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.
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 above 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.
Read more at L.A. Review of Books.
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.
Read more at Fuchsbau Festival.
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’.
Read more at The Literary Sofa.
