Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

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Hijab Butch Blues is not your typical coming-out tale that climaxes in a grand revelation to family members. “What would my telling them I’m queer achieve?” asks Lamya in one chapter. When we speak, she brings up people's fixation on revealing queerness to parents. “There are so many things that straight people don’t tell their parents growing up, there’s an entire part of so many peoples’ lives that their parents just don’t know about – and so it feels really strange to be obsessed with this idea of having to tell them everything,” she explains.

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For me, it made perfect sense reading that Lamya introduced their partner (Liv) to their family as a friend, not a girlfriend. Liv and Lamya agree a set of rules that they follow so the family are none the wiser about the true nature of their relationship. Among my queer Muslim friends, this is a common story because it’s an act of self-preservation. An inspiring vision of a world in which queerness and the Quran are not only compatible but illuminative of one another.” —Electric Literature At the forefront throughout were their tumultuous experiences – from introducing their partners to family as “friends”, to latent Islamophobia at airports and racist microaggressions at school and work. 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’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.” Icon Books is an independent publisher of thought-provoking non-fiction. We publish science, history, politics, philosophy, psychology, humour and much else besides

This new memoir explores Muslim identity through a queer lens

It seems easier to ease herself out of sight than to grapple with the difficulty of taking shape in a world that doesn't fit. She is a queer teenager growing up in a Muslim household, a South Asian in a Middle Eastern country. But during her Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam, and suddenly everything shifts: if Maryam was never touched by any man, could Maryam be… like Lamya?

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Lamya’s] determination to fight for a better world is inspiring…will leave readers feeling uplifted and empowered.” — Queer Space Magazine The toxic masculine subject matter: no man has touched this woman, so OF COURSE she's a lesbian! Spoken like a heteronormative, male-identified person. Lamya says that she started writing the essays that would form her book in her late 20s: “I was angry about things, and a friend had suggested that if I don’t write things down then the anger just dissipates.”

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

When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher—her female teacher—she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can’t yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. 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, she reads 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? 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.I admire Lamya’s courage when they come out to their Muslim doctor – an “aunty doctor”, in Lamya’s words. Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas and My Butch Career: A Memoir by Esther Newton (2000, 2018) Lamya H: I remember that moment blowing my mind because I didn’t even think you could pray like that. The way being in the mixed-gender line felt so right. A few times we tried to do that at the Islamic centre [in New York] as well, with varying degrees of success. I think another aspect of the community thing is also really just building communities of queer Muslims that are able to practise in ways that feel more expansive and queer and not gender-segregated, for example. Where critique and questioning is not only allowed but welcome, and is done in ways that feel like they expand possibilities. I think those are the things that have really saved me in the end – having access to community, and feeling a part of something that feels like it’s building towards justice. 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.

Hijab Butch Blues — Lamya H

There are people who will call this book blasphemous, and who will be incredulous as to how a Queer Muslim woman can compare her struggles to those of the Prophets. But there will also be those readers whose minds will be opened, their perspectives broadened, and their binary ways of thinking dismantled as they engage in critical thinking beyond the parameters of whatever version of faith they may have been indoctrinated with. After moving to the United States for university, Lamya recalls “deciphering the hierarchies of this country” – from white supremacy to Arab and Muslim names alone rousing suspicion. Lamya writes that their “brown hijabi Muslim body is seen as scary, disempowered, both hypervisible and invisible at the same time”. Masterfully constructed . . . a reminder of the power we have within ourselves and within our communities to defeat complacency, indifference, and cruelty.” — AutostraddleIt turns out 2023 has been the year of the memoir for my reading list so far. I didn't set out to do that intentionally, but I think I'm up to around 11-ish and most have been wonderful. A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran ina memoir that’s “as funny as it is original” ( The New York Times). At one point, Lamya contemplates the whale that swallowed Prophet Yunus and offers the interpretation that, rather than a punishment, it may have been a means of protection – “a brief respite, a shelter, a resting place. Protection, for the time being.” She then describes how her pseudonym serves a similar purpose: “A whale that allows me to keep fighting, to fight with my writing.” Lamya remembers examples of this, like when early on this couple “bemoaned the ‘homosexual agenda’” – as well as how they have grown in their allyship since then, making queer friends and confronting their prejudices. After Lamya comes out to him, Rashid asks Lamya to hold him accountable if this happens.