“One half of the world is moving towards
gay marriage. The other is still in Brunei, where you get stoned for being gay, and in Chechnya, with its gay concentration camps.” Nemat Sadat is the first Afghan to have come out as gay. But the cost of love, as he found out, could be death. Or a second exile.
At the session,
Diaspora Dialogues: A World of Our Own
, at the Times Litfest on Sunday, the 40-year-old LGBTQIA activist said straddling many worlds has not been easy. “I lived in Afghanistan in 1979, when the Soviets invaded. We left eight months after I was born... My mother didn’t want us to live in Afghanistan,” he said.
When he went back, years later, in 2012 what he saw were the broken remains of what he had once known as home. “Diaspora authors often speak about their homeland – an imagined one, a paradise created from stories told by parents and friends. How accurate can that be? What I saw in Afghanistan were war-torn ravages. The homeland had changed but, strangely, not how I felt about it.”
How he thought of this once-homeland and how it received him, however, were at odds. “Afghanistan made me persona non grata – I was not heterosexual and I had disavowed my religion.” He was teaching political science at the American University of Afghanistan at the time. When the pushback started, he got a gay movement off the ground. Eventually, he had to resign from his university post and leave the country. “It was either a life sentence or the death penalty.”
But in the US, not a lot changed in terms of acceptance. “Reconciling my identities – as gay and ex-Muslim – was difficult for them.” The intersectional identity has made communities like his highly politicised. “Everyone wants our votes. They make promises. But America is still based on racial white supremacy." What that translates into is outrage over hate crimes in the Islamic world but a blindness when it comes to homophobia in their own communities. "The approach is like we only want our white supremacists to kill gay people, not Islamic extremists.”
His creative expression finally found a home in India. “On National Coming Out Day (observed every year on October 11 since it was first celebrated in US in 1988), I came out as Indian. It’s a little dramatic, I know. But I wrote a piece, ‘Why I Call India Home’. This where I got a publisher who wanted to take a risk on me, be a trailblazer.” His book, The Carpet Weaver, came out this year to rave reviews. “I was empowered when Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination. I realised that you have to ignore all the gazes – the white gaze, the Islamic gaze – if you want to tell the best truth possible.”
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