I Will Greet the Sun Again by Khashayar J. Khabushani
In Khashayar J. Khabushani's debut, a young boy navigates a queer coming-of-age against the backdrop of pre-9/11 America and post-revolution Iran
The protagonist of Khashayar J. Khabushani’s I Will Greet the Sun Again is named, much like his author, after a great Persian king – the only one of three brothers to bear an Iranian name. He wears it uneasily, going by K in school and at home, his embarrassment thick under the hot beating sun of 90s California where his parents have relocated. Iran, in many ways, means very little to him – a hazy past from which he comes, but only finds expression in the broken Farsi and discomforting unbelonging of his present.
There is an intricacy to Khabushani’s debut that belies the frankness of its prose and the close-quarters intimacy of its coming-of-age. Starting out in the quiet claustrophobia of childhood, where a nine year-old K feels the tightness of burgeoning queer desire in his stomach and navigates the unpredictable moods of his father and brothers, the narrative breaks open midway through, as the boys’ father steals them away to Iran before they return to an America on the brink of 9/11. A tale of diaspora that is as gutting as it is tender, I Will Greet the Sun Again is an inquiry into what we can lay claim to: the collective haunting of a lost country, queerness that is barely allowed to take shape, grief and fear that can, at any moment, explode into violence. Every word, deft and unassuming, shatters.
