My decision not to cut is a moment that replays in my head very frequently, and I question what it was inside me that resisted the impulse. Perhaps it’s because there’s quite a marked distinction between being self-punishing and being self-destructive. Yes, the good angel on my right shoulder was almost vanquished, but some semblance of it was still there. And the angel on my left wasn’t a devil, but a good angel that had fallen with sin, causing me to be a deeply guilt-ridden child. It was inherently a good angel. Self-destruction is obliterative and nihilistic – you believe you are worth nothing – while self-punishment is an oddly abusive form of self-improvement. You punish yourself to preserve something deep in your core, which you innately believe might be worth saving, even if it’s tarnished, feeble, and almost gone. By the age of fourteen, pretty much every cell of my being was infected with a cancer that told me I was rotten. But there were a few, just a few cells, that were healthy, somewhere. As a way to keep that little cohort of survivors safe, I continued to make academic perfection my mission, and punished myself whenever I fell short, for I had an aching need to show the world this perfect part of me – it was the only thing that contradicted everything else the world was telling me.
This unhealthy drive for perfection is not uncommon among queer people. You see it very visibly among gay men, many of whom are driven by the obsession to obtain the most perfect muscular physique, say. For as a queer person, it is a mathematical certainty that you will be hit with a feeling that you have failed – by your family, your God or your society – and the crack in your being that this causes, however small or big, can bring with it a drive for external markers of success that might somehow repair it. In moments like the comma episode, I felt as though the crack was going to swallow me whole.
At the age of fourteen, I made the decision to stop speaking Arabic. I was never entirely fluent, but I could hold my own in a conversation, understood it near-perfectly, and could read it with relative ease. But my proficiency dwindled the longer I lived in the UK. My mother became terrified that I was abandoning my cultural heritage, so she hired a Muslim Arabic teacher to come to our house once a week. It was around this period that I officially became ‘a problem child’.
The Arabic teacher – let’s call her Mudaris (this means ‘teacher’ in Arabic) – was a conservative fifty-year-old woman who saw the Arabic language as sacred, and who didn’t hide her disgust at the fact that Ramy and I were Middle Eastern kids with dwindling proficiency in the language. Thinking back to how I treated her, I should probably write an apology note, but at the time she was another symbol of oppression that I had to combat. And I had many tactics up my sleeve.
As well as the time devoted to reading, writing and speaking in Arabic, a segment of our lessons was dedicated to staying familiar with the Quran, and it was here that I really crossed the line. Now, a part of me was still a practising Muslim at this point, but it was fear more than anything else that kept me connected to Allah, and I was questioning many of the rules I was raised to believe. But they were not up for discussion in Mudaris’s head. I pushed her to breaking point. During one of her lessons, she talked to me about Allah’s creation of man. Now, the Quran uses quite a beautiful metaphor, according to which the clay of the very earth we live on was used to mould man and woman, and this isn’t technically wrong; every single natural thing on this planet is generated out of something that already existed within it. But I interpreted the text a bit too literally and used this lesson to push at Mudaris’s buttons.
‘Allah used the earth’s clay to create the first people,’ Mudaris recounted, a glint of wonder in her eye.
‘Hold on pal. Are you seriously telling me that Allah made us out of mud? We’re made out of MUD?’ I prodded, an arrogant little shit.
‘Yes, child. We are created from the earth’s mud. Even the soil is Allah.’
‘So you’re SERIOUSLY telling me that I’m made out of mud?’
‘Yes, in a way. And I can prove it you.’
What the hell is she gonna do – pour water on her skin until it dissolves and crumbles? I was, in truth, intrigued at the proof she had up her sleeve.
With the anticipation of someone about to confess a long-suppressed secret, she proceeded. She seemed so sure that I actually believed she might rip off her face to reveal a layer of brown sludge. Instead, she pressed her hands together very tightly and rubbed them, to then present to me the residual debris on her palms that comes when you do this.
‘You see, Amrou, that is the mud of the earth,’ she said with a look of contentment, as if she’d just solved an age-old mathematical conundrum in front of a room of academics. I stared at her for a moment, utterly bemused, and then went up to my bedroom, only to come back downstairs with a biology textbook. I found the chapter on skin, and began to lecture Mudaris on the cellular structure of the epidermis. As I was doing this, an entitled grimace on my face, her face went red and her eyes the tiniest bit watery. Thinking back to this moment, I’m ashamed at myself for subjecting this kind woman to what can only be described as Islamophobia, and I feel angry at the thought that I used Western science to attack what was a spiritual – and much more meaningful – belief. After this patronising lecture of mine, I decided to embarrass Mudaris even more. I concluded with the line: ‘By the way, that stuff on your hands? It’s not mud. It’s dirt. So you should really take a shower.’ Mudaris’s face changed from embarrassed to wounded, and then to enraged. She closed up all her textbooks, packed up her bags, and then shouted for my mother. In Arabic, they discussed what a twisted child I was, and I went up to my room.
As I lay on my bed, I was completely unsettled. I felt heinously guilty for what I had just done, but I also felt pleased. The idea that I had upset a sweet old lady brought me close to tears, but by attacking her Islamic principles I was also attacking my own Islamic foundations. Believing these to be in direct conflict with my hidden homosexuality, I thought I had to destroy them. And even though it tore me up inside, I wanted more of this destruction. It felt wrong in my heart, but right in my head.
Pushing Mudaris’s buttons like that made Mama very cross with me. ‘How could you show an older Muslim woman disrespect like that? Who knows what she’s now saying about us to all her other clients – some of them are my friends!’ Aha! So this is about appearances. ‘Everything you do is a reflection of me, Amrou. Do you want people to talk badly of me?’ How have you made this about YOU? I’m different to you. ‘Swear to Allah you’ll behave with Mudaris from now.’
‘Yeah, whatever. Leave me alone.’
I pushed things that little bit further during my Arabic lesson the following week. Mudaris wanted us to write ‘complex’ sentences with a list of adjectives we’d been working on. ‘My mother’s dress is very beautiful, ‘The people at school are very cool’, that kind of thing. I tried to find adjectives I would most successfully be able to transgress with; as I looked down the list, there were two that offered me the perfect opportunity: ‘big’ and ‘small’. I licked my lips with a dastardly expression and asked if I could read my efforts out loud – Mudaris was clearly surprised that I’d taken any sort of pride in my Arabic writing. I coughed, ever so slightly, and looked at her with an extremely confident gaze, as if I too had cracked an insolvable proof.
‘Big. Amrou has a big penis.
‘Small. Ramy has a small penis.’
Mudaris’s eyes scoured me, and she visibly clenched her teeth, unable to believe that a young Muslim boy would dare discuss their genitals in front of an older Muslim lady in this way. Unlike ‘condom-gate’ back in Dubai, this time I had knowingly transgressed a boundary, and I felt comforted that I at least had control over this transgression. It was on my terms. Once again, my mother was called downstairs, while I went up to the living room to watch Lizzie McGuire on the Disney Channel (yes, Hilary Duff’s PG days). A muddy ramble of Arabic ensued downstairs, until the door firmly slammed. As Mama walked up
the stairs, I geared myself up for the inevitable scolding – but Mama walked past the living room with the slightest trace of a smile on her face, as if she’d just been laughing. Yes, Mama – I thought it was funny too.
My mother couldn’t keep a straight face when we spoke about my latest misdemeanour, but she implored me – with less rage than desperation – to be on my best behaviour for the upcoming lessons, lest the community should get wind of her filthy little son.
During the next lesson with Mudaris, I decided to make her quit. GCSE lessons were firmly underway, and I didn’t have time to mess around with Arabic. Especially as I was trying to get an A* in French.
When I’d joined my new school at the age of twelve, my French was very rudimentary. We had barely touched the language in the Middle East, and I was in the bottom set for the class. This, of course, had been a major blow to my self-worth, which rested entirely on a perfect academic record. So for the course of that school year, I had made it my mission to worm myself into the top set of the class where all the French–English bilinguals learnt. I had done absolutely everything in my power to succeed; during the Easter holidays, I had reversed my sleep pattern so that I got up at 6 p.m. and went to bed at 8 a.m., just so I could spend hours learning the French dictionary, uninterrupted by anybody. Every night. For a month. And whenever my parents spoke to me in Arabic, I had responded in French.
This was the final straw for Mudaris: after I spent an entire lesson responding to her Arabic with French, she simply refused to teach me any more.
I worked so feverishly that not only did I make it into the top set, but I won the school award for Best Student at French two years in a row. The victory felt far more than academic. The slow divorce from my heritage was now in full swing; as part of the internal negotiations, I was happy to relinquish the Arabic language – in return I got proficiency in another European language. I was well on my way to becoming a real Westerner.
The war with my cultural heritage intensified when I landed an acting role in Steven Spielberg’s Munich at the age of fourteen. The logical next step after a gecko was, of course, the son of a terrorist. Allow me to give you the context that led up to this point.
Performing had long been a way for me to escape the structures in which I felt entrenched. Academic work provided a quantitative validation that I wasn’t worthless; drama was an anaesthetic against feelings of worthlessness. To this day, there is nothing that makes me feel as present in a situation as performing can. When you’re onstage, inhabiting a whole new context, you cannot be anything but a hundred per cent committed to the action that is happening right there and then. It’s why I fell in love with drama lessons; all fears about going home momentarily subsided, disappointment in myself because I lost a mark in a piece of homework quietened, and instead I could pretend I was somebody else entirely. My drama teacher, let’s call her Ms Walker, was a guardian angel to me, and consciously made the drama studio a place where I could inhabit my queer identity. During our daily walks around the field at break time, I spoke to her about my fear of coming out to my parents. As a way to help me, she turned our drama lessons into the campest, most playful space you could imagine.
Improvisation was always one of my favourite times of the week. I didn’t enjoy scripted work as much, because the rigorous structure of a text triggered my OCD, but improv forces the performer to be entirely present within their situation and shuts everything else out. ‘To start off today’s class, I’m going to shout out two words, and then two of you jump in, and do an improv around the words until I stop you,’ Ms Walker instructed, winking at me to let me know the room was a safe space for self-expression. ‘Today’s first two words are: hairdresser and camp.’ I leapt up, dragging my best friend at school – let’s call him Oliver – with me. What ensued was one of the most uproarious times I had had in my life up till that point, as I acted out the role of a gay hairdresser who ran a dictatorial boot camp for failing hairdressers. What started as camp turned into Ab Fab on steroids, as if a frozen butterfly inside me had thawed, fluttering its colourful wings all over the room. And the best bit? The entire class was cheering me on. While at home I had to eradicate all traces of my effeminate side, in drama I got to revel in it. As with the dames who captivated me in the British Council panto, again I saw that being camp could be powerful. At the end of the lesson, Ms Walker gave me a tender, genuinely loving hug, and, looking me straight in the eye, said: ‘Darling, you were fabulous.’
I wanted to be fabulous over and over and over again. Improv was like a way to stop real time, and all its associated paranoia – so I enrolled in a Saturday improvisation class at the Sylvia Young Theatre School. It was there that I was spotted by one of the school’s talent agents, in an improvisation where I played a teenager coming out to my mother. The girl I was acting with – and I’m sorry if you’re now reading this – was not a natural. Her go-to response was to storm around the room with arms flailing in the air as she screamed for me to get out of her house because I was ‘disgusting’. Ironically, it wasn’t a million miles off from how I imagined my mother might react if she truly discovered that I was gay, and so my performance turned out to be quite genuinely emotional. So not only did the class allow me to express something I was terrified of saying out loud at home, it also got me an agent. And what is acting besides a sublimation of childhood trauma in order to get an agent?
When I met with this agent, there was, however, a little problem. I had a slight lisp, and my accent was too ‘international’. The condition they gave me on signing was that I see the school’s speech therapist, whose task was to eradicate my lisp and force me to adopt a dignified RP accent. She was a strict but warm woman, and she impressed upon me the sheer majesty of a proper British accent, how its wide vowels and refined pronunciation signify its nobility, and every week I strived tirelessly to emulate it. I was determined to emancipate myself from the dialect of my upbringing, and to enter the vocal hemisphere of the British gentry. Whenever I fell short in these lessons – a poorly enunciated consonant, say, or a meek vowel sound – the speech therapist did not mince her words: she once called my existing accent ‘hideous’. Cheers, mate.
Of course, I believed her. ‘My accent is hideous,’ I would parrot back to her. Instead of fully internalising that Arab culture found me hideous, I wanted to exercise autonomy by damning it as hideous myself. And so, slowly, I changed my voice. The soft Arabian whisper became a large plum, thudding consonants all over the shop.
Once all traces of immigrant were cleansed from my palate – thanks, Sylvia Young – it was time to make me a child superstar. Maybe I’ll be a Disney Kid like Britney! Or the host of a show on Cartoon Network? OH I KNOW, I’ll star with Hugh Grant in About a (Brown-)Boy – the sequel! This holy triptych of entertainment never found its way to me. Instead, every audition I got was a pick between one of the following: terrorist, terrorist’s son, terrorist’s relative, terrorist’s friend, something to do with terrorism, mute refugee, violent refugee, nondescript refugee, Indian person, Asian person of some kind – once, a CHINESE person – token brown boy to fill a scene, a thug, and even, one time, a cold-blooded wife-rapist. The more auditions I attended, the more imprisoned I felt by my race and heritage. Rather than direct my rage at the racist institutional framework of the entertainment industry – which is not usually so much on a child’s agenda – I yet again became mad at my heritage, for encasing me in models of male behaviour I wanted to escape. I had hoped to recreate the joy of the camp hairdresser improv class on the big screen; instead I was doing mime detonations in casting suites. I wanted to explore untapped facets of my identity through the fantasy of film; instead I learnt that my identity was only fit for narrating stories linked to 9/11.
Now, without wanting to go all Rachel Dolezal, I’ll admit that the racial profiling of the casting industry led to me experiencing some ‘race dysphoria’. The deification of whiteness everywhere around me – and the op
portunities it opened – made me feel even more in conflict with my own heritage. One of the biggest facial traces of my Arab roots is my nose. I now live in a harmonious relationship with my nose; it’s part of my personality, prominent and powerful, with a camel’s-hump bump that tells you exactly where I come from.
Back then, however, I was less a human being, and more a gigantic nose with little arms and legs dangling off it. Puberty targeted my nose before any of the rest of me – maybe it was avoiding my penis, in fear of the inevitable shit show – and it sprang out of my face like a building does in a 2-D pop-up book, bringing with it a whole load of racial anxiety. My nose was often commented on in castings – ‘you have such an exotic nose’, ‘your nose is so … distinct’, and in one instance, ‘your nose is impressive … have you met the modelling agency Ugly?’ UGLY. Awesome. I became so embarrassed by my nose that I tried to get rid of it. Genuinely. During my two years represented by the Sylvia Young Agency, I would wake up each morning and proceed to bash my nose with a book, or sometimes fist, hoping that if I did this every day, the eventual pressure might cause it to push back in. Needless to say, the Flintstones procedure wasn’t successful, but I did sustain some bruising, sinus issues, and a rash.
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