Marwan Kaabour (ed.), The Queer Arab Glossary / المعجم العربي الكويري (Saqi Books, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Marwan Kaabour (MK): I launched Takweer in 2019 as an accessible and engaging resource that aims to explore, archive, and celebrate queer narratives in Arab history and popular culture. The Queer Arab Glossary is the first realized project to come out of Takweer. The book as well as Takweer are a response to the lack of accessible literature that centers the queer Arab experience, which results in the community often looking westwards for references. By exploring and documenting the slang of the queer Arab community, I hope to have a home-grown resource from the community that can provide a sense of belonging and carve out a much-needed space in the wider Arab history. The book also aims to debunk popular myths that queerness is somehow alien to the Arab region, or that Arab communities are somehow innately incapable of embracing queer people. Finally, I wanted to challenge the dominant Eurocentric narratives around queerness, and make sure voices from the global south are heard, loud and clear.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MK: The book is an exploration of the linguistic landscape around queerness in the Arabic-speaking world. The book is divided into two parts: the glossary and the essays. The glossary is the result of a four-year long research into the words and terms used to refer to queer people, or those who might be presumed to be queer. It is divided into six dialectic sections that cover the entirety of the Arabic-speaking world. The glossary’s entries touch on the cultural, social, political, historical, and linguistic make-up of the Arab world.
The essays that follow present eight unique reflections on issues of language, slang, and queerness from a variety of writers including academics, researchers, organizers, novelists, musicians, poets, and translators. Each essay aims to contextualize the findings of the glossary within the particular area of expertise of each contributor.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MK: Over the course of the fifteen years that I have been working as a graphic designer, I have designed over twenty books. Designing books is a language I am skilled at and am able to think through. Text, language, and typography have always been central to my practice and often appear in my work as a narrative tool.
When I launched Takweer, my aim was always for the archive to be an open-ended space of exploration into Arab queerness, which would later lead to subject-focused projects. As I began to explore in more detail the linguistic universe of Arab queerness, it was a natural decision to synthesize the research’s findings in book format. Glossaries (mo’jam) have a long history in Arab literature, and I envisioned the book as a reference and resource that can live in domestic and institutional spaces for many years to come.
Unlike my previous work, this is the first time I am both the designer and editor of a book. This presented a unique opportunity to have complete creative authorship over the look, content, and choice of contributors and collaborators. It might be the first instance where audiences get to listen to my creative voice clearly. With that said, I do feel I have been threading the same authorial and creative mechanisms throughout my entire design, art, and writing practice.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MK: The book is first and foremost a love letter to the queer Arab community. For many of us who do not feel like anyone has our back or is willing to give our experience the time and care it deserves, this book attempts to rectify this exclusion. I hope that the queer Arab community, in the region and the diaspora, get to read and relish in the book and see themselves reflected in it. I also hope the wider Arab community shows enough curiosity to pick up The Queer Arab Glossary and learn more about a community that for too long have felt shunned from the narrative. The book can also be thoroughly enjoyed by queer people of any background who are curious to explore narratives beyond the Eurocentric one and to understand the multiplicity of expressions that queerness can take. The book also illuminates the social, political, historical, cultural, and linguistic world of the Arabic-speaking regions, and can be enjoyed by people who are intrigued by those parts of the world. Last but not least, The Queer Arab Glossary is a book about language, and so I hope it will be enjoyed by those who are interested in philology. Despite its specificity, The Queer Arab Glossary is universal in its reach.
J: What was the most challenging aspect of editing the book?
MK: The book deals with language, slang, and queerness—all three being notions that are consistently in flux and that escape concrete definition. Trying to capture the varied nuances and contradictions of not only the glossary’s entries, but also the communities to which those entries refer, presented the biggest challenge. Instead of trying to set things in stone, I opted to embrace these contradictions and present my findings in a way that leaves plenty of room for interpretation, expansion, and disagreement. Perhaps it was my way of “queering” the glossary—not only in content, but also in form.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MK: My design practice and my work with Takweer, of which The Queer Arab Glossary is part, have always operated side by side. Only last week, two books that I designed were released: a new cookbook on Persian cuisine by Phaidon, titled Persian Feasts, as well as Tavares Strachan: There is Light Somewhere, which is the companion publication to Tavares Strachan’s incredible new retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London.
I am currently working on a fascinating book that presents queer correspondences between writers and art practitioners from the Arabic-speaking regions, initiated by Haven For Artists, a cultural feminist organization out of Beirut; a monograph for Korean artist Do Ho Suh for Tate Modern; and a monograph of American artist Genesis Tramaine for Monacelli—all due for release in 2025.
After four years of working on The Queer Arab Glossary, I am now enjoying promoting and sharing the book with different audiences around the world. I am trying to make the most out of this moment, but I can already feel the ideas bubbling for follow-up projects.
Excerpt from the book (from the introduction, pp. 8-10)
Compiling and researching The Queer Arab Glossary was an ambitious undertaking. Both queerness and dialect are known to be in a constant state of flux and transformation, constantly evading limitation. To add another layer of complexity, there is no singular Arabic dialect, but countless iterations of spoken Arabic. ‘Arab’ and ‘Arabic’ are by no means a singular monolith. The Arabic language is diverse in its forms, as are the people who populate the Arab world.
What is often referred to as the ‘Arab world’ is a grouping of countries in Western Asia and North Africa, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south east. Most people in this area are ethnically Arab, but there is also a vast population of other ethnic groups such as Amazigh, Kurds, Somalis and Nubians.
A primary factor that defines Arab people is the fact that they speak Arabic. The Arabic language exists in its classical form as Standard Arabic, as well as numerous dialectic variations spoken by the inhabitants of the region. Standard Arabic is formally taught in an academic context, and primarily used in formal communications such as newspapers and news reports, period dramas and formal speeches. It is seldom used as a means for informal communication, that is, you wouldn’t hear people conversing in Standard Arabic on the street, only in dialect.
Spoken Arabic dialects vary massively, not only from one country to another, but from one small locality to its neighbour. The variations are based not just on accents or enunciations, but on significant changes in colloquial vocabulary. The latter is a window into the region’s socio-political makeup. The words we speak today are witness to and the result of years of cultural changes, imperial rule, colonisation and soft power.
The prevalence of the Arabic language itself exists because of Arabisation, the sociological process of cultural change in which a non-Arab society becomes Arab. Arabisation occurred following the Muslim conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as various nationalist policies towards non-Arab minorities. Despite the diminishing prevalence of the languages those minorities spoke, their impact on spoken Arabic dialects remains, such as Aramaic in Levantine dialects, Amazigh in Maghrebi or Kurdish in Iraqi.
Ancient political alliances and trade routes have also left their mark on spoken Arabic dialects. Egypt was part of the Roman Empire for seven centuries, and numerous Italian words remain in Egyptian dialect to this day. Most of the region was later under the Ottoman Empire for six centuries and the Turkish-Ottoman lexicon remains a fixture of Levantine dialects. More recent European colonisation and mandates have also imprinted our tongues, with Italian words making their way into spoken Libyan, or French entering spoken Lebanese and Syrian. In modern times, as American culture has swept through the world, many English words have been entering our daily vocabulary. This phenomenon will continue to shape and shift our language and vocabulary over time. Language is malleable and impressionable.
As is the case with the rest of the globe, the nation states that make up the Arab world came into being as a result of imperialism, colonialism and civil, regional and global wars. The states and political borders that ensued do not necessarily reflect the cultural homogeneity of the communities that live within these borders. Language and vocabulary do not acknowledge political borders, but rather travel freely and bleed across, visa-free.
When it came to deciding how to categorise the sections of the glossary, it would have seemed obvious to do so by country, but not necessarily the most natural way to proceed. For all the reasons outlined above, this glossary is divided by the six main Arabic dialects: Levantine, also called Shami (Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan); Iraqi; Gulf (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen); Egyptian; Sudanese; and Maghrebi (Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco).
I invite you to engross yourself in the glossary’s entries, which run the full range of emotions: harrowing, peculiar, hilarious, shocking, saddening, joyful, sweet and sinister. Explore the outstanding creativity, wit, humour and sass that our community has utilised to create language that speaks to and is about us. Learn about the etymology of ‘dirty’ words that seem to have survived, unchanged, for centuries and that remain embedded in our language. But also engage with the entries that were designed to hurt us the most. Use them as an educational tool to understand how our communities perceive us, and the prejudices that exist at its core.
While reading through the glossary, you might notice patterns and themes that run across several dialectic sections. Some themes are expected – like words of kinship to connote a queer family connection – but others are rather curious. Why are there so many words relating to worms? Why do the names of animals and modes of transport keep coming up? Perhaps one of the most obvious things to note is the massive imbalance between the many words relating to queer men versus the few relating to queer women, whether derogatory or endearing. This phenomenon persists despite queer women having participated equally in the submission and interview stages of the research.
The gender imbalance and inequality that patriarchy have fostered in the Arab world extends to the queer Arab community and the language surrounding it. While there are dozens of ways to refer to queer men and their sexuality, there are only a handful of words to do so for queer women. The misogyny embedded in our language limits the boundaries in which women are able to speak about their bodies, sexualities and queerness. The words that do exist mostly take agency away from queer women and bring it back to the man. This is effected by using words implying that women who are queer and/or are not feminine-presenting are somehow ‘manly’ – such as mistarjila (like a man; Levantine) or boya (feminisation of boy; Gulf). Or it is achieved through referencing queer women’s sex lives by using tropes popularised by mostly heterosexual men, such as laḥḥāsa (licker; Iraqi) or ḥakkāka (rubber; Maghrebi).
Despite it being particular to the queer community, the entries of The Queer Arab Glossary reflect the societies we live in and the linguistic landscape attached to them. The observations mentioned above are natural consequences of this landscape. It is my hope that this glossary encourages a conversation that leads to the innovation of new queer slang that fills in the gaps. I imagine an updated version of the glossary in the future with a wealth of entries relating to queer women, trans people and everyone else who presides under the queer umbrella.
And despite it being specific to the Arabic-speaking region, The Queer Arab Glossary presents a universal framework. It can be applied to any grouping of communities around the world, who share dialect and slang.