Three Parties, by Ziyad Saadi (Toronto: Hamish Hamilton, 2025), $34.95 / 9780735250963
For some readers of queer fiction, the coming out novel has been a tired sub-genre for quite some time now. From rites of passage to the development of a personal gay consciousness, it’s all been done before. With the subject exhausted, what fresh new take could there possibly be?
Why, a queer Palestinian coming out novel based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, of course!
Quite apart from the question of whether such an experiment seems timely while Israel continues its destruction of Gaza, killing more than 60,000 Palestinians and making starvation a daily reality for the still living, the concept of queer Palestinian consciousness remains a contentious issue. With LGBTQ+ people suffering discrimination and violence especially in Gaza (“I hear Hamas throws gays off of buildings,” one character says in Three Parties), human rights critics see ‘Queers for Palestine’ as an oxymoron worthy of ‘Chickens for KFC’ satire.
But Ziyad Saadi, a Vancouver-based filmmaker (“Hello, My Name is Death,” “Bag Boy Lover Boy,” “The Pioneer”) and writer (Indiewire, The Independent, The Gay and Lesbian Review), is no polemicist. Instead, he takes on his subject with a fast-paced, stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue style to reveal layers of complexity in the queer Palestinian immigrant’s experience of life in the West. With Three Parties, he has taken a century-old novel about an upper class, post-World War I English woman’s inner struggles and reimagined it through the contemporary lens of a gay Palestinian immigrant’s inner struggles. The result is a politically sophisticated and often wickedly funny first novel, grounded in the foibles of human nature and how we respond to them, that’s well worth reading.
As with Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway, this novel’s protagonist, Firas Dareer, spends a lot of time contemplating his love life and whether he’s truly happy with the choices he’s made. The three parties of the title refer to his cancelled twelfth birthday bash (a cruel prank by classmates who said they’d come but had no intention of attending), the fourteenth birthday celebration for younger brother Mazen, also cancelled but for principled reasons (respect for the dead following another massacre in the Middle East), and the upcoming party for Firas, which he plans to use to come out at last.
Early in the novel, Saadi lays out in detail Firas’s eight stages of coming out, only the first three of which he has reached: he’s out to himself, strangers, and acquaintances but not to friends and co-workers, and especially not his family. (Stages seven and eight are public disclosure of one’s sexuality, first through visibility at gay events and protests, then on the Internet.)
The author’s filmic sensibility is most evident in a scene where Firas—running errands before his party—stumbles upon Detroit’s pride parade. First he is accosted by a vacuous twink who spots him as a parade “newbie” and wants to make small talk about this year’s floats. (Firas sees him as “dashing, but in a generic way, like a model from a department store catalogue forgotten as soon as the page is turned.”) Then, moving through the crowds, he bumps into a six-foot-five drag queen in a flamenco dress, accidentally dousing it with her spilled cup of soda (“Do you, fuckwit, have any idea how long it took me to make this dress?”)
The drag queen’s parting shot, “Gays like you always ruin these events,” becomes fodder for reflection as Firas unpacks each segment of the phrase (“Gays like you. He was othered by a group that was already othered, making him doubly othered and quadruply alone”). The encounter reinforces his sense of alienation from both Western liberal culture and his own culture’s restrictive religious traditions.
For all his challenges, Firas has no problem getting laid. His first lover, Anton, is a “thick-accented Russian on a student visa” who applied to countless Western schools before settling on the University of Michigan “because the young man on its brochure reminded him of the porn star who made him realize the truth about himself.” There’s also a Burmese lover, and Firas briefly sleeps with one of his professors before dating the sweet but uninspiring Tyrese.
The lover of most interest is Kashif, a charismatic figure who wants only the best for Firas but is rigidly self-righteous about Palestinian nationhood. Kashif wants Firas to join him in “all the marches and protests to demand that the American government denounce Israel’s asymmetrical warfare on besieged Palestinians.” But Firas, focussed on schoolwork and his job, has no time for activism—a fact Kashif says makes him a less worthy Palestinian: unlike him, Firas is not fighting for the people.
Interrupting the present-tense drama of the hours ticking down to his party are several flashbacks to Firas’s early childhood in Palestine and his family’s flight to the U.S. Saadi is most effective in illustrating the sense of displacement for Palestinian immigrants who arrive in a country where people take their own freedoms for granted.
As in Mrs. Dalloway, there are several human dramas swirling around the protagonist as his moment of truth approaches. When Firas receives a text that his mother sent him by mistake, what will the revelation do to his father, already a broken man? And why does his curmudgeonly grandfather consider him “the bad one”? Should he really be envious of his younger brother Mazen, to whom everything seemed to come so easily, when his sibling clearly has mental health issues? Will Maysa, the untrustworthy maid, rat him out?
There are many twists in this story, which at turns is comic, sad, and poignant. Saadi has a keen eye for detail, so many scenes linger long after reading. A visit to the family home by the local sheik, which causes tension over opposing views of religious piety, was a favourite.
Three Parties is a compelling rendering of the conflict between private yearning and public obligation. When Firas compares the eight stages of coming out to the journey of Palestine itself, he can’t help wondering: what stage of Palestinianism has he reached?
