It’s sometimes a strange feeling to live overseas. No matter how settled you feel, how well you feel you’ve gotten under the skin of where you are, there are always voices whispering how you’re not of that place. These whispers talk of ancestral roots and ideas of home that Nuseibeh constructs into a series of essays linking to the fierce Islamic warrior, Nusaybah.
Nuseibeh explores her own identity as much as the near mythical figure of Nusaybah. Navigating multiple identities, a woman, a secular Muslim, a queer Palestinian living in Britain, and all these together at once, she’s an interesting voice which rises above being a collection of adjectives in her examinations of how THE WEST sees her and her intersections. She pulls in others often overlooked, contemporary, feminist Muslim voices like Mona Eltahawy, and shows a long unbroken line in their thought back to her namesake.
While Nuseibeh is a strong voice, to suggest she is monolithically fierce would be a disservice to her emotional honesty about her own struggles with anxiety and ambivalence. Her reflections are what raises this book beyond a collection of essays. While she says she’s not as courageous as her ancestor, I would argue that laying her anxieties and emotions bare for the world to see isn’t as far off as she might feel.
