| Sumario: | This article uses Jack Halberstam's notions of 'hidden transcripts' and 'failure' as a starting point for analysing Zeyn Joukhadar's novel The Thirty Names of Night (2020). The 'hidden transcripts' – diaries, sketchbooks and journals that are unearthed throughout the novel – form a spectral archive that queers the history of migration to New York City, and functions as an enduring alternative to the conscription of queer migrant lives at the hands of the contemporary nation-state. Through the racialized and queer bodies in his novel, Joukhadar articulates the experience of trying to account for oneself when one is not readily accommodated in language nor in the architecture of the city. His protagonist, Nadir, is a trans*masculine person who is coming to terms with his gender identity and reconciling it with his religious family and upbringing. In attempting to articulate their subjecthoods, Nadir and his friends paint, make music and dance as generative modes of expression, and Joukhadar positions these alongside the spectral manuscripts from the previous generation of migrants. By expressing their identities through the painterly and the sonic, Nadir and his friends mobilize the 'failure' of language as an opportunity to imagine new ways of loving, forming community, and belonging.
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