West Beirut Sexuality

Now we can move onto the role sexuality plays in these works. In the film “West Beirut” (at 20 minute mark) Omar and Tarek begin to talk about the woman their uncle is with. They view her in an overtly sexual manner and even film her from Omar’s room. They share highly provocative and sexual stories, smoke a cigarette, and then confidently strut around town, while “Rock Your Baby” plays in the background. This is the beginning of sexual tones in the movie. As the movie progresses we see a shift in attention from the adolescents sexuality to sexuality in a larger frame in society. This shift is brought about when Tarek enters Oum Walid’s brothel. Upon entering we are presented with the sight of guns and two angry men. One of the women working in the brothel

had bedded two men of different faiths, and this caused even more tension between Christians and Muslims in Beirut.

The application of sexuality in this way leads us to see how sexuality plays a role in violence, politics and religion.

When Tarek first enters the brothel, two angry men came out and grabbed guns. The tension created by the brothel could be enough to cause violence in the area, and as we’ve seen earlier in the movie, one attack could cause a big change to politics. After the first attack in the movie, Beirut is divided into east and west Beirut, and Tarek can no longer attend school. A similar situation could occur due to sexuality, if the men in the brothel decided to attack those of another faith.
A scene like this nearly did play out when two men of differing faiths had bed the same woman. Although they did end up taking revenge on rosie instead of each other, we can still see the role sexuality has in religion. As Oum Walid says “Since when does a bed have a religion?”

Another example of the role of sexuality is the “Secret Code”. The secret code is that in Zeytuni having a bra on your car or person is what gets you safe passage. The bra determines whether or not you’ll be killed for passing through a no go zone or not. This shows a that sexuality has an enormous amount of power and influence in

society.
If a sniper knows that you are just going to the brothel you’ll live, but anyone else may be killed on the spot, as we saw when Omar threw the boot outside. This also shows more about how sexuality plays a role in violence, politics, and religion, because all these factors are played out at the brothel and are all then tied together into sexuality.

Next we move onto the role sexuality has in the human psychology, and the factors that shape your environment. And for that we’ll switch our focus to Mohamed Choukri’s “For Bread Alone”. We can observe the role sexuality plays in human psychology through the narrator's mind as he grows throughout the novel. When the narrator was young he grew to hate his father and then he overheard his parents engaging in sexual acts, “They are devouring one another,licking each other’s blood. Mmmmm! He’s stabbed her. A long soft moan. He’s killed her.”(Choukri, Chapter 1) In this stage, the narrator’s hatred is growing and soon it will turn into sexual problems.

After watching Asiya bath the narrator took her clothes, when she found out he had done it she chased him and held him down. “Then she stopped the game, looking suddenly ashamed. I thought: I too am going to be stronger than a woman.”(Choukri, Chapter 2) At this point he begins to want to be able to overpower women, so he can get what he wants. He also starts to become violent with women, which can be accredited to his father's treatment. “My father’s rough treatment of me always served only to increase the rage of my desire”(Choukri, Chapter 2) The way his father treated him made him crave to be able to overpower women and get what he wants, he then acts out this desire in his mind. He imagines “slapping her in the face” until he gets what he wants from her.

The Narrator begins to link the ideas of sex, violence, and power. And due to his relationship with his father, they are all things he associates with dominance over women. One night the narrator “found” his “body warming itself beside hers.”,hers being “Fatima”. The narrator then emulated what he knew from his parents sexual encounters. “I pretend to stab her, in order to hear the groan I had heard my mother make.” The narrator follows what his father did to his mother, seeing it as violent, “He’s stabbed her.”, and he took pleasure in his actions to Fatima. “And for the first time I understood that girls had something wonderful and delicious, and that, whatever it was, I needed it.”(Choukri, Chapter 3) Now we have a narrator who, becomes violent due to his father's treatment, he gets hungry for power and what he wants. Now he is also linking the ideas of his father's abusive sexual relationship with the pleasure he felt when he had a sexual encounter with Fatima. So the narrator is slowly becoming like his father, abusive, dominant, and violent. Through this lens we see very clearly how sexuality, can heavily ingrain itself into the human psyche and affect all aspects of life.

In conclusion, we can see just a few of the ways sexuality plays an important role in Arab society, as well as in the two works themselves. We can see that sexuality plays a role in everyone’s lives and decisions. For those who know of Oum Walid, sexuality invades many parts of their lives. From their religion, like the incident at the brothel of a woman bedding men of two different faiths, to their politics. Zeytuni is also set up in a way that Madam Oum Walid’s brothel is right in the battleground between east and west Beirut, this is a representation of sexuality. All the sides of the people in conflict still have sexuality in common, and that’s why the brothel is between everything. And lastly we see how as the narrator in Choukri’s “For Bread Alone” grows and develops to be abusive like his father, due to the psychology associated with sex, and sexuality. He had tainted views of sex, power, and violence and when he grew independant, he chased these urges fueled by his father. After tying together ideas of power and sex, he experiences it on his own and then is driven to be the same as his father over time.