Performing professionally, which I had hoped would be emancipatory, brought with it even more restrictions to my identity. A particularly painful audition was for an advert for a rogue yoghurt brand, in which I had to play a petrified immigrant who was suddenly saved by the product (as if a dessert yoghurt, and not a banging asylum lawyer, would be our redemption). So tired of having my race confined to an offensive and limited set of narratives, I decided to conjure a bit of dame pantomime in the casting room, making my discovery of the yoghurt moment more melodramatic than was in the script. ‘Ahmed,’ the casting director sighed (I once got ‘Abu’), ‘can we try that again – but a bit less camp?’
‘Of course. Sorry.’ If my queer identity and my race were two separate magnets, then this was yet another moment where they repelled each other.
Oh, and working with Spielberg … I mean, it was obviously pretty exciting to be on such a massive set in a scene with Eric Bana. But it probably would have been more fun had the scene not involved me walking in on my terrorist father’s mutilated body in a room that was on fire. To be honest, I wished it was Ms Walker rather than Mr Spielberg on set that day.
Further shame about my heritage came during my after-school art classes. Oh boy. Let me tell you about those. I wasn’t exactly a natural at art, but what I lacked in talent I made up for in determination. Art GCSE was an extraordinary amount of work. Each term you were given a sketchbook with an overarching theme – ‘the Rainforest’, ‘African masks’, ‘Vintage’ – and for the course of the term you would conscientiously chart your artistic pursuits around the topic in your sketchbook, with drawings, annotations, and profiles of artists that inspired you. After a term of mining your artistic voice, the project would end with a single art piece that concluded the term’s work. For our examined GCSE sketchbook, we were given the topic of ‘Autobiography’. Wanting to avoid anything I really felt inside, I decided to do a study of my group of friends at school. We called ourselves ‘The Machos’. We were four boys, each of us lanky, gawky geeks. Instead of going on the lash, we studied hard, and had sleepovers where we played Monopoly and once or twice did a Ouija board. The other Machos knew I was gay and were very supportive. (Perhaps even too supportive – for my fifteenth birthday, one of them bought me a very expensive clitoral stimulator in the shape of a massive tongue. There was no way in hell I could take this home with me, which offended him, not least because he’d spent a great deal of pocket money in Ann Summers to purchase it.) We were a motley foursome, complete with a secret handshake and dog-tag necklaces inscribed with the word ‘Machos’. We were known around the school for being anything but macho.
My art project study of The Machos was gut-churningly twee, and one day our white art teacher – let’s call her Ms Paintbrush – mounted the seat next to me in full yogic pose, her African textile kaftan ballooning as she descended. Ms Paintbrush was one of those teachers who was open about smoking weed and talked to students as though we were her drinking buddies, and she tried to talk ‘real’ with me.
‘Amrou, my sweetheart – you know I think you have so much potential … and this sketchbook, it needs to be really powerful, you know. And currently … this topic you’re doing isn’t A or A* material.’ Fuck. If I get a B, it’ll be Armageddon. It was a fight or flight situation, and I was all ears. ‘How about you explore you, you know?’ Maybe she sees who I am inside. ‘Like go there.’ OK. Gah, fuck yes this sounds exciting. Am I ready? OK, I’ll — ‘Think about where you’re from!’ Oh wait. ‘What’s happening with 9/11, suicide bombing … turn it into art.’
SUICIDE BOMBING. MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY. SHE WANTED SUICIDE BOMBING TO BECOME MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY. So suicide bombing became my autobiography.
I’m sure Ms Paintbrush was envisioning a poetic exploration of stereotype, racism and identity, but I had a very binary approach to my race by this point. I felt infuriated that even my art had to feel confined by my race. My ‘Autobiography-on-suicide-bombing’ turned into an aggressive conflation of images from my upbringing and images of terrorism. I photocopied surahs from the Quran and ripped them up, sticking them all onto a page of my sketchbook, then covered my hand in red paint and imprinted it on the ripped Quran collage. And my final piece was an inexplicable horror show, a triptych of portraits of my mother – each portrait becoming bloodier and more decayed – with pictures of the Twin Towers collapsing behind her. Yup. With hindsight, it feels as though the piece was a problematic equation of the dying bond with my mother and my hate towards where I’m from, even though there were Western structures in place that were causing me to feel this way. Handing in the canvas of my mother disintegrating into the ashes of 9/11 only intensified my feeling that I had nowhere to belong. And the worst part? I only got an A for it.
‘I don’t understand. Your teachers talk about you like you’re an angel. Why do we only get the monster Amrou at home?’ We were driving back from parents’ evening at school, and my mother was baffled.
I remember the surprised look in her eyes as every single teacher we sat in front of gave glowing accounts of my work ethic, my courteous manners, my generosity of spirit, and academic merit. At home, however, I felt a rage I couldn’t control, and any conversation with my parents ended in them reprimanding me. By the teachers’ accounts, I was a cherubic joy, while my mother saw only a tormented child. Her surprise at the disparity was totally justified, for I was living out a Jekyll-and-Hyde duality. Identity, for me, became something that could be fractured into separate fragments; all the decaying aspects of myself – my relationship with my parents, my fear of being disowned for my sexuality, my heritage, the Arabic language, my faith – I stuffed in a closet at home, in a fashion not dissimilar to Dorian Gray’s rotting portrait. The qualities that I wanted to be seen, I tried to excavate from my depths, and to project them onto my artificial identity at school.
At home, my homosexuality was a conversational no-man’s land. The fact that I might be gay was never discussed, and my parents acted as if it would never surface again. Frequently – and I mean frequently – my parents talked to me about potential girlfriends from school, and would laugh with delight about my hypothetical wife-to-be as if they’d seen into the future and had a jolly with her. And whenever Majid and Lily came over – every so often Lily would bring a gay friend with her – my mother made sure to damn their lifestyle in front of me the second they left. Through coded signifiers, they were erecting invisible ring fences that were designed to stop me pursuing my homosexuality. Any time I did cross the line, I experienced a painful zap.
One of the most alarming instances was when I used my allowance to purchase a pink silk scarf (which I wanted to wear to school as a high-fashion post-modern turban). Because I was banned from purchasing anything ostentatious – this was actually a rule – I had to stuff it in my trousers when I got home, and then quickly under my bed once I safely made it to my room. My mother, sensing something was up, inspected my bedroom when I was taking a shower, and when I emerged, she held up the scarf in one hand, and the phone in the other. My father was waiting to speak to me from all the way in Baghdad. Even though my mother shook her head at me as I went to the phone, I caught her eyeing up the exquisite embroidery of the incriminating garment.
The phone call went something like this. ‘Amrou. We told you not to buy stupid shit like this. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU PLAYING AT?! I WORK MY FUCKING ASS OFF TO FUCKING PAY FOR YOUR LIFE AND YOU ARE USING YOUR ALLOWANCE TO BUY THESE STUPID FUCKING EXPENSIVE GIRLIE SCARFS! £!&£!*!£%(!%@!%)%!@)!@!!!!!!**********!!!!!!!!’ What had begun as a simmering rage escalated pretty quickly into a steaming hot assault, and his scream reached such an explosive pitch that he accidentally dropped his phone in the fiery flurry of it all. My mother, who now had the scarf around her neck and was catching a glance in the mirror, looked mildly concerned. ‘Well?’
‘I literally think he died.’ A minute later, the phone rang again. I picked up and it was my father. He hadn’t d
ied. It felt instead as though he’d had a sudden personality transplant (or a massive dose of relaxants). As was typical of his intense mood swings, he was now all cool, calm and collected, and, with the mellowness of a Reiki therapist, said: ‘So, tell me about the scarf you bought.’ It was this kind of emotional erraticism that made me feel unsafe, not to mention confused.
One Saturday afternoon, I heard something terrifying. My father was yelling my name – from my bedroom. Where the family computer was stored. Dread gurgled in my belly. ‘AMROU. UPSTAIRS. NOW.’ I ascended the stairs with all the enthusiasm of a Tudor queen approaching the executioner’s block. My disgruntled father was sitting on the desk chair with his left leg splayed on his right leg, taking up a great deal of physical space in that way straight men unconsciously feel entitled to. He told me to close the door and lock it. ‘What the hell is this?’ He pointed to the computer screen, on which the Google search bar revealed one of my recent internet forrays – Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I’d seen adverts for this programme, but the panopticon gaze of my parents meant I wasn’t able to find a safe window to watch it on TV. And so, late into the night, when the whole house was asleep, I googled it, longing to see men who had no shame about saying they were gay. I scrolled for hours to gawp at images of them, and also to find when the show might be repeated during extra-terrestrial TV hours. There were some 2 a.m. viewings I managed to catch with the volume on only one per cent, my face right up to the TV screen so that I could hear it. How I deified fashion expert Carson Kressley, with his invincible feminine spirit, his angelic locks, and his way of casting a spell on the people around him! How I doted on the kind-faced interior designer Thom Filicia, dreaming that one day he would design a castle for both of us to live in! My fascination for the show was only partly sexual – it was the fact that these characters were celebrated by society that gave me hope. I don’t think my father knew anything about the show; most probably he interpreted the search as my ambitions to sleep with straight men.
‘What the hell is this, Amrou?’ he repeated as I stood quivering by the door. The look on his face suggested he didn’t want an honest response regarding my sexual identity; his eyes were imploring me to deny the Google search. He didn’t want a confession – he wanted to force me into lying, to make me believe that my sexuality was also just a lie. And so, I lied.
‘Oh, that. Yeah, that was when my classmate Oliver came around – yeah, he was on the computer googling stuff. I didn’t realise that was what he searched.’ Oliver, by the way, is heterosexual.
My dad, with a forced grin, relaxed further into the chair, expanding into the space around him the way whipped cream inflates when released from a canister. He then segued into small talk about my day at school, before heading out of the room. As one leg strode out of the door, he swivelled around, and concluded the proceedings with this: ‘Amrou – be careful of Oliver.’ I knew that by ‘Oliver’ he meant the part of me that needed to stay locked in the closet for ever. After he closed the door, I felt the weight of the room’s silence. It became so powerful that it started to crush me with such a suffocating heaviness that I had to take off my clothes to relieve the pressure. The room became terrifyingly narrow, and I felt a sharp axe of pain inside my skull, as if something tiny in there was trying to claw itself out. I had to close my eyes and breathe deeply for the pain to subside. This, I know now, is the agonising pain of silence.
The regulation of my sexuality was continually enacted through these coded silencing methods. When I was fifteen, Brokeback Mountain was released in cinemas, and I knew I had to do whatever was necessary to see it. Once the trailer was released, I used every opportunity I had on the Internet to watch it. I gorged myself on it, memorised its every little detail, with one deeply tender moment in the trailer that I would turn to whenever I needed comfort. After four years of separation, the men arrange to meet up, and when they’re reunited, they greet each other with a hug so tight it’s as though they’re fusing into each other. I was desperate to feel an embrace like this, one so driven by love and desire that it would cause me to melt into my partner; I often lay in bed replaying this embrace in my head, imagining that the hug was so tight that it caused both men’s skin to peel off, so that they were two fleshy bodies merging into one complete whole, free from gender, race, or identity. To this day, every now and then when I feel particularly connected during sex, I imagine that this faceless merge might ensue. My teenage years were deeply lonely, and this image provided much comfort for me – as if love could diffuse the boundaries between people, so that we were each of us not separated by our own lonely bodies.
I devised a plan to see the film. It went like this: arrange a sleepover at a schoolfriend’s house all in the name of homework; beg said friend’s parents to drive us to the cinema; convince said friend that I needed to see Brokeback Mountain because I’d be broken without it; watch the film without popcorn or a refreshment, so that my eyes never escaped the enveloping embrace of the cinema screen. The film shows that the parameters of love are boundless, and that no true desire can escape us. It’s also achingly tragic, for love is also shown to be something that can be inhibited – in the case of Brokeback Mountain, by social conservatism in the American mid-west of the 1960s. A particularly harrowing scene shows Jake Gyllenhaal – God, he was great before he decided to play an Iranian in Prince of Persia – recounting an episode from his childhood when his father showed him the corpse of a gay man who had been killed for his sexuality. The film showed me things I wanted, alongside things I was terrified of, but it was also utterly honest with me, and it let me know that I wasn’t the only one suffering. After the film, I made sure the cinema stub was in my pocket, intending to keep it as a private totem for whenever I needed strength.
The next day, my mother picked me up from my friend’s house, and we drove back to ours. She quizzed me on the night’s proceedings, and I replied with monosyllabic lies. ‘Fine.’ ‘Just worked.’ I could tell Mama was frustrated with my cold demeanour, especially as she’d seen me only moments ago bid goodbye to my friend’s mother with all the cutesy charm of Little Orphan Annie. As we stopped at a red light, my mother turned to me, intending to ignite a conversation – and then she saw the cinema stub peeping out of my pocket. She picked it up, raised her sunglasses with the precision of a surgeon, and examined it. She contemplated that ticket stub as though it held the news that she had only one month to live. Then she took a deep breath and made a phone call through the car headset.
‘What is the Brokeback Mountain film? It’s the gay one, yes?’ The traffic light turned green and the car engine accelerated.
‘Amrou went to see the film yesterday. He lied to us so he could see the film.’
She then remained silent. When she hung up, she put her sunglasses back on, and looked straight ahead. The silence strangled me, and after a minute or two, I couldn’t help but ask her what was wrong. Her eyes never left the road in front of her. With a cracked voice she said, ‘We’re just very worried about you, Amrou.’
Back at home, I was allowed to go into my room unaccompanied, where I studied all evening, believing the limbo of anguish in the car to have drawn to a close. And then came the sound I was dreading – the hollow knocks on my bedroom door, which meant that my parents wanted to talk to me. They stood there like a black-and-white mime double act. I’m being taken to conversion therapy – I know it.
‘Amrou,’ my mother began. ‘Will you take me to the cinema – maybe to see Brokeback Mountain?’ Curveball. Genuinely no clue how to respond to this.
After a heavily pregnant pause, I went with: ‘Erm – why?’
‘Why not?’ Mama said somewhat threateningly. ‘Unless you think it’s wrong? Is that why you don’t want to take me? Because you know it’s wrong?’ Aha. This is what she’s doing. My dad, the silent puppet master, nodded, and with that they left the room. Again, they’d employed their sniper strategy – a quiet bullet to submit m
e into a silent heterosexuality.
You know that feeling, when you know what a group of people thinks about you, so you don’t even bother trying to correct them, and you even live up to their simplistic expectations, just to save the effort of explaining your complex emotions so you can get through the fucking day? That became home. My parents had given me enough indications that the internal truth of who I was would not be tolerated. So I became intolerable. The repercussions of actually telling them about my sexuality were too grave – I was sure I’d be sent away or disowned – so I began performing the role of the tormented child as a way to distract them from it. And as I was trapped in a situation with so little agency, I at least wanted to be demonic on my own terms, not theirs.
Pretty soon after the Brokeback Mountain incident, it was my father’s birthday lunch – and I made it my mission to ruin it. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the four of us went out to an expensive Knightsbridge restaurant to celebrate my dad’s special day. I was extremely reticent about having to go in the first place, because I wanted to stay at home and ensure every piece of homework was without fault. My mother, as she did whenever I left the house, laid out my outfit on the bed. Every now and then she would treat me to something I liked – as long as it wasn’t effeminate – but this time I was presented with a heterosexual straitjacket. As I looked over my history notes on Nazi Germany, I spied the soulless black shirt and dull loafers that awaited me. I tried to kick them off the bed, telling my parents that I needed to work. ‘My GCSEs are much more important than Dad’s birthday.’ My father was hovering on the precipice of fury, but as it was his birthday, my mother was the one to scream me into submission. Before I knew it, we were being driven off in my father’s new car, which felt more like a hearse.
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