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The young women who follow Siham in their searches for textual kin in the Arabic-speaking world will have one more text to discover— I Am You—to be furtively bought perhaps, poured over in secret and passed from hand to hand. I Am You is survival literature in that it speaks about and to lesbian desire in a society which is largely silent about such desires. It provides an insight that breaks this sense of isolation, making visible that it is not the whole of society that rejects the lesbian, and that there are other women out there with the same passions and fears. Surrounded by literary and popular cultural images that almost exclusively depict heterosexual marriage as the only possible way of life for women, within the pages of I Am You one sees a glimpse of other types of lives, and other ways of being. As the first text of its kind, I Am You will no doubt one day take its place as a lesbian literary classic, but, more importantly, it outs lesbianism in the Arab world (and specifically, in Lebanon), acting as survival literature, and perhaps, opening up a door for further lesbian representation in Arabic culture.
Dr. Rebecca Beirne
Author of Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium and editor of Televising Queer Women: A Reader