Fadi Zaghmout tells us his book’s big “what if” in his preface: “What if, instead of sex, we combined different traits and distributed them among people based on another biological attribute? Height, for example? What would this society look like?” Zaghmout’s answer is an intriguing novel that, he explains, uses height as an allegory for gender to critique arbitrary “masculine dominance” and “raise public awareness on gender issues.”
The novel thus joins a rich tradition of speculative fiction that plays with gender and sexuality, notably including Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967). Here, Zaghmout imagines a culture that is as dualistic about height as ours is about gender, forcing everyone into either “tall” or “short” categories without acknowledging in-betweens, arbitrarily lumping height together with a number of other, more malleable traits like dress, makeup, diet, and, most importantly, status. Binaries have a way of doubling as hierarchies, and here, shorts are privileged over talls; the narrator states on page one that this society works “to celebrate shortness as the ultimate gift, or to denounce tallness as a haunting curse.”
This thought experiment is potent because many can see the gradualness of height more readily than that of gender. Imagining height as a socially powerful binary, so the thinking goes, makes it easier to understand the arbitrariness of our own gender norms, which oversimplify the biological complexities of sex, over-privilege one gender over another, and overprescribe how one’s sex supposedly determines so many different things about oneself. The novel brings the human cost of restrictive binaries to life through a forbidden romance between the narrator, an unnamed tailor, and a client of hers named Tallan. She is a short, he is a tall—or so it seems. In a culture that doesn’t accept in-betweens, Tallan’s “average height” makes him a misfit who must force himself to pass as either tall or short. What little of his adult life he has not spent in seclusion in his aristocratic family estate, he has passed for tall. But an upcoming wedding he must attend will make him more conspicuous, and he needs professional help in designing an outfit that will make him fit in. He must avoid falling under suspicion of being a middle-height person, an unrecognized non-identity that would make him even more reviled than a lower-status tall.
Stirred by an instant and at-first-unrecognized attraction for Tallan—“a desire to help him took hold of me”—the narrator soon notices that “something about his average height was strangely appealing to me.” The attraction is mutual, and their professional artisan-client relationship quickly escalates into a romantic one. The relationship is not forbidden because of their putative height difference. On the contrary, tall/short intermarriage is the norm. Rather, the broken taboos are having sexual relations outside of marriage, and, even more importantly, Tallan having a nonbinary identity that is neither short nor tall. From these social restrictions, a compelling story unfolds involving intrigue, secrecy, oppression, resistance, and complicity.
If this society emphasizes height as much as ours does gender, its neglect of gender is far greater than our society’s significant, but often incidental, attention to height. This society is aware of biological sex but does not have social gender categories at all. Males and females have marriages with the same or opposite sex, and with one or multiple partners, without concepts of gender coming up. For instance, Tallan is male and the narrator is female, but this fact is not directly discussed until nearly halfway through the narrative. This raises the question of how a novel can be called The Man of Middling Height if the story-world does not have a concept of, and corresponding pronouns for, “man” or “woman”? More broadly, how could anyone authentically tell a story from within a genderless society using a gendered language? The novel’s ingenious solution is the conceit that the story as it has come to us is already a translation. The narrator explains: “Ours is a divisive language revolving around shorts and talls … I will tell you my story in a new tongue … A language that embraces and celebrates gender.” The narrator spends much of the later portion of the novel imagining a society structured around gender as much as hers is around height, and ends up imagining—no surprise here—the reader’s own world, up to and including inventing words like “man” and “woman,” even though those words do not exist in her own language.
The concept of story-as-translation must also reckon with the novel’s own out-world translation history. Since the novel is originally written in Arabic, “Translating it into English added another layer of complexity to the story,” Zaghmout points out. Arabic, he reminds us, “has words to distinguish between these two structures” of “biological sex and gender as a social construct,” which means that the original Arabic might have conveyed the story-world’s lack of social gender with more unobtrusively grammatical precision than English. These considerations raise larger issues of language’s relation to thought: In Zaghmout’s words, concepts of gender are “crystallized within the linguistic vessel” speakers must use. [1]
As it grapples with these ideas, The Man of Middling Height is at its best in moments that combine theme, plot, character, and image. Fittingly, given fashion’s inherent mix of superficiality with powerful social significance, many of the most effective of these more multivalent scenes are linked to the narrator’s profession as a tailor. Early on, for example, the physical proximity of taking clothing measurements sparks the narrator’s desire:
It was as if the confused shape of his body, somewhere between talls and shorts, attracted me in a way I had not experienced before. I felt my head spinning, and I almost closed my eyes to protect myself from what I saw in front of me. I had to deal with my reaction so as not to embarrass myself in front of him.
The sexual tension here is well-wrought and convincing, effectively portraying the ambivalent excitement of an involuntary attraction combined with the need to conceal it.
The tailor’s tools of the trade further heighten the story’s impact through symbolism. The narrator expresses pride over how she is
able to seamlessly insert the narrow silk thread through the needle, and pull it through the other side without fear of it slipping back. […] My thoughts shifted and I found myself thinking about Tallan and how he was neither tall nor short. He was not like a needle. Nor was he a thimble. Thus, he was not fit to play a role in the construction of our social fabric.
The self-conscious symbolism in this passage is good enough to make readers embrace the pun in the phrase “social fabric.” In a later passage, the added element of tailor’s chalk further develops the motif: a stick of it that the narrator uses “wasn’t as long or slender as the needle, and it wasn’t as short or round as the thimble. I found it like Tallan. And, in my mind I connected its vital role in the sewing work to Tallan’s role, with his average height, in a society that rejects him.” Without giving spoilers, it is worth saying that this societal rejection leads to severe harms against Tallan; the novel’s portrayal of trauma and violence fits its explicit investments in its relevance to the sexism, homophobia, and transphobia of our own world.
For all the book’s serious subject matter, many elements of its satire are also quite funny. Especially incisive is its parody of the infamously essentialist relationship advice book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray (1992). In one particularly playful scene, characters argue about a book called Shorts Are from Jupiter, Talls Are from Neptune. The book’s marketing copy is a note-for-note spoof of the back cover of Gray’s bestseller. If Mars/Venus has “helped men and women realize how different they can be in their communication styles, their emotional needs, and their modes of behavior, and offers the secrets of communicating without conflicts,” then Jupiter/Neptune likewise “clarifies the differences between shorts and talls, explaining how each type can and should express their needs in a way that doesn’t lead to conflicts.” The characters debate, somewhat unproductively, the author’s dubious evidence and reasoning, and similar conversations throughout the novel allow the book to explore persistent but particularly resurgent problems of prejudice, misinformation, and confirmation bias.
Clearly, the world in The Man of Middling Height is a mirror of our own. In a culmination of the novel’s strong mirror motif, the narrator realizes that the gender-centric world she has imagined “was nothing but a mirror of the life I lived.” But this mirror could offer a sharper image at times, with more world-building to conjure the impression of an “inner consistency of reality” so prized by Tolkien. Characters talk vaguely of other cities, geographical features, and countries, but there are no specific place names. The story’s main city lacks a strong sense of atmosphere or architectural style. The level of technology is intriguingly uneven, with modern-sounding references to hospitals, surgeries, and genetics; yet the narrator sews entirely by hand without any references to sewing machines or even electricity. This provocative mix of old and new features could have been explored further.
Just as the setting could use more development, so could some of the characters. While the narrator and Tallan are well-realized personalities, the supporting cast is largely two-dimensional. The book embodies conservative and progressive perspectives tidily in the narrator’s two feuding employees, who expound on their respective positions in ponderous mini-lectures. The narrator also sometimes goes on long infodumps, directly summarizing numerous aspects of the society to the reader. The novel’s many fine moments of showing suggest that it could have made do with a bit less telling.
In her afterword, French scholar Cheryl Toman calls Zaghmout “arguably the most important Jordanian writer today,” pointing out that the book’s “universal issues” are also enmeshed in “contexts specific to the Arab world.” Since I am not an expert in that region, there is surely much I am missing about this novel. But one thing that’s clear is that it is written in the shadow of the Arab Spring, a youth-led wave of progressive, democratic protest that toppled or destabilized multiple authoritarian regimes over a decade ago. After peaking in 2011, the movement has since failed to deliver lasting democratic reforms in most of the countries that saw uprisings. Readers can compare the fate of recent real-world revolutions to the fictional one that is brewing in a society built on height-based oppression.
Overall, this novel richly exploits science fiction’s great capacity to imagine the otherwise and denaturalize what seems inevitable and natural. The adventurous analogy between height and gender will surely provoke much discussion, and—hopefully!—controversy. This might be my own bias as an academic, but in addition to being a good read for any speculative fiction fan, I think this would be an especially excellent book to assign in a college course in literature or Gender Studies as a way of bringing feminist theory to life. Just as Zaghmout’s preface quotes feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s famous declaration that “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” a school principal in the book tells a pubescent student who is being indoctrinated into height roles, “Congratulations … You have become tall.” The absurdity of treating a gradual continuum as a sudden, either/or category comes into brilliant focus here. Full of moments like these, The Man of Middling Height is a timely, provocative call to question binaries and ultimately take up the struggle to live more authentic lives than those binaries allow.
Endnotes
[1] The idea that language shapes one’s worldview, known as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” or “linguistic relativity,” has been controversial in linguistics, with one recent literature review reporting that “studies have found diverging results on the influence of this grammatical feature [of gender] on our worldview.” Regardless, concepts of linguistic relativity have long been highly influential in science fiction, playing a significant role in classic science fiction novels including George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Here again, Zaghmout is in good company. [return]