After reading her 2014 Salon essay about cultural appropriation of belly dancing I knew I want to read more about and by Randa Jarrar. She´s fierce, bold, open, and a good and intelligent writer. Her takes are often political because identity is politically assigned and chosen, but I am political and my identity too involves political aspects and social priviledges that I am able to deconstruct in full awareness. I am not condescending when I say I want to understand a different identity, because I don´t know exactly the everyday existential content of a different identity. I can only listen and, as in the case of belly dancing, assume that me, as a white person born and living in Europe (by choice) I can only be a cartoonish clown if trying to play in other people´s shoes.
Love is an ex-Country is Randa Jarrar´s latest book, a memoir about the experience of parental abuse, political pressure, longing for her father´s country, coming to terms with her own sexuality and body. Every piece of this life puzzle is polished and added to her story which in all her contradictions and revolt shape her journey. Her everyday experience with America pushes forward her thoughts about what does it mean to be Arab in America. Her relationship with her body, the shape and the colour and the sexual stories wrote on it, or deleted from it, it´s building up barriers and the sense of her own being, liberated from her abusive narcissist father. She is ´confident and gorgeous´ in her ´rejection of mainstream beauty standards´, mostly the result of white people dreams about beauty.
And there is the inevitably political part of her identity, which involves the longing for the Palestine of his father´s family, which make her a Palestinian writer. I am a very political person and I assume my own political choices and identity, including by saying loudly that for me Leila Khaled is the very opposite of a hero. And that´s all I will write about this part because it is not my story to tell.
I love the way in which the memoir is organised, and the pace and sharpness of the story. From the Egypt to her mother to the closed gates to Ben Gurion and Marfa, Texas, Randa Jarrar lives with devouring passion for life, sex and ex-countries.
Rating: 3.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
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