A review by jayisreading
God in Pink by Hasan Namir

challenging dark sad fast-paced

3.75

God in Pink is a short novel with heavy content. Quiet and heartbreaking, Namir gives the reader a look into life for gay Muslims in Iraq through Ramy, a closeted man who’s pressured to find a wife by his brother and sister-in-law. Woven into Ramy’s story is the local sheikh’s own, Ammar, whose interactions with Ramy and his homosexuality lead to his own questioning of the relationship between religion and sexuality.

I was somewhat shocked by the amount of violence packed into such a short novel, yet I can’t imagine sugarcoating the reality of Ramy and other gay Muslims. There’s a particular grief that I felt while reading because of the pureness of Ramy’s love; it hurt to read about the aches he felt to live freely as a gay man. He is given fleeting moments of happiness that I treasured, but they’re so bittersweet. Then there was Ammar’s story, which slowly opened up to be something more than what initially read to me as a somewhat hallucinatory state— I really enjoyed the way Namir wove the two men’s stories in a way that put the two in conversation with each other.

That said, this novel felt a little too short. It was tightly packed with a lot of nuanced themes that require time to digest, but that left the plot and character development to suffer. As a result, it felt like there were missing details that could have made the story richer. There’s a lot to think about, though, and I’m left somewhat haunted by events that took place in less than two hundred pages.
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