Exploring what it’s like to be young, gay and brown
Three new Canadian books take divergent approaches to the issues of race, gender and sexual orientation
Canadian publishers are often seen as an endangered species these days. But there are exceptions to that dismal view. Founded in 1971 and still going strong, Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press continues to thrive, publishing between 14 and 20 new books a year and 12 to 15 reprints.
The three books from Arsenal considered in this review all address issues of race, gender and sexual orientation. However, apart from these overarching themes, the three are wildly divergent in genre, tone and execution, a diversity that reflects the maturity within gay and gay-themed writing that has progressed so notably within our lifetimes.
And this greater visibility for LGBT writers and citizens is a good thing, and stands as evidence that the anti-discrimination work of generations of gay liberationists has been largely successful, especially in urban enclaves of enlightenment in the developed world.
However, loving same sex partners can still get you beaten up or killed in many places around the world, including wide, dismal swaths of rural and suburban badlands here in North America. Homophobia is alive and well in the 21st century, and the work of equality for all has been advanced but not completed, as is evidenced by these three books, each in its own way a testament to the ongoing difficulties imposed on LGBT individuals, particularly when they are women or belong to racialized minorities.
Born in Germany to Turkish parents, Belden Sezen is a lesbian of colour and a gifted cartoonist. Her delicate cartoon images are often quite spare, executed sometimes in exquisite detail and sometimes in simplified and stylized treatment. The ironic intelligence of the accompanying text and the innocent feel of the cartoons themselves make this a very impressive piece of work, a moving commentary on what it means to grow up female, brown and queer in contemporary Europe.
Snapshots of a Girl illuminates the author’s process of coming out to her mother, father and aunt, and her search for love and community in several European cities, including Amsterdam, where she currently lives. The combination of text and graphics in Snapshots of a Girl portrays the process of coming out in a sensitive and moving fashion, which will be welcomed by any reader who has come out herself or loves someone who has.
Leah Lakshmi PiepznaSamarasinha’s Dirty River is also a story about recognizing multiple identities, both racial and sexual. Daughter of a father from Sri Lanka and a workingclass white American mother, the author flees from the mean streets of New York to Toronto in 1996 in search for a community of brown and mixed-race lesbians, punks, survivors of family and psychiatric abuse and political activists. In rapid fire, intensely felt and perfectly controlled prose, the activist/poet/ survivor evokes the terrors and pleasures of life in the pockets of counter culture, gender rebellion and anti-racist groups she found in Toronto and details her painful process of reflection and eventual self acceptance. The authorial voice is propulsive, eloquent and absolutely persuasive. Piepzna-Samarasinha is particularly good at conveying what it is like to live in poverty and political enthusiasm in a marginalized subculture and generously invites the reader to participate in that experience.
Simon Fraser University grad and Iraqi immigrant Hasan Namir’s debut novel, God in Pink is the story of a young Iraqi man, Ramy, who turns to a local Islamic teacher for support as he struggles to find a way to both come out and to survive in the context of the homophobia in his family, his city and his Muslim faith. Although God in Pink features some interesting magical realism elements (including a gay Angel Gabriel and a magically disappearing beard) the tone is often a bit over-earnest and the plot takes many melodramatic turns that fail to convince this reader, at least.
Nevertheless, this first novel has many virtues, not least its ability to introduce western readers to a war-torn Iraq in 2003 and the ongoing global disaster of religiously inspired anti-gay violence as it plays out in Baghdad.
Namir is a writer with a lot on his mind and a commendable interest in providing his readers with information on the criminal impacts of old men setting the sexual rules for all on the pretext they speak for God. While this book is not entirely successful, it is a respectable first effort and suggests a real talent just finding its way and its own voice.