Details:

Pages: 342
Format: 130 X 195
Word count ≈ 49 800
ISBN: 978-9941-37-659-7

MOUSTACHES

Author: Tinatin Nogaideli

Description: 

Unprecedentedly bold story in contemporary Georgian literature, Moustaches is a coming-of-age age novel, or more accurately, — a coming-of-identity novel.

At the age of six, the protagonist is torn from the grandparents who raised her, to start school. Unable to meet the academic expectations or requirements of a perfect daughter, she decides to run away.

She starts her lifelong story of homecoming with the act of mapping her body in the 90s frontier village in Georgia and continues through European cities. She learns to soothe anxiety through discovery and connection to her body: whiffing her own armpits and crotch, masturbation, and sexual connection with her first non-binary partner. The body and its autonomy are the ultimate manifestation in her story, the nest that she desperately looks for. A chapter-long sex scene in the novel was fueled by years of research and interviews with other Georgian queers in the attempts to create the right syntax and lexis for depicting modern sexual relationships.

The novel portrays an explicit image of a traditional family, embodied in vivid characters, who demonstrate just as much cruelty as support. The act of running away is a repeated strategy for emancipation from family pressure, mother figures, and the pressure of motherhood while men are caught in a crisis of masculinity. We meet a child hidden from the village because of his hemophilia or closeted Muslim practices links queerness to the stories of exclusion. When assimilating is not possible in such spaces, the only way of survival is hiding. The frontier region of Adjara, invisible in Georgian literature, depicted through colloquialisms and humor, anchors the novel in a specific space, time, and local identity in a newly independent, post-civil-war Georgia.

Published during the ongoing protests in Georgia against foreign agents and anti-LGBTQI+ laws, the novel is amongst the rare narratives told by and for queers, as their stories are systematically erased by the authorities. This love story is told through the local prism that reflects the lived realities of many queers in Georgia. The author explores joys and pleasures, refusing to make sexual identity a tragedy.

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