Hiding in Plain Sight

Of course there is nothing new about homosexuality in the Middle East, even if, every so often, fundamentalists act horrified to discover it. And Ali tended to see himself as tied to a long tradition of notable gay sensibilities. He loved the exquisite work of C. P. Cavafy, the Greek poet of luxurious Levantine Alexandria a hundred years ago. There was also part of him seduced by the idea of Britain's T. E. Lawrence, who became a desert warrior in World War I, not least, to honor the memory of a presumed lover. "I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present," wrote Lawrence, the empathetic Orientalist. And Ali had several long-term relationships. But he also sought out anonymous encounters, which he sketched with finesse and wrote about in rugged detail.

Some of his most vivid descriptions are of his assignations in the vast Cairene cemetery-become-slum called the City of the Dead in the 1970s, where he came across Egyptian soldiers "hungrily waiting for it … on a darkened plain by a tin statue of a defunct poet staring into oblivion … more money changed hands … and here I sit in the night café watching the same sharp excavational mind go by in all sorts of luscious shapes. Hustle!" As Ghandour puts it, "every word and drawing from that time evokes the humanity that lives and sings and steals and prays and plays and makes love in the deep fissures of that ruptured society."

There is this sense of discovery, disappointment and decay as the abiding themes of Ali's life. In the 1980s and 1990s, when I first got to know him in Amman, he had built a reputation as a difficult man who painted accessible works. (Queen Noor commissioned several large canvases for the palace.) He also had become a kind of gadfly conservationist, fighting an all but futile battle to protect such ancient sites as Petra and the Aqaba waterfront from bureaucratic despoliation. "History to Ali was always very personal," writes Ghandour. "A record of things past, unearthed artifacts of bygone lives, offered tangible proof that names like his, families like his, people who have a feeble claim on the present, once defined it."

Indeed, there are moments when a reader may feel he's stumbled into an Arab "Grey Gardens," watching fading nobility decline into lives of utter futility. For most of Ali's later years, he remained financially and to some extent emotionally dependent on his aunt, Saadiyeh. Her husband, Wasfi Tall, had been Jordan's prime minister in 1970 during the bloody crackdown on Palestinian militias known as Black September. Eventually the Palestinians murdered Tall or, as Jordanians at the time were wont to say, martyred him. So by descent, by marriage and by widowhood, Saadiyeh was part of little Jordan's highest society. But Ali found himself alternately embraced as a dear companion and attacked as a sycophant until, as Ghandour says, Saadiyeh succumbed in the early 1990s "to the serenities of Alzheimer's." When she died, she left Ali nothing.

As for Ali's own death in 2002, none of his old friends really know what happened. Probably it was a crime of passion, perhaps a fight over money. There has never been an arrest or trial. But that seems, oddly, a very small lacuna in the fascinating narrative of Ali's life. And what our good friend Amal Ghandour has given us in the telling of it is an account of love, loss, art and history in the Arab world as we've never really seen it before.

© 2009