Love Is an Ex-Country

December 1, 2020
A Palestinian American writer and creative writing professor transforms a road trip into an occasion for reflections about her identity and past. In 2016, Jarrar drove cross-country from California to her parents' home in Connecticut. The author's journey becomes the framework and context for a memoir in essays that discusses details of that trip and delves sharply into issues of race, gender and sexuality, trauma, and female embodiment. The first noteworthy incident took place in Arizona, where Jarrar encountered a White female trucker who likened her fellow Syrian-born drivers to monkeys. The confrontation angered the author for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it revealed how she was not recognized by the woman as Arab; and how being Arab in the U.S. meant being "silenced, erased, demonized, vilified, and monstrosized." Later on, Jarrar expressed her indignation and outrage by destroying a symbol of American racism--the Confederate flag--discovered by chance in a small thrift store. At the same time, the trip proved liberating, as the author reveled in her freedom and sexuality with Tinder matches and barroom flirtations. But as she celebrated her plus-sized body and the confidence that came from rejecting "mainstream beauty standards," she also remembered her adolescence, when her body seemed to be "punishing me, rebelling against me." She chronicles how she was abused by her father and, later, her son's father. The author reveals how experimentation with "kinky" sex helped her work through the pain and other powerful emotions caused by patriarchal violence. "Sexuality, pain, love, obedience, hurt: all are woven together in the loom that is my body, that is my skin and my heart," she writes, as she also describes how Parkinson's changed her father from a "bully" into a painfully weakened man. Though individually compelling, these viscerally eloquent essays don't always cohere as a unified whole. Nonetheless, Jarrar makes a significant statement about self-acceptance while celebrating the complexity of intersecting identities. An intimately edgy text well suited for reading in pieces.

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December 1, 2020
In this cutting and triumphant memoir-in-essays, Jarrar (A Map of Home, 2008; Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, 2016) lays bare her continuing fight for validation and love in a world unused to celebrating people that look and think like her. Identifying as a fat, queer Palestinian woman, born in America and raised in Egypt, Jarrar sits at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. Her upbringing and young adulthood were rife with abuse from her father and the father of her child. This combination of mistreatment shaped Jarrar into the fierce, merciless thinker and writer that she is today. These essays explore her dramatically unstable early life, the formation of her adult identity, her sexuality, and her insatiable hunger for new experiences. The memoir itself traverses the globe from Texas to Connecticut to the Middle East to Berlin, with Jarrar's grit and intelligence leaping off every page. The entire book is a symphony for the pushed-out and the unheard.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020

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January 22, 2021

Jarrar (A Map of Home), who self-identifies as fat and queer, writes about her experiences as an Arab American with an itinerant childhood. Her father was abusive and when Jarrar seeks help from the police as a teenager, she is informed that filing a complaint will jeopardize her father's immigration status. Lacking recourse to protect herself, she married young. Her husband was also abusive and controlling; when Jarrar becomes pregnant, he coerces her into keeping the child. When the marriage implodes, Jarrar is left to raise her son on her own. Although billed as a memoir of a road trip the author took from California to Connecticut, the book is so scattershot that this narrative backbone is almost entirely incidental, if not absent. Jarrar jumps back and forth in time and situation, from one country to another. Her immersion in the S&M community helped her overcome self-image issues and reassert control in her life and relationships. Throughout the book, many of her divulgences about her sexual life seem lurid rather than germane or revelatory. VERDICT Readers interested in the queer Arab American experience may be better served by Samra Habib's We Have Always Been Here. Recommended for fans of the author's previous work.--Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID

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