A Year in Reading: Salar Abdoh
The year more or less begins with something of a pushback at mid-winter dread – when Covid is still a convenient rumor in my mind – with three back-to-back books to understand the world from more than my own tired perspective:
The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal Transformation from Female to Male by Max Wolf Valerio. The memoir’s honesty leaves me discombobulated. As if I were listening to Tiresias. Hardcore and insightful, it keeps me up picturing some of the situations Wolf describes – his returning, for example, to a lesbian bar in San Francisco that he used to frequent as his prior self.
Then another lens, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s not there: A Life in Two Genders. Boylan, like Wolf, tells of feelings probably impossible to know unless you have experienced them first-hand. She is generous in her narrative and extends a hand to show us that ineluctably tortuous path a person takes to finally settle into the skin they should have been born in all along. One night, well after she has made the transformation, she comes out of a bar she has been playing at with her band and is immediately accosted, almost assaulted by the brute that had had his eyes on her all night long.
And so the world turns:
To Saeed Jones and How We Fight for Our Lives. Reading this taut, poetic, sometimes scorching memoir of growing up gay and Black in Texas reminded me of moments from other people’s lives in other parts of the world that I have known. It’s a book I would like to dare and gift to many a young person in the Middle East and North Africa someday.
Next to war:
The Syrian poet has been a part of a larger translation project from Arabic and Persian into English with my co-translator, . After translating several love poems of Jarrah from a, where the poet, long in exile, writes of his absence from his nearly ruined city, Damascus:
