An award-winning Iraqi writer creates a new world for himself in Seattle in search of lost love.
As the US occupation of Iraq rages, novelist Mortada Gzar, a student at the University of Baghdad, has a chance encounter with Morise, an African American soldier. It’s love at first sight, a threat to them both, and a moment of self-discovery. Challenged by society’s rejection and Morise’s return to the US, Mortada takes to the page to understand himself.
In his deeply affecting memoir, Mortada interweaves tales of his childhood work as a scrap-metal collector in a war zone and the indignities faced by openly gay artists in Iraq with his impossible love story and journey to the US. Marginalized by his own society, he is surprised to discover the racism he finds in a new one. At its heart, I’m in Seattle, Where Are You? is a moving tale of love and resilience.
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Mortada Gzar’s memoir, I’m in Seattle, Where Are You?, is a dazzling account of love, loss, and the complications of exile. This Iraqi novelist, filmmaker, and artist, a Whitman-like figure who contains multitudes in his embrace of the cosmos, understands ‘that stories, like meteors, obey the laws of physics,’ and what emerges in the stories he tells to an array of characters, including the statue of a vagrant, is proof that while ‘their energy does not fade or increase’ they will shape the lives and thinking of those who have the good luck to hear them. This is exactly the book to read in this fraught time.
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Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood