Novels on homosexuality coming out of the Arab experience have emerged with an unparalleled authenticity and a familiarity that is difficult to find elsewhere anymore — from Abdellah Taïa to Hasan Namir, and now Saleem Haddad. If a novel can (and should) transcend the “gay” label, it’s Haddad’s Guapa.
Haddad reminds us that the signature surreptitiousness of gay life has not disappeared despite astounding progress in the West. It lives on in societies splintered by modernity where one man’s day can pass seamlessly between translating interviews with so-called terrorist elements, enjoying a raucous underground drag scene, and listening intently as the government shells the terrorist strongholds in a neighborhood not far from the protagonist’s own.
Many in the West still wrestle with their own homosexuality, of course, but there’s something in Rasa’s story that could never carry quite the same weight in a similar story of a young American or European man coming of age: eib. The Arabic term — a sort of culturally untranslatable concept combining not just shame or class-consciousness — would not be as powerful in a Western society where, as Rasa explains when he travels to the United States for school, “[Americans] divided everything into manageable parts that only they owned, and everything seemed orderly and operated under a law that was immune to any appeals to eib or haram, as such actions would have done back home. There was no eib here.”
Ostensibly set over the course of a single day, the story in fact flashes back to parts of Rasa’s childhood as he somewhat hazily pieces together the memories of an absent mother and a divided home — divisions driven almost entirely by the one woman Rasa seems to love and resent the most, his overbearing and demanding grandmother, Teta.
Guapa is a novel of learning to exist in a world where self-assured liberals demand identity-group loyalty, where uncompromising Western conservatives demand submissiveness from men like Rasa, where acknowledging one’s homosexuality draws expectations for disclosure and where the Islamic mainstream forces secrecy. It’s a novel about failing to meet expectations, both of an eib-attentive culture and of what privately acknowledging one’s homosexuality must mean for one’s public life. More than anything else, Guapa is about Rasa’s expectations.
His are ones which, after Part II’s flashback glimpse into his past, are the product of a young man who has persevered through all of the other expectations to find what he actually wants from life. Beyond threats of eib and his own Arab Spring hopes for his country, beyond the idle goals of the navel-gazing counterculture of Western university life, and beyond his tired resignation toward both escaping and staying as his country convulses around him, Rasa spends the length of the novel certain that all he wants is Taymour, the man his grandmother saw him in bed with moments before the novel began. After the glimpses Haddad gives us into Rasa’s childhood and young adulthood, it’s a humble and universally familiar desire.
Throughout Guapa, Rasa struggles to know where to belong. Is it with Taymour who, in more ways than one, is seemingly obsessed with keeping up costly social appearances; agitating with activist and drag queen Maj who insists on rejecting the so-called impositions of hetero-normativity and Western Orientalism; trying to embody fantasies of American life fed to the rest of the world via television and movies; on the front lines of the Arab Spring demanding reform from a government too powerful and too unchangeable; or idly passing time with his Teta in a three bedroom apartment for the rest of his life?
It’s eventually clear to the reader, if not to Rasa, that he belongs in none of these places. He’s never fully convinced in the singular fulfillment any of them will give him. Not even Taymour is satisfying or attainable for Rasa, and so perhaps the only place he has left to go (but not necessarily belong) is Guapa, the bar where, after hours, effete bar patrons try to persuade foreigners to whisk them away to some safer place and where Maj dresses up like Princess Jasmine and belts his way through a performance of “Genie in Bottle”.
Guapa is a deceptively busy novel about a deceptively straightforward day. Interspersed throughout, Rasa wanders back in time from childhood to college and, finally in the last pages of the book, to that traumatic moment just before the story began, when his Teta peeked through the keyhole and saw Rasa and Taymour in bed together. Despite the fact that Rasa spends the entire book longing for Taymour and coming to terms with what it might mean to lose him, his most complex and significant relationship isn’t with the other man, but with the woman whose keyhole-snooping precipitated the narrative — his Teta.
A number of ghosts hang over the events of the day as Rasa tries to exact some certainty from an inaccessible Taymour that they won’t let the drama of the morning end their relationship. One, of course, is the political turmoil in the country — embodied by the photograph of a missing young dissident man Rasa learns about near the beginning of the novel. Another is his absent mother, of whom not even Rasa knows the fate. Driven away in his childhood both by her own inability to fit into the Arab society she was a stranger to and by his overbearing Teta, Rasa wavers between wanting to reconnect with her (wherever she might be) and resenting her.
This uncertainty over what he wants plagues Rasa’s relationship with nearly everyone but Taymour. Even his Teta is both deeply loved and resented. Throughout much of the novel, she’s talked about more than she’s allowed to talk for herself. We never see the present-her until near the end of the novel (until then, we’re presented only with Teta in flashbacks). When we and Rasa finally confront her for all the transgressions she’s been said to have inflicted, Teta is an old woman being harangued out of bed by a grandson who had momentarily considered suffocating her, before he tears her apartment to pieces trying to find a key to the mailbox where his mother might possibly have sent him letters for the past 15 years.
By the end of the story and the day it documents, it’s clear that something vital to the man Rasa was has ended — and it hasn’t ended in the way the reader is led to hope for in the duration of the book. Throughout the day’s events, Rasa watches as gradually both Taymour and his hopes for Arab Spring reform slip from grasp. On these fronts, perhaps, there’s no hope to come: Taymour is unattainable, reform is elusive.
As Rasa climbs into Maj’s car just as the sun rises on the next day, it’s clear that everything he (and the reader) have spent the previous day worrying over isn’t as incomprehensible as Rasa believed. Rasa and Maj will go back to agitating for reform, the two agree, but not before another drink or two at Guapa.