When my father died, I watched death drift across his flushed face. All of you deal with the dead better in the mosque, after the person's spirit has been surrendered to heaven.
Yes, neighbor, that's the truth. My father's tears left me parched. My last image of him is the smile he granted me as if wishing to absolve me from some future sin.
The Diesel is a man, a woman, a singer, a dancer, a traveler. Born in an Arab country on the precipice of modernization--perhaps a place like the Emirates of author Thani al-Suwaidi--he grows up through transformations of many kinds. As he tells his story to the novel's silent audience, the muezzin of a mosque, he describes being raped by a "wayfarer" as a child, then watching his father fall from a boat and die. He dons women's clothes and becomes a singer in a women's ensemble, a role that allows for a fuller expression of his inner self (though the use of the pronoun "he" remains consistent.) The introduction describes the Diesel as "trans," and perhaps that's true, especially in a broader since of moving across identities and roles. It's this final role, as a singer and dancer, that the Diesel becomes famous, and it's in this artistic expression--both radical and, as I understand it, somewhat rooted in tradition--that gives him a way to be in the world.
The Diesel is part of my SHORT BOOK FEBRUARY project, and its slimness, along with its stream-of-consciousness and its bewildering imagery, gives it the air of a long prose poem. Indeed, Emirati author Thani al-Suwaidi is a poet, and this is a poet's novel. I didn't always find the images as arresting as I would have liked, and I often felt as if there were some cultural context I was missing, but I was interested in the ways that The Diesel navigates the demands of tradition, modernism, and subversiveness, three ideas that make, I think, a trio rather than a spectrum.
I found myself wondering about the name: is it a reference to the petroleum industry that launched the economy of once humble places like the U.A.E.? The Diesel reminisces on the first house in her village to be electrified; by the end of her tale, great electric cities have bloomed in the desert. It seemed to me that The Diesel, more than anything, is a meditation on a new Persian Gulf, one that has undergone tremendous transformations over the past fifty years. The Diesel, like the Gulf, goes through a number of transformations, and in doing so finds a way to his or her true self; does The Diesel suggest that the economic and political transformation of the Gulf is an opportunity to redefine one's self in relation to gender and sexuality, too? There is always something hopeful, I suppose, about a changing world, which even in the face of uncertainty holds a certain amount of promise, too.
This is the first book I've read from the United Arab Emirates, which means my "countries read" list is up to 84!
No comments:
Post a Comment