Buy This Arab is Queer

Essay: The Decade of Saying All That I Could Not Say by Mona Eltahawy

It took Ireland and Bosnia to force a reckoning with my nesting dolls of secrets.

Of all the countries I have travelled to for work in the Western world, I have always felt most understood in Ireland. Unlike many other European countries which prefer to deny and distance themselves from talking about where I am from – Egypt and the surrounding region – and say, ‘it’s shit over there’, Ireland understood: ‘it’s shit over here too’. The stranglehold of the Catholic Church on everything from politics to education to geopolitics fostered understanding and empathy whenever I spoke there.

In 2015, Ireland became the first country to hold a referendum on marriage equality. The reckoning that such a referendum required inspired Ursula Halligan, one of Ireland’s most high-profile journalists, to come out at the age of fifty-four. (At the time of writing, I am also fifty-four). She wrote poignantly about a secret she thought she would take to her grave.

‘I was a good Catholic girl, growing up in 1970s Ireland where homosexuality was an evil perversion, she wrote. ‘It was never openly talked about, but I knew it was the worst thing on the face of the earth. So when I fell in love with a girl in my class in school, I was terrified.’ Halligan’s words gave me whiplash.

When I was sixteen years old, I was a good Muslim girl, growing up in Saudi Arabia where homosexuality was an evil perversion. I too fell in love with a girl in my class. But unlike Halligan – and this I now realise had been my denial and distance – I was in love with a girl and a boy at the same time and thought everyone else was too. I did not have a word for it, and I could not explore it beyond feeling jealous when the girl I was in love with told me she was in love with a boy and crestfallen when she did not say I, too, was an object of her love. It would take another three decades until I kissed a woman. But, tellingly, it would also take another decade until I kissed a man.

At around the age of seventeen, I began having nightmares that I had married the wrong man. Even when, at the age of twenty-one, I left gender-segregated Saudi Arabia for the more relaxed Egypt, my country of birth, I wanted very little to do with men. I was that good Muslim girl who was waiting for marriage and, much like Halligan, poured myself into work.

To say ‘had sex for the first time’ sounds like Christopher Columbus ‘discovering’ a country that existed long before he set sail.

Subscribe now

When I read Halligan’s coming-out essay, I marvelled at the almost identical teenage love for a girl and I wondered how our journalism careers had helped us hide. I knew that I, at least, was hiding in plain sight.

Was I brave? Of course I was: I wrote articles that exposed the human rights violations of a regime that tapped my phone, had me followed, summoned me for interrogation at State Security several times, threatened to imprison me, and eventually made good on its threats that night on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in November 2011.

Was I brave? Of course I was not. I could not say, for the longest time, that I desired men and women. How could I when, for the longest time, men alone were off limits. How was I to figure out what I desired when desire for anyone was off limits?

When I was twenty-eight, I became – finally – sexually intimate with a person other than myself. That sounds like an awful lot of words to say, ‘lost my virginity’ or, ‘had sex for the first time’ but I lost nothing – it was fucking wonderful – as I had already been masturbating and enjoying the orgasms I gave myself. To say ‘had sex for the first time’ sounds like Christopher Columbus ‘discovering’ a country that existed long before he set sail. I have determined to retire those phrases I used to use once and for all.

I chose the person I was now having more orgasms with – a man I asked out and with whom I declared a truce in my war against femininity. When Y and I had penis-to-vagina sex – a phrase that did not exist in my lexicon in 1996 – I stopped reading the Qur’an. I could not stand reading the word ‘fornicators’ repeated again and again. And I started growing my hair. I am still trying to figure out why.

Short hair had, for years, been central to my identity. I am told that, when I was ten days old, my paternal grandmother had my ears pierced. This is a very common practice in Egypt, where gold stud earrings are a popular gift for baby girls. That same grandmother was a teacher and a smoker – in a society where smoking is considered a male privilege. When my mother complained to her that I cried every time she tried to detangle my hair after washing it, my grandmother’s advice was, ‘Just cut her hair short.’ So, from the age of three or so, my mother kept my hair very short.

When I moved to London in 1975, at seven, the first time I went downstairs to play with the other children, they asked me, in order: ‘What’s your name? Are you a boy or a girl?’ My English wasn’t so good and I ran back home.

None of the questions was asked with malice, but the last question was indicative of an expectation British society had for markers of ‘boy’ and ‘girl’. My neighbours didn’t see those markers in my appearance and they were confused.

But it was said with malice, when I was thirteen and in Cairo, by the guy who told his friend, ‘That girl used to be a boy and they gave her a sex change.’

What does a girl look like? Who taught me to be a girl?

In 2013 I finally kissed a woman. I had always assumed that, when I had a threesome, it would be between two men and me.

This Arab is Queer

When I started growing out my hair after sex with Y, was I performing what I thought a sexually active, heterosexual woman looked like? Was I comfortable with the trappings of femininity now that I was older? When I had been younger, had I associated it with weakness? Were those years in hijab responsible for the power I had amassed?

When I removed my hijab aged twenty-five, I had worn it for nine years. On the day I stopped wearing it, I arranged for what I considered an intentionally ugly haircut. I did not want to be beautiful. I did not want my de-hijabing to be ascribed to a need for the male gaze’s approval. I wanted nothing to do with that gaze.

I was unsure if it was the gaze – that infamous eye of the beholder – or the beholder himself that I did not like.

Was sexual intimacy with Y giving birth to a new iteration of me? When did I start believing that nonsense about the ‘magic penis’, that heteropatriarchal nonsense that claims that being penetrated by a penis changes everything?

Adrienne Rich, a feminist and literary icon, defined compulsory heterosexuality as the ways by which a patriarchal and heteronormative world socialised women into heterosexuality – and I was taught a specifically Egyptian and Muslim version of it. I was raised to wait until I married a Muslim, Egyptian man to have sex. And for the longest time – too long – I obeyed. I could not find anyone I wanted to marry – or, more truthfully, I did not want to find anyone I wanted to marry. I became fed up with waiting and fed up with wondering, ‘What if it did not have to be a man?’

In 2013 I finally kissed a woman. I had always assumed that when I had a threesome, it would be between two men and me. But it turned out to be with a man whom I was seeing and a woman we invited to join us. It was also me who reached out and kissed her. And when the man left the room to use the bathroom, it was me who reached out for her once again. Still, I used no label and did not further explore my attraction to women.

In 2015, when I was getting to know the man who is now my Beloved and anchor partner, he told me in one of our earliest email exchanges that he was bisexual. I replied that I was polyamorous. I knew by then that monogamy was not for me, but I was still not ready to say that I, too, was bisexual. Learning how he explored and then acknowledged his sexuality has been a tremendous help, one that I credit with the progress I’ve made in shattering this final nesting doll of silence I’ve held onto for so long. While I was not ready to say I was bisexual, I did start to call myself queer – I considered my polyamory to be a form of rebellion and resistance to heteronormativity.

I was raised to wait until I married a Muslim, Egyptian man to have sex. And for the longest time – too long – I obeyed. I could not find anyone I wanted to marry – or, more truthfully, I did not want to find anyone I wanted to marry. I became fed up with waiting and fed up with wondering, ‘What if it did not have to be a man?’

This Arab is Queer

The liberatory and revolutionary potential of queerness … became especially poignant for me when I first visited Sarajevo in 2016. I went to Vilina Vlas hotel and spa, which had been used as the largest rape concentration camp during the Bosnian War, and to Srebrenica, site of the worst massacre in modern European history. The previous night I had been to a queer club in the Bosnian capital with queer friends. It was a small club that played a mix of western pop and dance songs along with domestic folk-dance music. The club was packed, mostly with men, who frequently kissed. I held onto those images – the men kissing all around me as I danced with my friends – the next day, as I reeled at the atrocities that had been committed in the places I visited. The queerness I carried out of that radical space of openness and the transgressive sexualities that surrounded me were the perfect antidote to the horror of militarism that had been unleashed at Vilina Vlas and Srebrenica. Men should kiss each other more often and kill less – much less.

One of those men in the queer club in Bosnia kissed me.

‘I’m bisexual,’ he told me.

‘So am I,’ I replied.

—You can support my work via a one-time payment through PayPal

—You can also support my work via Patreon

Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her new book, an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, will be published March 5, 2025. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

I appreciate your support. If you like this piece and you want to further support my writing, you can like/comment below, forward this article to others, or send a gift subscription to someone else today.

Give a gift subscription

Subscribe now

Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan (Translated by Georgina Kleege)

Patriarchy, toxic masculinity, xenophobia, war: Etel Adnan’s novel lays all bare. This is a short and righteously furious read; short but massive and searing.

Sitt Marie Rose was the first novel written about the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). Shortly before I read this I saw one of the late Etel Adnan’s paintings at a glorious exhibit of abstract art from North Africa and South West Asia. To see the art of the then 94-year-old Adnan and then to read a novel she wrote early in the arc of her writing was to appreciate her incredible breadth and range. The exhibit also made clear that Adnan was a lesbian and mentioned her partner, Simone Fattal, who she met in 1972 and with whom she lived until her death. It was good to see two older queer women from the region whose sexual orientation and love for each other was clear and celebrated.

The eponymous Marie Rose - based on Syrian social worker Marie Rose Boulos, who was killed by a Christian militia - is a Christian woman who “crossed enemy lines” during the civil war. She is an activist and teacher who is abducted, put on “trial”, tortured and executed by a Christian militia - all in front of the deaf children at a school where she volunteers.

To talk about her “crime” would be to act as if war in and of itself were not the ultimate crime; the back and forth between Marie Rose and her captors/interrogators/tormentors is an indictment of the savagery of patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

Marie Rose must be “punished” for daring to cross over to the other side, to the Muslim and Palestinian areas of Beirut where the school for the children is, where she volunteers for the “enemy” in a Palestinian refugee camp, and for having a lover who was a Palestinian doctor in the camp.

Buy Sitt Marie Rose

Who is a woman allowed to love and who owns her loyalty? The group, the tribe, the religion: Adnan puts all those on trial. I've included some passages I underlined in a fury of my own about patriarchy, women, internalized misogyny, xenophobia, and how toxic masculinity so easily recruits and pushes men to horrific violence.

Subscribe now

This is why it’s important that women, queer people, writers who are not cisgender heterosexual men write about war.

Upgrade to Paid Subscription

Read more

Subscribe now

Cantoras, Caro De Robertis

I want to write a book about this book! This is the book I have waited all my life to read. This is what happens when genderqueer people write about revolution! Who is the revolution for? Who does a revolution liberate? A novel about five queer women living and fighting to exist during the time of military dictatorship - the ultimate expression of patriarchy via fascism - in Uruguay.

I first read this incandescent novel as we marked the 9th anniversary of the January 25, 2011 revolution in Egypt. I’ve long said that sexual liberation and gender liberation are essential to all revolutions, in Egypt and everywhere, and I have always said that Central and South American countries that liberated themselves from CIA-backed military dictatorships were the role models that Egypt should learn from.

And so the importance of this brilliant novel by Caro De Robertis who I had the pleasure to meet when I spoke at the Berkeley Book Festival in 2016 and who to my honour asked me to contribute to their anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times, which they published as an act of resistance and defiance after Trump’s first election in 2016.

Buy Cantoras

Cantoras was a winner of a Stonewall Book Award and De Robertis is the 2022 winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

I underlined so many pages in this book! Cantoras filled me with joy, made me cry, re-energized the revolution within me. The revolution must free us all! Too often revolutions focus on the kind of change that cisgender heterosexual men want and benefit from—from the State and just for them. Too many cis men, including those who are not white, are moved only by the fight for liberation from the State. “None of us are free! This is not the time for feminism!” they say. If the State oppresses men and women, then the State, Street, and Home together oppress women and queer folk. Cis men refuse to make those connections that make them complicit in what I call the Trifecta of Patriarchy.

A feminist revolution targets patriarchy in the State, Street, and the Home because it recognizes that there is no liberation without sexual liberation, without gender liberation, without queer liberation. It states as a revolutionary statement: I own my body, not the State, not the Street, not the Home. I do.

A feminist revolution dares to imagine liberation from the militarism of the State and from its echo in the conservatism of the Street and the Home. A feminist revolution recognizes that the hardest revolution of all is the one at the Home, because all dictators go home.

And a feminist revolution disobeys all those who insist “People are not ready,” because as revolutionaries we must recognize that if our communities are ready for us, we are too late.

I recently read and loved Caro’s latest novel The Palace of Eros (which will get its own review soon. I’m out of town and don’t have my copy with me right now) and they have just published a non-fiction book, So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two Spirit People of Color. And alongside Cantoras, I recommend you read The President and the Frog, especially as we continue to mourn the death of former Uruguayan president José Mujica.

Upgrade to Paid Subscription

Read more

Subscribe now

La Bastarda, Trifonia Melibea Obon (Translated by Lawrence Schimel)

This is an incredible book of just 88 pages about women’s sexuality and pleasure, the price paid by those who insist on existing outside of patriarchy’s dictates, and how they create a chosen family and safe space in Equatorial Guinea.

It is the first book by a woman author from Equatorial Guinea to be translated into English and tells the story of Okomo, a teenage girl who is gaining an understanding of just how much the patriarchy fucks everyone except for the men whose dominance it serves. When she falls in love with a woman she comes to know that there is no word for lesbian in her language and learns how dangerous it is for those who insist on their right to exist outside of patriarchy and the dangers to anyone who refuses its heteronormative dictates.

Buy La Bastarda

Okomo lives in a village near the border with Gabon. As the afterward by Abosede George emphasizes, this makes Okomo’s story as “authentic” as it gets and upends charges that same-sex relations or love are “Un-African.” It beautifully captures and defines for Okomo and other characters what chosen family is and what a safe space is and where and how those exist.

In an interview with her translator for Electric Literature, the author says “The sexuality of the Fang woman doesn’t exist. Not even the heterosexual woman has a right to her sexuality, the only thing expected of her is reproduction, that’s it. My novel advocates for this right for women: the right to have a sexuality.”

Read this book.

Upgrade to Paid Subscription

Read more

Subscribe now

I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood - Tiana Clark

Every year on Nina Simone's Born Day, I post a thread on Twitter of some of my favourite quotes by the revolutionary and the legend who when asked in the mid-1960s by Vernon Jones, the head of the Urban League, how come she wasn't more active in civil rights, replied "Motherfucker, I am civil rights."

When Nina sings, I am ready.

And this February 21, 2020, as I was posting my thread of #NinaSaid, I came across an essay written by Tiana Clark about a pilgrimage she made to the singer's family home in Tryon, North Carolina. That visit was foundational to The Rime of Nina Simone, an incredible imagining of a conversation between the classically trained pianist and the poet. In the poem - which is worth the price of entrance to this collection alone - Nina Simone, whose ambition to continue her training as a classical pianist and play Bach and Beethoven was thwarted by racism, warns Tiana Clark that that same racism will demand that the poet perform Black pain in order to succeed at her writing programme.

Buy I Can't Talk About the Trees

Upgrade to Paid Subscription

Read more

Subscribe now

Savage Conversations, Leanne Howe.

There are many things that the United States of America refuses to reckon with from its history: who determines what is history, whose stories are told and what is sanitized in that telling. The crimes that settlers committed against Native people are central to those considerations. This slim book, as Susan Power writes in her forward, “burns through accepted stories like fire.”

“Being Native American in this country means often having a very different take on American history and historic figures generally accepted as national heroes. Just because they’re your heroes doesn’t make them automatically ours, since what benefitted non-Native settlers was often dangerously harmful to indigenous communities,” writes Power, who is from the Dakota Nation.

Buy Savage Conversations

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the order for the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men, the largest mass execution in US history. In 1875, Lincoln’s widow Mary Todd Lincoln was tried on charges of insanity and committed to a sanitarium. Entered into evidence is Mary Todd Lincoln’s claim that every night a “Savage Indian” enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp.

Leanne Howe, from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, links the two events in this short and devastating book. “Savage Conversations is a daring account of a former First Lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.”

Refer a friend

Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her new book, an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, will be published March 5, 2025. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

I appreciate your support. If you like this piece and you want to further support my writing, you can like/comment below, forward this article to others, or send a gift subscription to someone else today.

Give a gift subscription

Subscribe now

Consider this a celebration of South African literature! For Daily Dose 167, I shared a quote from Reflecting Rogue: Inside the mind of a feminist, by.South African feminist scholar and one of my favourite people, Pumla Dineo Gqola. Read Pumla!

Buy Reflecting Rogue

Here are reviews and recommendations of short story collections by two other South African women authors.

Buy Intruders

Intruders, Mohale Mashigo

I loved this collection of short stories! I'm a fan of several South African authors, some of whom I've had the pleasure of meeting. I first met Mohale at the Ake and Arts and Book Festival in Nigeria, which is the biggest arts festival on the African continent and again at Abantu Festival in Soweto, South Africa.

With her voice in my mind, I relished Intruders. Especially when she makes it clear in the introductory note: “I’m not a fan of dystopia (though sometimes it feels like we are living it) nor am I a believer in utopia; but I do believe that there is a place in between the two where South Africans are able to live in a future that is free from white supremacy (please don’t argue with me; I’m not interested in your reverse racism fallacy) and poverty.”

She tells us “There are stories that take place in the future but cannot be called Afrofuturism because (I am of the opinion) Afrofuturism is not for Africans living in Africa.” And explains why. And then you read the stories and you understand exactly what she means.

Anyone who knows me will understand why The High Heel Killer is my favourite of these brilliantly executed tales. Especially when its protagonist declares “I am a monster. A beautiful monster with wings and no fear for the first time in my life.”

Read this!

Buy If You Keep Digging

If You Keep Digging, Keletso Mopai

This is a wonderful debut collection of short stories by South African author Keletso Mopai, who I met in Soweto at Abantu Book Fest in 2019. Published by a press that was launched to highlight Black authors in the white-dominated publishing world of South Africa, Mopai’s stories draw us into the lives of South Africans--from a lesbian couple trying to survive homophobia, to an albino woman in love--and insists on staring down misogynist violence in many forms--from sex-for-grades abuse on college campuses to the ways patriarchal societies pit women against each other to the ways such patriarchy limits men’s lives too.

I bought If You Keep Digging in Lagos at Ake Arts and Book Festival in Nigeria after the festival bookshop staff enthusiastically recommended it. There has always been exciting art and literature from the continent and I am grateful to have met and read so many of my fellow African authors at these exciting festivals--Ake is the biggest arts festival in Africa--and thrilled to see young and brilliant authors emerging.

I want to read more by Keketso Mopai. She is a superb storyteller and I’m eager to see what she does next.

Refer a friend

Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her new book, an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, will be published March 5, 2025. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

I appreciate your support. If you like this piece and you want to further support my writing, you can like/comment below, forward this article to others, or send a gift subscription to someone else today.

Give a gift subscription

Subscribe now

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, Rebecca Hall, Illustrated by Hugo Martinez

When she was an attorney who represented low-income tenants and homeless families, Rebecca Hall would be pointed in the direction of the defendants' chair. Fed up of the racism and misogyny that could not imagine a Black woman as an attorney, she left the law and returned to the academy for a PhD in history.

She unearthed women-led slave revolts while researching her dissertation, which she has turned into Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts. Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is a powerful and captivating reminder of the ways that patriarchy has silenced and erased the women warriors who fought to emancipate themselves during the Middle Passage, in Colonial New York, and across the Americas.

For example, a woman known in court records only as the "Negro Fiend."

Upgrade to Paid Subscription

Read more

Subscribe now

The Shadow King and Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste

Full disclosure: Maaza Mengiste is a dear friend of mine. So while I have every reason to be utterly biased in raving about these two incredible novels, it is for another reason that I urge you to read them.

I have often said that the January 25, 2011 Revolution in Egypt was a lifelong dream of so many of us in my country of birth, as were the other revolutions that sprang across the region after a Tunisian man set himself on fire in December 2010. I rarely use the term "Arab Spring" because not everyone who rose up identifies as Arab and revolutions are not seasons or colours or flowers and the phrase "Arab Spring" has too often been used against us as "Arab Winter" etc to signal the "failure" of something that very much continues. Revolutions are not something that start suddenly or end suddenly and too many (men) political analysts are more concerned with regime change than with the people change that revolutions bring about.

Upgrade to Paid Subscription

Read more

Subscribe now

Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, Martha A. Ackelsberg

Who is the revolution for? So often, too often, we are all called to join the revolution, to risk all for the revolution, and the revolution turns out to be a cisgender dick swinging contest. I am not interested in dick swinging contests and neither were Mujeres Libres (Free Women), an anarchist organization founded officially in Spain in 1937, The women who founded it were for the most part members of anarchist-affiliated organizations active in Spain at the time. Those organizations might have expressed commitment to gender equality but many male members of those organizations did not take women seriously and failed to be as committed to that revolutionary goal of gender equality. Sexism does not live just among the right wing and the conservatives. The "comrades" must be held to task too.

Upgrade to Paid Subscription

Read more