Unicorn

As I went back into the kitchen, where Mama now sipped a Turkish coffee as she laughed infectiously on the phone, I asked her when she would be done – at which she shooed me off, loath to interrupt the flow of what was clearly a banging anecdote. Those lucky women on the other line! The situation was desperate. Mama was slipping away from me, and she urgently needed to remember what we had. My eyes darted around the kitchen, searching for a remedy. Maybe I could spill water on the floor and pretend to slip? My not being a stuntman threw this one off the drawing board. Maybe I could pretend to break a vase? My mother had a passion for expensive tropical flowers – or maybe just things that were expensive, period – so I decided this would do more damage than good. And then I spotted the steaming bronze Turkish coffee pot on the cooker, the shimmer of its Arabesque metallic belly beckoning me towards it. Like a cunning magpie, I made a beeline, and picked it up with my bare hands, incinerating my right palm until I screamed in agony. When Mama saw what had happened, she dropped the phone, grabbed my hand and put it under cold running water as I sobbed into her arms. She was mine again.

She was mine for the rest of the night. Because my hand was so badly blistered from the ‘accident’, she stayed with me as I slept. I lay on the couch, with her on the floor next to me, holding up my hand so that I didn’t hurt it during my sleep. And she sat like this until I woke up the next morning – my beautiful, generous mother. Now I realise these were extreme measures to take for a moment of maternal comfort. But believe me when I tell you: there was no other option besides Mama.

Dubai was my home until the age of seven, Bahrain till I was eleven. Where I was raised, there was a marked distinction between the masculine and the feminine. I grew accustomed to binaries from a very early age, even though I had no awareness of the concept of them. The earliest recollection I have of a strict division between the sexes was when my mother drove to the border of Saudi Arabia (my brother and I were curious to see it). My mother edged to the border and drove away again. ‘But Mama, we want to go in,’ I implored, confused about what was stopping her. ‘Women aren’t allowed to drive in Saudi,’ my mother said with a remarkable calm, as if the patriarchy lived harmoniously inside her, at one with her brain and mouth. ‘Oh, OK,’ I said, mirroring my mother’s breezy tone. But this was only one incident among many that erected a strict scaffolding of gender rules inside me. Gender segregation was so embedded into the fabric of life that it was impossible not to internalise it and believe it was utterly normal. In mosques, men and women prayed in separate areas; in many Muslim countries, even the form and methods of prayer change depending on your gender. And when it comes to secular activities, the Middle East can be remarkably homosocial (you could say ironically so).

Like schoolchildren separated into queues of girls and boys before PE, my parents always split up when entertaining guests at home. My mother drank tea and smoked with the other wives in one room – all of them trampling over each other to show off the most recent designer pieces, as though it was some label-obsessed Lord of the Flies – while my dad and the husbands claimed the larger room, where they puffed on cigars and gambled. When my brother and I were ‘lucky’, we were invited to the pews of masculinity, giving us an insight into the cunning rules of poker – ‘lying to make money’ I called it – and tuning our ears to conversations about business (also lying to make money). Ramy clearly felt privileged to have access to this space, and wherever possible would initiate poker games with his own friends in a classic case of social reproduction, all of them future Arab homeboys in the making.

One night, when the whisky-scented card game was drawing to a close, I excused myself to go to bed. As I made my way, I hovered by the corner of the women’s quarter, peering in to get a glimpse of a world with which my heart felt more aligned. This was a room to which I needed the key; each guest was decked in enough jewellery to make the collective room feel like a vault at Gringotts (yes, I like Harry Potter), and textured fabrics of the richest emerald, sapphire, and ruby hues. The conversational mannerisms were dynamic and poetic. I watched with wonder as my mother entertained her guests, how she conducted their laughter as if the room were an orchestral pit, channelling an energy diametrically opposed to the square masculinity next door.

My mother’s Middle East was the one I felt safe in; this was especially the case the more Islam dominated my life. As a child, I was taught to be extremely God-fearing, and Allah, in my head, was a paternalistic punisher. He could have been another man at the poker table, but one much mightier, more severe than the ones I knew, one who might put his cigar out on my little head.

From as early as I can remember, I was forced to attend Islam class every week at school. When I got to Bahrain, the lessons went from warm and fuzzy – where Allah was a source of unending generosity and love – to terrifying, forcing open a Pandora’s box I’ll never be able to close completely.

At each lesson, the other children and I sat jittery at our desks and looked up at the Islam teacher. Her ethereal Arab robes cloaked stern arthritic hands and the billowing black fabric affirmed her piety. Her warnings about Allah’s punishments were grave. We were taught that throughout our lives, any sin committed would invite a disappointed angel to place bad points on our left shoulder, while any good deeds would allow an angel to place rewarding points on our right. Sins were remarkably easy to incur, and could stem from the most natural of thoughts – I’m jealous of that girl’s fuchsia pencil case – while good deeds were nearly impossible to achieve at such a young age, and only counted when you made an active, positive change in the world, like significantly helping a homeless person (a hard task for any seven-year-old). Sins, Islamic class taught us, hovered everywhere around us, and we had to do whatever possible to avoid them. Any time a slipper or a shoe faced its bottom up to the sky – an unimaginable insult to Allah – we’d be hit with a wad of negative points (it’s important to note that many things we know to be sins were inherited from cultural traditions rather than the Quran). And so, once I moved to Bahrain, I developed a compulsive habit of scanning any room I entered for upside-down footwear; I’d sprint around houses like a crazed plate-spinner, burdening myself with endless bad points for having got to each piece of footwear too late. These upside-down shoes would cost me up to fifty sins a day, each one a hit of fiery ash from the cigar above my head. Till this day, in fact, I still turn over any upside-down slipper or shoe that I find. And as a young child, I felt so desperate for these elusive positive points on my right shoulder, that at one point I decided I would be a policeman when I grew up, so as to make a career out of acquiring good deeds (little did I know of institutional police corruption).

The consequences of a heavier left shoulder were gravely impressed upon us. In short – as a sinner, you were fucked. Each week in class, we were made to close our eyes and imagine ourselves in the following situation: an earthquake tearing open the earth on its final day, forcing all corpses to crawl out of their graves and travel to purgatory for Judgement Day. Here, Allah would weigh our points in front of everyone we knew, who would come to learn all our sinful thoughts about them. And of course, if one incurred more sins than good deeds during one’s life, the only result was an eternity of damnation in Satan’s lair. As in any gay fetish club worth your money, the activities on offer include: lashing, being bound in rope, and humiliation – except none of it is consensual, it never stops, and you’re also being scalded with fire the whole time. Twenty years since being taught these torturous visual exercises, I am still subject to a recurring nightmare where Allah himself has pinned me to a metal torture bed surrounded by fire, and incinerates my body as he interrogates me for all my transgressions. Around twice a week, this nightmare wakes me up to a bed pooled in sweat (and, weirdly, once in a while, cum).

My left shoulder quickly outweighed my right in points. Of course there were the everyday misdeeds – my brother is annoying me, this food is dry, I think my cousin smells – that occupied my sin-charting angel, like a passive–aggressive driving instructor totting up minor faults. But there were also the major indictments. For instance, at the age of nine, as I was daydreaming in a lesson, I unthinkingly drew the outline of a bum on the Quran – thereby committing the ultimate defacement and simultaneously betraying an unconscious association between anal sex and religion that’s probably straight out of the psychoanalysis textbook. This blasphemy was a crime of such gravity that there was an entire school inquisition, with all the kids in my year group forced to produce writing samples. There I was, sitting on the sizzling hot concrete outside the headmaster’s office, trying to figure out how many good deeds I’d need to settle the insurmountable difference, yet also plotting to botch the test to get another child in trouble.

I got off the hook. After my writing sample was checked, I was told I could go home. On the bus back from school, I remember staring at the sandy pavements, and being struck by how many heavy rocks and boulders there were lying around all over the streets. I counted each one I could see, feeling the weight of every stone in my conscience, all colliding together to create an avalanche of heavy guilt, knowing that some poor Muslim child was getting the punishment of their life for defacing the Quran with an arse.

This obsessive sin collecting had developed into a pretty debilitating OCD by the time I was ten. Here’s how it manifested. Since doctors were highly respected by my family and community – particularly male doctors – I told my parents I wanted to be one, and asked them to enrol me in an after-school first-aid club (and you thought Glee Club was as lame as it gets?). It was here that I learnt of an acronym that ensnared my brain – DR. ABC. It’s short for Danger, Response, Airway, Breathing, Circulation, and it’s the order of things to assess when you see someone in peril. You look around to evaluate the threat of surrounding Danger. You make noise and prod to see if the victim in question Responds. You ascertain whether their Airway is clear. You check to see if they’re Breathing. And you search for a pulse to feel for any Circulation. DR. ABC. It was the key to saving life. DR. ABC. It was the key to doing good. While the exhausted angel on my left shoulder forever beavered away, turning every single moment in time into a concoction of misdemeanours, I had DR. ABC at the forefront of my consciousness, driving me towards the light. Let me explain.

In the first stages, I muttered DR. ABC under my breath at any chance I could. Obsessively repeating DR. ABC meant I wouldn’t have the mental capacity to commit a sin. While my left shoulder was sinking under its wealth of sin, DR. ABC was like a lifeguard, rescuing me from a tarry ocean of transgressions. Let’s say I was sitting at home, with my brother and father yelping while the football played on TV; my DR. ABC incantation would stop any sinful, negative thoughts from forming, such as hoping the TV exploded. During Islamic Ramadan, a month during which we fasted all day as a demonstration of our piety, any internal dubiousness I had over Allah’s rationale to starve his people was diverted by DR. ABC. When my subconscious felt like I was plummeting down a sharp steep cliff edge, DR. ABC was a bit of rope to hang on to, slowing down the inevitable descent. DR. ABC became my form of control. But then, like all systems implementing order, it started to control me. And eventually, it enslaved me.

In periods where I felt especially rotten inside, it would come out with a vengeance. For instance, if I was having a bad day and someone spoke to me, I would count the number of syllables they used through the acronym DR. ABC. So let’s say a classmate at school said, ‘Amrou, do you have a spare rubber?’ That’s nine syllables. And so, in my head I would mutter DR. ABC until I reached nine syllables – D. R. A. B. C. D. R. A. B. Ending on B, my eraser-depleted classmate would now be characterised as a B in my mind. Then imagine the teacher chimed in: ‘Amrou, hand in your homework.’ Seven syllables, D. R. A. B. C. D. R. – R. So they became an R. And on and on this would go, exhaustingly charting the letter-position of everyone who spoke, balancing the syllable counts of the room like a juggler on crack, all to uphold the fascistic order of DR. ABC.

DR. ABC, my new male oppressor, was always buzzing about, calmed only by being with Mama.

As Allah and DR. ABC enacted a mental tug of war with a masculine brutishness, Mama offered a mystical feminine grace of a different order entirely. While public expectation called for a strict separation of the genders, the rules seemed to fall apart for us in private.

I think this was particularly due to the peculiar set-up of our family unit; for the most part, my brother was raised by my father, and I was raised by my mother. (This is why Ramy doesn’t play much of a part in this book – well, until right at the end, when he steps in and has a very significant role.) Weekends were centred around what Ramy and I wanted to do. Ramy enjoyed playing football and going to the arcade; my father was passionate about football, and enjoyed the camaraderie this gave him with Ramy. Baba was also usually drained from his long weeks at work, and enjoyed any activity that required no emotional commitment. My favourite pastime was going to the mall with Mama, and I spent most weekends watching her try on clothes and get her hair blow-dried at the salon (how I loved observing her gossip with the hairdressers, marvelling at the waves of her rich Arab hair and hearing the chorus of laughter that greeted her anecdotes). Whenever Mama was driving, I always seemed to be in the front seat of her car; Ramy was Baba’s passenger. Among relatives, it became a family mythology that Amrou was Mama’s and Ramy Baba’s; in all honesty, it sometimes feels like we had separate childhoods with little overlap.

‘Amoura,’ Mama sang from her bedroom one evening, a tune that I was more than happy to follow. For I knew what this musical tone meant. ‘Yes, Mama?’ I said with a performed coyness, knowing full well the treat that awaited me. Mama was going out to dinner with friends, and she needed help deciding which pair of shoes to wear. Her left foot flaunted a short-heeled, patent silver, open-toe number – divine – while her right foot donned a more sensible boot, though not without its embellishments, which included studs, and gold eyelets for the laces. Like a runway model posing for a designer, Mama switched from profile to profile so I could assess the full picture before giving my vote. I went for the silver (a total no-brainer). My mother winked at me, then fetched a baklava sweet from her make-up table, which she fed me as she stroked my hair, chanting, ‘My clever boy. My clever, darling boy.’ Mama and I knew that she was going to choose the silver shoe all along, but this performance was all part of our secret language. She knew I was illiterate in football, but the grammar of glamorous footwear – in this I was fluent.

There were other iterations of our secret club. When my brother and father went to play in the park, I would stay in to ‘finish my homework’. Once the echoes of football studs against the marble floor were no more, I emerged from my bedroom to be with Mama. This usually entailed me sitting with her on the couch as she painted her nails, smoked her cigarettes, and gossiped on the phone to a background of whatever the Egyptian networks were airing on our TV. It was during one of these sensory sofa experiences that I witnessed the magic of Umm Kulthum.

As Mama was flicking through the channels, a powerful voice flowed out of the TV screen. The moment this happened, Mama put down the phone, and both our heads turned simultaneously. This sonorous voice had the depth and gravitas of a gargantuan black hole that nothing would escape. The vibrato of her chords felt more like a tremor, as if each note was sending the room into a seismic shock that grabbed your insides until you were crying without realising. And not only was her voice able to take up – even alter – space, but her presence was of a might that I’d only ever associated before with the force of Allah. A large woman, she stood rooted to the spot onstage, her hair towering above her in a perfectly constructed up-do, her ears enveloped by enormous oval diamonds, and as she sang each heartbreaking note, she wrung her hands together with all the intensity of a grieving mother.

‘Mama … who is that?’ I said. My voice came out whispering and faint, as though Umm Kulthum had sucked in its power to strengthen her own.

‘Hayatti (‘my life’), that’s Umm Kulthum: she was the most famous singer in the world.’

Mama explained how Umm Kulthum (1898–1975) – oddly, her name translates as ‘mother of the male elephant’ – was an Egyptian singer who had taken the Arab world by storm. She was the most notorious singer of her time, known for a voice so powerful that it would break microphones if she stood too close to them. ‘You see how far away the microphone is on the stage? That’s so it doesn’t break.’ Her performance on TV was transcendentally majestic, and the response of her audience would make a Gaga concert look like an episode of Countdown. I watched with fascination as grown Arab men, dressed in traditional Islamic gear, broke their patriarchal stoicism and wept in front of their wives, who themselves stood up and ululated at Umm Kulthum. This feminine deity had the power to crumble the strict gendered behavioural rules that governed our communities. A fuzzy, comforting feeling started to circulate in my bloodstream. Hope.

And so I lay my head on Mama’s silky lap, as her indigo-manicured hands brushed my hair with the delicacy of a feather. But as I closed my eyes, the velvety bass timbre of Umm Kulthum’s voice gradually became the shadowy echo of an Islamic call to prayer. The shift in mood woke me from my hypnagogic dozing, and I realised that it was the male voice of an Imam interrupting the TV broadcast, as happened five times a day on Muslim networks. I fell asleep with ease that night, thinking that even though I had missed my prayer that evening, my sofa time with both the elephant’s mother and my own was its own kind of religious experience.

Umm Kulthum was a matriarchal version of the Middle East I wished I knew more of. During Islam lessons, as our teachers reminded us of our inevitable damnation, I would close my eyes and think of Umm Kulthum, the true ruler of Arabia.

Part of Islam class involved learning verses in the Quran – surahs – off by heart, so that we could recite them during prayer. The importance of our knowing these by memory was impressed upon us with severity; we could be called at random to recite a surah in front of the class, and detention awaited us if we weren’t able to. I’ve had the fortune of a photographic memory my whole life, so was always able to have these surahs down. And learning an Umm Kulthum song was not dissimilar to learning an Islamic surah. Umm Kulthum’s songs were similar in form to Islamic prayer – they felt more like incantations with no fixed melody, were often thirty minutes long, and the concerts they resulted in were practically spaces of worship.

I asked my mother to buy me some Umm Kulthum CDs to play in my Discman – remember how even the slightest movement would jolt the music in those? – and her voice would hypnotise me until I fell asleep. Umm Kulthum chanting in my ear was an anaesthetic against DR. ABC, as if all the water in the River Nile ran through me, calming every one of my demons with its soporific embrace. And after my week with Umm Kulthum (the coming-of-age Arab sequel to Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn?) I had learnt one of her fifteen-minute songs off by heart. When my father was away with work one week, I woke my mother up in the middle of the night and sang it to her note by note. With a smile that could thaw even Putin’s cold, dead heart, she watched my solo performance, and invited me back into bed with her once I had finished the song. This time, I was sure not to suggest we find ourselves a condom.

Holding onto Mama was the only way I could feel safe in a culture and faith that was really starting to scare me. The idea that we might ever be separated was a thought too horrifying to entertain, and I had to do whatever possible to keep her close. This took quite a literal turn when I became obsessed with grabbing my mother’s thighs. Whenever Mama and I were separated for longer than I was used to – if, say, it was my father whose car I was in for the weekend, or if she was late from work, and Islam class had been particularly terrifying that day – one of the first things I would do was beg to play with her thighs; more specifically, the bit that jiggled on the inside of her legs. This might sound slightly sordid, but I assure you it was completely innocent and utterly calming. When Mama emerged from her bedroom in one of her airy silk dressing gowns, she would sit on the couch to watch TV and smoke, allowing me, if no one else was there, to shake the loose bit of muscle on the inside of her thigh. I found its soft, buoyant texture deeply calming, as if her flesh were like a stress ball that could assuage any anxieties about my status as a sinner. Enveloping myself in her flesh was like burying my face in a silk pillow, a site of utter relaxation and peace from the terrors of the world outside. This activity was such a habitual remedy that when Mama could sense I was having a particularly bad day, she would open up her dressing gown and present her leg to me, the calming cushion to all my fears.

My father was clearly insecure about the unashamed preference I had for Mama, so one evening he took Ramy and me out to dinner for ‘a boys’ night’. I dreaded the evening to my core. Not because I didn’t want to be with them, but because I didn’t want to be apart from Mama. To be honest, I can’t remember much of the evening, except one quite alarming moment. As I excused myself to go to the toilet for the eighth time during the main course, I glimpsed the back of Mama’s head at a table in the smoking section of the restaurant (a smoking section – how vintage!). I felt suddenly elated that my time in the boys’ corner might be over sooner than I expected. I sprinted over to her and wrapped my arms around her neck as if we were two conjoined swans, burrowing myself into her hair. She jumped up in shock and turned around, severing me from her embrace as she did so. When I looked up at her … she was not my mother. She was just another Arab woman of my mother’s age (who potentially used the same hairdresser). I apologised, and drooped back to Baba and Ramy, embarrassed and upset. All I wanted was to be with Mama. I was all about my mother.

When it was just me and Mama, we created a pocket of ‘camp’ that only we were privy too. And it was in this special fortress that my love of performance was born. Now, Dubai and Bahrain had no culture of theatre – literally, none – and so my only access was a VHS tape of CATS on the West End that I received as a gift from some cousins in London. Until I was a teenager, I thought CATS was the pinnacle of Britain’s rich theatrical history. In truth, I believed that it was the only real bit of theatre that mattered. The first time I watched it, I was struck by the way male bodies were celebrated for their balletic curves, how they flaunted chic feline poses with utter pride, sitting side by side with the female performers without any shame. Now, my homosexual desires hadn’t quite taken shape when I was nine, and sexual desire was not a concept anyone articulated (in fact, one of my Muslim cousins only learnt that pregnancy was the result of sex, rather than marriage, at the age of sixteen); but the way that the musculature of the male performers was embellished by their spandex costumes sparked a feeling in me that had been lying dormant until that moment. All I have to do is get to London, and then I’ll be able to roll around with the spandex male cats. This became a definitive, serious ambition of mine, and I told my mother that I wanted to be a performer so that I could be in CATS in the West End one day.