Review: Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H

Title: Hijab Butch Blues

Author: Lamya H

Publisher: Dial Press

Length: 305 Pages

Category: Memoir

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: Everything in this book is a baring of soul and revelation of the strength and courage it takes to live with authenticity and without apology. I’m entirely grateful to have found this book and that Lamya H bared her vulnerabilities and truths so eloquently.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher—her female teacher—she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can’t yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don’t matter, and it’s easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: When Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya?

From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own—ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant.

Review: Hijab Butch Blues is a reckoning. It’s a beautiful, touching, intimate, and eloquent sharing of the author’s inner conflicts and gradual affirmation of Self. Lamya H (a pseudonym to offer her a necessary anonymity) reconciles the contradictory facets of her life on these pages: her faith, her queerness, her activism, and her place in a country that “Others” her based on her faith, her queerness, her activism, and the color of her skin.

“When it comes to my family, my hijab is my beard.”

Lamya H shares her most personal thoughts and feelings with readers. From the moment she realizes she has a crush on a female teacher to her connections with various stories in the Quran to the trust issues imprinted on her over the years, Lamya H reconciles these variables, among others, to share her relationship with her gender identity, the truth that there is no one single or right way to be queer, or, for that matter, a devout Muslim. One of the more striking things about this book is that while we may not share many likenesses, what I internalized was the truth that the stories from the Quran Lamya H shares are the stories I’m familiar with by their anglicized names—Mary, Noah, Joseph, Moses, Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael, Jonah, et al.—illuminating how connected rather than disconnected those of different faiths actually are. Lamya uses these stories to help make sense of her life experiences.

“Why can’t people see the everyday overlap of our lives?”

As touching and effective as Lamya H’s prose is, an interview at the end of Hijab Butch Blues with the esteemed Roxane Gay further illuminates and illustrates the author’s journey into healing and how she continues to unlearn things that she had internalized about her faith, ethnicity, and queerness. Everything in this book is a baring of soul and revelation of the strength and courage it takes to live with authenticity and without apology. I’m entirely grateful to have found this book and that Lamya H bared her vulnerabilities and truths so eloquently.