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language: Arabic (English tr. Leri Price)
country: Syria
year: 2018
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 26.5.25
there’s a lot I liked about Khaled Alesmael’s Selamlik, translated by Leri Price. in some ways it’s a fairly conventional Migrant Novel, about a young gay man from Syria who is seeking asylum in Sweden; in other ways, though, it is decidedly atypical, and the atypicality is what (largely) makes it work.
first there is its nonlinearity. this is not a straightforward novel-of-emigration that follows the protagonist from childhood to decision to emigrate to struggles in new country, or even a less straightforward back and forth with a present in the new country and flashbacks to the process of getting there. each chapter is, instead, organized around a particular subject: bedrooms, dogs, cruising, Qur’ans, Furat’s new roommate at the asylum-seeker hostel, and so on. some of these chapters, like the one on Qur’ans, are individually more or less linear, but structurally the novel is a collection of vignettes presented in the order they occur to Furat, including two elaborate sexual fantasies (one a relatively straightforward, though involved, shower orgy and one a surrealist parody developing from a Swedish for immigrants class about body parts).
second, there is, of course, the fact that Furat is gay. in this respect, the book this most strongly reminded me of was Micheál Ó Conghaile’s Sna Fir, and not only because of the similarity of their titles. there are Furat’s first encounters with cruising and with the culture of gay bathhouses, of course, but especially the novel’s attention to the ways he’s caught between social worlds, both in Syria — where the gay social world of the hammams is literally walled off from the straight world outside — but also in Sweden, where he is doubly alienated, from the local gay community by virtue of his race, language, and immigration status and from the other refugees he lives with by virtue of his sexuality. while it doesn’t hold back from addressing homophobia in Syria, Furat also misses Damascus not only in an abstract way, as Home, but specifically because he misses the gay scene there, the gay social world — or worlds — of Damascus, the kinds of gay life it made possible and that Sweden does not.
overall, I would describe the book as a catalogue of lives: the range of lives Furat could have lived, from his brief romance with his roommate before he moved to Damascus for university to his relationship with a man from Aleppo with whom he adopts a dog (only for her to be stolen by one of the soldiers who want to use their apartment building as a sniper lookout) to his both real and imagined encounters with other refugees. in spite of the stasis of refugee life — I would also pair this with Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life — and the meandering of the vignette structure, though, there’s a strong sense of movement throughout the book. it never drags and it never feels like it’s not moving purposefully, in a particular direction, even when it’s jumping backwards.
I have two main complaints. one is more aesthetic, namely that while the book was written in and translated from Arabic it definitely felt unambiguously written for a white European readership. some of this was just the general vibe, but some of it was very specific things like “in Arabic there is a proverb...”. I also suspect some of it may have been Price being overly domesticating, rather than Alesmael, but it’s impossible for me to know.
the other is about the final chapter. here Furat revisits his time in Istanbul, against the backdrop of the Gezi Park protests, but focused on his encounter with a sex worker nicknamed “Baklawa” and a brothel that also serves as a front for the smugglers he’s hoping will help him across the border into the EU. the problem here is gender: while Furat uses masculine pronouns for Baklawa, Baklawa at the very least engages in sex work dressed as a woman, and it seems reasonable to identify [him] as, at the very least, TMA even if [he] wouldn’t necessarily identify [him]self as a woman (I use the square brackets to mark the provisionality of these gendered pronouns). the pimp at the brothel Baklawa works at, meanwhile, is unequivocally a trans woman: “I will call Mama Nabila ‘she’ as she asked,” Furat tells us, though he proceeds to identify her as “born as a boy” and to characterize the deeper register of her voice — used when a jealous client attacks Baklawa — as “her real, much gruffer voice”.
insofar as this reflects Furat’s perspective, this isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker, though it reflects a strong and seemingly unexamined transmisogyny. the biggest problem is the very end of the novel — literally the last three paragraphs — where, after Furat and Baklawa have fled the brothel at Mama Nabila’s direction to get away from the jealous client, Mama Nabila shows up with a threatening man, searching for Baklawa. Baklawa, Furat tells us, is found murdered at the end of the night, but Furat “didn’t witness the crime”, having left when he realized how drunk Baklawa was. the last paragraph of the novel takes this, the murder of a transfeminized sex worker, as the jumping-off point for a brief musing on the refugee hostel as selamlik — also the name of Mama Nabila’s brothel — and the ambiguities of waiting.
this is straightforwardly a bad look, and I think it may also cast Furat’s gendering of Baklawa (as [he]/[him]) vs. Mama Nabila (as she/her) in an unpleasant light, since Baklawa, the victim, remains included for Furat in masculinity (albeit a cross-dressing masculinity) while Mama Nabila — if not the murderer then at least the murderer’s backer — is “allowed” to be unequivocally a trans woman.
up until the last few paragraphs, I think this is a solid, enjoyable novel, if not a perfect one. the last few paragraphs then come in to narratively reproduce the disposability of trans women and especially of trans sex workers and use Baklawa’s murder to fuel a cis man’s musings on Life (even if in this case the life in question is Refugee Life). it is, to say the least, unfortunate.
so: I liked a lot of things about this book, but with a heavy caveat about the ending.
moods: dark, grimy, hopeful, horny, reflective