HIJAB BUTCH BLUES (Book Review)

By Lamya H

 

(The Dial Press, 2023)

 

 

I’ve been underwhelmed by the many queer memoirs I’ve read from younger writers during the past several years. Typically, my impression is the writer doesn’t have enough perspective yet. There’s always a danger of a memoir coming off as self-absorbed and that seems more likely when the writer doesn’t have enough lived experiences. The woe and the wow come off as overdone.

 

After a couple of my writing friends, one lesbian, the other trans, had spoken favorably of Hijab Butch Blues, I tracked down a copy. For what she refers to as her own safety, the writer uses the pseudonym, Lamya H. The book offers a different take on a person’s coming to terms with queer identity. Uprooted from an unnamed country of birth (Afganistan? Pakistan?), Lamya lived most of her childhood and teens in an Arab country, feeling different based on being darker skinned and less affluent than the people who held status. Her sense of difference grew as she realized a budding queerness, feelings that didn’t have words (other than derogatory associations) within her culture.

 

Moving to the U.S. for college at seventeen was an exit pass of sorts but also an introduction to another place where her differences made her feel inferior and shunned. It’s hard to get a sense of how old Lamya H is—the vagaries presumably are intentional to guard her identity—but she seems to have a couple of decades of working through queerness to refer to as she writes this memoir.

 

Each chapter is named for a specific prophet or character in the Quran or, in one case, a group of characters: hard to spot, impish spirits known as jinn. The experiences of the characters in the Quran or told by elders in the case of jinn are related in the particular chapter, interspersed by parallel experiences in Lamya’s life. It’s a unique structure that sets Lamya’s life against a broader context, helping her find new, more personal meaning in the Quran while also interpreting and accepting her own life. The formula helps forgo a self-absorbed telling. 

 

Readers with fewer minority labels to process may dismiss Lamya’s conflicts. Why continue being a practicing Muslim when the religion is male-dominated and homophobic? The idea of walking away comes easily to those whose religion can be more easily removed from culture, family and the more mundane but ever-present aspects of daily life. I, however, admire Lamya’s efforts to reinterpret her religion, viewing Allah as female or non-gendered, finding power in Yunus who learns when to preach and when it’s better to walk away and rejecting the noble subservience of Asiyah, a queen mistreated by her husband, a Pharaoh, “the most evil man that Allah had ever created.” 

 

Keeping her identity private,

this is the author photo at

the back of the book.

This memoir is about finding one’s place. Lamya’s journey involves figuring out how her religion and her queerness fit in her life and how she practices both in New York City, where her visual minority status as a brown-skinned women wearing a hijab, both stands out and gets lost in the diverse fabric of the metropolis. 

 

There are those who will conclude that there is too much compromise in Lamya’s walking along the path she’s created. Maybe there’s too much time struggling with mental and religious gymnastics. It all works for her. I see her as tenacious in the way she questions, processes and balances the mixed influences in her life. I respect the fact she’s creating her own identity based on mixed influences.

 

It's definitely a memoir worth reading.