The Queer Arab Glossary Edited by Marwan Kaabour

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Kaabour provides us with a wittily important insight in the richness of queer lives beyond the confines of White Western stereotypes.

Haitham Haddad’s illustrations play with the literal meanings of the words and phrases used to describe queer people – some of the words are harsh but these illustrations are a playful act of reclaiming identity.

That there are so many words for queer people is a testament to the fact that queer people have always been a part of every culture – but this is not a naïve utopia, that most of the words are either about effeminate men or masculine women – often words/slurs used about them – as Sophie Chamas reflects in one of the accompanying essays “this glossary, largely documents the language through which queer Arabs are linguistically fashioned and re-fashioned into deviants by society at large” - but within that mix there are words of self-identification as Sophie Chamas continues it “allows queer Arabs to refuse the injunction to be either queer of Arab… It is a reminder that archives need not be authorised… they can be felt, be swallowed, be spat back out, and that language and people can be a home when place is unwelcoming.”

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali offers the insight that “language will always be insufficient to narrate the intimacies of our lives. Language hints, hovers, and caresses but it does not complete of capture … Even if we redress biased absences … there would still be more: more feeling, more flesh, more experience, more subject than the language can bear. This failure of language for me is not exclusively a failure. I am drawn to what cannot be named.”

Finally I will mention Nisrine Chaer who points to out that among the many challenges LGBT+ refugees encounter there is one of language, as the categories of Western identity are taken to be universal but they are in fact cultural products – an individual’s identity isn’t but the ways in which it is framed are – in moving cultural contexts you lose the frames of reference to give meaning to your own identity.