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.
As well as the time devoted to reading, writing and speaking in Arabic, a segment of our lessons was dedicated to staying familiar with the Quran, and it was here that I really crossed the line. Now, a part of me was still a practising Muslim at this point, but it was fear more than anything else that kept me connected to Allah, and I was questioning many of the rules I was raised to believe. But they were not
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