Kitabı oku: «Life as a Unicorn», sayfa 3

Cute, right? The snag for me was that I was taught that homosexuality resulted in an automatic infinite number of sins, and no kind of good deed – not even curing cancer or solving climate change – could help compensate. But I only have a crush on Robin Hood THE FOX – the Quran doesn’t say anything about fancying foxes? I clutched onto this minuscule loophole of hope – I had to. For the punishments of hell were described to us with intimate detail. While water in heaven was a redemptive, cleansing element, in hell we’d be forced to drink and bathe in boiling water. ‘Close your eyes and imagine the heat on your skin and in your stomach,’ our teacher would tell us. With my eyes shut, I clung onto the lifebuoy that was DR. ABC – but it was no longer enough to stop my whole body from boiling. Another fabulous little treat in store for us was The Tree of Zaqqum, a deceptive piece of foliage whose fruit we’d be forced to eat. When I say ‘fruit’, I mean little devil heads disguised as fruit, which would mutilate our insides once ingested. And what to drink to wash off the horrific taste? Boiling water, of course. DR. ABC – what’s your cure for a shredded, incinerated gut? Nothing.

The intensity of hell’s punishments had a domino effect that debilitated DR. ABC’s capacity to hold off the terror, spreading around my brain like a wildfire that just couldn’t be controlled. And then came the final blow in our classroom tour of Satan’s lair: the overarching punishment of hell would be our regret that we hadn’t changed our behaviour on earth – that we lost Allah – coupled with the knowledge that nothing would placate Allah’s rage. We were stuck here for eternity, and it was entirely our fault. Eternal self-blame was Allah’s ultimate punishment, and it’s a feeling that has seeped into absolutely everything I experience.

To this day, every single time a traffic light goes red, I experience a pang of anxiety because I fear I’ve incited its fury. I’ve tried and tried to shirk this, but it is so engrained into my neurological make-up that I just can’t. Another road phenomenon that overwhelms me with guilt is when I press the ‘wait’ button before crossing a road; if there are no cars coming, I might decide to cross, but sometimes the traffic light then goes red, forcing a car to stop even though I’ve already crossed the road. I usually feel so bad when this happens that I have to mouth an ‘I’m sorry’ to the delayed driver every time. And, throughout my life, whenever I’ve had major doubts about Islam, one of the key thoughts that dissuades me from my scepticism is this: but just in case Allah is real, I should probably stay Muslim to avoid the not-so-glam time in Lucifer’s dungeon. This shadowy doubt, which I managed to stave off through times with my mother as a kid, became an all-consuming plague when I went from fancying cartoon foxes to actual boys.

The first boy I crushed on was none other than Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – can you honestly tell me you didn’t when you were a kid? I was ten years old. I knew I was gay by this point. I wanted to cuddle Macaulay Culkin in bed, and had the intense urge to help him through his lonely sorrow in the film. I wanted to support him, to be his partner, to lie naked with him and to feel supported by him. Perhaps it was also because I was starting to feel lonely in the Middle East, and I thought that he and I had a lot in common. When I realised the intensity of my desire, I was terrified by the religious implications of it. What I really wanted to do was cuddle up to Mama and have her and Umm Kulthum sing me to sleep, telling me it was going to be OK; but the fear was all-consuming, and it had to come out of me, for the thought was munching at my insides like a flesh-eating virus. And so I came out with it when we were on a family vacation in London.

Let me set the scene: we were visiting my dad’s old childhood friend who worked in the UK (let’s call him Majid); unlike most Arab men his age I’d met, he had never been married, and was dating a raucous and infectiously free-spirited English woman (let’s call her Lily). They were the first ‘interracial’ couple I’d ever seen, and much like the panto dames fusing genders, this relationship seemed to bridge cultures, a further sign that there were other models of behaviour outside of what I’d grown up with. Lily had a gay friend (let’s call him Billy) who was a fleeting but powerful presence. With bright red hair and toned arms, Billy wore tank tops and denim hot pants, and spoke with a melodic Liverpudlian accent that made every room he was in feel like a scene in an uplifting musical. My interactions with him were slight; when he came over to Majid’s house in Islington, I stayed quiet and read my Jacqueline Wilson ‘teenage-girl’ books in the corner (they were my favourite), attempting a surreptitious peep over the pages every now and then. I’d never seen a man so effeminate owning space like he did, and as he and the adults – my parents included – chatted over dinner and drinks, he splayed his lean legs over a spare chair, recalibrating the entire rhythm of the room to his own pace. Billy was the mistress of ceremonies in this house now. Lily referred to Billy with a ‘she’ pronoun throughout the night, and this flexible attitude towards gender seemed entirely accepted, just as it had been with the dames in pantomime. Perhaps this is only OK in London (or the British Council)? When I looked at my mother, she also seemed to hang on Billy’s every word, and she laughed from the belly in a way that told me she was genuinely delighted by his company. The next day, they even went clothes shopping together, for crying out loud.

The way in which Billy was accepted by everyone – particularly Mama – gave me the confidence that confessing my love for Macaulay Culkin might even be celebrated, despite what I knew about homosexuality from Islam. So as I was having lunch with Majid at a restaurant one afternoon, I said ‘I’m in love with Macaulay Culkin.’ Majid, who was sipping a whisky and Coca Cola, slowly put down the tumbler.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘You love him in the film? Because he’s a good actor?’

‘No! I’m in love with him. I want to marry him.’

Majid picked up his drink and took a big gulp, then he told me to finish my food. His thick eyebrows furrowed as he watched me slurp my spaghetti. The silence was a bit unnerving, but I interpreted his gaze as somewhat benevolent – maybe he feels the same because he also fancies a white person? As I found out later that evening, that was definitely not what he was feeling.

As I thumbed a new Jacqueline Wilson book in the guest room that evening, Majid called my name from the living room downstairs. I presumed dinner was ready. But after descending the staircase, I entered a room that was eerily quiet. The TV was off, no food was laid out on the tables, and Majid, my father, and mother were sitting neatly on the living-room couch, like Olympic gymnastics judges, ordered and unreadable. On the sofa next to them sat my brother, Majid’s fifteen-year-old son and marijuana-enthusiast, and Lily, who had her eyes glued to the floor. Majid then spoke: ‘Is everyone OK if we go out for dinner tonight? There’s a tasty Lebanese place near us.’ Phew. This is just a menu meeting. General mutters of agreement spread around the room. ‘But before we go … Amrou, do you want to tell everyone what you told me today?’ Mama sat up straight, the fact that I might have confided something to Majid without telling her first clearly upsetting to her. Mama and I didn’t keep secrets from each other. But on a cultural level, the fact that I said something to a family friend without first checking it with my parents was also very taboo; where we’re from, family units are more like clans. You are less an individual, and more one puzzle-piece of the collective familial-self, where everything that you say or do reflects the entirety of the family tribe. If any member of the family unit displays individual ways of thinking and behaving, the entire clan must come together to control, exile or destroy the offender.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. My mother’s eyes were giving out a hot glare, as if thin infrared lasers were beaming out and trying to penetrate my subconscious.

‘About Macaulay Culkin?’ Holy Shitting Fucking Christ on his Fucking Crucifix.

I looked around the room and assessed the perilous situation. Maybe I should just tell everyone I’m in love with Macaulay Culkin? I mean, we are in London – the home of spandex male cats, the place where pantomime was born – and look at Lily! She parties in St Tropez and wears revealing clothes – and she’s white and dating an Arab! – and WAIT A SECOND, what about Billy, the gay superhero who my mother LOVES?! Maybe it won’t be so bad? What if Islam doesn’t exist in this part of North London? OK – I’m going to go for it. What could possibly go wrong?!

‘I told Majid that I’m in love with Macaulay Culkin. One day, I want to marry him.’ My dad, who avoids emotion like it’s a skunk’s fart, looked almost fatigued by the news, as if it being raised was an utter imposition to his dinner schedule. Ramy started playing on his Game Boy – I would have done the same to be honest – while my mother looked stunned, tears brimming in her eyes, as if this was the most shocking, dangerous thing she had ever heard.

Majid looked to his son (let’s call him Hassan), who had clearly been briefed on this Iraqi episode of Jeremy Kyle. ‘Listen dude,’ Hassan chimed in, ‘just ’coz you think a guy is cool and you want to hang out with him, doesn’t mean you’re in love with him. Dudes can’t be in love with other dudes, it’s haram.’

‘Exactly,’ said Majid, with a self-satisfied grimace that even today makes me want to go back in time and whack his face with a slab of raw tuna. ‘You just want Macaulay Culkin to be your best friend. You didn’t know what you were saying – you were being stupid.’

With Lily’s eyes now fused to the ground, my dad sinking into the sofa as if it were quicksand, and my mother wearing the expression of a traumatised soldier just returned from war, I decided just to say this: ‘Yes. I was being stupid. I didn’t know what I was saying.’

I said I wasn’t hungry, and retreated to my room upstairs. My mother swiftly followed, barged in, and with more terror than rage in her demeanour, held my face in her hands and said this: ‘Never say anything to anyone about being in love with a man ever again – have you no shame? Look how you’ve embarrassed me. Haram on you, Amrou!’’ Her fake nails indented my arm’s soft flesh, and I burst out crying and released myself from her grip.

This was the first time in my life that I had ever willingly renounced her embrace.

I locked myself in the nearest bathroom and stayed in there for what must have been at least two hours. But in those two hours, the entire wiring of my brain changed, as if the experience had torn down the remaining neurological systems built on trust and hope. The final childhood bridges were being burnt, with new, coarser and more corrosive patterns of thinking emerging from the rubble. It was the first significant realisation I had that my life was going to be difficult. Islamic attitudes towards homosexuality had already made me feel full of fear and shame on the inside, but this was the first moment that these fears played out in the external world I inhabited. I had developed a mechanism for coping with my anxieties in private, but as I cried in the bathroom, the looming journey into adulthood seemed unimaginably treacherous. And treacherous because of the desires and feelings that lived inside of me – as if my natural urges were building the hurdles that were going to trip me up. The enormity of it all fatigued me, and so I lay my head on the cold marble tiles of the bathroom. I closed my eyes and willed Robin Hood – fox, man, whoever was available – to come lie next to me. Only this time he appeared like a thin apparition, barely present, and unlike on our first encounter, the marble stayed freezing, and the world was cold and lonely.

After the Macaulay incident, the colours of my world changed – spell-binding hues of emerald, sapphire and ruby dulled into a formless mud. What was more, I soon realised this mud was a minefield. One incident was particularly unsettling.

During our London trip, I was of course desperate to go to the West End. More specifically, I wanted to see what I believed was the most profound work known to humankind – CATS. Finally, the opportunity arose. It was decided that Ramy, my mother and I would go with another Middle-Eastern family who were also having a summer in London. The two boys were friends of mine and Ramy’s from Dubai, and their mother was one of the wealthiest people I’ve ever encountered. She turned up in chinchilla – even though it was summer – and strangled by a diamond choker that looked more like a neck brace. It was fun to watch her and my mother gossip. Imagine All About Eve, but cast entirely by the Arab elite who eat macaroons at Harrods, and you might get a sense of their dynamic.

On the way to the show, we had to walk through Soho. This was before gentrification, and on a Friday night it was gay and raucous and colourful as fuck. I was overwhelmed by the number of outwardly gay bodies, my field of vision a collage of men kissing men, and women kissing women, a street boasting a whole spectrum of genders. I tried, as much as possible, to keep my head down to avoid my mother catching me looking – maybe if I just stop looking for ever, I’ll eventually be straight? With my eyes glued to my shoes, taking one step after the other as we slalomed through the queer scrum, one of the young boys from the other family shouted, ‘Look Mama! There are two men kissing!’ Yes, thank you mate, I was trying to ignore it. His mother, whose heels were quivering on the Soho cobbles, responded with: ‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s disgusting? Every single one of them should be shot.’

Hearing that, I felt as though I was taking a bullet myself. When I looked up to see Mama’s response, she was smiling, walking along with her girlfriend as if they were having an everyday, pleasant conversation. If I turn out gay, Mama would rather I was shot dead. It seemed that everything developing inside me was bringing with it diabolical consequences. My simple desire to kiss a boy from a movie could result in me being gunned down, and then having to nurse the gunshot wound with boiling water in the afterlife. It felt a bit like having an autoimmune disease, as though my own body and mind were attacking themselves, as if the world I inhabited was trying to kill me for existing within it. My brain was being programmed to fight its own natural curiosities, and it was turning my head into a war zone.

I spent the entire production of CATS, my long-awaited beacon of hope, trying to avert my gaze from the spandex of the male cats. Rather than relishing the details of a show that I knew and loved so intimately, I sat there miserably, seeing only damning temptations. I remember very little about the actual production. The only clear memory I have is of looking at my mother during it and speculating: If she had a gun and found out I was gay – would she shoot me? For a very long time, a little part of me always believed that she would.

Another thing that made this all even more horrific was that in Islam class, we had also been taught that if we had more sins on our left shoulder than good deeds on our right by the time we died, not only would we be sentenced to eternal torture, but so would our mothers for failing us. No pressure. By the age of eleven, I knew hell was a certainty, and to calm the guilt of bringing my mother down with me, it helped to see her as someone who deserved to go to hell. It was a lose–lose situation, granted, but I needed a narrative that would stop me feeling like the root of all evil. As a survival tactic, I began to mythologise my parents as dragons that I needed to slay so I could live freely as an adult – I was definitely going to burn in the afterlife, but at least I could be some sort of hero here on earth. Picture them as villains, and you’ll no longer be the kid in the wrong. That was my only coping mechanism. And then I found something that convinced me that Mama was indeed planning to shoot me down.

My mother, as she rushed out of the house one day, left a copy of the book she was reading on the living-room table: A Child Called It. The book, in case you’ve not heard of it, is an autobiographical account by Dave Pelzer of his mother’s brutal and nightmarish abuse of him as a young child (when he was, somewhat eerily, a similar age to me when I found it). I read it from cover to cover in one gut-stirring sitting, feasting on the tales of a mother stabbing her son, forcing bleach down his throat, and gassing him with Clorox in a bathroom. Maybe Mama’s planning on doing the same to me to get the gay out? Am I her child called It? As I read it, I visualised all the torturous assaults taking place in our house, and pretty swiftly every room was a psychological site of Mama’s potential abuse. This might sound odd, but the book was a comfort for me; it confirmed that my mother could be a woman plotting my murder. The book was like a ghost coming to tell me that it wasn’t all my fault, that it was others who were causing my pain. The child is a total survivor, and he ultimately triumphs in a world violently against him. Perhaps I projected myself onto his narrative, telling myself I would eventually get out of a household that might have me shot for my sexuality. Or maybe I felt deep down that I deserved this kind of abuse from my mother, and wanted to believe that she really did see me as A Child Called It; painful as the thought was, at least it was simpler than questioning how Mama could love me even if the deepest part of me was something she hated. Either way, when I put down the book and returned it to the place my mother had left it, I went to the bathroom, locked the door, and lay on the cold marble floor again, imagining Mama through the door trying to gas me with Clorox fumes. After I got up, I washed my face in hot water, like a soldier readying myself for combat. I was going to get out of this a survivor.

What I didn’t realise then was how much my life was about to change. Later that year my father was offered a new job with Majid, and our family moved from Bahrain to London. It was time to find some armour; for I was about to enter a whole new battlefield.

THE IRAQI COMES TO LONDON: A STRANGE CASE OF JEKYLL AND HYDE

When I was thirteen, I made one of the most important decisions of my life. The memory of making it is so vivid that every detail of the room I was in and what I was feeling when I made it remains clear.

It was 8 p.m., and I was sitting on the floor of our living room in Chiswick. Since coming to London, I had felt a heaviness and general malaise, and I had fallen behind with my homework that term. I needed to hand in a backlog of three English assignments for the next morning. I retrieved the brand-new exercise book from my backpack – the front cover was mauve, of a tone not that dissimilar to my mother’s old work pencil-skirt – and I stared at the blank pages, daunted and unwilling. My mother was on the couch furthest away from me, glued to yet another Egyptian TV show (you can take the girl out of the Middle East …). My eyes moved between her, the TV, and my blank page, each one a hostile prospect. My mother now comfortably assumed the role of villain in my head (I was her Child Called It); Arab TV brought with it the soundscape from the warnings of hell in Islam class; and the blank pages in front of me were a further indication of my failings. But as I looked at the open exercise book, I had a realisation: these blank pages were also an opportunity to rewrite my narrative, to start completely afresh, on my own terms, with a total, uninhibited agency. I had no control over my burgeoning queer desires, nor my family’s attempts to police them. But with this homework, this mauve exercise book, these blank pages, I could control my fate. With the clarity of perfectly clean glass, I knew what I had to do: I am going to do amazingly at school. The decision was made, almost as if I had never believed in anything else. I can control how hard I work at school. If I get 100 per cent in everything, then maybe I won’t feel wrong any more. And even if my family think I’m wrong, I’ll have proof that I’m not because I’ll get straight As.

I picked up the exercise book, retreated to my room, and went above and beyond for all three pieces of homework. With the neatest handwriting my black-ink fountain pen could conjure, I completed the three best pieces of work in my school career up till that point: a comprehension exercise on Treasure Island, in which I answered every one-mark question with an essay; an actual essay about some poems we had been reading, for which I went beyond the parameters of the question, citing every other poem from the anthology; and an example of a ‘formal letter’, which was so extraordinarily well presented it looked like a bit of museum calligraphy preserved from the Elizabethan era. I worked throughout the night, and my focus never faltered.

Even though I was tired the next day, I felt a sense of hope as I handed in my opus. At the end of the week, our English teacher (let’s call her Ms Clare) – a dainty, sweetly-spoken American lady with a perfect, bouncy bob – asked us to come to the front of the class to collect our homework, as was the routine every Friday. On the procession to her desk, I felt as if I was preparing to meet Allah on Judgement Day.

As she handed me my fate, Ms Clare winked at me. I wonder if Allah winks at people who get into Heaven on Judgement Day? The wink comforted me only for a moment; my negative thought patterns didn’t let me believe it was something good, and I immediately assumed she must have had something in her eye. Well, that was until she said: ‘I can tell how hard you worked on this. And it paid off.’ The euphoria I felt was extraordinary – a current of joy flowed through the base of my feet, surging up through my thighs, rising into my belly and all the way up to my face. As I skipped back to my desk with a smile so wide it looked as though I was on a dentist’s chair, I flicked through my work. Every single red tick offered a validation I hadn’t felt since I was five years old and unquestionably my mother’s favourite. The next time I would experience such a pure, unadulterated bliss was when performing in drag for the first time some years later at university; but for now this high was something I needed another hit of, and soon. It was abundantly clear: a hundred per cent academic track record would be the antidote to everything negative I believed about myself.

Pretty quickly, however, the chase for a high became an agonising addiction, with each high feeling meagre in comparison to the one before. My chase for the 100 per cent mark made even 99 per cent feel like a catastrophic failure; if I didn’t get 100 per cent in every single exam and piece of homework, then I was a worthless queer who deserved to rot in hell and be shot by my mother. These extreme patterns of thinking led to some maddening episodes of OCD, and actions that must have seemed totally fucking crazy to my teachers and my parents. There are too many examples to recount, but a few stand out in my memory.

At thirteen, we were forced to decide which subjects to take for GCSE. Let’s just say, I did not approach the task lightly; a bomb defuser deciding which wire to cut in order to save mankind probably approaches their task with less gravity. As well as the standard mixture of Maths, French, English and Sciences, we had to decide which of the humanities we wanted to pursue. The reputability of History and Geography were no-brainers, but what to choose for my third spare slot? Classical Civilisation brought with it the Oxbridge kudos of antiquity, Art was a huge passion of mine, and I believed it would demonstrate my creative side to universities, and Statistics was an additional Maths GCSE that I thought would show people I was an academic BALLER. This is the hardest decision I have ever had to make. I scheduled meetings with each of the department heads multiple times, coming to school early to wait outside the staffroom, so they could repeat everything they had all told me several times already. During the weekend, I called pretty much every classmate on our house phone to hear their analysis, and as I was such a nerd, most were willing to take my call as a trade for me doing their homework. Eventually, though, they all tired of me; their parents would pick up and lie that their child was out even though I heard them laughing on the other line.

So I did what in the early millennium felt like uncharted territory: I Asked Jeeves (the camper, more budget precursor to Google). Soon I found myself on an online forum for academic students trying to ace their GCSEs and A levels, and I put the question to them. The overwhelming majority responded with: ‘Just do what you like; what matters to universities is if you do well in your core subjects.’ PAH! I’m not falling through the admissions cracks on that lazy excuse. Amateurs! What ensued was a creation of multiple different profiles, each of whom asked the question in slightly different, veiled terms, so I could collate as much information as possible. Safe to say, I was blocked from ever using the forum again. And unable to make this life-altering decision, I convinced the school to let me study all three – Classical Civilisation in the allotted school time, Art after school three times a week, and Statistics at home combined with extra homework. YOLO.

Every single piece of school work soon became an odyssey I had to conquer so as not to feel rotten inside. Even a single page of multiple-choice exercises could become an all-night endurance test on which my life depended. Things significantly ramped up a gear when we were given our first piece of coursework that would actually contribute to our GCSE for Maths. In other words – it was a BIG FUCKING DEAL. The task we were given was relatively benign: we had to follow a sequence involving cubes, to see how the number of visible faces would increase the higher the number of cubes. Add another cube, how many more visible faces are added to the sequence? From that, we could deduce a formula that predicted the laws of this pattern, so that if we were to plug in, say, 279 cubes into the formula, we’d accurately be able to predict just how many faces would be visible. To get an A*, the syllabus required that after we completed the set assignment, we should try to invent one additional variable to the existing exercise – perhaps one side of each cube being red – to demonstrate our capacity to apply the rules of the exercise to a slightly different problem. I’ll repeat: the syllabus required that we only do this ONCE, and that the workings could be summarised on a SINGLE PAGE. I, wanting to ensure that I did everything in my power to obtain this critical A*, did not just do one additional sequence. Oh no. I did 123 additional variations of the event. For the course of the two weeks, I pulled an all-nighter every single night to be able to meet the expectations of this self-imposed and totally futile task. And on the day we had to hand in the work, as every other member in the class handed in a neatly ordered slim plastic sleeve with their coursework, I arrived with a package of nearly 200 pages. My maths teacher – let’s call him Mr Brute (it suits him) – stared down at me as if I were presenting him with leather anal beads instead of coursework, lifted the dense wad of workings from my hands, and shook his head. As I trudged back to my seat, I heard him muttering something I couldn’t make out.

But poor Mr Brute hadn’t seen the last of me. For the rest of the week, I read through my coursework/PhD on cubes every night at home, becoming incredibly distressed whenever I spotted a spelling or grammar error; and every morning I would arrive early to school so I could badger Mr Brute in the staffroom and swap out the pages containing the offending mistakes with the new ones that I’d printed. By the end of the week, the look in his eyes had gone from terrified to pitying, and eventually to seriously concerned. As I hunched over on the floor by his desk, replacing pages with the quivering fragility of a drug-pumped lab rat, he looked at me and said: ‘Jesus, Amrou. You must have worked really hard on that.’ Yes, Mr Brute. You could say that.

Maths, of course, could easily trigger my obsessive compulsions. But my quest for 100 per cent became far more emotional – even political – when it came to English. For while Maths is a universal subject detached from identity, I was an Arab outsider who was distinctly not English. As an immigrant in the UK, you walk around with an inherent sense of displacement. This is especially the case when you’re a recent immigrant, when every street you walk down feels like a foreign land where you don’t have currency. While my brother went to an international school, I was at a popular London day school populated overwhelmingly by white students, who seemed to be equipped with a different set of cultural idioms than I was. For instance, I remember being taken aback on learning that their parents allowed them to travel to school by public transport – this, according to my mother, was ‘child abuse’. They also swore, and talked of drinking alcohol, and many people in my year group were dating each other, even recounting sexual experimentations. I never swore because of the sins it would accumulate (I barely heard any grown-up swear in the Middle East); I didn’t drink because I was still culturally a Muslim; and sex … well, I’d once fucked a marble floor while imagining it was a male cartoon fox. But actual physical intimacy with another human being – are you kidding? My English, compared to everyone else’s in my class, was of a far less urban register, even inauthentic. I spoke fluently because the Middle Eastern schools I had attended followed the British curriculum, but my accent was distinctly international, with a soft hint of American, and I sounded like a total imposter whenever I mimicked the other students with any of their phrases: ‘safe blad’ – the cool boys greeted each other with this; ‘pulling’ – which meant ‘snogging’ (which meant kissing); or ‘sick’, which I believed to be an insult, when in fact it meant something was amazing.