“There is everything that ever happened, and then there is this morning.” Rasa’s grandmother, Teta, has discovered him in bed with his boyfriend Taymour. It’s a potential disaster for Taymour, who tries to “play by the rules, one foot in and one foot out”, and for Rasa it precipitates a crisis of eib, or shame, the fear of what people will say, and the necessity of lying it imposes.
But Teta’s spying is only one of Rasa’s problems in a novel that is set on a single day. His friend Maj has been arrested, either because of his human rights work or his sexuality. In flashbacks, we see how, in a hidden nightclub called Guapa – the “pocket of hope” that gives Saleem Haddad’s wonderful debut its title – Maj belly-dances in full niqab adorned with an image of Marilyn Monroe. “We are all performing,” he declares, referring to eib, and to the demands of survival in a prying dictatorship. The president’s gaze, no less than Teta’s, “unpacks your existence bit by bit until you are naked and helpless, your most secret thoughts out in the open for all to see”.
The unnamed, composite Arab city Rasa lives in is clogged with traffic, policemen, cynical cab drivers and new and old refugees. The city is divided between west and east, the west is “split from the rest of the country” and “sucked into the global economy”. In the eastern slums the municipality rips up roads then neglects to rebuild them. There are power cuts, piles of rubbish, and festering resentment.
This is a post-Arab spring landscape. Rasa remembers how the protest started: he and his friends standing alongside “the chain-smoking trade unionists, the women syndicates, the bearded Islamists”. Met at first by American tear gas and local thugs, then by gunfire and tanks, their slogans became more religious. Soon “revolution” was recast as “crisis”. Now, people are stuck between authoritarianism and terrorism, militarism and neoliberalism.
Rasa works for a media venture founded optimistically as the “first in a canon of new local media free from the constraints of the president’s propaganda”, but which has quickly become a translation company serving foreign journalists. On the day in question, he accompanies an American correspondent to meet Ahmed, an opposition leader who assumes that “everyone wants an Islamic state” and plans an ideal city, not zoned by class but arranged around mosques. The police have killed Ahmed’s son and, in an eery echo of the pro-Assad slogan “Al-Assad or We Burn the Country”, Ahmed’s wife declares: “We will make the entire country burn so that his death is not in vain.” As he translates, even Rasa feels the pull of the Islamist worldview. It would provide him with family, “authenticity”, and clear positions. “I am like them: misunderstood, vilified by the regime and the media,” he thinks.
As the single day’s action hurtles to its explosive conclusion, it is punctuated by remembrance and reflection. There are family memories, strictly controlled by Teta just as the president controls national history. Their flat is a shrine to Rasa’s dead father and a way of dismissing his vanished mother. (The painful degeneration of Rasa’s parents’ marriage is brilliantly drawn.) And there are memories of Rasa’s time in the US – he arrived there as the Twin Towers fell. In the US he was “queer” on account of being Arab and Muslim, “the by-product of an oppressive culture, an ambassador of a people at war with civilisation”. Reading Amin Maalouf had taught him that “an individual identified most strongly with the aspect of their identity that was under attack”.
Participating in the American anti-war protests amid “the smoky haze of alcohol and debate”, he had met Arabs who behaved very differently to those he knew at home – women who didn’t straighten their hair, men who grew their beards unkempt. He suffered unrequited love, gained friends who overused the word “problematic”, and was forced to re-examine his identity. An Arab-American man had accused him of being too westernised; a French woman had told him he was too Arab. Rasa’s struggle for self-definition, mirroring the complex battles for self-determination being fought out in Arab societies, is the novel’s central theme.
So much insightful commentary is packed into Guapa, on themes ranging from the effects of bilingualism to the symbolic appropriation of the keffiyeh, but none of it disrupts the narrative flow. This immensely readable novel is fluent, passionate and emotionally honest. Equally astute in its analysis of Arab and American mores, the book’s characters are nuanced and dynamic; it gives fresh life to the maxim “the personal is political”.
