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It provides a narrative that depicts everyday lives of lesbians in the Middle East, moving beyond seeing victims of homophobic laws, in order to explore their desires and the possibilities for living life outside societal parameters. I Am You is unique in that it is the first novel published in Arabic to truly take up lesbianism as an issue, and I would argue, a cause. For indeed, it is a highly political novel, questioning every prevailing societal belief about homosexuality, and contending that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon.
The vehicle through which this questioning takes place is through the ostensibly heterosexual Layal, an anthropologist who seeks to “inconspicuously infiltrate these new, and yet unexplored, territories” (136). In counselling young lesbian student Siham, Layal recognises that it is not homosexuality that is the problem, but the society that represses it. Mansour uses the character of Layal as a vehicle to pose questions to her reader. She recognises that some, like Layal, may be approaching the subject from a voyeuristic, knowledge-seeking perspective, and thus offers a search for origins, for the ‘reasons’ of various characters’ lesbianism. Later on, however, Layal undermines this search for the cause of lesbianism, turning to interrogate the basis for the search itself: