Title & author
Love Is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar
Synopsis
Framed through the concept of a cross-country road trip, Love Is an Ex-Country challenges the reader to not only see “home” as more than just a physical space, but also as that definition being one of privilege. In doing so, the memoir asks readers to understand that finding home, particularly for a queer, fat, Arab American woman, is a political act.
Who should read this book
Fans of Detransition, Baby and White Tears/Brown Scars
What we’re thinking about
How we define home and who gets to define home
Trigger warning(s)
Physical violence, sexual violence, substance abuse, eating disorders, sexism, mental health, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, fatphobia
Running across the cover of Randa Jarrar’s memoir Love Is an Ex-Country (Catapult, 2021) is a pale blue path, one that weaves across numerous mountains and makes the reader question: is this path leading toward or away from something? In many ways, Jarrar’s memoir does both— it captures her exploration of the concept of home and what it means to her (the leading “toward”), but also the sacrifices, pain, and moments of reckoning along the path (the leading “away”). “Home is the memory, home is the present moment, home is the body, home is the work,” Jarrar said in an interview. Framed through the concept of a cross-country road trip, Love Is an Ex-Country challenges the reader to not only see “home” as more than just a physical space, but also as that definition being one of privilege. In doing so, the memoir asks readers to understand that finding home, particularly for a queer, fat, Arab American woman, is a political act.
Exploring her identity as a woman of color living in America, Jarrar details the impact stereotyping, profiling, and racism have on her sense of belonging. “To be Arab in America is to be a mouse unwittingly dunked into a paint of pot of invisibility ink,” she writes (Jarrar, 13). Running throughout the title and particularly within the chapter “Magic” is Jarrar’s exploration of invisibility. Where is she truly seen, and who truly sees her? Even for herself, the US has “convinced me that my own erasure is good for me” (13). The erasure of her identity, of all Arab’s individual identities, is both literal and metaphorical. Between imprisonment, killing, and wars, as well as the all-consuming tropes enforced through every media story, every history book, their identities become one and the same.
And for an individual that cannot be seen as themself, cannot feel safe, how does the US become home? “That also becomes part of home, that absence of home,” Jarrar stated in an interview. “A lot of refugees will say that the memory of home has become home.” The Western world has largely labeled an entire body of people as an “enemy,” an act that prevents Jarrar from feeling safe, in the US. So as she works to build a home, create a life for herself and her son and her family beyond the expectations of whiteness, of white nationalism: that’s political.
“My body was small; then it was not. That is the story almost all of us have about our bodies,” Jarrar writes (41). The line is matter-of-fact, something not intended to be arguable. It puts individuals— no matter their age, race, gender, ability, etc.— on the same page. But “fat femmes are both hypervisible and invisible,” Jarrar continues. “Muslim femmes are erased or ignored or used as an excuse to invade and decimate entire geographical regions” (194). Because of her race, because of her sexuality, that simple line is not Jarrar’s end of story. No— again, her identity, her culture, her home, they are all erased, literally and metaphorically. They are dictated by Westernized values and beliefs, particularly around what a queer and fat individual can/cannot do and have.
And then Jarrar finds kink. “In kink, consent is queen...For people of color living in 2019 America, this measure of agency and power can mean the world” (191). In fact, consent “is a central idea to liberation, abolition,” Jarrar stated in an interview. Kink allows Jarrar to have ownership over her body in a society that wants to regulate it for her in more ways than one. She embraces her body, she embraces her sexuality, yet another political act as she asserts and cultivates what home means to her.
“Like rain lashing at a window. Like a flood. Like a doll cut up into five distinct pieces. Legs, arms, head. Like a cardboard box with a sword through it. Like a fist. Like a magnifying glass over something in large print. Like a clap” (69). Jarrar’s writing is poetic, lyrical, blunt. Her memoir forces the reader to do work: it’s nonlinear, it’s framed in a way that readers might take too literally, and there’s even an experimental page format near the end. But why shouldn’t Jarrar? Why shouldn’t the readers have to give her words nothing but our full attention as we read through these stories? Why shouldn’t we have to think critically, pause to revel in the beauty of her writing, stop to breathe before turning a page? Why shouldn’t the work to explain be taken off of her?
“What happens to young women whose adolescent sexuality is controlled, whose bodies’ every movement is surveilled? Exit strategies and maps. We draw them up and go over the routes. We try the exits sometimes, at our own peril, too, because it’s worth it to know that exiting could work.”
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At the end, Jarrar includes an experimental chapter. Did this alter your reading? Why or why not?
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