LOVE IS AN EX-COUNTRY

A Palestinian American writer and creative writing professor transforms a road trip into an occasion for reflections about her identity and past.

In 2016, Jarrar drove cross-country from California to her parents’ home in Connecticut. The author's journey becomes the framework and context for a memoir in essays that discusses details of that trip and delves sharply into issues of race, gender and sexuality, trauma, and female embodiment. The first noteworthy incident took place in Arizona, where Jarrar encountered a White female trucker who likened her fellow Syrian-born drivers to monkeys. The confrontation angered the author for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it revealed how she was not recognized by the woman as Arab; and how being Arab in the U.S. meant being “silenced, erased, demonized, vilified, and monstrosized.” Later on, Jarrar expressed her indignation and outrage by destroying a symbol of American racism—the Confederate flag—discovered by chance in a small thrift store. At the same time, the trip proved liberating, as the author reveled in her freedom and sexuality with Tinder matches and barroom flirtations. But as she celebrated her plus-sized body and the confidence that came from rejecting "mainstream beauty standards,” she also remembered her adolescence, when her body seemed to be “punishing me, rebelling against me.” She chronicles how she was abused by her father and, later, her son’s father. The author reveals how experimentation with “kinky” sex helped her work through the pain and other powerful emotions caused by patriarchal violence. “Sexuality, pain, love, obedience, hurt: all are woven together in the loom that is my body, that is my skin and my heart,” she writes, as she also describes how Parkinson's changed her father from a "bully" into a painfully weakened man. Though individually compelling, these viscerally eloquent essays don’t always cohere as a unified whole. Nonetheless, Jarrar makes a significant statement about self-acceptance while celebrating the complexity of intersecting identities.

An intimately edgy text well suited for reading in pieces.