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Binaries be damned: What if God is genderless? What if God is trans?
Within the new memoir Hijab Butch Blues, Lamya H takes what Leslie Feinberg began in 1993 with Stone Butch Blues — a fancy depiction of gender and labor politics in Nineteen Seventies-era America — and makes it true and holy. To Lamya, God is not a person or a lady. “My God,” they write, “transcends gender.”
Lamya, a bored 14-year-old “nerd” who “by no means skips Quran class,” needs to die. On the age of 4, her mother and father had dragged her from her unknown, Urdu-speaking nation of origin to stay in a “wealthy Arab nation,” “in a “giant metropolitan metropolis” situated “away from the whole lot and everybody we knew.” She’s caught in a system of “unstated racial hierarchies.” She turns into fascinated by her feminine economics instructor: “A hyperawareness of her coordinates always, like there is a lengthy invisible string connecting us.” She realizes she’s homosexual — although she would not have the language for it but.
The writer’s new id appears to battle with their religion, till deeper reads of tales from the Quran educate them and readers on Islam in an avant-garde manner. Their curiosity retains them alive. At 17, Lamya earns a scholarship and strikes to the U.S. to pursue their training at an unnamed “prestigious school.” Just a few years later, although, after they apply for a particular visa extension, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Providers mistakenly sends their official mail to an previous tackle. Lamya receives it too late, and so they need to make a life altering determination: depart the nation or struggle for the brand new life they’re constructing for themself.
Hijab Butch Blues is organized in three elements. The primary one is all about Lamya’s childhood and gender questioning. When Lamya tells her mom she’ll by no means marry a person, her mom responds: “How will you reside…? Who will maintain you?” Lamya’s undecided. Readers get the CliffsNotes on Maryam, the East’s “Virgin Mary,” and Lamya sees the story with contemporary eyes: “Did Maryam say that no man has touched her as a result of she did not like males?” Her instructor says no, however Lamya resists: “Is not it apparent? Does not it make sense?… Maryam is a dyke.”
Within the second half, Lamya challenges the “authentically homosexual expertise,” e.g. popping out to your mother and father, frequenting lesbian bars, and explicitly defining your sexuality to others to be able to be “legible.” These aim posts aren’t vital, Lamya argues: Popping out to their mother and father “would not make sense.” They “stay throughout an ocean in a rustic the place queerness… is not an id…” In response to Lamya, all you want to be homosexual are your personal “homosexual sufficient” actions. For them, that is “dosas each Thursday night; watching the soccer world cup and selecting which groups to cheer on based mostly on anti-imperialism…”
They present readers how harrowing it’s to navigate life within the U.S. of their “brown hijabi Muslim physique,” which is “seen as scary, disempowered, each hypervisible and invisible on the similar time.” Lamya learns to hold photocopies of their papers always. When their time in graduate faculty is nearing an finish, 11 years have handed since they first arrived within the U.S. They’ve renewed their scholar visa 4 occasions: “4 occasions filling out intensive paperwork, 4 airplane journeys to the one U.S. consulate within the nation the place my mother and father stay… 4 occasions being requested questions designed to journey me up: Are you able to inform me your mother and father’ birthdays once more? Have you ever ever been rejected for a visa earlier than? You are not one of many ones we have now to fret about, ha-ha-ha, proper?” Lamya’s life within the U.S. may finish in a flash resulting from one bureaucratic blip.
The third and closing a part of the e-book is all about Lamya’s internalized homophobia and their popping out. “Courting queer ladies will make my gayness actual in methods it is not once I’m crushing on straight ladies,” they notice. A number of unhealthy dates later, Lamya finds somebody they wish to preserve seeing. On the similar time, they buckle down on their religion and begin a examine group, discovering new which means in a few of the Quran’s “hardest verses to reconcile”: those which, in response to typical interpretations, condone “intimate accomplice violence” and unjust inheritance legal guidelines for males versus ladies, and condemn homosexuality: “What if Allah needs us to extrapolate gender inequality to class inequality,” Lamya wonders, “… needs us to redistribute wealth?”
Hijab Butch Blues is greater than a must-read. It is also a examine information on Islam, a handbook for abolitionists, and a queer manifesto. It conjures up important considering, upholds activist self-care, and permits the defining of 1’s personal queerness. Good vs. unhealthy Muslim, straight vs. homosexual: That is all a entice. There are third choices, too. By the top of it, readers will see queerness — theirs, others’, and the idea –“for what it’s: a miracle.”
Ashlee Inexperienced (she/they) is a author and editor dwelling in Washington, D.C. Inexperienced is former managing editor of The Northside Chronicle; their work exploring gender and sexuality, energy constructions, private freedom, and psychological well being has been printed in HuffPost and The Rumpus. Discover them on Twitter at @ashleegreenbean
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