Emerging Writers Series: Daniel Nour
Credit: Kasif Harrison
“I think Toni Morrison said, ‘I didn't set out to be a writer. I'm just a very picky reader,’ and it was in the process of looking for something good to read that she wrote her first novel. I think it's in that same vein that I wrote this. I have not seen a self-deprecating account of being Arab that has captured that peculiar phenomenon of being torn – the sense of obligation to your parents versus your own innate drive to self-actualise.”
Journalist and writer Daniel Nour chatted with us about his recently published debut memoir, How to Dodge Flying Sandals (Affirm Press, May 2025). The book was written in response to a perceived gap in literature documenting the lives of queer Arab men, particularly experiences which reflected his own.
With candour and humour, Daniel speaks to us about navigating discomfort and truth-telling, and the tensions inherent in growing up queer and Arab in Australia.
Could you take us through how this memoir came to be from your first idea to its publication?
I suppose it is the fruit of several years of labour. I first wrote a screenplay about five years ago with the help of a friend of mine, Marty McSmiley, about the absurdity of being in my Egyptian parents' house well into my twenties, and this idea that I would never move out or would only move out when I got married. But it was a little hamstrung by my lack of self-reflection, which is to say that I was still so deeply enamoured by the idea of marrying a girl, being a good Christian boy, and so forth that I couldn't quite get the lift -off I needed for this story to ring true.
Then a couple of years later, I did several ‘return to your roots’ style trips with the Egyptian consulate in Sydney. I did two trips where I went back to Cairo with a group of 20 or 30 Egyptian Australian youth. And also in the two or three years since I did the screenplay in 2017, the pandemic happened. Shortly before the pandemic I did this Christian TV show where I had this kind of absurd confessional experience of being a family man, which is so patently untrue. So, the combination of all of these events – seeing other young people live their lives with joy, seeing the absurdity of me saying marriage is between a man and a woman, and then of course having to be alone for two years in the pandemic – created a magnifying effect on my own profound insecurity, so that when I finally did enlist in the Sweatshop Collective in 2020, I was ready to be a little bit more honest about who I was.
Did you face any difficulties doing that at first, and how did you overcome them when beginning to write?
Well, you shouldn't write about anything that you would feel uncomfortable with everyone knowing about. So I didn't write about my sexuality and I didn't write about how fraught that journey was, but I did in bits and parts. For example, I wrote for SBS some years ago a couple of essays about body image and how Nigella Lawson helped me work through that. I wrote about the way that Arab Australian men are maligned for places like Meanjin in an essay called ‘Mama's Boy,’ which was about how, when I was seven I was in the bathroom of Sutherland Shire Leisure Center, naked as day and this white woman said, “he shouldn't be here, he's making us uncomfortable with his staring.” It was so jarring and humiliating, even at a young age, that it created this lingering sense of inferiority with a white status quo that I've had to work through with critical reading over the years.
But it did allow me to plant the seed of “I feel uncomfortable in my body” and “my body doesn't feel acceptable by the status quo.” Later on in that same essay I wrote about how I would go to clubs and white girls would put their hands on my chest and say, “I love Arab,” like they were talking about a kebab or something. In truth, it was a man who said that to me at Stonewall on Oxford Street when I was 19 years old, but at that stage, I was too uncertain about myself to report that – so I changed it to a woman. Until I was comfortable, I couldn't write about it, but I allowed myself to intimate the truth in small way through all of my writing.
You write in the memoir about your training as a journalist. How do you think your experience as a journalist informed your approach to writing a memoir?
I think Toni Morrison said, “I didn't set out to be a writer. I'm just a very picky reader,” and it was in the process of looking for something good to read that she wrote her first novel. I think it's in that same vein that I wrote this. I have not seen a self-deprecating account of being Arab that has captured that peculiar phenomenon of being torn – the sense of obligation to your parents versus your own innate drive to self-actualise. I hope that my book is my modest contribution to that canon of a more authentic account of the so-called Arab Australian experience. No doubt there are memoirs in that vein, but I haven't seen so many from men and I certainly haven't seen any from queer men that really resonate with me.
What do you think someone who is in your shoes, in terms of identity or even just their experience of the world, would take away from reading your memoir?
Can I be honest? I don't know that I want anyone to take anything away, because I'm not here to instruct or teach. I hope that by placing it within the context of the milestone experiences of the Arab diaspora in Australia – which are 9/11, the Cronulla riots, the Pauline Hanson years and the kind of moral panic that has ensued since then about Arabs in this country – that I have offered some kind of a mirror back to the community. I do that not to criticise or provide any moral feedback. It's just my account of living in between those very notable experiences in an honest way, and what that means – what TV shows I grew up watching, how much I loved Sesame Street as a child, how I resented and longed for Dawson's Creek, how I thought the Fresh Prince of Bel Air was a closer representation of my life than Home and Away. So much of our lives are reckoned through popular culture, and I've seasoned my book with references to the popular culture that formed and informed me. In that, I'm trying to do a funny account that is honest, self-deprecating, but also true. I think if you are moved as a result of that, then that's so much the better. If you see the shortcomings of our community in a way, especially the conservatism of the Egyptian community and obsession with appearances, then I've done my job.
The concept of truth is interesting and debated in journalism and memoir writing. How do you view the concept of truth in both these forms, and how did you honour truth in your memoir while respecting it as a subjective account?
I can only ever speak to my truth, I think. I wrote in the author's note that you can say many facts, but not an ounce of truth. iIt's in that vein that I offer this kind of unreliable ethnic memoir where I have taken liberties. Further to your point about how you grapple with that line between fact and fiction, what we're seeing now in the culture is a selective replaying of the facts with no deference to the overall truth. In the Gaza war, for example, we are seeing accounts of numbers killed in the occupied territories, but we are also seeing a larger obfuscation of the clearer truth that this is a genocide in our times.
Not since Iraq, in my opinion, have we seen such a not just ruthless, but shameless exploitation of another people, and yet it's all governed by the endless regurgitation of fact in the news media. I would say that it is possible to say many facts without saying the truth. For example, it is possible to say of my experience that the Egyptian community is very conservative and homophobic, without also offering the deeper truth that my parents have loved me unconditionally.
These are truths, although they may not be facts, you know? Ultimately it's my own conscience which dictates that I can present these people who are closest to me in my life in a way that preserves their dignity.
Moving to the structure of the memoir, I was interested in that, for a coming-of-age memoir, it starts with a chapter on death. What were you trying to capture about ethnic family structures and dynamics by doing that?
Can I ask, what do you think I was doing there?
Coming from an Indian and Iranian background, I understand the idea of being from a collectivistic family structure rather than the individualistic structures of the west, and the idea that the way your family operates is something you inherit, so the birth is not the beginning of your life, but just a continuance of this family structure.
That sounds true to me. We are in a community. There is this slightly antiquated, but charming idea that how you act publicly is an immediate reflection of your people. But I also think I had to mourn the loss of my old identity and the death of my grandfather at the beginning of the book was a signpost for that. It’s also a peculiarly Arab thing to be completely unsentimental about death and to mention it often because we have survived so many wars; our language is littered with religious idioms that refer to the mercy of God and fear of hell. Whenever anyone dies, we say “Allah yerhamhum,” which means “May God have mercy on their souls” – it’s so intrinsic to our culture, so I thought I’d start with a funeral.
You mentioned navigating your experience as a child of migrants, living in two worlds and honouring them both — how did you aim to convey this?
I talk about family expectations more broadly in the book. My parents expected me to get married and have children and work a stable job – they're not particularly impressed with me being single in my thirties and frequently desire or rather comment on their desire for grandchildren. Other critiques in the book include the way I dress strangely with jeans that have tears in them, and that my friends are all “faffy boys working in the arts,” and that I don't go to church with them anymore. I certainly felt and still feel the pressure of family, cultural and community expectations. All I would say is that one has to compartmentalise as the child of migrants, and you have to be able to be selective and not throw the baby Jesus out with the bath water and say, “oh well, I will never speak a word of Arabic. I will never go to church or mosque or temple and I am done. I’m done with this culture.” I don't know that that's a particularly sustainable way to live. What's more, I enjoy elements of Arabic culture. I like the soap operas. I like the music. I like the deference for elders. It is a rich and noble culture littered with homophobia. Both of these things can be true. So, you compartmentalise and you make selections.
Your memoir spans a number of years and during that time your attitudes and beliefs change a lot. When writing this memoir, did you face any difficulties honouring old versions of yourself while writing with the beliefs you hold now?
I put myself in that moment. In the chapter, ‘How to Offer Hospitality,’ where my family’s preacher walked in, I was roughly age 15, so I did not have a fully formed identity by any means. But I knew I wasn’t straight. But I think at that time it would have been disingenuous to say, “Here I was, a gay boy, growing up in my parents’ oppressive culture.” I would not have thought that way, it would be the wrong use of tone. Instead, I obsessively looked at pictures of Dwayne the Rock Johnson on my computer – let’s put some respect on his name and his body of work, if you know what I mean. I felt uncomfortable at the toxic masculinity of the visiting preacher man who came to sit at the dinner table and he would say things like, “you should lift weights.” I had this visceral feeling of revulsion and fear and anxiety at this man, which my mother clocked. These are the ways that I place myself at any given moment in the timeline of my life without projecting overtly modern or contemporary ideas onto them.
And when you’re revisiting yourself now and putting yourself in that moment, do you have any new insights about that time?
I think when you look back, you realise how absurd the contradictions are in our lives, the way that we can so clearly be one thing such as queer and camp and creative, and yet forced to be a round peg in a square hole.
Moving onto your future as a writer, do you think you will keep exploring this style of personal writing or branch out into other types of writing and journalism?
I studied political science at university with my journalism degree, and an idea that we're often told about the Middle East is that it depends heavily on notions such as collectivism, whereas in the west we have an individualistic society. And I'm curious about interrogating that further. Is that true? Is the reason, for example, that we saw a lone gunman shoot up a mosque of peacefully praying Muslims in the Christchurch massacre because our society here in Australia and in the West more broadly is so inherently lonely that it leads to this kind of moral bankruptcy and racism? That's a question I still have, and I don't have a good answer for that question. What does that tell us about the kind of society we have? What does that tell us about the way that we disparage the so-called developing world?
Read our review of How To Dodge Flying Sandals here.
Daniel Nour is an Egyptian-Australian journalist and a member of Sweatshop Literacy Movement. His writing has featured in The New York Times, SBS Voices, Meanjin Quarterly and Eureka Street. In 2020, he won the New South Wales Premier's Young Journalist of the Year Award. He dabbles in improv comedy.
Ariana Haghighi is an emerging literary critic with proud origins in student journalism, editing student magazine PULP (2022-2023) and student newspaper Honi Soit (2024). In 2024, she chiefly organised the inaugural Student Journalism Conference. She has been published in Meanjin and Overland, and is happiest when reading or underwater.