Guapa by Saleem Haddad; Other Press, $16.95
Grounded in themes of sexuality, belonging, exposure, and self-acceptance, Kuwait-born author Saleem Haddad's debut novel Guapa encompasses the life of a misunderstood Arab man who harbors dreams of coming out, expressing his personal freedom, and finding happiness through love and familial approval. But these ambitions are far-reaching for someone living in a country ravaged by the threat of civil war, constant internal strife, and violent intolerance of queer culture.
Much like Sahan Namir's remarkable 2015 Iraq-set novel God in Pink, which movingly chronicled the experience of being gay and Muslim, Haddad's story takes place in the current conflict-crisis state of the Middle East, tracing an eventful and jarringly bad day in the life of Rasa, a young media translator who has made a complicated, irreversible mistake. "There is everything that has ever happened, and then there is this morning," he laments. "I've crossed the red line with Teta."
Teta, his paternal grandmother who essentially raised Rasa, is overwhelmed with shock, sadness, and rage after catching her grandson in the throes of passion in his bedroom with Taymour, his secret lover of three years. Taymour rushed out that night, and is now terrified that his own heterosexual cover will be blown as well.
The bad day doesn't end there. Maj, Rasa's best friend, a defiant drag queen and star of the underground drag shows at local gay bar Guapa. finds himself in jail after being arrested in a gay moviehouse. The three people Rasa loves the most are in turmoil, so he frets and explores the city searching for answers.
Rasa's clandestine love for Taymour seems to dominate him most. It's an all-encompassing passion and one that he obsesses over. Do they have a future together, could it all come crashing down? Only in the book's brilliant final section are readers made privy to what is really happening to Taymour, and in this context, Rasa's desperation makes sense. He also wrestles with the disappearance of his mother and the enduring impact of her glaring absence.
For all its good intentions and lucid prose, the novel has a few issues. Haddad inexplicably cloaks the name of Rasa's Arab home country as well as the American college he attended for several semesters. The reasons for this remain unclear throughout the narrative, as well as in press interviews he's given, and this nebulous quality has a distancing effect on the reader. There are also pages of dense interior musings that stagnate the flow of a novel that shines in its final chapters, which involve a bittersweet marriage and the truth behind Teta's late-night discovery.
Tense, tightly wound, and effectively written in Rasa's first-person perspective, this powerful novel angles itself off what some consider the shame of the homosexual experience, but also from an oppressive Middle Eastern society. While there is bliss from the liberation of coming out as a member of the LGBTQ community, there can also be dire consequences and life-long reactions, as Rasa discovers. In Haddad's world, where Rasa and Taymour had to hide out in a grocery store to shield themselves from sniper fire, there is great unrest, but for his characters, just as much confusion and unresolved angst. Haddad explores this through a variety of multifaceted characters in a locale that, while not identified, reflects the kind of dark unknown we have all had to surmount to reach daylight.