Unicorn

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.

There were some other Arab students at the school – three in my year group – and I tried to befriend them. During Ramadan, we all inevitably hung around together as the white contingent of the school ate in the cafeteria, but I was quickly ostracised by them. The three boys saw themselves as tough sub-cultural gangsters, and my limp wrists immediately excluded me from the poker table. In case you haven’t already worked it out, I was a very effeminate boy – even an ant could have told you I was gay – and so I was exiled from this male Muslim cluster for being, to use their vocabulary, a ‘faggot’. To be taunted by the only other Arabs in the school took its toll, and so I believed that a mastery of the English language would give me a chance of integrating into the school’s mainstream cultural contingent.

This feeling intensified in 2003, when I was thirteen. For 2003 was of course the year that Britain joined forces with America to invade Iraq, the country my family is from. There was little discussion of it among my peers, and in truth, I was also disengaged, even though I could hear the tremor of bombs in the background when I spoke to my grandmother in Baghdad. All I knew was this: Iraq was the baddy, and Britain, which was now my home, was the goody. With an aching desire for a place to belong, and having learnt time and time again that Arabs didn’t want me, I believed that an A* in English would effectively qualify as my citizenship test. I spent most weekends reading my way through the British literary canon, from Austen and Brontë to Shakespeare (and yes, a dose of J K Rowling). I ingested the words of the English literary greats – it was like undergoing cultural conversion therapy – so that my right to speak it could not be called into question. Whenever I slipped up, I punished myself harshly.

Again, it was coursework that was to be my undoing. The first assignment was for us to write a short story (mine was about a boy who ran away from his family, only to get lost in the woods and freeze to death – make of that what you will). I had armed myself with a canon of metaphors and similes, and all but slept with the marking criteria to make sure I had this down. We were assessed according to an exam-certified chart, which asked the teacher to score everything from our use of verbs to the complexity of our punctuation choices. (A message to all teachers reading this: if you suspect that your student might have OCD, for the love of Lucifer please do not show them a strict chart of rules to be adhered to. It has the opposite effect of an anti-depressant.) I worked extraordinarily hard on my piece of coursework. I went through thirty-two drafts, to be precise, and made sure I had included everything mentioned on the mark scheme I had studied. I felt a huge sense of relief when I handed it in on the Friday before a week of half-term holiday.

When I got home, the always agitated angel on my left shoulder, who prohibited me ever feeling happy for more than a fleeting moment, impelled me to look at the coursework I had just submitted. I read it through, my finger trembling as it scrolled on the desktop mouse, terrified that a glaring mistake might explode in my face at any second. After a nail-biting twenty minutes, I reached the final paragraph, and was almost out of the woods. When there it was. A disaster worse than I could possibly have imagined: I had forgotten to use a comma in a sentence that needed one.

An iron rod of panic whacked my chest. I felt quite genuinely that life was no longer worth living. My first port of call was to investigate why I had been so careless as to omit a comma; I read each of my thirty-two drafts to track when I had accidentally erased it with a backspace. I then downloaded every single examiner’s report about this GCSE unit, to ascertain what this absent comma would cost to my life. I then tried to find Ms Clare’s number on every school document that was in the house – no luck. That evening, I refused dinner, and even screamed into my pillow in bed. For the upcoming week’s ‘holiday’, I was so fatigued with depression that I spent all of it bed-bound, barely able to eat, let alone talk. I limped through the week with the hope that I might be able to convince Ms Clare – who had said that this date was the absolute deadline – to allow me to swap in the page with the forlorn little comma.

It felt, and I’m not exaggerating, like a life-or-death situation. Doing perfectly at school was the only tangible thing I had in my control, and without it, my desires and transgressions would take over me like a rabid infection. I was plunged into a low so deep that by the end of the week, I went in the kitchen to look for a knife. I needed to punish myself for this cataclysmic failure. I rummaged around the kitchen drawer, searching for the sharpest knife I could find. My mournful week in bed had completely drained me of life, and I was searching desperately for a way to feel something. Of course, the burdened-with-paperwork angel on my left shoulder would not allow comfort or joy to be the solution, so sharp pain and punishment was the most natural thing for my brain to seek out. I picked up the knife, and pressed the flat metal side against my wrist. The cold titillated my veins, which bulged out of my skin, almost asking to be sliced. I turned the knife ninety degrees, so that its blade teased my skin. But my right hand, whose shoulder was home to the angel that recorded good deeds, refused to move. I returned the knife to the drawer, and went back to my bed. Oh, and in case you’re dying to know the conclusion of this nail-biting saga, the benevolent Ms Clare of course allowed me to replace the document with the new, correct page.

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.