Wanting in Arabic

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Fiction, 2014

Wanting in Arabic is a refusal of convenient silences, convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l’ecriture feminine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father’s language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood.

Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism,Wanting in Arabic attempts to traverse the fantasies of foundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order to further a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, of generous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition.

“The poems are routes one might take to reach home in your own body, mind, history, and landscape. They vibrate with longing and tenderness.”

–Kerry Clare, 49th Shelf

“Employing a number of different poetic modes, Salah’s writing is by turns political, evocative, and quite often hot. A Lebanese-Canadian from Nova Scotia who never saw her father’s homeland nor spoke his tongue, Salah explores the nuances of identity, and her writing is simply gorgeous.”

—The Walrus

“[Wanting in Arabic] shares a cultural experience rarely made available to mainstream American audiences.”
—Buzzfeed