Love Is An Ex-Country: A Memoir by Randa Jarrar
Love Is An Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar, book cover
THE PREMISE: In 2016, inspired by an Egyptian dancer's 1940s journey across the United States, Randa Jarrar sets off on a solo road trip from California to Connecticut. She writes, “Unlike Carioca, I was not famous or wealthy or a professional dancer. But like her, I was fond of dancing, light-skinned and privileged, libidinous, divorced more than once, and ready to motor.”
On sabbatical from her university and away from her overbearing parents and her newly-adult son, Jarrar is without responsibility for what reads like the first time in her life. The result is a sexually, emotionally, and philosophically provocative coming-of-age story that explores what it means to be a “Queer, Muslim. Arab American and proudly fat femme” in modern America, but also what it means to be entirely and unapologetically human.
THE SETTING: The road trip covers thousands of miles of unvarnished America, throughout which Jarrar delivers cunning social commentary, largely viewed through the lens of the body— whether it’s the way strangers see her, men or women fuck her, or the way she indulges or denies her appetite for food. What’s striking is the way she manages to reveal humanity in every character she encounters, even while she unabashedly shares her own negative opinion of said lover, family member, stranger, or enemy. Somehow Jarrar connects with everyone she meets, from the rest stop in Arizona where she confronts a racist; to Santa Fe New Mexico where a Tinder date teaches her about the city’s colonial history; to a Whataburger in Wichita Falls where she soothes a mother who is grieving the loss of her pre-mature son.
But this journey is hardly limited to the American Road. The non-linear story meanders through Jarrar’s life and travels, from Tunisia to Germany to a detainment in the Arab Room at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport; and down into a series of basements—the basement in Connecticut where her father beat her; the basement in Kuwait where their family sheltered during air raids; the basement apartment in Yonkers where she conceived and later nursed her son.
It is in portraying her most off-the-beaten-track destinations—kink dungeons—that she makes some of her most profound observations and where every theme in the book is considered—pain, pleasure, abuse, love, control, freedom, indulgence, deprivation, identity, prejudice, and ultimately a forward-thinking vision for the way the world can be. “No one can touch you here, unless you ask them to…..Unlike vanilla sex,” she writes, “consensual kinky sex makes sure each and every party is in negotiation and therefore in control of how much they dish and how much they take. Of all and any levels of pleasure, of pain. For people of color living in 2019 America, this measure of agency and power can mean the world.”
IN THE END: For all the social ills it critiques, this electrifying memoir asks us to see the world for its possibilities. What if consent was always enthusiastically negotiated? What if we stopped letting the beauty industry tell us what’s wrong with us? What if we were willing to really see each other, fat-queer-libidinous-Arabs and all? What if we all felt as free as Jarrar ultimately does to eat “and to write what I like. And say what I like. And fuck whomever I like”? What if?
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