THE MEMOIR BY LAMYA H was one of the most anticipated books of the year. She is a queer Muslim writer and organizer living in New York City whose essays and book reviews have been widely shared, and whose talent is widely admired. Listen in and read along as she and I discuss the why one might write a memoir under a pseudonym, and so much more.
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Marion: Today, my guest is writer Lamya H., whose pronouns are she/they, and who is a queer Muslim writer and organizer living in New York City. Her memoir, Hijab Butch Blues, is just out from Dial Press and was one of the most anticipated books of the year. A former Lambda Literary fellow, their work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, Vice, Autostraddle, Vox, and others. She’s received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Aspen Words, and Queer Arts. Welcome, Lamya.
Lamya: Thank you so much for having me.
Marion: Delighted to have you here. I suspect the first piece of yours I read was a 2017 piece she wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books in which you show us what coming home entails, you write about it beautifully. Let me set this up a bit. You were born in South Asia, moved to the Middle East at a young age, and then came to the U.S. knowing almost no one, attended school here and now live in the New York City Metropolitan area. You have spent years feeling out of place, so, let’s talk about that out of placeness. What does being out of place allow in writing?
Lamya: That’s a great question. Interestingly, I find that this idea of being out of place or displaced or someone who’s from various places and someone who has moved around a lot lends itself really well to experimentation and queerness and writing. I know that when I was just coming into my queerness and really thinking about what that means and how I want to live, one of the things that I found a lot of solace in was this idea that I knew what it was like to move and I knew what it was like to go somewhere else and start over, and I always had that available to me.
I think in some ways that is such a great blueprint for writing too, because I think it allows you to move between worlds in certain ways. It allows you to imagine other possibilities. It allows you to not be afraid of who you are and where you are because, if you need to, you could always start over. Yeah, I think what I love most about writing in particular and that concept is that it really allows you to imagine different lives, both for yourself and for others, and really gives you that mental flexibility to think through who you are and where you are, but also the who you are that you could be and the where you are that you could become.
Marion: Yes, I think so. I think that you could fly over and be of on the same page, it’s fascinating. I’ve read that you wanted to write a memoir that was “unabashedly and unabashedly Muslim”, and I hope no one listening needs to be brought up to date on what is going on in America in the world on those fronts, but I’ve also read interviews with you, pre-publication, that openly discuss your fear of publication and the self-care you engaged in to prepare. Talk to me about balancing out the fear of the inevitable exposure via publication that allowed you to get to the desk and move into writing this book.
Lamya: Yeah, writing is so interesting because it’s such a solitary pursuit in some ways. You sit at a desk, at a computer, and you put words on a page. Then, for me, I forgot that on the other end is a reader who is going to read these things and know all of these things about me. In some ways, writing a memoir in particular is especially vulnerable because you’re putting your whole life out there. I was writing things that I was like, “Wait, do my friends know this about me?” Sometimes I’d write something and my partner would read it and she would be like, “Wait, what? I was there in the same experience, I didn’t know you were feeling these things.” You weren’t able to share in words aloud in ways that I could when I was writing.
It’s really interesting, because not only are you putting words on a page, but then you have a reader. Then there’s also just a bigger, broader audience who is reading your words and has thoughts and feelings about it. I was definitely very, very, very nervous putting my work out into the world. I have been for a long time. I’ve written essays before, like you’ve talked about, and even then I would get some pretty mean comments, either about queerness or Muslimness or both. I was very nervous with this book and I chose to write it under a pseudonym, which I think was a really, really good life decision, both because of what this country is like right now for people who are queer and people who are Muslim, and both, but also because, in some ways, being able to write this book anonymously really allowed me to be honest and vulnerable in ways that I just couldn’t have without that layer of protection.
Yeah, so I was definitely nervous but it’s also been really interesting to see the response that the book has garnered. I know that you’re not supposed to read comments on the internet about your work and I really wish I had the stamina to not do that, but I don’t so I frequently read things, but it’s been really lovely to see it resonate with so many people. Then a lot of people have been emailing me really lovely positive things. It’s definitely been a whirlwind and definitely not what I’ve expected. That’s felt really, really good.
Marion: I’m so glad. I’m relieved for you and a bit for this country and for the world. You’ve taken a little of the pressure out of my head by saying that, so thank you.
One of the pieces of advice writers are given is to write the book they want to read. I can’t imagine, even if you had grown up from infancy in this country, that you would have seen yourself on the shelves in the children’s books that I’m familiar with, in the young adult literature that I know. I don’t want to put words in your mouth about what it’s like not to see yourself on the shelves, but I wonder about how you get out of the way of the emotional content and are able to write a book knowing that there isn’t one like this on the shelves. If it’s anger, for instance, that can be a very intrusive emotion. Again, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but what do you do with that emotional content that must be present in anyone who cannot find themselves on the bookshelf?
Lamya: I definitely have so much experience with not seeing myself on the page. Growing up where I grew up, which is this country in the Middle East, we had very limited access to books in English. I think it wasn’t until high school that I read a book that prominently featured a person of color. When I did, it blew my mind because I was like, “Wait, hold on, you can write books about Brown people?” It hadn’t even occurred to me that that was a possibility. It’s really cool to see so many genres exploding in that way currently. I feel like in the YA world especially it seems like there’s so many books that are about queer people, about of people of color, even about Muslims. It’s been really, really cool to see.
In terms of my book, I wanted to write something that felt definitely like something that I would’ve wanted to read as a younger person, but what seems really cool is that it doesn’t feel like it’s the only one anymore. I think maybe 10, 15 years ago it would’ve been, but it’s so cool to see how many other even queer Muslim books there are. I was thinking about this a lot right before my publication and I was thinking a lot about the books that I’ve read that have influenced me. I sat down and made a Twitter thread of the various queer Muslim books that I’ve read, and there were so many. It was just so lovely to curate that list and be like, “Oh, I’m not the only one, and how cool that I can write into this context.”
Marion: That’s great. We didn’t really talk about anger, because that’s not what you identified as being a motivation and that’s perfect, but your Twitter handle is @lamyaisangry and your subhead on Twitter states that you are, “queer, Brown, non-binary, Muslim, too angry to be your tragic narrative”, which I just love. But in many ways, your book chronicles a history of your anger, how it emerges, grows, evolves and provides for you. But anger can be a really difficult mistress when writing memoir because it can leave us typing with our elbows, pounding on the keyboard, and when we do that we forget to contextualize for the reader, we just yell at them. Let’s talk about the tension between being angry and having the patience to bring us along, because there’s an awful lot of cultural education that you supply very gracefully for us. How did you navigate that?
Lamya: First of all, thank you so much for identifying that as a theme. I worried when I was writing this that it was something that was lost or that could easily be lost, because I think anger is such a big undercurrent in terms of my motivation for both living and writing. Interestingly, I came to writing through anger. I used to tell stories all the time about various things that had happened in my life, like various microaggressions or macroaggressions or forms of discrimination. This one time my friend was like, “You know that sort of rage dissipates unless you do something about it, so why don’t you try writing?” That’s how I came to writing in my late 20’s.
For me, being able to pin that anger onto the page, it’s been a real learning process, because you talked about sometimes it’s easy to get lost in that anger and use that anger almost as a crutch and not think through things or use that anger as an overwhelming emotion and then the reflectiveness gets lost, but it’s definitely something that I had to learn how to do. As I was learning how to write, I feel like I had to learn how to write anger in particular. For me, a big part of that is trusting my reader, that my reader will both see the source of the anger and that I can give my reader enough context to understand where that’s coming from, but I don’t have to spell it out for them and that I can really sit in that trust that my reader is attentive and intentional and from reading the surrounding emotions and the context will really understand where that anger is coming from and then also where that anger is going and where it’s becoming channeled.
Marion: I love that answer, it’s generous as it can be about anger. In it you mentioned learning to write. I know you described yourself as having come to writing late, which I had to giggle a little bit because you were in your 20s, so it’s not too late, I promise. I love the idea of somebody suggesting that it might be a portal for you to work through some stuff, but you had never trained as a writer or taken a writing class and yet you choose a very non-linear way of laying out the stories, it’s very complex and wonderful and it works beautifully. Complex, I don’t mean that it’s hard to follow. Complex, I mean that it takes a lot of themes and goes in a lot of time zones without us ever getting lost.
You thank your friends and people who gave you feedback late in the book. I wonder if you could just shed a little light on the process of this, who got to read it and when and how you asked for what you needed so that you could learn to write.
Lamya: When I talk about coming to writing late, part of it is just, A, I wish I had done it earlier, I wish that it had been a big part of my life in my teens, in my early 20s, and then on the other hand, I think a lot of people just have a lot of practice with writing, through things like writing classes or even in school, and I didn’t really have a lot of that. I had a lot of practice with reading, which to me became a practice and a way to learn writing, that’s where that comes from.
When it came to writing and editing, I found it so helpful to get feedback from friends and various people in my community. I really don’t think I could have taught myself how to write without this context of these people who really volunteered their time and energy to look through various first drafts, to point out to me what it means to show and not tell. I’m so indebted to so many of my mentors in terms of that. Then for me, I went on a writing retreat with Lambda, which I think was one of the things that really changed how I saw myself as a writer. It really made me take myself seriously and it clarified for me what kind of writing I wanted to do and what I wanted to do with my writing. Then one of the best things for me to come out of that was that I ended up with a community of writers. I had a friend who started a writing workshop club situation, and we would meet once a month and trade pages.
Through a lot of these, I was able to get something that I really crave, which is accountability and deadlines. Then on the other hand, just having that constant feedback about what was working, what wasn’t working, I found that so helpful. One of the things that we did in my workshop, which really changed how I think about feedback, is that we read aloud our work and then got feedback in real time, which is so rare, I think, especially with early drafts to be able to get, but it was really cool to see firsthand and immediately what resonated with people and what didn’t, what parts people laughed at, what parts I hoped people would laugh at but they didn’t. Yeah, I think that was one of the coolest, most helpful things that I’ve done as a writer.
Marion: The reading aloud part is so highly recommended. I was given that advice for my first book when I was in my 20’s and I have stuck with it ever since. To have someone to read it to is genius, because you’re right, if they don’t laugh and you thought they would, you can go back in there and figure out why not.
There’s a lot of things that I marveled at, many things that I marveled at in the book, especially for a first book. Hijab Butch Blues is your first book, and yet you take on structure like a master. I teach structure classes and I will assign this book and ask people to have a look at the structure. You choose the navigation markers the reader must witness to metabolize your story, you do so via stories of the Quran. Specifically, early in the book you write that you want to disappear, it’s what at stake in act one, it’s a crisis. But one day in a Quran class, you read a passage about Miriam who, when she learns that she was pregnant, insisted that no man had touched her. You begin to wonder, could Miriam, uninterested in men, be like you, uninterested in men?
From that moment you navigate your life comparing your experiences with some of the most famous stories that we know, considering you come up alongside Musa, who was also known as Moses, liberating his people from the Pharaoh. You ask if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might be non-binary. [inaudible 00:17:22], Nuh, or Noah, who is tasked with building the arc, just as you are tasking yourself with building your own life on your own terms.
Here’s the question. My audience is writers and they get ideas about structure and then talk themselves out of it immediately, they say, “Oh, I can’t do that. I can’t take stories from the Quran or stories from the Bible. I can’t co-opt those and compare my …” They’ll talk themselves out of it. Talk about getting and sustaining this idea.
Lamya: I think what really helped me honestly was bravado and not knowing that I couldn’t do it. Yeah.
Marion: Bravado, that’s great.
Lamya: I think there’s so much that’s generative out of being foolhardy. I feel like in some ways I lucked into this. I love reading braided essays, I love reading writing where people are taking two parallel tracks and exploring them side by side and intertwining them, and sometimes in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious but that are just there. Some of the writers that do this really well, for me, include Melissa Febos and Esme Wang’s, The Collected Schizophrenias. In some ways I feel like reading a lot of those helped because I was able to see what worked and I was able to dissect what I wanted to do in my writing.
Then I love telling stories and I love retelling stories. To me, the retelling stories from the Quran came pretty naturally, because in some ways I had always been doing that and I had always been thinking about these characters both in the Quran and in all the various books that I had read and really wondering at their internal thoughts, at their decisions, at their messiness, at their flaws. Yeah, to me, being able to look at those stories side by side with my own. I feel like one of the things I had to really learn how to do is how to be subtle and how to really let both stories, of the various figures in the Quran and my own stories, how to let them breathe on their own without hammering my reader over the head with how the two intertwined and how they spoke to each other.
Interestingly, I feel like I had to almost learn how to scale back. I think what really helped, apart from friends and community giving me lots of feedback, is just having an an amazing editor who was really able to take these stories and step back and look at them from a holistic point of view, look at structure across the entire book and also on the level of an essay. Because, I had never written anything long, I feel like I also had to learn how to move through time and space while also giving my reader context and cues. What was really helpful was having an amazing editor who had such a good eye for both the big picture and the smaller details.
Marion: Yeah, that’s incredibly helpful. I think the idea of this being the quotidian, that you are reading the Quran daily, alone and in community, this is what you did, this wasn’t a stretch, this really is. Many of us have ideas as writers, we’re walking along, suddenly we see the metaphor, as you just said, the braided idea, that there’s a great similarity between this and this, and we might say, “That’s outrageous,” but the idea that it is part of your daily life, the reading of the Quran, I think really makes this feel so organic. It allows for these builds, these really big life builds. Can I be queer? Can I build this arc for myself?
I think, no, I know by far and away my favorite of the many builds you have in this book is the slow build you bring to the page of why and how you use a pseudonym and what it does for you. You talked about the pseudonym earlier, but can you just set this up a bit for the reader and how you chose to use the story I know as Jonah and the Whale to inhabit your pseudonym?
Lamya: Yeah. This is one of the chapters that is towards the end of the book and it involves a conversation between me and my friend. This is a friend who, again, I’ve had so many conversations with about prophets. We start off playing this game where we talk about our favorite prophets and pick our faves. One of her favorites is Jonah, also known as Yunus. It’s interesting because my whole life I’ve always rolled my eyes at Yunus, being like, “Okay, he’s the one who walked away from his people and then he gets swallowed by a whale. That’s a punishment from God for walking away and giving up when things got hard with the people that he was sent to.” My friend for who Yunus is one of her faves, she was like, “Wait, hold on. You have this entire thing wrong. What are you talking about? He doesn’t give up, he leaves because it’s a terrible use of his energy to continue to preach to these people who are just not listening to him.”
From there, that really struck me, I was really surprised. I’m not someone who likes to back away from a fight, so I definitely fought with her a little bit, like, “What are you talking about? You’re totally wrong,” but the more that I thought about it the more that I realized that, actually, yes, this is something that I’ve had to learn as a lesson, how to pick your battles in some way and how to not deplete yourself because you’re fighting all the time and how to really channel some of that anger and some of that energy into fights that are actually more productive, into organizing or going to protests or something instead of constantly arguing with your coworkers about various things.
Yeah, that made me think a lot about the ways in which the whale is not actually punishment, but is protection. To me, there was this huge parallel between writing under a pseudonym, which I’ve done for many years now, and this idea of protection and learning how to have boundaries and learning what I want to devote energy towards and what I don’t want to devote energy towards. One of the things that was really important to me, for example, when writing this book was just to not be Googleable and to feel like I had privacy and safety, even though I know that those are very loaded terms. To me, it feels like being in a whale and having this semblance of protection.
Who knows, maybe at some point in my life I won’t need that whale anymore or I will find myself outside the whale, but for now it’s really important to me to have those things and to think of it not as this idea of punishment and not this tragic thing where like, “Oh no, this is so awful, I can only tell my story through a pseudonym,” but actually to think of it as protection and to think of it as a channeling of my energy. Instead of using my energy towards worrying and anxiety, actually, I can channel that energy towards writing and living.
Marion: Well, we’re very grateful that you do and it’s the perfect place to wind this up. That was a great answer about a pseudonym, a great answer about the transcendence we can experience when we think something through. Your book provides so many moments for us to think things through. Thank you, Lamya. I wish you all the best with it and I’m deeply honored that you agreed to come in and talk about it. Thank you so much.
Lamya: Thank you so much for having me.
Marion: You’re so welcome. The writer is Lamya H. See more on her at lamyah dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes on how to write memoir. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. If you like what you hear, please leave us a star review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
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