I'M IN SEATTLE, WHERE ARE YOU?

A memoir from an Iraqi novelist, journalist, and visual artist about how the search for a lost love brought him to America and saved him from persecution as a gay Muslim man.

Gzar first came to Seattle looking for Morise, an African American soldier he had loved during the Iraq War. He began his West Coast sojourn living in a house with three gay men who he believed knew nothing about the true nature of his visit. In the months that followed, Gzar told the story of his life in Iraq while exposing his own trauma. The wildly inventive narrative that emerged—in conversations with his roommates and then with everything from his own shoe (“I stood, grasped the shoe, and placed it in front of me, near enough for it to hear me clearly”) to a stranger’s glasses—revealed he had grown up under the Saddam Hussein regime. Hussein’s savage dictatorship valued "manliness, virility, and bushy mustaches on clean-shaven faces" and viciously punished—often killed—any homosexual activity. The author knew early on that he loved boys; when his tell-all diary fell into the hands of a Fedayeen soldier, so did his father, who “bowed to our tribe’s pressure that I must be pun­ished.” Gzar eventually left for the University of Baghdad to study petroleum engineering, and he became known for the extreme piety that helped him navigate a brutally homophobic world. It was there, just as Baghdad fell to American forces, that he met Morise. Sadly, Morise’s departure to Seattle and, later, the author’s own imprisonment for homosexuality conspired to keep them apart. Built on keenly observed cultural, political, and personal details and populated by vivid characters, this book—illustrated throughout with Gzar’s starkly surreal ink drawings—draws readers into a narrative web that is by turns shocking, funny, and deeply moving.

A magical tragicomic story of love, sacrifice, and conviction.