Love, language, and liberation

MARWAN Kaabour refers to his book, The Queer Arab Glossary, as “a love letter” to his community.

- 

An impressive tome, the book contains the definitions of more than 300 slang Arabic words used to describe queer people (some affectionate; most, derogatory). It also includes essays and delightful illustrations which put a playful and affirming spin on some of the often offensive terms. In this interview with Carl Collison, Kaabour speaks, among other things, about the reasons behind tackling this ambitious project, the patriarchy inherent in language, and his active inclusion of a section of the global queer community so often “ignored”.

Carl Collison (CC): I found it telling — and kind of amusing - when I opened the Sudanese dialect section of the book and the very first entry was ‘Awl d Mk’ (“Mickey Mouse kids”), which basically alludes to the perception that queerness in Africa is as a result of ‘Western influence’. That it’s a Western import. But then, you also have lots of entries which date back to precolonial days. There’s the beautiful essay, A Rich Constellation of Identities, by Sager AlMarri, where they write about a manuscript that dates back to the 1300s in which reference is made to what we would today call intersex people. And so there’s a kind of contradiction, in a way, in how queerness is seen across the Arab world. What other contradictions or differences did you notice in your research?