God is Trans
P. Eldridge speaks with Lamya about navigating the intersections of their identity, writing from personal experience, coming out, and writing as an action which promotes action and resistance.
INTERVIEW BY P. ELDRIDGE
Photo credit to Lia Clay for the Queer | Arts | Portraits series.
Lamya H, a pseudonym for an author seeking privacy, creates an intimate and powerful narrative in their book, Hijab Butch Blues which explores the complexities of their identity as a queer, Muslim person raised in a South Asian family living on the Arabian Peninsula. Beginning with a journey into the struggle of reconciling their gender identity with their faith, at fourteen Lamya grapples with the feelings of displacement by describing wanting to disappear. A pivotal moment in Quran class sparks a new perspective setting Lamaya on a path of queering the Quran in stories Maryam, the virgin mother, and Allah, the story of Adam and Hawa that reveals the exile of both into a world of homogeneity and rigidity of the gender binary; where Lamya asserts: God is trans.
P. Eldridge: First of all, it’s so wonderful to be speaking with you. I really loved your book Hijab Butch Blues. I wanted to start at the beginning of the book, you describe wanting to disappear completely. You say you feel like an outsider in various communities. How do you explore and reconcile these feelings of displacement?
Lamya H.: As someone who was born in one country, lived in another, and then immigrated to the US, displacement has always been a big part of my life – not just in terms of myself, but also the people I grew up around who were similarly in motion, moving from one country to another for jobs, for education, for their families. Displacement has always felt connected to disappearing – friends would leave at the end of the year and we’d write letters to each other but slowly disappear out of each other's lives. Or we’d visit our extended families every summer, but the rest of the year, they weren’t part of our lives.
Disappearing has always felt familiar to me, but the ways in which I wanted to disappear growing up came from something deeper: I felt so different from the people I grew up with, even before I had words to recognize that I was gay, I was brown, I was genderqueer. But what was really interesting about living alongside lots of people who were born in one country, lived in another and then immigrated to somewhere else, is that being an outsider was okay. Everyone was different in some way or the other, and no one was expected to fit in completely. But my wanting to disappear was, in retrospect, linked to this way in which I couldn’t imagine a future for myself. I didn’t want to live like my parents and I had no models for other kinds of lives. And so I wanted to disappear, to have never lived – until I read the story of Maryam (the virgin Mary).
In the Quranic story, Maryam is a badass. She rages to God about wanting to die. When an angel comes to her disguised as a handsome man to tell her that she will give birth to Isa, she won’t even talk to him, she tells him to go away. Reading this story in Quran class in school, my teenage self recognized something in Maryam that I read as queer, as someone who fights for how she wants to live. And this gave me hope that I too could carve out a life for myself, amidst wanting to disappear.
I’m very interested to hear how you navigate the intersections of your Muslim faith, queer identity, and South Asian heritage. How do these aspects of your identity shape your experiences and understanding of self?
I’ve never not lived at these intersections so it’s hard to know how they shape my identity – because I’ve never not been Muslim and queer and brown. What I do know is that I’ve drawn from these aspects of myself in different ways through my life, and they’ve been at the forefront of my consciousness to different extents in different contexts and geographics. For example, when I was living in a Muslim country, I didn’t think a lot about my Muslimness because it was the default, and similarly, when I was younger and didn’t have words for my queerness, it played a different role in my life.
What’s been really cool about growing older is finding new understandings and practices of myself through my identities and learning what I want to put effort into and what I want to let go of. Language, for example, has become important to me in ways that I wish I had valued more growing up – I wish I had spent more time learning my first language well enough to be able to read literature in it. I’m working on that right now. I’m reading the Quran with my friend through a queer, anti-oppressive lens – also something I write about in my book, about how that has changed my relationship with some of the verses and concepts that I struggle with.
I’ve grown to think about queerness as a synonym for thoughtfulness, breaking open assumptions about how people are supposed to relate to each other, about what role love plays in our lives – from romantic love to friendship to community to justice. It’s been such a gift to have all these identities in flux as I grow into myself.
Further to that question, there’s a moment in the book where you bemoan the societal expectations of living an ‘authentically gay experience’ and in other parts you have confronting realisations — with Adam’s partner — that you’re the ‘only visible Muslim in the room.’ These intersections are a lot to hold all at once and the performances of those can be exhausting. This seems a large burden to carry. I just wanted to know how you transgress, condense, or switch between those, if you do, or if they have their own individual characteristics and ways of expressing themselves that you’re aware of when writing?
The thing that blows my mind the most about code-switching is how automatic it is – how reflexive it is to over or underplay performing identities depending on the situation I’m in, who is in the room, and what I’m being asked to do. These days, I’m putting effort into being more intentional about this and thinking through why I’m code-switching. Is it out of protection, like writing under a pseudonym? Is it out of love or having access to space, like hiding my queerness at the mosque? Or is it because I want to avoid conflict and I want others to like me - like the story you’re referencing, where I was talking to a friend’s partner and he said that he was so glad that he had talked to me because he would have otherwise avoided the religious Muslim in the room? It’s the latter that I want to avoid as much as possible, to push myself beyond and writing has really helped me untangle and separate my reasons for switching and condensing parts of myself. Writing has helped me figure out when I want to transgress.
Do you find yourself most consolidated within the intersections when writing?
What I love most about writing is that it helps me untangle complicated feelings. It gives me the chance to explore these intersections and tease apart situations that made me feel uncomfortable to figure out the root of what’s causing me distress. Not that it’s possible to “solve” problems entirely by writing, but I do think it gives me clarity about the different angles involved – so when I’m in a situation where there’s been a microaggression around race or Islam or gender, I can sort out what’s making me angry. And writing/retelling stories from the Quran has been a fun parallel because I get to think through situations that prophets and other characters have been through and imagine what would or wouldn’t have worked for them.
Do you think you can only write from experience?
I’ve only written from experience in the past. I came to writing late in life – I had always journaled and always read a lot, but I didn’t start writing until my 20s, when a friend recommended that I channel my anger at the world into personal essays. I found it easiest to teach myself to write by writing from experience – I found that I could sit in the feelings and put those into words and then narrativize my memories around those feelings. But I’m working on a new project these days and it’s fiction – which is hard because I’m having to build worlds that aren’t directly based on my experiences. But it’s fun too, I’ve been enjoying teaching myself a new skill.
The book is a coming-of-age through the complications of a coming out story, and so I wanted to know how you’ve continued to self-accept and embrace vulnerability following its release?
Writing the book was a huge exercise in self-acceptance and vulnerability
– except not when I was writing it because when I was doing the actual writing, I forgot that people would be reading it as well. It’s been incredibly vulnerable having the book out in the world because I wrote about so many things that I have a hard time sharing with my friends and even my partner. (True story: often, my partner would read a chapter and be surprised at all the big feelings I had felt in a situation where she was also present.)
Surprisingly though, it’s been so lovely having people read the book and still love me, despite the vulnerability. This is something I write about in my book, this concept of “queer indispensability” – which posits that queer people live with the threat of abandonment looming over them from being outed, because of which they overcompensate by making themselves “indispensable” in their relationships with friends and family, sacrificing their needs and their vulnerabilities so that they don’t get left.
I was scared, I’ve always been scared that letting people see the messiest sides of me will make them leave. So it’s been really lovely to have written this book, have it out there in the world, and still have people who love me.
I’m also really intrigued on how the theoretic and ideology of womanhood and feminism, which you seem very comfortable and proud of, is juxtaposed with a sense of uncomfortability toward femininity?
I came into a lot of my politics through feminism – at first, just asking angry questions like why does my brother get away with doing so few chores? and then gradually reading feminist history, theory, blogs, etc.
Feminism fueled my inquiry into injustice and I will forever be grateful to it for bringing me to my politics around so many issues, including queerness, race, class, Palestine, etc.
Feminism also brought me to gender, and thinking through the nuances of gender in terms of expansiveness – beyond the ideas of femininity and masculinity, which led me to identify as nonbinary. My discomfort with femininity comes from the ways in which it was forced upon me – an experience that is not uncommon – but I’m also similarly uncomfortable with masculinity being the alternative, and with masculinity in general, especially the ways in which it can (but does not have to) become quickly toxic. What I love about being nonbinary is that it allows for me to play with the aspects of both that I find compelling, that it is an alternate alternative.
I keep returning to (and melting, ugh it’s so good) the chapter ‘Allah’ and the story of Adam and Hawa. Satan entices them both to eat the forbidden fruits and when they do their genders are revealed to them, where they are exiled in the homogeneity and rigidity of the gender binary. I want to know, how does this affirm your delineation that god is trans?
Another thing that’s really interesting to me about this story is the way that Adam is gendered in the Quran. Like in a lot of other languages, words are gendered in Arabic and in the creation story, Adam is gendered with both “he” and “she.” I had to stop and reread that multiple times when I saw it in the translation, had to call up my friend and have read it too to confirm that this is true even in canonical translations of the Quran. This affirms for me the gender expansiveness in Islamic tradition – starting from the first human. And it affirms for me too the gender expansiveness of God. God frequently refers to themselves with “We” and “They” pronouns in the Quran and this is brushed off by more classical interpretations as the royal “We” but I read it as trans, as genderqueer, as nonbinary. It’s interesting that this is what I’ve gotten the most pushback on in the book – but I don’t think it’s that radical of a thing to say. God is beyond gender.
God is trans.
I’ve been explaining the book as a queering of the Quran. Is there another prophet or character in the Quran, that you haven’t written about yet, who is queer or exhibits queer sensibilities?
I consider all characters – both in the Quran and in literature in general – to be queer, unless they explicitly state that they’re straight.
Why should straightness be the assumed norm? I think it’s important to push back against that delineation. That said, of course since writing the book, I’ve come across other characters that I wish I had written about. Khadijah, for example, who I write about briefly, who was Prophet Muhammad’s first wife. I wish I had written about her more – she was so badass, a no-nonsense merchant running her own business. There’s something queer about the ways in which she took Muhammad under her wing, supported him when he received the revelation, and validated his fears. I also wish I had written about Khidr, a sage who comes in contact with Musa (Moses) and has a preternatural way of knowing the future that I think would be interesting to look at through the lens of queer astrologies.
Do you see your writing as that which provokes action and resistance?
I think a lot about Teju Cole’s tweet: “Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.” Writing for me is definitely an act of resistance, and I hope it impels others to fight against racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and others.
This feels so important right now and reminds me of Fargo Nissim Tbakhi who wrote in Notes On Craft, ‘We have to abandon [craft] and write with sharper teeth, without politeness, without compromise. We have to learn, or build, or steal, or steal back, the craft we need for the long Intifada, which we carry with us to liberation and beyond.’ How do you see your writing evolving, is it becoming sharper without politeness?
I love this quote so much. I’ve been thinking a lot about writers and writing, amidst the ongoing genocide of Palestinians – the ways in which the act of writing, of sitting down with a laptop and an open Word document, feels so futile when Gaza is being carpet bombed and invaded. To be honest, I haven’t been able to write much since – but I’ve appreciated the Palestinian voices that have been writing so eloquently, without politeness: Sarah Aziza, Elena Dudum, George Abraham, Noor Hindi – especially her poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying” – and others. And I’ve been so inspired about queer organising efforts in New York around Palestine that also have become sharper, without politeness: No Pride in Genocide, protests against HRC, LGBT Center workers in NYC calling out their employer’s lack of stance around Palestine, the marches organized by Queer for a Liberated Palestine, and others.
Lamya H (she/they) is a queer Muslim writer and organizer living in New York City. Their memoir HIJAB BUTCH BLUES (February, 2023 from Dial Press/Penguin Randomhouse) won the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and a Stonewall Non-fiction Book Award, and was a finalist for Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards.
P. Eldridge (her) is an artist, tranarchist, and founder of the radical force SISSY ANARCHY; a multifaceted platform dedicated to exploring the intersection of trans and queer identities with anarchist philosophies, most recently featured at the 60th Venice Art Biennale 2024.
