This is a love letter to you, Uncle Farid. And here are the questions I was never able to ask you: Did you ever believe in Allah? Did you ever try to come out to your parents? How did the news feel, in your body, when you were diagnosed with HIV? Were you able to feel fully queer, and fully Arab, in France?

“Made Of Smokeless Fire” is an homage to my uncle Farid who passed away in 2013. Without having the ability to speak to him, I turned my lens toward LGBTQIA+ people within Muslim culture in France, which are often underrepresented and simply ignored. France has the largest proportion of Muslims in the Western world, estimated at 8.8% or the population, or 5.57 million. But still, islamophobia is omnipresent. At the intersection of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and racism, LGBTQIA+ people of Muslim culture are actively fighting against these inequities, while redefining their own cultural and religious heritage.

Since 2020, I have encountered more than 30 participants who have shared their experience : although some have had to cut ties with their family, others have reinterpreted the Qur’an, found ways to heal with their parents, created their own family, nurtured welcoming and safe community spaces in France. There isn’t a single story. Using both photography and personal testimonies, this project aims to unsettle the stereotypes, highlighting the unspoken and unchallenged aggressions existing in France while also celebrating the resiliency of the subjects.

The month of May 2023 marks 10 years since my uncle’s death. Opening up our memories and traumas can almost be redemptive, leading to questioning our imposed narratives of faith, survival, family and love. This body of work has become a necessity for me, a tunnel for examining the trauma of silence surrounding queer lives. With secrets tied in loss of memory due to immigration, to a colonial past, to learning new codes and languages, this work has begun to not only feel like an homage to Farid, but to queered and racialized bodies - bodies in liminality.