Searching for Selfhood: Caught Between Cultures, Identities and Worlds

Illustration Credit: Georgia Ryan

Fairuz Ghareeb reflects on their experiences as an Egyptian international student at the University of Cambridge, and how the shift of leaving Egypt for the ‘West’ has led them to question the very foundations of their identity.

When I was about 16 years old and writing essays for university admissions, one of the prompts I had to answer was roughly “describe something you view as vestigial”. I wrote about tribalism, and its modern manifestations  in terms of nationalism, gender and identity. It was my only essay to land me a spot on a waiting list rather than an outright rejection from all the US universities I applied to, so at the time I was quite proud of it. I have now come to dislike it the most, even more than I tend to dislike my past work. I, of course, cited no anthropological or sociological literature, did not distinguish between the identity pride of marginalized groups and that of fascists, and did not discuss the role of nationalism in resisting colonial aggression. I did mention in the essay that I do not intend to denigrate “those who feel strongly about their heritage”, but in the concluding paragraph I made a vague appeal to finding a sense of purpose in the “unity of humanity as a whole”. The whole piece smacks of a stench of lazy pop-evo-psychological musings, and a smug sense of superiority at my supposed enlightenment beyond borders.

It was, in many ways, a reflection of my political awareness at that phase. Were I at liberty to speak more at length about the source of “inspiration” for this piece, I would have discussed my recent skepticism towards religion, my distaste for the toxic social mores of Egyptian society that I interpreted as stemming out of religion, and all the misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia and general backwardness they entailed. It was my attempt at distancing myself from an environment I loathed to belong to, expressed through the lens I had acquired from watching and reading the works of my Western atheist overlords. 

But the roots of that short-stemmed tree extended far deeper into the soil of my history than I realized. I had never been interested in Egyptian or Arab history, beyond the boring jingoism I was fed in history class and immediately forgot after each exam. I had no interest in Arab cinema, music, or culture. I had always, on some level, hated my own name. As a child, whenever I would need to choose a name for my role-playing game character, it would make me cringe to write down “Fairuz”, and I would opt for something more “normal”-sounding. Making online comments, even when unrelated to politics, would still compel strangers to make a caricature of me in their minds, and insult “my religion” or the savagery of “my society”. I still do dislike my name, its ubiquity in a home country I am unlike, and its unpronounceability in a West that brands me with permanent otherness. The difference is, I now realize where these negative feelings come from.

My essay was not malicious. It was a naive noble-seeming attempt by a naive teenager to define myself outside of the confines of an identity I did not choose. I had been taught by those I did not realize were reactionaries that it was somehow unintelligent to identify so strongly with my race or gender, that the third-wave feminists were unproductive for clinging to such identity-categories as so immutable when their purported intent is creating a post-racial post-gender egalitarian society. My grasps towards the humanist project, as juvenile as they were, were completely genuine. I wanted to shed attachment to what I saw was the source of so many of the world’s conflicts, and become a cosmopolitan citizen of the planet, only considering a policy good if it benefits humanity as a whole, not just my tribe. I do still retain some sympathy for the humanist project, since, as cheesy as it sounds, I aspire to be an ally of the international proletariat. So what changed my perspective so severely that I now view my misguided yet ostensibly well-intentioned essay with such disdain? Well, to put it bluntly, I moved to the West.

I do not mean to make it sound that studying abroad is an overall negative experience; indeed, I am at my happiest outside of Egypt and away from my family, and it is still my ultimate aspiration to settle far and away permanently. However, I cannot deny how occasionally othering the experience has been, both on an institutional level and an interpersonal one. Institutionally, I must navigate a complex Kafkaesque bureaucratic maze and litany of rules that seem designed to make me feel unwelcome. I must sign a document three times a year affirming my dedication to obeying the terms and conditions of my visa. As a citizen of Egypt and other hand-picked countries, I must register with the police, and carry the police registration on my person if I am outside the greater Cambridge area, for it is a serious offense if I am caught without one. At job fairs, all my friends can immediately approach potential employers and discuss the company environment and all their exciting projects, while I must preface any excitement with a question that eliminates most of my options - “do you hire internationals?”. I could not afford to be so picky as to want to work someplace that excited me. Interpersonally, the effects of my foreignness were slightly more muted; living in a university-city with a mostly young liberal-minded student populace and many other internationals eased my transition, but my social life was not without its issues.

I will not list the few instances I felt people harbored explicit racial animus towards me, since that frames the problem in a very unsophisticated manner, meaning, it implies that had nobody said anything explicitly racist to me then I would have nothing to complain about. The problem is much more subtle than this, and often with no identifiable perpetrator. Speaking even to the most welcoming and wonderful group of friends would not save me from feeling out of place, as they would naturally often discuss and joke about things I could not relate to: their childhood, their positive familial relationships, their education system, the class structure of their society, etc. Faced with such conversations, I would avert awkwardness by resorting to talking about how different Egypt and Egyptian society were. The most mundane of my experiences back home proved fascinating to those unfamiliar with its culture. At first this approach seemed harmless enough, and highly effective as a social lubricant and ice breaker. Unfortunately, a few incidents proved to me that I had made a mistake. I was once sitting in the company of one of my few religious British friends. I must have complained about some parental or societal restriction borne out of some religious law. Their response was eye-opening, much like a bucket of ice water to the face of a man in a deep slumber; “Man, Islam is so weird”.

I was under the impression that my audience shared my understanding that my the hurdles I was facing as an ‘outsider’ were not specific to my religion, but I quickly realized this was not so. Such problems had become racialized, associated with my alienness, as though it is some exotic foreign illness that affects some far-away region of the world and which you only hear about as a curiosity on documentary television, all despite the fact that overly conservative parents and a stringent religious institution are ailments that can just as easily afflict the Christian West. I realized that my ice-breaking fallback was not merely an exercise in cultural exchange but an othering of myself, and the intrigue that others displayed in my stories ceased to be an endearing interest in my culture and became an exasperating ignorant white gaze. For all my lack of experience with many facets of their culture, I knew much more about them than they did about me. I had already consumed their media, their entertainment exports and their education, whereas, understandably, they had never consumed a single Arab cultural product in their life. This imbalance meant that I was not simply filling in the gaps of their understanding as they did mine, but that I was substituting for the entertainment they could have watched to understand my background. I was their entertainment, like a monkey at the zoo.

This framing of things in terms of entertainment really strikes at the heart of the matter. It is not that I believe they have done anything wrong by not being interested in Egyptian cinema, nor am I demanding that they watch it. I realize my culture is nothing special, and if that were my demand and I believed in being consistent, I would demand that they familiarize themselves with every artistic product of every culture on earth, which is simply absurd. The problem is broader than a dearth of diligence in a handful of individuals. The seed issue is the global cultural hegemony of white subjectivity. It is the same seed whose once-invisible roots compelled me to hate injecting my own self into a roleplaying game, the one that teaches the implicit assumption that the experience of the straight cis-white man is the default one, any deviation from which is an abnormality, an inherently oriental or political exercise. Think about how even seemingly apolitical works (if such a thing truly exists, which I believe it does not) suddenly invite discussions about diversity if the lead is incidentally a person of color. There is no way to be incidentally brown, in the same way that there is no way to be incidentally female, or trans, or gay. Your very existence sticks out, and it begets political discussion and intrigue, even at the hands of well meaning liberals who want to applaud your courage. Being eternally relegated to the role of the marginalized subject, being the constant focus of fierce debate by those who fetishize debate and scoff at you for snubbing it, becomes exhausting. There is comfort in living within the exported standard subjectivity, in being born into a throne with a legacy of cultural imperialism - in being “normal”. And I longed for that normalcy, even far before I understood what words like “internalized racism”  or “cultural hegemony” meant.

Further, I had made the mistake of assuming it was possible to be somehow acultural, that there existed some neutral reference point from which a person can be a cosmopolitan, if only they free themselves from the weights of cultural affects they were shackled with at birth. But there was no such preferred reference frame, and the things I viewed as acultural only appeared that way because it was the culture of the hegemony; from things as inconsequential as clothing, how many meals there are daily and when I eat them, to my sense of humor, interpersonal and professional etiquette, to even the grand comforting humanist project that the atheist movement seems to fall back on by default (often defensively, I should add, as a response to the accusation that atheists lack an obvious objective morality). Who is regarded as a human and who is subhuman? What is human nature, and can it be universalized? When we say we make decisions so that human well-being may flourish, which humans exactly do we mean when different humans have competing interests? Answers to these questions are far from trivial, and a lack of interest in examining them - and other underlying colonial assumptions of the humanist project- have ironically also been the cause of much suffering, just as the religion the project attempts to supplant was. There was simply no free human spirit at my core that would be exposed should I shed my shell of tribalism, and my attempts to do so would be replacing one shell with another, a capitulation to the white hegemony by being blind to its existence- much like the devil’s victory to religious folk.

I have come to realize that identity is not always an irrational primitive pride in things one did not personally achieve. Identity is often imposed upon people, and their pride is a repudiation of power structures that strive to convince them of their inferiority. And it was imposed upon me too, all my life, both by my in-group and out-group, and no amount of deliberate isolation from it would make the hegemonic machine pleased enough with me to view me as one of its own. When someone makes a shitty comment, or an assumption about me, or gazes upon my skin a certain way, it will not matter to them how much I have attempted to become the noble savage. I will be treated like the rest of my kin. But while I  understand I was capitulating to white supremacy and not achieving my goal of internationalism, that does not magically cure me of the psychological damage I suffer living in Egypt every day. The issues teenage me saw were not hallucinations, after all. So where does this leave me?

It leaves me with the arduous task of constructing my own identity myself. This may seem a pointless task to many, after all, people are who they are, and they do not actively engage in building a self image. But just as those who are born to homeowners will not need to understand the amount of thought that went into the selection of building materials that comprise said house, so will those not in my position never understand the pains I must go through to actively select elements of my heritage which I deem to be non-toxic and inadequate for use as a tool of abuse or indoctrination. Things like foods, perfumes, certain uncontroversial songs about universal emotions like love all seem like viable candidates. But the biggest hurdle in my existential mission is not its tediousness, but its selectivity, which sucks the authenticity out of anything I select. I came to this understanding one year as I was performatively fasting in Ramadan despite living away from the disciplinary gaze of Egyptian society and my utter lack of belief in a benevolent creator. One day during that period, I heard a salat jama’a for fajr coming somewhere near my dorm room. I briefly entertained the thought of how nice it would be to spend time with this Muslim minority in Cambridge, maybe even have iftar with them so as not to feel so alone. I very quickly realized, however, that those people would view what I am doing as utterly absurd. They fast because they believe it will get them into heaven, and fasting while being an atheist, unlike secularly celebrating Christmas, was almost unheard of. Even if they smile in my face while we break our fast, deep down some of them would know I was not truly one of them, that this was a futile effort on my part to please a God that wants nothing to do with me, and who will throw me in a pit of hell. The parallels between this and my discussion of capitulation to hegemony earlier are not lost on me. Who am I doing all of this for if neither party would grant me a card to carry?

So, in conclusion... what? I don’t know, I would not be writing essays as a coping mechanism if I had a clear answer in mind. Perhaps if I had waited a few more years, when I am older and wiser, I would have written a gripping autobiographical journey with a satisfying conclusion about an epiphany that led me to comfort in who I am, but I have a tendency to let ideas ferment in my head for so long that they rot. So, for better or worse, this essay now exists, out there in the world, rather than in the rusty cellars of my mind. Maybe I will revisit it when I come to hate it as much as the original vestigiality essay, and it would mark another era of my political understanding I will have superseded. Or maybe I will reside in this uncomfortable greyness forever. Only time will tell me who I am.