Wanting in Arabic is a refusal of convenient silences,convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictionsof a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurationsof lyric, ghazal, l?criture feminine, and, in particular,her own sexed voice. Without a memory of herfather? language, the questions her poems ask are thosefor a home known through photographs, for a languagelost with childhood.
Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences ofsexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism,Wanting in Arabic attempts to traverse the fantasies offoundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order tofurther a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, ofgenerous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition.