Javier was there, in my body, in my skin, instead of me. I no longer knew what he wanted from me. I no longer knew what I wanted from him.
I wasn't myself anymore.
I had to find myself again. And to do that I let myself get lost on the streets of Cairo.

Taïa's short autobiographical novel takes you from growing up in Morocco, knowing he's interested in other boys who only want him back if they get to call him a girl, to life in exile in Paris, to movie shoots in Cairo (film, of course, is about shining through something to create an image that's both true and false), through near-death and near-rape experiences to heartbreaks and some sense of self-knowledge.

The prose is feverish, skittish, but still very self-assured. It's never a simple novel of Overcoming Homophobia or Surviving Racism, instead reading like a series of short breathless vignettes on the inextricable nature of infatuation, sex, fear, body, memory, culture. The fearful need of the fucker to feminize the fuckee, the need for absolute certainty of one's position in relation to others and oneself (the Biblical sense of "knowing" isn't just a linguistic gag). An extremely physical novel, as if the very existence of a gay African body were an important act of actively being oneself.

I turn the last page and wish there was more of it, that it didn't just stop. Then again, by the time it does, it's lobbed itself like a benevolent handgrenade at its reader, and doesn't offer a simple denouement. It continues being.