Unicorn

by Amrou Al-Kadhi

  After filming Run(a)way Arab, I began to feel something quite foreign to me: anger at other people. I had long been accustomed to flagellating myself, over forgotten commas, say, or for achieving anything less than 100 per cent in all academic and professional endeavours. Normally it was hard for me ever to be angry at other people. Such a position would suggest that I had enough self-love to be enraged that someone else had potentially injured it, whereas I approached every scenario as someone unworthy of love, and just felt appreciative of anything that resembled it, even when it quite clearly wasn’t. Now, however, I suddenly started to feel mad at others.

  This was unexpected, because I was creating work to try to find the joy in things. Drag, in particular, was about rediscovering the aspects of my heritage and my mother that I wanted to think about in new, positive, queer ways. Drag was becoming a vehicle in which I could live out the feminine parts of my upbringing from which I had long been severed. I had no real intention of diving back into the parts of my life that traumatised me, but, like with Run(a)way Arab, I was being led to them. For, of course, the more difficult memories hovered side by side with the ones I was exploring – like quantum contradictions – and it wasn’t long before they clashed together and engulfed me. The resulting energy was a fiery fury.

  I was no longer willing to believe that I was the cause of the world’s anger. I wanted to be able to enter a social situation without the paranoia that my merely being there might cause even a pint of beer to reject me. And so, instead of harbouring the belief that I was the root of my parents’ unhappiness, I forced myself to believe that they were the cause of mine. During therapy, I recounted every single thing that they had done that had actively contributed to my poor mental health and the shame surrounding my sexuality and identity. The list seemed endless … Their reaction to my intention to marry Macaulay Culkin? Their terrifying responses to my watching gay TV and cinema? When they threw away my favourite clothes? When they told me that I was unworthy of love? The way they emotionally manipulated me into thinking that my queerness was to blame for their problems? The way they allowed me to internalise some Islamic attitudes towards homosexuality? But then again … they did make huge sacrifices for me to have the life that I had. Mama, though sometimes cruel, was incredibly warm and funny, and so much of what I loved about drag was rooted in her. But, like the whack-a-mole arcade game, I had to hammer down any thoughts that popped up that made me think of them fondly – for the time being, I needed to picture them as villains who had constructed a world of unhappiness for me, otherwise the feelings of shame that came from believing I was to blame would never disappear. During this month, I rejected every single call from Mama and my father, I ignored every text, and I diverted every email of theirs into the trash. One day, Mama called me twenty-one times, clearly worried for my safety. Eventually, I picked up.

  ‘Amoura. Habibi. I am so worried about you. Why have you been ignoring me and Baba?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to speak to you.’ Gosh, that felt satisfying.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean I don’t want to speak to you. Whenever I speak to you, I feel shit.’

  ‘…’ Weren’t expecting that, were you?!

  ‘For my entire life you have made me feel so bad for being gay and for being myself. You told me I was the source of your unhappiness. Well you know what, you are the source of mine. For so long you have made me feel ashamed for being myself. I don’t need you and Dad any more. So why should I put up with your beliefs? Unless you and Dad are willing to apologise for what you have put me through, I have nothing to say to you.’

  Long pause.

  ‘Amrou. You are so lucky to have generous parents like me and your father. Any parent would have reacted the way we did to everything you were doing.’

  ‘Actually, no Mum. What you did was fucking homophobic and has made me a paranoid, often depressed person with severe mental health issues. Most parents would be proud of a kid who has had the life that I have – you’re only embarrassed.’

  ‘You know where we’re from. What do you expect?’

  ‘Are you willing to accept blame for what has happened?’

  ‘No, Amrou. We’re your parents. We don’t have to apologise to you. We did the best we could.’

  ‘OK then. Please never call me again.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  As I was about to hang up the phone, my mother interjected with one final remark – the only bit that sounded from the heart (everything else felt culturally scripted): ‘Amrou. I just want you to know that I love you. And whenever you need me, I am here.’

  ‘I don’t need you any more.’

  I hung up the phone.

  It was six months before I spoke to her or my father again. I told them not to contact me unless they were ready to apologise, or just to wait until if or when I was ready to make contact. This decision gave me emotional space. The combined love and resentment I had for my parents was so muddled, and everything I did felt in some way a form of disappointment to them. Any time I got some promising career news, I only felt anxious that they would discover it was about something queer. Any time a photo of me in drag circulated on the Internet, I felt scared it would fall into their hands. I had reached pure financial independence from them a little while ago, and needed to sever myself from them to feel completely autonomous, to have a chance to feel proud of myself for my work, rather than harbouring a constant buzz of shame around it. Throughout that six months though, I realised how desperate I was for them just to say, ‘I’m sorry’. It was in this period that my brother and I became close in a way we had never been before.

  I really love my brother, but I don’t know him as well as you might expect for twins. We spent our time in the Middle East separated by our mother and father; we went to different schools from the age of twelve, and lived in different countries during our twenties. But my kind, generous, wonderful brother had recently moved back to London, and my mother was visiting him during my decision to make a clean break from her. Throughout the six months, Ramy was a pillar of support for me, at every stage assuring me that my feelings were true and valid, and keeping me up to date on how my parents were responding. I became hooked on the sequence of events, as though my life were a Netflix drama. Here is the chain of events that went down with Mama and Ramy:

  Episode 1 – Anger: Ramy said that as soon as I got off the phone with Mama, she raged around the living room, furious that I would dare to attack her for being a bad parent. I wish I could have watched this impassioned performance, which included such hyperbolic claims as, ‘I am the best mother in the world’; ‘how dare Amrou accuse me of this when it is Amrou who made me unhappy all my life’; and, with utter seriousness and self-belief: ‘I am perfect’.

  This was the reaction I assumed she’d have. Whenever any critique came her way, her go-to response was that she was a person without flaws. As much as I admired the goddess complex, it automatically made everyone else at fault. She so vehemently believed that she was the ideal mother and person, that by proxy you were always in the wrong. Mama was good at gaslighting, but also an expert emotional manipulator; it didn’t take long for her eyes to water, and for her to spin out gut-wrenchingly guilt-tripping phrases like ‘I sacrificed my life for you’, and ‘I only ever wanted you to be happy’. So I was unsurprised that this was her initial response with Ramy, but still hurt that she couldn’t see that anything that she had said to me in my past was unacceptable. She told me I wasn’t worthy of love – surely that had to get me an apology Post-it note at the very least?

  Episode 2 – Devastation: The next time Ramy spoke to Mama about the entire scenario, he acted like my lawyer, vouching that the way she and Dad attempted to control and eradicate my sexuality and queer identity was emotionally abusive, and tried to explain the consequences this had had in my life. What started as my mother shouting at my brother and ref
using to believe what he was saying turned into her collapsing on his bed and weeping. Ramy said that she was completely broken when she realised that she might have had any role in making me unhappy. According to Ramy, her reaction was difficult to articulate – she was heartbroken that anything she had done had caused me so much pain, but still firmly believed that what she did was right regardless.

  Hearing of my beautiful, dainty mother falling down with grief was a horrible picture to come to terms with. I immediately felt guilty, and wanted nothing more than to run to her house and beg her not to be upset. I was also moved that any notion of my unhappiness could elicit such a primal response in her – maybe she really does want me to be happy? But these feelings were muddied by a latent rage on my part, for the fact that she still couldn’t apologise for the things that had hurt me so much. ‘Sure, she’s upset,’ I told Ramy. ‘But is she sorry?’

  ‘I don’t know bro. But she’s really depressed … she can’t get out of bed. She’s crying a lot. I don’t think she realised how bad it was. I think she’s pretty shell-shocked to be honest. I’ve never seen her like this.’ Again, the idea of my mother being so depressed was painful … but it was also oddly satisfying. It sounds emotionally stunted, but I got an odd kind of pleasure from the idea that I was punishing her somewhat. Finally, she was feeling some hurt, and perhaps this might be a way for me to shed how much I had punished myself. Let her be sad. She deserves to be in pain over what’s happened. It can’t all be my fault.

  Episode 3 – Victim: According to Ramy, my father had no interest in playing along. At this point in his life, he was suffering a deep depression. He had lost a great deal of his fortune in the recession, his business had completely collapsed, and he had been forced to move to Dubai to work tirelessly in a completely new job. Now I know I’ve painted my father in quite a negative light so far, but he really is a very good man. He’s just extremely tired. He left Iraq in his late teens to study in the UK, then had to move back to Iraq, hopping around jobs in the Middle East, before working his socks off to build a small fortune in the UK from nothing, sacrificing everything so that my brother and I could have a good life – and I’m eternally grateful to him. He learnt English from scratch, and worked in telecommunications even though he had no passion for it; his dream of becoming a footballer almost came true when he was scouted to trial for Arsenal football club, only to sustain a leg injury that required complex surgery and left him with a life-long impairment. When he wasn’t working, he wanted things to be easy. My nonconformism made things difficult for him.

  Baba was essentially far too miserable and tired to engage in anything at all self-reflective, and he told my brother and my mother that he wouldn’t hear a thing about me being angry at them. His argument was this: ‘I work like a dog. I’m unhappy. And now I have this ungrateful little shit telling me that I was a bad father?’ According to Ramy, Mama was trying to work through the issue, slowly coming to understand why what had ensued in our childhood was so emotionally damaging to me. But any time she raised it with my father, he screamed for her to shut up, telling her that my silliness was not to be entertained. ‘Dad’s really depressed bro. He’s not gonna tolerate any of this,’ Ramy told me.

  During my conversations with Ramy at about this point, it dawned on me just how difficult a husband my dad must have been for my mother. Mama was actually trying to work out how to salvage the relationship between us, while my father wasn’t at all willing. In fact, he was trying to forbid my mother from apologising for their attitudes towards my sexuality in my upbringing. What I had failed to see all my life was that my mother was also a victim of the Arab male patriarchy. How much of what she said was silently puppeteered by my father? I mean, she’s a woman who was raised in male-controlled countries. How much of what she did to control me was a result of her having led a life that was controlled by men?

  My mother was on the receiving end of so much of the anger I felt about my childhood. It didn’t ever occur to me that she and I might be ensnared within the same system of oppression. In fact, in Middle Eastern households, you’ll often find the mother as the mouthpiece of the patriarchy; while the father silently benefits from his male privilege, the women are left to enact the structures that the men profit from, perhaps even dictate. My dad’s apathetic response to this entire odyssey pointed to the fact that it mostly fell on my mother to be the bearer of the patriarchal hand – as such, I had always punished her more in my mind. But according to my brother, she was left once again to deal with the consequences of what was happening. My brother, who had always worshipped my father, said that this entire period had given him a whole new respect for Mama, and for what she had had to deal with.

  After six months, I received this message from Mama: ‘I’m so sorry you feel so bitter. If I hurt you or upset u in the past it was because of my ignorance and emotions and I’m genuinely very sorry. I always tried to do my best but I’m not perfect. Nobody is. I love you and can’t live without you so pls let us start a new page. All I want is your and Ramy’s happiness. I have nothing else.’

  She had apologised. And in an authentic way that allowed me to believe that she really meant it. She wasn’t apologising in a way that suggested her actions were intentionally harmful – as a woman raised in a Middle Eastern Muslim family, she had genuinely done the best that she could. She believed that homosexuality was a sin that would throw me and her into hell, and she wanted to protect me from the flames. She knew that the community would turn on me for being queer, and was desperate to prevent my exile. My mother is a very beautiful and innocent soul; she’s never touched drugs, and the most transgressive thing she’s done in her life is buy a ticket for Cirque du Soleil. The path I was taking quite clearly terrified her, and she was doing whatever she could to keep me on the only one she believed was safe. Sure, it wasn’t the right tactic, but it was all she knew. And here she said it – she wanted us to start a new chapter. I appreciated that she knew we might not be able to erase the damage of our history. But maybe we could begin a new relationship, starting now. The next day, Mama and I went for lunch.

  To mark this new chapter, I wore something I would have previously been too scared to wear in front of Mama, especially at a fancy restaurant: a rayon pyjama trouser and shirt duo bedecked with pictures of an unknown woman, bright blue high-heeled ankle boots, and a jacket patterned with fluorescent clouds. The sound of my heels against the marble floor echoed that of my mother’s as a child. I was led towards the table, but Mama wasn’t there. I got paranoid that she might have seen my outfit and done a runner, but after five minutes she was ushered over to the table, in a serious mood with the waiter. As she sat down, wearing sunglasses as big as her face – even though we were indoors and it was raining outside – she commented, with the gravity of a doctor breaking fatally bad news, ‘They sent me to the wrong table for ten minutes. I’ve never been treated like this in my life.’ A warmth flooded me, and I said, ‘Oh Mama. I’ve missed you so much.’

  ‘I’ve missed you too, Amoura.’ We held each other’s hands across the table.

  ‘Do you like what I’m wearing?’ I asked, both jokingly and provocatively. Mama considered her response, not wanting to damage this newly erected bridge between us.

  ‘Not really,’ she said lightly, still holding my hands. ‘But you should wear what makes you happy.’ This felt like a landmark moment between us. My silent punishment had been an attempt to establish new parameters between us – and the experiment had worked! Did I change her mind about what she thought was acceptable for a Muslim boy? No. But did she make the decision to bypass her beliefs so that we could be together? Yes. And that was the most accepting thing I had ever experienced from her.

  The lunch was one of the most honest and open times I’d ever had with Mama. We talked about drag, and how in many ways my drag was tied to her. True to form, when I teased her about the hilarity of hiring a welder to fix her dress, she responded with
utter sincerity: ‘What’s funny, Amrou? It was a very stressful day.’ I asked her why she had tried so hard to prohibit my drag, and her answer blew me away.

  ‘Amrou. Amrou. You are so lucky to be a man.’ I was going to interject that I don’t identify as a man, but she quickly continued. ‘Do you know what I have had to suffer because I am a woman? Do you know how hard life is as a woman? Your Baba treats me like shit, he doesn’t let me talk, and he screams at me whenever I try and communicate with him. The men in our family have stolen money from my business and just expect me to stay quiet because I am a woman. Being a woman is hell. And you, my special Amoura, with your special brain, choose to be a woman, even though you are lucky enough to be a man? I don’t understand it.’ Now there’s a great deal to unpack here. It took a while to make her see that for some people born male, their male body isn’t a ‘gift’, but a burden that makes them feel dysphoric and out of place in their own bodies. It took even longer to explain that drag isn’t about ‘being a woman’, but about expressing a side of yourself that you feel has been trapped, and if anything it parodies gender construction, rather than enforcing or replicating it. But oddly, it didn’t take long for her to understand how drag was my way to stay close to the Middle East, how it helped me remember the feminine aspects of our culture and my times with Mama long ago. But she was resolute that she would never fully understand my love of drag, and was honest that she’d never come to a show or outwardly support this – this wasn’t said out of malice, only truthfulness and love. Again, I began to understand the lengths to which she had been a victim of the patriarchy, and how my ability to transgress was in her eyes a patriarchal privilege. ‘If you had been a woman, you wouldn’t get away with what you do,’ she said. I told her that I wasn’t willing to feel grateful for having suffered what was in her eyes ‘only a small amount of trauma’.