Often in gay fiction, characters explore their sexuality amid such tension with far more uncertainty than Ni’mat shows. In Philippe Besson’s Lie with Me, for example, the affair between Philippe and Thomas proceeds more cautiously, as the characters wrestle with shame and secrecy. Ni’mat’s lack of uncertainty is partly a product of the novel’s brevity: any doubt or shame Ni’mat might have struggled with could be eclipsed by the missing year between Part I (when he has his first homosexual experiences, with Islam and another man) and Part II (when Ni’mat is ready “to fully assume” his identity as a homosexual). For instance, in contrast to his society’s unease with passive masculinity, Ni’mat revels in it. Khawala to him becomes “the most beautiful of names” as he assumes the passive role with the younger man. Meanwhile, for Islam, even the intervention of his Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated friend can’t diminish the filial respect, admiration, and irrepressible desire he feels towards the captain.
Yet even as society broadly tries to enforce a strict vision of masculinity, each man’s willingness to test those restrictions is partly enabled by the encouragement of someone they trust. As such, any uncertainty is negotiated away through the implicit permission of the masseur Abu Hassan, and Islam’s older friend, Uncle Samir. However circumspect their encouragement may be, Samir and Abu Hassan at least help each man come to accept some part of their behavior together. Samir, a Nubian like Islam, is the embodiment of the neighborhood, and his encouragement gives Islam a kind of societal approval to proceed, with the safety guaranteed by Samir’s discretion: as a repository of so much private information, “on countless occasions the police had in fact turned to [Samir], though to no avail.” Abu Hassan acts far more directly to sanction Ni’mat’s new behavior by giving him a sexual massage and the same guarantee of secrecy, “Nothing of what happens in this room, which as you can see is sealed like a tomb, travels beyond it.”
The connections his society draws between national weakness, military failure, and sexual passiveness also provide Ni’mat with the psychological language to subvert the sexual restrictions in the first place. As the captain reverses the predictable roles of older and younger man by being the submissive partner in their coupling, he describes Islam’s penis alternately as a “sword ready to run him through” and “the war weapon of his young and very recent master [which] now wielded the power of life and death over him . . . ” Vergnaud manages to skillfully convey the poetic tone of Ni’mat’s fantasies in a way that still captures both their erotic and violent elements.
For Leftah, the history of Egypt’s conflicts with Israel provides a window through which both Ni’mat’s and the nation’s virility are considered. Ni’mat’s expulsion from the army following the 1967 defeat–and therefore his non-participation in the perceived redemptive 1973 victory–separate him from his older military friends in self-described “impotent solitude.” He writes in his diary, “ . . . wasn’t the very choice of a career as a war pilot, a celestial falcon spitting fire over peaceful valleys and terrorized men, dictated in large part by that supreme ideal of virility?” Now, years after his expulsion and into retirement, the captain begins taking more pride in his body following his sexual awakening. Ni’mat comes to recognize the pride and power in his submission. Unlike his friends, who are stuck like mummies in the past, Ni’mat is more alive than ever with Islam.
In fact, it’s Ni’mat’s dream at the beginning of the novel that sets Islam up as the captain’s protector and savior. The younger man emerges from a pool to assume the position of a “miraculous archer,” keeping an army of threatening clones away. When his archer-savior turns to leave, Ni’mat’s fear drives him to pursue the nakedly “radiant” and “sumptuous” Islam. After waking, Ni’mat quickly dismisses any consideration of whether his dream is satanic or divine and instead, now drawn like a magnet toward the real-life Islam, marvels at the “incandescent” young man sleeping.
Related to this tension of the individual versus society is the equally consistent theme of doomed male love. Until very recently, male same-sex love in literature has been almost universally destined for heartbreak, prolonged suffering, or worse. While the happily-ever-after may be seen as an insufficiently complex base upon which to build a literary novel, it’s often also a subliminal signal about the historical ledger in the individual (homosexual) versus society (heterosexual) struggle. In some respects, Leftah’s novel doesn’t break from the theme of doomed male love. It is, after all, a novel set in Egypt, originally published more than a decade ago. But the way in which he goes about fulfilling it is still distinctive and worth considering.
For Ni’mat, Islam allows him to escape a stale middle age—in which he is too self-conscious of his body—and a restrictive society that places even stricter expectations on him as a man formerly “charged with defending the country.” The affair expands the ways in which Ni’mat feels free to inhabit his body and take new pride in the pleasure he experiences and gives. When considering himself in contrast to his friends who regularly relive their 1973 victory, Ni’mat secretly enjoys the fact that, despite only ever knowing military defeat, he’s the only one still truly alive. “[O]h that double climactic peak that brought tears to my eyes just like my wife at the moment of orgasm!—a spring continuously blooming . . . ” he writes.
After he has lost both his marriage and social stature, Ni’mat still has the pride that comes from managing “to inspire if not love, then desire in a young and radiant teenage boy who made of my body a celebration.” His own celebration of Islam’s body alternates between the religious (“Oh Manifold Splendor!”) and the martial. When he considers the possible origin for his late-in-life sexual awakening (e.g., the psychological toll of the war, the growth of the prostate in old age), Ni’mat is clearheaded that he has no desire for psychoanalysis or a medical procedure to alleviate him of it, whatever the cause.
Near the end of the novel, Ni’mat writes in his diary, “Life was wonderful, and worth the pain of being lived.” It’s undeniably the thought of an old man, who has far less life left to live as compared to Islam. His age permits him to be more reckless and to risk more by standing up to a society that “suffocates and annihilates the individual.” Ni'mat can afford to risk everything for what he shares with the young man, regardless of the individual cost. In fact, at the time he writes that sentiment, he’s got nearly nothing left to lose. But Islam is not yet willing to live with that same pain. When the home they’ve built together, in a modest apartment in Al Fajjala, is vandalized with graffiti threatening to kill them, Islam returns to his home village to lie low “for a while.” Leftah doesn’t break the spell of doomed male love, but the way in which he traces the particularities of this doomed love gives us a subversive and thoughtful exploration of the theme.
