Hiding in Plain Sight

At a dinner party among close friends in Jordan in November 2002, one of the guests was missing. Ali Jabri, then 60, was an artist with a temperament, and we'd gotten used to his no-shows. But still, it seemed odd that he wasn't there to be, as ever, the life of the party. The next day passed and then the next as I focused on reporting about the impending invasion of Iraq, and then one of our friends called to say Ali was dead, murdered in his apartment. The main suspect was his Egyptian lover, a man none of us knew, who disappeared back across the border.

My wife and I and our Arab friends mourned the death of a passionate esthete who brought great wit and discernment to the arid confines of Amman society. But one of Ali's circle, Amal Ghandour, did more. She began to pore over the journals that Ali had sometimes let a few of us glimpse. Their illustrations were extraordinary: pages upon pages of sketches, pastels, clippings, collages. And woven through the images was densely written script full of perceptive, sometimes poisonous aphorisms chronicling the life and sentiments of this tall, blond, blue-eyed Arab who moved among so many cultures.

Ali was a scion of the ancient and decaying aristocracy in Aleppo, Syria, who sometimes styled himself, improbably and ironically, "the last descendant of Saladin." His elementary education in the early 1950s was at Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, the alma mater of Jordan's King Hussein, among others. In the 1960s, Ali tuned in, turned on and dropped out in California, then, in the early 1970s, plunged into the art-and-drug-and-sex scene of England. (He called that green and pleasant land his "juicy citadel of chlorophyll.") But many of his most revelatory writings and paintings come from his experiences among Arab homosexuals in his native Middle East where, until recently, people did not ask or tell, and many gays, like Ali, learned to hide in plain sight.

As one of Ali's friends told Ghandour, his was a life of "parallel universes." He found in these contrasting worlds ecstasy and inspiration, but also injury, frustration and fear. And it's sadly ironic that Ghandour's amicable but unflinching work of nonfiction, “About This Man Called Ali: The Purple Life of an Arab Artist” (Eland: London), should be coming out in Britain just now, only weeks after Amnesty International denounced the murder of dozens of homosexuals in what the Bush administration used to refer to as liberated Iraq.

"Over the last few weeks at least 25 boys and men are reported to have been killed in Baghdad because they were, or were perceived to be, gay," Amnesty wrote on April 9. "The killings are said to have been carried out by armed Shia militiamen as well as by members of the tribes and families of the victims. Certain religious leaders, especially in the Sadr City neighborhood, are also reported in recent weeks to have urged their followers to take action to eradicate homosexuality in Iraqi society."

Had Ali lived long enough to see it, he might well have clipped that report and worked it into his journals along with the usual caustic commentary. A romantic of Arabia often disappointed by the realities of Arab society, he could have written on that page, as he did elsewhere, about the frustration and disappointments of an "Arab milieu that's finally destructive; desultory; chloroforming; amnesiac."