off the plane back in the United States when he started planning to return to the Middle East for his retirement. Margie, my American mother, long fluent in Arabic and devoted to her husband, was happy to follow him back.

I always suspected, however, that in the end, my father’s flight was at least partly to escape me, the gay son he could never embrace.

But he could never escape the fact I would not produce for him a son, an heir to the family name. So soon after my parents returned to the Middle East, the news came that after 30 years Sabir was divorcing my mother to marry a woman half his age. If his only son would not produce the obligatory grandson, he reasoned that the burden of carrying on the family name once again became his. My mother moved back to the United States one last time, to live out her final years with me. And at the age of a grandfather, Sabir became a new dad again. Today, at 77, he has four children, two boys and two girls, ranging between the ages of 2 and 10.

And that is where our personal war has remained deadlocked for more than a decade now.

I read over and over again the e-mail from my priest friend, count the growing numbers of dead and wounded, watch the images of devastation on the nightly TV news, and feel immediately guilty for drawing even linguistic comparisons between a personal conflict and one with such life and death stakes.

But the uncomfortable truth is that the two are inextricably linked in my life as a gay man and a Palestinian, however Americanized I may be.

Before the Cold War with my father, I was a Palestinian activist, organizing speakers and protests at my college campus, joining national Arab organizations, and writing frequently about the Palestinian cause. When I came out, I found myself ostracized from my Palestinian friends and family alike.

Though intellectually I understand that the struggle for a Palestinian state is separate from the cultural struggle over homosexuality, it is not so easy to clearly and cleanly divide up one’s own life. Though I fought against it, the cultural rift inevitably forced me to feel estranged from the politics. To borrow from an old adage, I found myself asking how I could be part of a revolution that wouldn’t let me dance.

And that uneasy state of not quite being at war with my father and my culture, and yet being nowhere near a truce either, is how things seem to remain for the most part.

Until war breaks out.

I fish through some old letters from Sabir until I find his cell phone number. Nervously, I dial.

"Hello," his voice sings from the other end, and I am gladdened by how strong he sounds, and surprised at my own joy.

Amazingly, we speak for half an hour, talking mostly of the war and the dangers and the curfews that even on the best days keep people prisoners inside their homes except for the few hours they are allowed to go buy food from 8 a.m. until noon. We talk about the prospects for an end to the war, the political one on the ground there, not the personal one that sits uncomfortable and unspoken between us.

When we have exhausted our words, we both hesitate, neither really wanting to hang up, neither really knowing what more to say.

"It was good to hear from you," Sabir says, and know he means it.

"I’m glad to hear your voice," I say, equally sincere.

And then the line goes dead, and I wonder if there is any hope for a lasting peace.

Living in Manhattan, Mubarak Dahir writes for a variety of queer publications, including The Advocate. He receives e-mail at MubarakDah@aol.com.