Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

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These are the stories that make the headlines, though, and given the statistics about LGBTQIA+ people considering or dying by suicide – LGBTQIA+ young people in particular, I wouldn’t be surprised if those statistics are a vast underestimate.

Butch Memoirs To Check Out in Honor of “Hijab Butch Blues” Butch Memoirs To Check Out in Honor of “Hijab Butch Blues”

The memoir swings, pendulum-like, between her own story and her reflections on the stories at the heart of Islam, stories that shape her understanding of what it means (or can mean) to be female and Muslim. This pairing of personal and theological truths is powerful and respectful of both individual and cultural identity. Lamya H has fashioned in this book what I never thought possible: she describes a world in which I could live.” —Kazim Ali, author of Fasting for Ramadan I do realize that I’m somewhat playing into these binaries and strict categorizations by applying such a specific scope to this list, but I hope this will be seen as a useful starting place for memoirs on butch and/or masc identity and not restrictive. Definitely shout out any books you’d like to recommend in the comments, even if they don’t necessarily explicitly touch on butch identity! I’ve included some recent releases as well as some slightly more under-the-radar titles that skew academic or hybrid in form. I’d love to hear more suggestions! I found this a fascinating and fitting analogy, because practically every Muslim I know has a story about someone who was possessed by a jinn. And in Hijab Butch Blues, it’s dispossession that empowers Lamya to challenge this mindset – in themself and others.She reimagines Prophetic tales in contemporary, colloquial language, and interweaves lessons she extracts from the Quran with her daily life experiences. More than a must-read . . . a study guide on Islam, a handbook for abolitionists, and a queer manifesto. It inspires critical thinking, upholds activist self-care, and permits the defining of one’s own queerness. By the end . . . readers will see queerness—theirs, others’, and the concept—’for what it is: a miracle.’” —NPR

Hijab Butch Blues | SpringerLink Lamya H.: Hijab Butch Blues | SpringerLink

I want to focus on the reality for LGBTQIA+ Muslims. There have been far too many news stories about queer Muslims contemplating suicide or worse, dying by suicide.This book is not written by a Muslim, and if it is, may Allah forgive them. This book is a total and absolute shattered portrayal of Islam, if you are non-muslim, then know that this book should not even be on Goodreads. This is a violation of Islam and everything that it has to do with. Worse still, Lamya is belittled by family for wearing hijab. In a toxic mix of Islamophobia and classism, Lamya is told by relatives that they look like a servant in hijab, that hijab is not in their culture and would hinder assimilation in the United States. The most familiar element of this memoir was Lamya’s coming out journey. That is to say, they don’t – not to their family, anyway. They write how “it still feels unthinkable” to tell their family they’re gay, or anything about their relationship status, and that this might be the case forever. An influential voice in the realm of cultural anthropology and LGBTQ+ studies, Esther Newton’s two memoirs — the first published in 2000 and the second in 2018 — combine personal and scholarly writing on gender and sexuality. In My Butch Career, Newton writes: “Bar dykes were the first to show me how to be butch, which means they showed me how to have style. Postmodernism and consumerism have given style a bad name.” Indeed, throughout her oeuvre, Newton writes about butchness from so many angles. A documentary is currently being made about her and her work. An inspiring vision of a world in which queerness and the Quran are not only compatible but illuminative of one another.” —Electric Literature

Hijab Butch Blues - Springer Lamya H.: Hijab Butch Blues - Springer

An insightful memoir-in-essays by a queer nonbinary (she/they) Muslim author, which pairs stories from the Quran with stories about their life. This truly exceeded all expectations. Lamya touches on immigration, Islamaphobia, racism, homophobia, and more as she finds hope in a religious text while needing to remain closeted to much of their community, including their family. Their devoutness happens *because* of their identity, not in spite of it. It’s a nuanced, powerful view of religion. Not only that, Lamya is a talented writer. I’ll be thinking about this memoir for some time to come. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys memoirs that grapple with faith/religion. Hijab Butch Blues is a memoir from Hijabi, Queer, Nonbinary, Muslim author Lamya H. At age fourteen, Lamya realizes she has a crush on her female teacher. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don't matter, and it's easier to hide in plain sight- to disappear. But one day in Quran class, they read a passage about Maryam that changes everything: when Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya?From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own—ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant. In many ways, reading Hijab Butch Blues felt like looking in a mirror. It wasn’t an exact reflection by any means, but I could recognise so many of the experiences recounted in this captivating memoir. Your narrative structure makes me think about both geographical displacement and the displacement of desire – themes present in many religious texts, by way of spiritual and bodily transition.

Hijab Butch Blues — Lamya H

Lamya H’s debut memoir Hijab Butch Blues doesn’t exactly begin here. When we first meet Lamya, they are fourteen years old and they “want to die.” Actually, they don’t want to die exactly. They want to disappear, they want to never have existed in the first place: “I just don’t want to do this thing called living anymore, and this feeling both creates and fills up an emptiness inside me. I want my parents never to have had me, I want my friends never to have known me, I want none of this life I never asked for. I want to never have lived at all.”She ultimately finds a community of like-minded Muslim Americans when she attends a “coming out Muslim play”, a gathering that she writes “feels like a window into Jannah”. Lamya H: Yeah, and I think what’s really hard about that is that we don’t, as queer people, necessarily have models in the same way. I think of myself ten years ago, not knowing a lot of queer elders, or just not knowing what the possibilities were for my life. That’s also part of why I wrote this book, because it felt like a way to put stories out there into the world about alternative ways to live. I think about that a lot. The fact that we’ve had to chart our own way, and do it without models. This is also where some of the Qur’an stories come in for me. Once I started seeing all these prophets as flawed characters who make somewhat questionable decisions, and you know, are possibly queer and have their own difficulties and stories, it felt more possible to have them as models, as opposed to these saintly figures who never do anything wrong.