This highly engaging story describes with great passion and intelligence how Rasa feels isolated within a society which is divided by Eastern/Western values and straight/gay culture. As the city teeters on revolt against the authoritarian military regime, closeted Rasa's personal life undergoes its own upheaval having been discovered in bed with his boyfriend/ habibi Taymour by his grandmother. The novel follows a day in the life of Rasa, a young gay man who lives with his grandmother and has been working to found a new media company after a period studying in America. This is within an unnamed Middle Eastern city undergoing extreme political turmoil. It's interesting how the descriptions of this place feel very recognizable to read about as if it were any gay-friendly bar in Berlin or New York City, but the bar's patrons and the issues they raise when speaking to narrator Rasa are specific to the location.

In Saleem Haddad’s striking debut novel that place is a bar called Guapa with its bustling mixed clientele on one level and a more radically charged groups who watch cabaret performances on a lower level. As Rasa confronts the simultaneous collapse of political hope and his closest personal relationships, he is forced to discover the roots of his alienation and try to re-emerge into a society that may never accept him.It’s important for any oppressed minority group to have a physical location where people can come together to socialize, organize and form a sense of identity together. Each new encounter leads him closer to confronting his own identity, as he revisits his childhood and probes the secrets that haunt his family. Ashamed to go home and face his grandmother, and reeling from the potential loss of the three most important people in his life, Rasa roams the city’s slums and prisons, the lavish weddings of the country’s elite, and the bars where outcasts and intellectuals drink to a long-lost revolution. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar, Guapa, who has been arrested by the police. One night Rasa’s grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, as he tries to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and social upheaval.

A debut novel that tells the story of Rasa, a young gay man coming of age in the Middle East

Guapa a novel