This Arab Is Queer by Elias Jahshan

Author:Elias Jahshan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saqi

I have never thought myself a sin. My queerness has never curdled into self-loathing. Save for a few days when a woman first slowed my heart – when something unnamed and afraid tried to rear its head – I have always held my queerness gently in my ribs, a secret I am not ashamed of. I have never tried to rip it out, claws sharpened by a childhood of religion lessons and the many kindly veiled women who raised me.

I have never believed that the God who sends me a shooting star is the same one the idiots yell about on TV, with spit flying out of their mouths. Theirs quakes in anger at my love; mine smiles, honoured by a soul loving the very best of His image.

She spoke to me, once – the woman who slowed my heart – of Vita and Virginia’s letters and how she is reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. That night on the beach, she is glowing and total and nothing less than divine and I too am reduced to a thing that wants Thurayya.

It is a man with a child’s laugh who will tell me later that the cluster of stars that she picks out like flowers at 2 AM – five delicate pinpricks, so small, so deliberate as they huddle together for warmth – is called Thurayya.

He will tell me a less misogynist version of an old Arab legend. That Thurayya – Pleiades or the Seven Sisters – soars infinite through the cosmos with her Dobran, the shepherd who loves her and the brightest star in Taurus, never far behind.

God has never denied me my Thurayya. Every night, when I am lucky enough to lie underneath a pinpricked sky, God reaches for me, blinks to me from behind a cluster, and reminds me we are nothing but love.

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