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    Guapa
    Unavailable
    Guapa
    Unavailable
    Guapa
    Ebook330 pages5 hours

    Guapa

    By Saleem Haddad

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2017

    “A remarkable debut.” - The Huffington Post

    “Freewheeling and incendiary.” - London Review of Books

    “…vibrant, wrenching début novel...sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood.” - The New Yorker

    A Middle-Eastern capital caught in the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. A day in the life of a young man disillusioned with both East and West and struggling to find a place for himself in a society ruled by hypocrisy and contradictions. Rasa works as an interpreter for Western journalists by day and divides his nights between the Guapa, an underground nightclub where the city’s clandestine LGBT community congregates, and his secret lover Taymour. Every night Taymour sneaks into the house Rasa shares with his overbearing grandmother, the woman who raised him. When she finds them in bed together on the eve of Taymour’s wedding day, all hell breaks loose.
    That same day Rasa learns his best friend, the famous drag queen Majid, has been arrested by the police. Unable to go home, afraid for Majid’s fate, and heartbroken by Taymour’s determination to keep living a double life, Rasa’s fragile balance collapses, while all around him the brief, intense season of public protest is cut short by the regime’s repression and the rapid rise of the hard-line Islamist movement.

    “This immensely readable novel is fluent, passionate and emotionally honest. Equally astute in its analysis of Arab and American mores, the book’s characters are nuanced and dynamic; it gives fresh life to the maxim 'the personal is political'.” - The Guardian

    “Guapa offers an intimate, complex portrait of gay life in the Arab world, a subject rarely explored in fiction.” - Gay Times

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEuropa Editions
    Release dateOct 20, 2016
    ISBN9781787700277
    Unavailable
    Guapa
    Author

    Saleem Haddad

    Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City in 1983 to a Lebanese-Palestinian father and an Iraqi-German mother, and was educated in Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has worked as an aid worker with Médecins Sans Frontières and other organisations in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and Iraq. His writing has appeared in Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Daily Beast, among other publications.

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    Reviews for Guapa

    4/5

    46 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Reading this story was amazing! The struggles faced by the young man were seemingly insurmountable. If only seeing coming out and gay life in a Muslim world were presented that would have been fine. Even escaping his native world and coming to America to attend college was not what it seemed to be. Experiencing the events of 9/11/2001 as a Muslim, a visitor to the U.S., guilty while being innocent was eyeopening. But this is not a sob story. It is simply a persons struggle to come to terms with his own life in a world not unlike our own, one where it is better to be invisible and safe rather than open, honest and truly free.
    • 3/5
      At 27 Rasa lives with his grandmother in al-Sharqiyeh, a large city in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. He works as a translator for foreign journalists because he speaks fluent English after going to college in America. The novel Guapa by Saleem Haddad spans 24 hours in Rasa’s life that are an emotional flash point. He has participated in the Arab Spring protests, wants change for his country, but the pressure to get married and live a life of lies explodes when his grandmother catches him in bed with his boyfriend. Suddenly, her knowledge and the events of the day ahead means that everything and nothing matters.Rasa’s sexuality has been a source of confusion and shame for him since he was a young teenager. Haddad complicates this issue with the fact that both of his parents are gone, his father from cancer, but his mother as only a disappearance from his life. His grandmother’s traditional beliefs and the social structure in his country leave him no room to maneuver so he hopes that the time away will allow his feelings and identity to coalesce. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of 9/11 his college years are spent defending/hiding/apologizing for his nationality. His attempts at dating are abortive and ultimately, he directs his energy outwardI took all my rage and channeled it into activism, into human rights and justice and things that were clear and simple. I was passionately angry about the unjust wars, the brutal occupations, the massacred children, and the exploitation of people for profit and the pursuit of new markets. The angrier I became, the less time I had to think about how lonely I really was. I would never have admitted it to myself at the time, but underneath it all I wanted nothing more than to satisfy an inherent feeling of the unfairness of the world in my own life. p. 245 Through Rasa, Haddad encapsulates the passion of a group of young people who are striving to mesh dreams of freedom with the culture of their homeland. Scenes of police brutality, abject poverty, and the fear of being locked up for unknown infractions are pervasive throughout Guapa. That Haddad then layers in the most intimate aspect of human nature—who we love—and wraps it all in the heavy cloak of eib (the Arabic concept of shame) makes Rasa’s situation even more oppressive. His idealism about the protest movement wanes as he realizes it has become religiously radicalized. Under a fundamentalist government he will have fewer social freedoms than he does now. Haddad propels the plot of Guapa through its 24 hours with a pace that conveys the building tensions in Rasa’s mind and his inability to keep it all together. Where things wobble is regarding his mother. Her disappearance early in his life seems largely unremarkable for most of the story but then becomes paramount to his feelings of resentment and abandonment towards the novel’s end. While this dilutes the energies of the many vital elements in Guapa it is still a forceful work that provides worthwhile insight to a world most of us will never experience.
    • 2/5
      Rasa has been educated in America and is a translator for western journalists in an unnamed Arab country. I got the feeling that the story took place not many years of 9/11.Taking place over the course of 24-hours, Rasa must confront the man who he really is. The day starts off horrifically when he learns that his beloved grandmother, the woman who raised and loved him, saw him with his lover, Taymour, the night before. He feels guilty and deceitful. Grandma has taken to her room.Rasa cannot stand to know the dishonor he has brought on his house. Taymour doesn’t seem as in love with Rasa as Rasa is with him. He receives vague texts from Taymour about their relationships, which seem counter to the man Rases loves.The next day, Rasa learns that his best friend, drag queen Maj, has been arrested. Maj is star at Guapa, an underground gay bar. He roams the city’s slums, looking for Islamist rebels, finds himself at Guapa, and eventually winds up at a wedding. Through it all, the backstory of Rasa’ life are interwoven, giving the narrative an unbalanced feeling. I get that that’s to help the reader feel what Rasa is feeling, but that unsettling wasn’t consistent. There were times, like Rasa’s life, the book was riveting and times that the story seemed to drag. Upon reflection, debut author Haddad did a remarkable job. However, I didn’t care for this story. The bouts of compelling reading interspersed with lengthy, rather boring text just can’t make me like the story. And I still don’t understand why the book was named after a bar. Maybe I missed it.I give Guapa 2 out of 5 starts.
    • 4/5
      Reading Guapa means spending 24 hours in the life of Resa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, as he reflects on the immediate trauma and past events of his life. The stories of his father’s death, his mother’s departure, and his difficult relationships with friends and lovers, are interwoven through a tale of his struggle to discover his place in the world. This novel delivers so much more than it promises, delving deep into Resa’s mind to explore issues of marginalisation within every community Resa tries to discover an identity for himself. Resa struggles to find somewhere that he belongs and is on a constant search to find meaning in the definitions that other people put onto him, based on his nationality, sexuality, religion (or lack of).This is an amazing novel that explores complex issues in a delicate and sensitive way, bringing them to life through vivid characters and an evocative landscape. I found myself nervous before the ending, worrying what Resa was going to do and what would happen to him. I wondered how he would react at the wedding and if it would destroy him. Being able to see through a small window in to a world that I’m not a part of was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measures, as I found myself wanting to argue with almost everyone Resa came into contact with.