They grew up without queer role models but now these two debut novelists turn to fiction – and to bisexual protagonists – to address complex personal and political histories.
Haddad came out to his mother Nawal in 2017, after he was outed by an extended family member without his consent.In their new novels, Sakr and Haddad, draw from history and memory to create moving narratives centred on bisexual protagonists living in Western Sydney.
"People are always going to have these ideas about writers' lives informing their work. If you're going to come to my work with that assumption, then I'm going to run at it," Sakr toldHe dubs Jamal his "distant avatar", through which he tells the story of a young man's sexual awakening and struggle to locate himself within the faith, traditions and family ties he has inherited.
"So, I made a concerted effort after that to give the context to my mother: how she is a product of her environment, and the violence that was inflicted upon her first." "But in revisiting those memories and also in fictionalising them, I take some of the power away from those moments … I use it to reclaim agency that was lost through the abuse."
"Coupled with September 11, that was the kind of onset of this 'othering' of Arab — really, of ethnic — men," he recalls. Instead, he shows us much of the trial through the eyes of Joey's grandmother, Elaine. Widowed, wrestling with a gambling habit and a pile of unpaid bills, she feels like an "entirely useless matriarch", yet Haddad makes her the moral centre of his novel – and it is she who isn't ready to let Joey off the hook.
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