Status
Available
Call number
Publication
TSAR Publications (2002), 90 pages
Description
Wanting in Arabic is a refusal of convenient silences, convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l'ecriture feminine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father's language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood. Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism,Wanting in Arabic attempts to traverse the fantasies of foundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order to further a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, of generous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition.
Media reviews
The Globe and Mail
“Wanting in Arabic is a self-impelled keening for identification with a lost tongue, both that of her father's Lebanese roots and her own metamorphosis … cross-citing psychoanalytic and feminist wagers about the sexed text … with glam-porno rubber-assed apostrophes to various lovers (not a
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poetics of celibacy, I assure you), with the funny and poignant savvy of postcolonial theory…. This indeterminate and determined voice chronicles the trans-self's journey as a tour et retour de force…. With ethical toughness and carnal ecstasy, Salah's writing bosoms up every damn dam in the literary waterway.” Show Less
Awards
Lambda Literary Award (Finalist — 2014)
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
90 p.; 5.72 inches
ISBN
1894770005 / 9781894770002