Fourteen years ago, a Palestinian friend from Gaza gifted me a copy of Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love. It was a birthday gift that was nearly a year late, a fact that sticks in my mind for two reasons. The first is that, when my friend handed me the book in the garden of her Islington house-share, I recall how the warmth of the sun felt youthful and full of promise in that specifically early summer way, whereas my birthday is in late September.
The second reason I remember the lateness of the gift is that, when my friend handed me the book in 2010, I brought its pages to my nose — as I do with almost everything, but especially books — and inhaled deeply. A powerful smell of dead cigarettes wafted from the untouched pages. The book had been sitting in my friend’s bedroom for many months, and she was a smoker who spent her days in London — unemployed, with no work permit, and unable to return to Gaza following the Israeli blockade — lying in bed chain-smoking and reading.
“I think you’ll like this,” she said.
Two recent Palestinian novels approach the ghosts of the Nakba in different ways. Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance, translated from the Arabic by the Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, imagines what happens when the gradual disappearance of the Palestinian people from their land reaches its logical conclusion. Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, returns to the Nakba to examine the repercussions of a single, emblematic incident of violence that has been all but erased from history.
In the winter nothing ever dries in Lisbon. Laundry hangs wet for days, married to its moisture. Clothes, blankets, bedrooms, and restaurants all carry the musty smell of damp. In the spring, as the Jacaranda trees bloomed in a magnificent explosion of purple, we opened a suitcase we had stored in our closet to find that the clothes inside had grown damp and moldy. (“It’s an old city,” Portuguese friends said with an inevitable shrug, when we told them what had happened.)
Every year, on May 15, I ask my grandmother to tell me the story of how she was made homeless. It happened 67 years ago. She was 14, the youngest of 11 siblings from a middle-class Christian family. They had moved to Haifa from Nazareth when my grandmother was a little girl and lived on Garden Street in the German Colony, which used to be a colony for German Templars, later becoming a cosmopolitan center of Arab culture during the British Mandate. When I ask her to recall what life in Haifa was like back then, her eyes fix on the middle distance.
One of my favorite television shows growing up was a Ramadan special featuring an Egyptian performer called Sherihan. One year she had a Ramadan special called 'Sherihan Around the World', a twenty-minute singing and dancing extravaganza, which had her dressing in exquisite costumes from around the world and performing elaborate song and dance routines. Sherihan was a woman, but she was the best drag queen I had ever seen: camp, self-aware, and fabulous. She had planted in me, without my knowledge, the first seeds of my own gay identity.
Image used with permission from Diab Khalil
From ISIS to Sisi, masculinity in the Arab world is being performed and negotiated in different ways. But what does it mean to be a man in the Arab world today? And what are the consequences of performing-- for failing to perform-- certain notions of masculinity?
The bodies of the victims of the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando were still warm when the first narrative began to take shape.
Earlier this summer, a young French writer at a literary conference I attended in Berlin said that it was presumptuous for writers-- particularly writers of fiction-- to assume their work held any power to change the world.
A few weeks after my novel was released, I received this text from a friend:
I couldn’t find your book under ‘General Fiction’. Turns out it was in the LGBT section.
This may not be shocking for a novel whose central character is gay, but—as the author—I had never thought of Guapa as a ‘gay novel’.
