The Postcolonial Arab Novel and the Intersections of Queer Polity: Reading Hasan Namir’s God in Pink

Abstract

In contemporary Arab states, there is a bulk of fiction that is in an attempt to expose sexual representations. Most of these societies are now informed with the ways in which normativity has become queerish and has been considered as normalized. This means that the recognizable segments of what is considered as normal sexuality is gaining a re-interrogative discourse. Re-interrogative discourse has been positioned in the ways a good number of postcolonial Arab writers explore the notion of queer polarity and its polity in contemporary fiction. Al- Musawi (2022) argues that adult narrators are usually selective in compiling their urban catalogues (p. 12). This is the case with the autobiographical nature of the text understudy. In their quest to re-interrogate what is considered as mainstream sexualities, these adult narrators go an extra literary mile to disclose the fact that normative sexualities prescribed by the societal gaze is simply a disruptive trend that subjugates one form of sexuality for the other. As such, there is a reducible claim on the group of sexualities that stand out of heteronormativity. It is against such backdrop that postcolonial Arab writers use their narratives to explore other forms of legitimated sexualities as a mode of sexual expression. This paper argues that Hasan Namir’s God in Pink explores the queer polity of sexualities as a mode of expression within an Islamic informed context. The paper equally illustrates the ways in which sexual identities are contested and idealized in the text understudy. Queer theory and postcolonial literary criticism are employed in this paper.