Countermemories of desire: Female homosexuality,“coming out” narratives,and British multiculturalism in Shamim Sarif’s I Can’t Think Straight

Abstract

This article examines Shamim Sarif’s novel I Can’t Think Straight (2008), with occasional reference to the film of the same title, and in light of intersecting issues of ethnicity, religion, and sexuality in multicultural Britain. It argues that Sarif’s narratives, which depict the burgeoning romantic relationship between a British woman of Muslim heritage and a Christian Arab woman with ethnic links to Palestine, challenge the Western stereotypes of Muslim and Arab women as submissive and of their male counterparts as uniformly patriarchal, which have become all the more prevalent since 9/11. It also examines the collusion in British and cosmopolitan contexts, as evidenced in Sarif’s texts, of religious and Western medical discourses about homosexuality that denounce it as a disease. The article assesses these qualms as cultural values more closely aligned to social status and religious practice than to strict religious dogma. It also surmises that, despite Sarif’s configuration of same-sex desire in relation to the Western cultural model of “coming out”, which is shown as potentially homonormative, and in spite of the limited vistas offered by her narrow class perspective, her deployment of queer bodies helps to forge a clandestine countermemory challenging the contemporary Islamist erasure of female homosexuality. The article demonstrates that Sarif’s queer narratives act as a welcome antidote to the routine omission of the dissident perspectives of non-normative women of Muslim and Arabic ethnic heritage in dominant LGBTIQ discourses in the West, as well as in contemporary debates about British multiculturalism.

Homosexuality is still a taboo in many global Muslim communities. As Oliver Leaman remarks, “[h]omosexuality is often regarded as a feature of western decadence that does not and should not exist in Muslim communities, and if it does, then it is merely a reflection of the unwelcome spread of corrupt ideas from without” (2014: 86). In response to this rejection of homosexuality, queer tafasir, or scholarly commentaries on the Qur’an and its attendant traditions revising dominant ideological positions regarding sexuality, have been gathering momentum for the last decade. For example, Samar Habib (2007) and Scott al-Haqq Kugle (2010) analyse Islamic scriptures and cultural representations which contradict the idea of a categorical Islamic dismissal of homosexuality, additionally showing how homosexuality has not always been a taboo in Islamicate cultures. Challenging the categorical nature of current Islamic homophobia, it is often the stories told by diasporic non-normative Muslims which foreground discussions of sexual orientation in Muslim-minority countries such as Britain. Moreover, the continued focus on masculine sexual performance and the obsession with framing Muslims as either terrorists or in need of being rescued (Morey and Yaqin, 2011) have entailed a comparative ignorance of Muslim female same-sex desire. The work of writer and filmmaker Shamim Sarif (b. 1969), a British woman of South Asian Muslim heritage, ensures that narratives exploring non-normative Muslim diasporic female sexualities have their rightful place in contemporary British culture. Sarif’s literary début, The World Unseen (2011b), first published in 2001, constitutes an exploration of South African apartheid in the 1950s ¹ with some familial inspiration. Sarif’s second novel formed the basis of her first film as a screenwriter and director, I Can’t Think Straight (2008), which offers a semi-autobiographical account of the development of Sarif’s relationship with her civil partner, Hanan Kattan, a Palestinian-Jordanian woman of Christian Arab heritage who has become Sarif’s regular film producer. The story deals with the cultural and familial obstacles a lesbian couple must overcome in the national and diasporic spaces of contemporary Britain and Jordan.

The relationship between the literary and cinematic versions of I Can’t Think Straight is a curiously symbiotic one; interviewed by Regina Marler, Sarif reveals that she had finished a first draft of the novel by the time she started preparing the film, whose script was written in collaboration with screenwriter Kelly Moss. After the film’s completion, Sarif returned to the novel. In the book’s acknowledgements, she candidly states that she “managed to shamelessly appropriate some of the best lines that Kelly wrote for the film and use them in this book” (Sarif, 2008: 4), ² yet she also admits that “[s]ome scenes are coming out very different!” (Marler, 2008: 57). Ronnie Scheib argues that “[i]n both cases, Sharif’s novels have suffered in translation to the screen, with detail and subtlety sacrificed to point-making exposition and broad caricature” (2008: 37). Due both to modal differences and to Sarif’s beginnings as a novelist, the literary version of I Can’t Think Straight can focus more keenly on characters’ interiority, whereas the film, with its subscription to the techniques of the romantic comedy, sometimes offers caricatured representations which may be deemed problematic. For instance, the comically vindictive Indian housemaid, Rani (played by Nina Wadia), regularly spits into the various drinks made for her snobbish Palestinian mistress, Reema (played by Antonia Frering), whose tasteless materialism perpetuates the stereotype of the rich cosmopolitan Arab. In her own defence, Sarif explains that her cinematic efforts “aren’t meant to be traditional art house or experimental films” and that she is “definitely looking for strong story arcs and characterizations” (Oumano, 2010: 99). In opting for conventional cinematic narratives, Sarif is queering the mainstream, making previously unheard stories intelligible through a popular medium that is accessible to both LGBTIQ viewers and wider global audiences.

This article constitutes the first critical examination of Sarif’s novel, with some important evidence being drawn from the eponymous film. It explores the ways in which Sarif’s narratives undertake a critique of intersecting issues of gender, ethnicity, faith, and sexuality, albeit with certain ideological and cultural limitations. Written and produced in the decade following 9/11, Sarif’s novel and film have to compete with robust Western ideologies denouncing Islam’s incompatibility with Western liberalism. Against this backdrop, Aleardo Zanghellini asserts that “homosexuality has become one of the principal battlegrounds over which normative contemporary Western identity and its Muslim counterpart are being enacted and consolidated”, rendering it “a particularly suitable field on which to enact the contest of identity politics” (2010: 269–70). In addition, Momin Rahman (2014) suggests that homophobia and Islamophobia are engaged in a process of triangulation, whereby Muslim anti-Western homophobia and Western Islamophobia endlessly reinforce each other. He also argues that queer diasporic Muslims face constant scrutiny both for being members of a vilified ethnic minority in the West and for being incompatibly queer. However, as Fatima El Tayeb observes,

Islam’s positions on women’s rights and homosexuality are already vigorously debated in Muslim communities, often invisible to a dominant society still not ready to enter an open dialogue — and to a gay and lesbian community not ready to include Muslim queers. (2011: 103)

Sarif’s narratives help us undertake a triangular critique of diasporic British monoculturalism, ³ Islamic homophobia, and Western Islamophobia. As we will see, Sarif’s novel and film are forced to wrestle with the double burden of two economies of desire: on the one hand, a heteronormative South Asian and Arab familial and societal affective legacy imbued with Christian and Muslim dogma; and, on the other, dominant Western LGBTIQ discourses that ring with the culturally superior tones of Western sexual exceptionalism. At times, Sarif’s narratives risk becoming complicit with homonormativity, ⁴ as is the case with her “coming out” narrative device. However, in response to the contemporary absence of Islamicate or Arab cultural archives of same-sex desire, I would like to argue here that Sarif’s deployment of queer bodies helps her forge what Gayatri Gopinath calls, via Joseph Roach, “clandestine countermemories” (2005: 4), challenging the discursive erasure of female homosexuality. Sarif’s efforts are symptomatic of a burgeoning global interest in the topic of Islam and same-sex desire, in both national and diasporic contexts, ⁵ and her contributions exemplify the complex predicament of second-generation queer diasporic subjects born and bred in Britain who are torn between the competing values of their countries of birth and of their migrant communities.

I Can’t Think Straight tells the love story of Tala, a young Palestinian-Jordanian woman spending her time between Amman and London, and Leyla, a young British woman of South Asian heritage based in suburban London. Gopinath suggests that “all too often diasporas are narrativized through the bonds of relationality between men” (2005: 5). ⁶ In response, Sarif gives prominence to the dialectic relationship between diasporic and cosmopolitan women in Britain. In I Can’t Think Straight, young women of South Asian and Arab heritage are not confined to domestic spaces or expected to depend financially on men, yet they are often co-opted into their fathers’ businesses. For instance, budding writer Leyla is forced to refuse her father’s entreaties to take a more active role in his life insurance firm, and Tala has started her own trading business selling Palestinian products in the West. As she tells her fiancé, Hani: “I have to make it work. My father’s already pressing me to come back to the family business” (11). ⁷ Sarif’s diasporic and cosmopolitan women are defiant of familial expectations, offering a positive challenge to gender roles in diasporic Muslim and cosmopolitan Arab communities in Britain, whilst unsettling the image, often conjured up in the West, of the repressed and domesticated Muslim or Middle Eastern woman.

Marriage is still, nonetheless, the ultimate destination for Sarif’s two female protagonists, at least in their families’ views, and not just any form of heterosexual legal union, but one which remains within strict ethnoreligious boundaries and which is financially advantageous. Tala’s mother, Reema, throws a lavish engagement party for her eldest daughter in order “to ensure that nobody missed the fact that this final fiancé outshone even the three wealthy heirs she had previously been promised to, because Hani was handsome and articulate, as well as Palestinian, Christian and rich” (18). In Reema’s assessment, Hani’s physical and intellectual attributes only help complement the circumstances that really matter: his ethnicity, religion, and economic status. Tala defends her choice while speaking to her uncle when he tells her: “[o]f course you love him. He’s Christian and he’s rich”, to which she responds: “[h]e’s kind and honest and forward-thinking. And handsome” (19). Tala’s emphasis falls on personal qualities, yet when she later discusses relationships with Leyla, she cannot help making manifest her internalized societal and familial expectations: “‘The third [fiancé] ticked all the boxes — good family, Christian Arab, intelligent, handsome. But it just didn’t click’. She looked to Leyla for understanding and received it in the glance back” (58). Sarif’s narrator highlights Leyla’s sympathy for Tala because she herself has internalized the culturally-enforced necessity to find a prospective life partner that “ticked all the boxes”. Her current boyfriend, Ali, is the person who introduces her to Tala and her family. At their initial meeting in Tala’s second family home in London, Leyla is already probed by Tala’s mother about their two-month relationship. Reema’s intrusive cross-questioning forces Leyla to assess the foundations of their relationship, expressed more fully in the novel’s exploration of Leyla’s thoughts: “And since she came from the same religious background as he, and since he had the advantage of money, business acumen and charm it would have been inconceivable for her to turn him down when he asked for a date” (30). As a young British Muslim woman, Leyla has been socially conditioned to accept the advances of suitors of her same religious background.

Sarif’s narratives suggest that, as regards marriage, British Muslim and cosmopolitan Arab communities are too religiously exclusive and that they foster monoculturalism rather than multicultural exchange, although they show how this is not just a symptom of a crisis in British multiculturalism but also affects Christian families based in both Britain and the Middle East. Indeed, the culturally hermetic character of ethnoreligious unions does not chiefly affect Christian Tala and Muslim Leyla, who, as we shall see, are sometimes at loggerheads regarding the provenance of their values, but also Tala’s “good” and “bad” sisters, sensitive Zina (played in the film by Kimberly Jaraj) and materialistic Lamia (played by Anya Lahiri). In a scene of sisterly intimacy depicted in both the novel and the film, Zina confides to Tala that her Jewish boyfriend has broken up with her because she is of Palestinian Muslim heritage: “He can’t imagine being married to a non-Jew […] he wants Jewish kids and Hannakah and Passover … it would be impossible” (117, 118). Conversely, we find out in the novel that materialistic Lamia, who is jealous of her family’s continuous investment in Tala’s relationships, has previously been romantically entangled with a Muslim boy working in her father’s business. Apart from being of lesser financial status, which was not totally insurmountable, “he was also Muslim, and that, Lamia knew, was nothing less than impossible. He told her that his family would not accept her if she remained a Christian, and she knew that hers would never countenance a conversion to Islam” (85). Lamia makes the mistake of confessing her relationship to her mother, who pats her daughter’s back reassuringly before immediately laying him off. Reema’s upholding of religious exclusivism shows to what extent religious identity is not a matter of free choice, but of familial and cultural inheritance, and often wilfully policed.

Tariq Modood argues that British liberal secularists believe gender, sexuality, and race “are not chosen, whereas religion is something one can walk away from” (2010: 42). Although Sarif’s characters gradually walk away from organized religion, her narratives confirm Modood’s assertion that “[n]o one chooses to be or not to be born into a Muslim family” (2010: 42). In fact, in Tala and Leyla’s initial meeting at Tala’s family’s London home, Tala wrestles with the identitarian religious model and teases both her mother and later Leyla herself about religious conditioning when one is born into a British Muslim family. She later questions Leyla’s beliefs: “But did you prefer Islam? Or do you prefer it because you were brought up with it? How would your parents feel if you ‘preferred’ Judaism?” (38). At first, Leyla is unsettled by Tala’s pointed questions, yet at their second meeting, Leyla confesses that Tala has made her think “[a]bout why we follow certain paths. Is it just expectation? Or conditioning?” (53). In addition, Sara Ahmed suggests that subjects “inherit the proximity of certain objects […]. These objects are not only material: they are values, capital, aspirations, projects, and styles” (2006: 86). Sarif’s narratives construct familial religious conditioning as a negative influence which circumscribes the social and romantic prospects of British Muslims and cosmopolitan Arabs, since they are expected to remain within the boundaries of their ethnoreligious communities. In Leyla’s case, her identity as a second-generation diasporic British citizen is in tension with the values and aspirations of her Muslim family, and she resists following the lines of traditional religious practice, illustrating her ideological struggle with her religious inheritance.

In a conversation with her father, Sam, about missing Friday prayers at the mosque, Leyla mildly reassures him: “Dad, I believe in our religion. You know I do. I just don’t like to go when everyone else does”, to which he retorts, half-jokingly: “If you don’t go with everyone else, how will they know you’re a good Muslim?” (27–28). The issue here, echoed later by Leyla’s mother, seems to be not so much with either moral or spiritual orthodoxy, but with orthopraxy, or adherence to “correct” religious performance. For Leyla’s family, religious observance involves a collective performance which sits awkwardly with Leyla’s second-generation diasporic perspective in Britain. Sarif’s narratives suggest that religion is not a matter of choice for those born into particular religious communities, and that the expected adherence to religious tradition involves a struggle for British diasporic subjects. Crucially, the exploration of Muslim and Arab communities’ monocultural biases runs alongside Sarif’s critique of their equally prescriptive heteronormativity. Elena Oumano declares that “sexual preference is largely irrelevant to [Sarif’s] films. Sarif’s paramount concern is exploring the issue of ‘finding one’s own place within the culture and family that one is born into, something most people grapple with as they mature’” (2010: 266). Conversely, I would argue that sexual orientation is of the utmost centrality to I Can’t Think Straight, since the film focuses on how sexual non-normativity contravenes the overlapping cultural and religious values of Leyla’s British Muslim and Tala’s cosmopolitan Arab families.

Tala and Leyla, played in the film by Canadian South Asian Lisa Ray, the star of Deepa Mehta’s Water (2005), and by American South Asian Sheetal Sheth, begin their romantic relationship in the quintessentially English space of Oxford, on a shopping trip covertly used to get to know each other better. The queer presence of a British Muslim and a Christian Arab same-sex female couple in this iconic seat of English higher learning constitutes an antidote to what Gopinath calls “the unthinkability of a queer female subject position within various mappings of nation and diaspora” (2005: 15). However, their erotic sojourn is cut short by an enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality. Tala’s jealous sister, Lamia, who accompanies the two women, suspects their intimate bond, and drops enough clues for their mother to find out about their liaison. Alarmed, Reema quickly manufactures a plot to bring Tala’s fiancé, Hani, on a surprise trip to London that will discourage Tala’s homosexual tendencies. Reema and Hani catch Tala and Leyla in flagrante just as they return from their trip to Oxford. Reema intently looks on the scene while Tala and Hani greet each other with a passionate kiss, as she also watches the effect of this heterosexual gesture on Leyla. According to Ahmed,

[w]e can reconsider how one “becomes straight” by reflecting on how an orientation, as a direction (taken) towards objects and others, is made compulsory. In other words, subjects are required to “tend toward” some objects and not others as a condition of familial as well as social love. (2006: 85)

In Ahmed’s consideration of sexual orientation, she ponders how subjects are made to “become straight” by being socially and familially conditioned to tend towards some objects (heterosexual partners) and not others (homosexual ones). In the scene described above, Tala’s mother purposefully throws Tala towards Hani and away from Leyla, in a way that makes heterosexuality compulsory. After this incident, conditioned by familial and social love, Tala chooses to honour her publicly sanctioned relationship with Hani and is forced to leave Leyla.

However, Leyla’s eyes have been opened by her affair with Tala to the inexorability of her same-sex desire and she sees no way back to Ali or to pretending to be heterosexual. She decides to “come out” to her family, and will eventually persuade Tala to do the same, as a condition of their relationship. Familial responses to their homosexuality constitute a typical assemblage of mainstream religious dogma and internalized Western homophobia. Leyla stuns her mother, Maya, by proclaiming: “I’m gay!” Leyla’s father, Sam, joins their conversation in the kitchen. After Leyla repeats her confession, he retorts, with perfect comic timing: “But I’ve only been gone two hours” (147). Maya’s rage escalates, and the following argument takes place:

“First you stop coming to mosque, now you are up to your neck in sin!”

“It’s not a sin.”

“It’s a huge sin.”

“According to who?” Leyla was close to tears now.

“According to God!” Maya yelled.

“What kind of a God is that? I don’t accept it!” Leyla yelled back.

“Then you will burn in hell,” stated Maya […].

“That’s enough.” Sam’s firm voice cut through the thick air and brought Maya to a stop. (148)

This dialogue features Maya’s mainstream Muslim reaction to Leyla’s alleged “deviance”. It is believed by many Muslims that homosexuality is a sin explicitly censured by God, despite historical debate surrounding same-sex relations, indexed in the introduction, that rebuts this dogma as a given. Surprisingly, Sam comes to their daughter’s rescue. Leyla subsequently tells him: “If I could help it, I would, […] [b]ut I can’t”. He responds, soothingly: “I know, […]. I know” (149). In the film, father and daughter embrace at this point. Here, Sarif is opposing dominant Western Islamophobia, particularly the stereotype of the conservative and homophobic Muslim patriarch, while disorganizing dominant gendered narrative structures. Gopinath argues that “the oedipal relations between fathers and sons [often serve] as a central and recurring feature within diasporic narratives” (2005: 5). I Can’t Think Straight extends British diasporic gender debates often focused on fathers and sons, while qualifying Western notions of Islamic patriarchy by depicting the supportive relationship between a Muslim father and his homosexual daughter, hence opposing mainstream Western conceptions of Muslim men as universally homophobic and misogynistic. These popular images of intolerant and oppressive Muslim fathers have been circulated routinely in the West both before and since 9/11, and have contributed to discourses of justification for military intervention in Muslim-majority countries.

Nonetheless, Sarif’s queer mirroring of oedipal relations is partly undertaken at the expense of the other women in her work. Sarif’s depiction of the censorious Muslim and Arab matriarch is somewhat redolent, for instance, of several of Salman Rushdie’s ferocious female characters. ⁸ Yet, despite Sarif’s exaggerated construction of Reema as the epitome of maternal ruthlessness, she is also keen to dissect Maya’s religious zeal, her homophobia shown, not unsympathetically, as being culturally conditioned. Whereas Maya’s initial condemnation of homosexuality invokes God’s censure, her qualms about her daughter’s sexual orientation gradually intersect with Western medical discourse. This demonstrates that Muslim homophobia is not purely Islamic, but intermingles with Western models of homophobia. When Leyla’s supportive sister Yasmin jokes about the fact that Leyla “can’t think straight at all”, Maya surmises that “it had something to do with Leyla and her affliction” (165; emphasis added). She later offers, “What do two women do together? […] It’s not natural” (167; emphasis added). Analysing the current collusion of Islamist and Western homophobic discourses, Olivier Roy suggests that “[e]ven when the mainstream Muslim approach in the West is very conservative (towards homosexuality or abortion, for example), it is usually expressed in line with the position of the Catholic Church or Christian Right” (2004: 32), which reveals not a “pure” Islamic conception of sexuality, but an assemblage of various models of homophobia. In fact, Maya’s medicalized perspective on her daughter’s homosexuality has much in common with the Christian perspective of Tala’s mother, who ponders: “she would have to find a way to cure Tala of this” (194; emphasis added). We can perceive here the intersection of Muslim and Christian religious dogmas with a medical view of homosexuality as a disease, which constitutes the legacy of nineteenth-century Western homophobia. Moreover, although Maya’s initial outrage seemed provoked by Leyla’s spiritual degeneration, the novel’s exploration of her interiority illustrates that her discontent is more linked to cultural practice than to religious orthodoxy: “Without [Leyla’s marriage], without the preparations and shopping and congratulations and general elevation of status amongst her peers at the mosque, she could not imagine what else could be left for her” (167). Instead of referring to any scriptural traditions, Maya’s main concern is with social perception, and with her own status within her ethnic community. Sarif’s depiction of Maya’s social anxiety, which is not dissimilar to her husband’s opinion on Leyla’s scant mosque attendance, suggests that some British Muslims are not so much troubled by homosexuality as a moral transgression as by its being detrimental to their social status in diasporic Muslim communities in Britain.

In relation to Leyla’s and Tala’s journeys towards sexual liberation and away from compulsory heterosexuality, Sarif’s texts are visibly drawn to a Western model of sexuality and gay cultural archive, exposing the limitations of Sarif’s intersectional critique. Leyla’s British and middle-class liberal embrace of Western lesbian icons and of “coming out” as the only possible option for queer citizens either in Britain, or elsewhere, constitutes a problematic example of homonormativity, which reproduces Western exceptionalism at the expense of cultural difference. In both the novel and the film, Leyla’s perceptive sister Yasmin (Amber Rose Revah) visits Leyla’s attic bedsit in their family home, where she realizes her older sister may be struggling with her sexual orientation: “Yasmin recalled that Leyla has been playing the new kd lang CD almost non stop recently” (65). Both the novel and film versions of I Can’t Think Straight also refer to popular representations of female homosexuality on American TV: when, later in the narrative, Yasmin questions Ali’s naivety about Tala and Leyla’s relationship, she says: “Listen, did you ever see the TV show, ‘The L Word’?” (178). However, the film is more emphatic than the novel about Leyla’s lesbian cultural archive. Sarif’s shot of Leyla’s room offers a candid view of it in the shape of a significant tower of books, containing: the short story collection, A Haunted House (1943), by first-wave feminist icon Virginia Woolf; lesbian tennis player Martina Navratilova’s autobiography, Being Myself (1985); Jeanette Winterson’s edited collection of lesbian short fiction, Passion Fruit (1986); Sarah Waters’ neo-Victorian revisionist lesbian novel, Fingersmith (2002); and lastly, tentatively placed at the bottom, Sarif’s second novel, Despite the Falling Snow (2011a). In this mise-en-scène, Sarif places her work in line with a Western and decidedly Anglophone lesbian canon, while establishing her position as a minority ethnic pioneer of sexual dissidence, for hers is the only contribution of any writer of Muslim heritage. Nonetheless, her embrace of a Western lesbian canon and model of sexual liberation also entails a narrow subscription to Western liberal values, and the implication of a lack of commensurability with other cultures.

For instance, although Tala breaks up with Hani on the morning of their wedding, Leyla will not give her relationship with Tala a second chance unless she follows her example and “comes out” to her Middle Eastern family, in a manner that obviates ideological as well as cultural differences. Palestinian-Jordanian Tala is highly conscious of social censure, and bluntly tells Leyla after their first night together: “This is not a way to live […] It’s not easy. It’s not acceptable” (93), to which Leyla responds with homonationalist aplomb: “You live in the West now” (94). Although Jasbir K. Puar (2007) focuses on American forms of homonormativity, her assessment of the ways in which the US propounds its exceptionalism at the expense of constructing “other” nations and citizens as inferior is applicable to Sarif’s British depiction of other countries and cultures. Sarif’s characters often describe the Middle East as a place of ideological stasis; as Hani tells Tala: “Amman was the same, […], nothing ever changed” (78). When Leyla presses Tala to be honest with her family about her sexual orientation, the latter is pessimistic about Jordanian tolerance of homosexuality: “Look, Leyla, you don’t understand. The Middle East is an unforgiving place. And my parents have a strong presence in that world, and it’s a culture that doesn’t change” (186–87). As a privileged middle-class Briton, Leyla admittedly does not “understand” the position of those outside her ethnicity and nationality. Sarif’s potentially Orientalizing depiction of the Middle East as culturally and ideologically fixed, as opposed to the West’s implied social progress, does little to conceal Sarif’s partial perspective as a British writer and filmmaker. Leyla ultimately triumphs, and Tala comes out to her parents, after which she tellingly takes refuge in London, this being the prerogative of her affluent middle-class position. Sarif’s narrative constructs Britain as the place of sexual exceptionalism, and “coming out” as the only tenable model of sexual liberation. In favouring such a dominant model, Sarif is ostensibly siding with what Joseph A. Massad has famously called the “Gay International” (2007), occluding British and other global cases in which “coming out” may be materially and socially unadvisable or dangerous, and failing to countenance any other forms of sexual liberation. Yet, for all the epistemic violence inherent to this embrace of one single form of sexual emancipation, Habib also reminds us, “life for individuals with non-normative sexuality in the Arab and Muslim world may be lived inside a culturally unique closet, but a closet is still a closet” (2010: xxix). This means that keeping one’s homosexuality a secret, despite different cultural codifications, remains at heart a universal condition for which the closet is simply “another trope” (2010: xxx). Habib’s judiciousness about the arbitrariness of nomenclatures and her highlighting of commonalities across geographical borders and cultural predicaments can help us overlook the more homonormative tones of some of Sarif’s characters and to appreciate the visibility it bestows on lesbian characters whose stories would have otherwise been easily elided, particularly given the precariousness of discussions of female homosexuality in Muslim and Arabic contexts.

As a British citizen of South Asian Muslim heritage, Sarif and her self-fashioned character, Leyla, have been brought up in a diasporic Muslim community in Britain whose uprooting from South Asia and rerooting in the “West” involves her family’s subscription to global Islamic values. Amanullah De Sondy (2014) points out the persisting influence in South Asia, as well as globally, of Syed Abul A’la Mawdudi’s anticolonial interpretation of Islam, arguing that much of the tenor of global mainstream Islam regarding women’s roles and sexual “deviance” harkens back to his work. This astringent interpretation of Islam includes a dismissal of centuries’ worth of Muslim non-normativity, including an Islamicate homoerotic archive. In light of such glaring absence, Sarif utilizes Tala and Leyla to forge her own version of same-sex desire, their bodies becoming an antidote to the current silencing of Islamicate female homoeroticism.

Sarif is a more adept and experienced novelist than a filmmaker at depicting her characters’ sensations and interactions, in ways that chime with Ahmed’s consideration of queer phenomenology. Ahmed surmises that

[w]e are turned towards things. […] We perceive them insofar as they are near to us, insofar as we share a residence with them. Perception hence involves orientation; what is perceived depends on where we are located, which gives us a certain take on things. (2006: 27)

Location and perception are both central to orientation, and sensorial proximity can affect queer subjects’ perspective on themselves and others, which is significant for Sarif’s forging of interpersonal connections in multicultural Britain. For Tala and Leyla, interaction with each other involves a positive reorientation in terms of desire. In Tala and Leyla’s first intimate scene in their hotel room in Oxford, they do not talk, but let their instinctive movements speak for themselves, their kissing “arousing a desire [Tala] had denied at every moment” (90), which suggests an excavation of feelings previously repressed, both ideologically and culturally. This is followed by a significant homoerotic moment: “Now Leyla gave an audible sigh, an intake of breath as Tala reached the centre of her, and together they began to move against each other in a rhythm that neither had to search for” (90; emphasis added). Sarif constructs her protagonists’ same-sex desire as manifesting itself instinctively. Habib reminds us elsewhere that these same-sex acts have a definite place in Arab, including Islamicate, cultures:

For female homosexual behaviour, the term most commonly used in both past and present Arab-speaking cultures is suĥaq [“grinding”] […]. Anatomically speaking, the word “grinding” is in reference to the rubbing of clitorises against each other, or presumably, against the lover’s or beloved’s body parts. (2007: 17)

Tala and Leyla find a shared homoerotic rhythm that has been discursively silenced by dominant versions of Islam, yet not empirically eradicated, and which allows them to connect with each other phenomenologically. Despite Sarif’s novel’s lack of access to a cultural archive that can give her characters an Islamicate erotic language, her depiction of interpersonal physical communion restores suppressed female same-sex desire through first-hand bodily interaction, fruitfully acting as a material corrective to Islamist discursive erasure.

In addition, Tala and Leyla are reinscribing female homosexuality onto Muslim and Arab cultures while simultaneously contesting diasporic normativity in Britain. Gopinath asserts that “[q]ueer diasporic cultural forms […] enact what [Joseph] Roach terms ‘clandestine countermemories’ that bring into the present those pasts that are deliberately forgotten within conventional nationalist or diasporic scripts” (2005: 5). Although Gopinath is referring to forgetfulness about the colonial past, her point can be extrapolated to the current Islamist erasure of homoeroticism in the collective Muslim past. Tala and Leyla’s interfaith homosexual affair challenges the conservatism of traditional diasporic communities in Britain, which deny both inter-ethnic intimacy and the historicity of Islamicate homosexuality. The reciprocated “unthinkable” desire of a Christian Jordanian woman towards a British Muslim woman is given due visibility in Sarif’s queer narrative. In the final sex scene described in the book, Leyla and Tala’s bodies become an assemblage of identities previously deemed incompatible by normative British nationalist and diasporic ideologies: “Shaking, [Leyla] slid down on top of Tala, who held her close against her own skin, their bodies fused together, so that, in the indefinable world revealed by her heightened senses, Leyla could not tell where hers ended and Tala’s began” (202). Here, Leyla’s senses, erotically oriented towards Tala, create a symbiosis between her and Tala’s bodies, forging, through reciprocated homoeroticism, a clandestine countermemory that challenges dominant ethnoreligious exclusivism and homophobia, incepting, meanwhile, a new homosexual and female archive assembling various national and ethnic positions in Britain’s diasporic spaces.

Nevertheless, this assemblage of queer diasporic and cosmopolitan perspectives is ultimately tenable because of the economically privileged position of Sarif’s protagonists. When Tala breaks up with Hani, she can feasibly escape to London, with the film offering footage of a plane leaving Amman. After Leyla’s mother’s negative reaction to Leyla’s coming out, her father mentions the possibility of arranging a flat for Leyla, a sympathetic financial gesture mentioned only in the film version of the story. Sarif seems partially aware of her characters’ circumscribed class positions, yet unable to surmount their experiential constraints. For instance, when discussing the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Kareem, Lamia’s husband, responds hotly to Hani’s diplomatic gestures:

You and I have never suffered like our Palestinian countrymen. […] You and I have never held a dying baby in our arms because an Israeli gun shot him in response to stone-throwing. You and I have never watched our children crying from hunger. (137)

As Tala inwardly admits, “[i]t was a stirring piece of rhetoric, but Tala was willing to wager that Kareem himself had never placed his perfectly polished shoes within miles of a refugee camp” (138). In spite of Tala’s cynicism, Kareem’s rhetoric becomes metonymic of Sarif’s empirical limitations, since her focus never goes beyond her privileged characters’ environs. In the novel’s acknowledgements, Sarif mentions a research trip to Amman to prepare for the book, featuring a visit to a “refugee camp” (4). Palestinian refugees’ harrowing material realities do not feature visibly in the cinematic or literary versions of Sarif’s story. Instead, the film shows how, when Tala’s wedding is suddenly called off, her sympathetic father, Omar (Dalip Tahil), orders all the food to be taken to the “camps”, meaning the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. The film’s narrow class vistas ultimately demonstrate the significant limitations of Sarif’s middle-class British perspective on her financially privileged characters.

These material class limitations should not altogether diminish, however, our estimation of the power of Sarif’s intersectional exploration of female homosexuality in diasporic British contexts. As a whole, her queer narratives act as instruments of gradual ideological change and ethnic resistance. Culturally and ideologically rooted in Britain, Sarif chooses the vehicle of a romantic comedy to start revealing the contours of mainstream nationalist and diasporic expectations, offering us: ethnic minorities in dialogue with each other despite dominant monoculturalism; significant representations of Muslim and Arab characters post-9/11 who, despite residual patriarchal values, are not universally repressive or homophobic; and a focus on female homoeroticism challenging both the Islamist censorship of historical debates surrounding same-sex desire and Western normative ideologies that fail to include the perspectives of queer citizens from ethnic minorities. Although Sarif’s British, liberal, and middle-class perspective, as I have suggested, poses limitations regarding class positions and homoerotic cultural archives, her work forges clandestine countermemories, whose urgency constitutes a necessary antidote to the continued neglect of non-normative female sexuality in local and global contexts. In this regard, although Sarif favours a Western-style “coming out” scenario and enlists an array of Western cultural references to liberate her characters sexually, Sarif’s narratives reinscribe female homosexuality into diasporic Arab and South Asian communities in a manner that renders them an inalienable part of multicultural Western narratives, hence contributing to the vanquishing of ethnic distinctions between “East” and “West”. Despite the fact that Sarif’s dissident characters, as well as their counterparts in real life, Sarif and Kattan, abandon both Islam and Christianity in search of more self-affirming worldviews that can less polemically encompass their dissident sexualities, their defiance of British nationalist and diasporic mainstream values offers, nonetheless, counterdiscourses eroding compulsory heterosexuality and ethnic exclusivism, while foregrounding the experiences of queer women of Arab and Muslim heritage, whose voices are too often silenced in post-9/11 debates about Islam and multiculturalism.