Photo of the installation Reclamation Through Art: Tatreez Resistance by Chris Sifri.

Return to the Body, Return to the Land: Being a Queer Arab in the Diaspora

October 20, 2026/in Culture/by Chris Sifri

This story first appeared in Queer Cincinnati: Beyond the Binary, published Oct. 23, 2026.

Queer identities have existed fluidly for centuries within multiple cultural landscapes, outside of the one-dimensional scope of imperial Western thinking. European colonization within the Middle East held the true power of creating mechanisms of repression in terms of homosexuality. The Western ideal is to create boxes for humans in order to arbitrate the way in which we express ourselves. I live through the notion that to be Queer is to exist as a form of resistance, meaning to be Palestinian inherently is to be Queer.

My Jido grew up in Yaffa, Palestine and was forcibly expelled from his home in 1948 by the illegal occupation. I sit with him as he recites poems and memories of his childhood in Yaffa. He leads me through the streets of our city that are now beneath skyscrapers and settlers. He sings me songs that his dad would play on the oud in the salon of their house. I come from a family filled with artists, but after the Nakba, everything changed. My Jido shares how his father was beaten by the Israeli Occupation Forces in 1936, then again in 1948.

He tells me about how they fled; an Uncle, who owned a bus company, which once ran between Al-Ramleh, Yaffa, and Al-Quds, filled the buses to capacity and left.

My Teta grew up in Bechmezzine, Lebanon, a small Orthodox Christian village. I live in the diaspora. I watch as many celebrate a so-called ceasefire, for a number of times I cannot count anymore along with the number of bombs that have dropped, violations of international law, proof of genocide, children murdered, and so on. It is June in Cincinnati; I often sit with the fig tree behind our house, which my Teta gifted us before she passed. This tree represents the breaking of generational cycles of fear, and the grounding of cycles of ancestral healing.

While living in Chicago post October 7, 2023, I was embraced by the Queer Palestinian community. Every week we’d gather to practice our lost traditional arts of singing, painting, tatreez, and dance. This led to a formulation internally of the beauty of living within the intersections of being Queer and Arab. What I found most important would be the nights of dancing at a DJ Nanoos set. While dancing dabka and belly dancing – despite your gender – there was an unspoken freedom on the dance floor where we could all shamelessly showcase our Queer Palestinian existence through our bodies, all while living in a world that ostracizes these identities. For a century, the occupation has forced fear upon us. Alongside the introduction of foreign colonial powers within our homelands came restrictions on our sexual beings and livelihoods.

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In 2013, after training mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by pairing it with small shocks, researchers found that generational trauma lives within our bodies. The children and grandchildren of these mice were born with an inherent fear of the scent, even though they had never smelled it before. We have been forced into cages and have constricted our bodies. The occupation forced my father’s, father’s, father to be small, afraid, and run. This visceral feeling of running has been intergenerationally passed down within bodies and bloodlines.

We must realize the intersection between colonial trauma, sexual imperialism, and diaspora consciousness. I have been trying to articulate what connects my Queerness and Arabness, it is our refusal to conform and a necessity to return to our humanity. The action of return connects us all.

All of the loss we have experienced sits within me. I do not forget the ways in which we create with our hands, bodies, and voices. I have grazed the borders, those of which I am not permitted to cross. I have seen home from over the valley and from the peak of the mountains. I have tasted sweet return on the tip of my tongue. I have found return within my throat, as the muscles contract in ways only done two generations ago. I have found home within my fingertips as they glide along a canvas, as they stitch British missiles onto cloth, as they pick figs from the tree she once held. Exile is an act of being. Exile forces home to be anywhere and everywhere except for the place you long to go. Return is a practice. Returning home is a return to the body. The land is my body.

I am rooted in my land, although thousands of miles away, I am rooted in her pain and resilience for it lives in my body. I allow my body to freely move in the fluidity of being a Queer Arab in the diaspora. As the world attempts to ethnically cleanse our people, land, and our culture we continue to resist and refuse erasure.