While I was away on vacation, things have been happening in the blogging world. I have just accessed my blogroll for the first time in a week and discovered that everybody is writing about an American graduate student in Scotland who has been blogging under the guise of a gay woman in Damascus. Now that he has been revealed to be a straight man in Great Britain, numerous blogs are almost exploding in condemnation of his “dishonesty.”
If you care to visit the actual blog (one that attracted over 2,000 followers and had over 800,000 hits since it was started this February), you will discover that, from the very beginning, the texts that are posted on it are announced as a novel, a work of fiction. I wouldn’t say it is a particularly good novel, but the author tried to make clear from the start that this is what it was. Posts are referred to as ‘chapters’ and are structured as such. Can anybody really doubt that 4-page-long dialogues cannot possibly be faithfully memorized by their participants and transmitted word-for-word? Any such account will of necessity be either fictional or fictionalized. Many of the posts on the blog are poems, which makes it even clearer that we are dealing with a work of fiction.
The reason why people are so upset about the ‘discovery’ that Amina Arraf is not a real person but a product of somebody’s imagination is that MacMaster managed to tap into a number of obsessions that currently preoccupy many liberal bloggers. What can be sexier in the mind of a progressive blogger than a gay Muslim woman persecuted during her fight for freedom within the framework of the Arab Spring? This was an image that was begging to be invented and, of course, it was. The West loves rewriting events happening in foreign places in its own language and in accordance with its own set of concerns. MacMaster did exactly what the absolute majority of commentators on foreign affairs do on a regular basis.
Talking to Westerners about feminism, gay rights, democracy, left and right, freedom, etc. is difficult because they so often refuse to recognize that these concepts can carry an entirely different meaning for people from other cultures. I studiously avoid any articles on Russian-speaking countries that appear in Western media because they keep trying to massage a very different reality into a set of concepts that are alien to it.
Of course, when a person called Amina Arraf with a suitably Arab (but still one that can be attractive to the Western gaze) appearance starts writing exactly what Western progressives want to hear from an Arab fighter for freedom and gay rights, everybody is extremely happy. Finally, these strange, incomprehensible people are giving us what we want and are speaking the language we have been eager to have them speak. When it’s revealed that the dream of the ‘correct’ Muslim gayness is nothing but a fantasy of an American blogger, the hope of finally encountering an embodiment of our pseudo-liberal fantasies is dashed and a wave of outrage is unleashed.
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