namazie.
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namazie's poem is a guidebook for how to navigate queerness and diaspora. These are the guidelines for the reclamation of "the homeland" as the rightful queer inhabitants and keepers of the land. We assume the homeland wants to be as distant from us as our bodies are from it. The stories we hear are meant to keep us away as we are taught the land that we were meant to be on does not want us and will not love us back. Yet, namazie rejects this as we are desire with a destination. The use of contrasting ideas in the same sentence, "my homeland is alive, unknowable, and does not exist," forces us to rethink these strict guidelines that seek to define a homeland that does not include us. Instead, we are encouraged to commit to the dangerous act of reclaiming and maintaining our homeland. Our identities are our homeland and mix in "densely sensual, affectively relational, and miraculously mutable" ways. These ways we already know to be true about our homeland, as we get to feel its warmth in small pockets, but they are true about us. What is especially true at the intersection of queerness and diaspora is that "our erotic is our weapon," and that is what we must use to give us the strength to liberate and un-translate our homeland into one that works for us because that is how it was designed.
edit: I was just reading through a photography book my friend just gifted me, which is Beirut-based and queer, called "What's Ours." In the end, Boulos the photographer writes, "My friends and I used to take pictures naked in the streets of Beirut...It was our own way of reclaiming our streets and our bodies. Everything that is supposed to be ours." I think this really connects to what namazie's poem is saying.