“Même en tant que personne trans, on peut trouver le divin.”

“I wanted to tell a story that was fundamentally about many things at once… It was just as much about being trans as it was being the child of an immigrant, about being Muslim, about being Arab American. I want those things to be inextricable from each other.”

“How do I explore my own sense of desire & pleasure & my relationship with myself if I’m constantly subjected to this dehumanising gaze? I wanted to turn that gaze back on itself & at the same time I wanted to think of an antidote to it. For the trans couple in my story, their gaze on each other is a sacred thing—[one character compares it to] a painting called the “Virgin of Mercy” by Piero della Francesca, which shows Mary covering a group of believers with her cloak. If we can see each other, we can protect each other, & block out the harmful gazes that seek to define us.”

“It was really powerful to know that I was not alone and that I was sort of held in the net of history… that there were all of these other Arab American people who had had all of these lives that had led up to mine in some way, that their stories were a part of my story, and that as I was trying to envision a future for myself, I had to know this history in order to move forward. I had to know where we had come from in order to know how to move ahead.”

“The art in the book, both real and fictional, serves as a portal to escape the limits of language, to escape meanings ascribed to certain kinds of bodies, and to escape time itself… This approach was important to me in trying to capture on the page what it feels like to be trans [and to be nonbinary], beyond the ciscentric (and infuriatingly oversimplified) idea of transness as a visible and clearly defined transition from one binary gender to another. Nadir, like me, is not interested in what transness “means” to cis people, but in the felt reality that transcends visible, measurable, and medicalized markers of transness and arrives at the nature of existing in a human body in time.”

“I often think of the economic and logistical hurdles other trans creators of color in my life face, and all the incredible work that we’re losing as a result, and it makes me sad and angry at the high costs of cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, ableism, and racism. If we are invested in the kind of radically innovative art and literature of which we, as a society, most certainly have a desperate need, we have to better support queer and trans creators of color, especially Black trans women and transfeminine people, and we need to dismantle the systems designed to silence, incarcerate, and kill us. There is no other way.”