Beneath all the blood and the smoke in Saleem Haddad’s debut novel Guapa lies an overwhelming shame. But it’s not quite shame as we understand it in English: the little Arabic word eib (عيب), which appears frequently in Haddad’s novel, encapsulates a cultural concept so particular that it takes a 10-minute discussion to explain.
Haddad is game, though: “Eib in Arab societies is like a social code,” he says. “It binds communities and creates boundaries and creates trust. But at the same time, it can be very constricting.” It is not like the widely used haram, a religious term for something forbidden in Islam. “Islamic law says this is forbidden, while this is allowed. Shame, however, is malleable. It is open to subversion. I wanted to explore how people could play with that.”
Guapa, described in the Guardian as “immensely readable … fluent, passionate and emotionally honest”, follows Rasa, a young gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, over a single day in the recent aftermath of a failed political uprising.
Rasa’s grandmother Teta has just discovered him in bed with his boyfriend Taymour, who tries to “play by the rules, one foot in and one foot out”. The book begins the morning after this shaming encounter: in the tense aftermath, Rasa, fretting about possible repercussions while dealing with eib, attempts to distract himself at work as a translator for western journalists. Moments of his past play out as he makes his way around the city on a day that he knows will end with Taymour’s wedding, to a mutual and unsuspecting female friend.
As a gay Arab man, Haddad is fascinated by shame, but was also once plagued with it: growing up he felt ashamed for not filling the ideal male role. Now 33, living in London with his partner and his dog, he grew up burdened with the knowledge that he would not have children or continue the family lineage, in a society where stereotypes about the effeminacy of homosexual men abound. As Rasa observes in the novel, gay Arab men live a codified existence, where homosexuality is seen only in a slight lightness of the wrists, a fearful self-awareness in the eyes – and not in elaborate pride parades or overt flamboyance.
Haddad, in his own words, is a piece of human history. His Palestinian grandmother was born in Nazareth, then moved to Haifa and eventually Beirut after the Palestinians were expelled, where his father was born. During the Lebanese civil war, his father went to Baghdad, where he met Haddad’s Iraqi-German mother. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Haddads moved to Kuwait, where Saleem was born. During the Gulf war, when he was a child, they moved to Cyprus.
“When you are from so many different backgrounds, you often feel like you don’t belong anywhere. But I am part of a larger story,” he says. On his first day of school in Jordan, a child asked him whether he was Christian or Muslim (“Christian”), Palestinian or Jordanian (“Palestinian”). He was categorised accordingly and “discovered how I was understood in a wider context”.
This would not be the last time he was pigeonholed. At 18, he enrolled for university in Canada weeks before the 9/11 attacks: just as he finally had the freedom to explore his sexuality, he says, he was forced back into the closet, as he dealt with his peers scrutinising his Arabness. At a similar moment in Guapa, Rasa calls himself “the by-product of an oppressive culture, an ambassador of a people at war with civilisation”.
As “a good, middle-class Arab boy”, Haddad studied economics. He had wanted to do drama because he felt he would be a good actor. (“Being in the closet helps,” he jokes, with in a brief burst of campness.) Economics was a compromise for not studying medicine, but Haddad discovered an interest in poverty and development and began working for NGOs, particularly Médecins Sans Frontières, in Sri Lanka, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Iraq.
While working for MSF, he wrote essays and articles, but never fiction. It wasn’t until 2010, when he was burned out by hard missions in Yemen and Iraq, that he returned the UK and began writing. “I needed a break. I needed to process everything,” he says. “When the revolutions happened, I felt a very strong urge to write a story like this, partly out of this sense that I was still struggling to find a space for my voice because I was so mixed up. So I put everything into this novel and it was a relief.”
His work made him “very political, very angry, very dark”. But then he tells a sweet anecdote about the moment that changed: once, when he returned to London after a stint in Iraq, his boyfriend dragged him to Borough market to sample “the best cupcake in the world”. Tired and sceptical, Haddad went along. “Suddenly, I knew this was him telling me to slow down and enjoy things. I knew I had to look at the world in a different way. I needed to channel the anger into understanding how people tick. I think if he hadn’t taught me to just be OK with enjoying things, even things as little as a cupcake, I wouldn’t have been able to write this book, a book about someone processing emotion.”
He was in London when the Arab spring began in 2011 and started writing Guapa that year while working full-time for an NGO. He would wake up at 6am to fit three hours of writing in every day before he went to the office, “whether it was London, Yemen or Libya”. By mid 2014, he had found an agent and by the end of that year he had a book deal.
But something wasn’t right about the manuscript and a week before submitting it to the publisher, he ripped it apart. “My boyfriend thought I was crazy – I turned our tiny London bedroom into a huge mind map of Post-it notes. It was some Beautiful Mind stuff. But it clicked for me. I knew where everything had to be.”
He came out 10 years ago via email to his parents, who immediately flew him to Abu Dhabi for a five-day interrogation so traumatic that Haddad says he doesn’t remember a lot of it. “I remember sitting in silence for hours as they yelled and cried. My mother printed out the Wikipedia page of homosexuality and they were going through it, trying to understand it. But there was nothing I could do.”
His parents have since read Guapa and are coming to terms with their son’s sexuality, he says. After a recent book launch in Lebanon, he even managed to wheedle his dad into joining him at a gay bar to celebrate. “He was like, ‘Oh it is not my place, it’s not for me.’ I had to tell him, ‘You are not going to get Aids just from going.’ And he came!” he says, still clearly delighted by the memory. “He sat in the bar and it was so important for him to see it was just a bar. No leather daddies tried to pull him into a corner. This whole process has been very positive.”
He struggles to pin down how much of Guapa is autobiographical: “Emotionally, it is very autobiographical. Plot-wise, less so.” Many parts of it, aside from the clear parallels with Haddad’s own story, feel true: the unnamed location could be any one of a number of Middle Eastern cities in the aftermath of a failed uprising. I read it assuming it was Egypt; Haddad, pleased, says:“Syrian people tell me it is Aleppo, Lebanese people say they saw this bit of graffiti in their neighbourhood, Jordanian people say the divisions between the east and west parts of the city are just like Amman. That is exactly what I wanted.”
Why? He didn’t want to expose any particular queer community to new scrutiny. “Whether it is house parties in Saudi Arabia, clubs in Beirut or coffee houses in the Gulf or north Africa, the thing I felt was most common was the idea of these underground spaces where the LGBT community can congregate.” So he created the smoky bar Guapa, with its basement drag show, from an amalgamation of various places across the Middle East.
Guapa has had an enthusiastic reception from readers as far apart as Italy, Brazil and India, and there are tentative plans to translate it into Arabic.He finds it alarming to suddenly have LGBT readers emailing him, asking for advice. (“It is quite hard because they relate to the book so much and I need to remind them, the book is the book and I am not Rasa!”)
When he first mooted the novel, “a few people said, ‘Listen, international fiction doesn’t really sell and gay fiction doesn’t really sell. And you’re combining the two.’ I kept telling them that there would be readers out there. I knew people who wanted this story.”
And he has been proved right. “It has been so overwhelming because all of this stuff I thought was just my own shit actually was stuff so many people are experiencing, all over the world.”
