FEAR AND LOVING IN THE MIDDLE EAST
‘Mama, should I get us a condom?’ I was eight years old when I asked her this. We were taking our regular joint evening nap. I lay entangled in her embrace – my father, as usual, was travelling with work – and my fingers swam through her silky golden locks, as if their depths were infinite. At that age, my mother had convinced me that eating roast chicken would result in jewel-tinted hair, but I know now that she had what we call ‘highlights’.
I had heard the word condom a few times by the age of eight – not in my school’s daily Islam lessons, nor at Iftar, the nightly family meal we shared to break our fast during Ramadan, but from the American sitcoms that occasionally sneaked their way through to Bahraini TV networks. I had ascertained that condoms were used between husbands and wives, or boyfriends and girlfriends. Not understanding what sex was, I presumed a condom was a gift shared between people who love each other, only to be bestowed in a bed (it was as a gay adult that I learnt what an apotropaic gift a condom truly was). And so, after a process of logical deduction, I was confident that I fully understood the true definition of condoms.
And here was the perfect opportunity: I was tightly wrapped in the person I loved most on this earth, and in the designated location for this American gifting ritual. I detached myself partially from her maternal clutch, and looked up at her with the earnest expression of a dog expecting a treat for not shitting inside. ‘Mama, should I get us a condom?’
My mother’s eyes, which I had only ever known to be a source of unending nourishment and affection, changed from their comforting almond shape to a severe angular squint, as if a demon possessed her, an enraged serpent imprisoned behind her glassy pupils. We were gridlocked in this glare of purgatory for what felt like the length of my entire childhood thus far.
‘WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT, AMROU?’ The severity of her interrogation caused an unsettling warble in her voice. ‘WHY ARE YOU SAYING THIS?’ This horrified woman was not one I had ever encountered before, and I felt, for the first time in my life, genuinely scared of her. My strategy was to revert to our tried-and-tested form of interaction, and so I responded with: ‘But Mama, it’s because I love you.’
My mother leapt up off the bed, my fingers ripped from her halo of golden hair, and she chanted in Arabic, praying to Allah for guidance. If I had known what drag was at the time, I’d probably have enjoyed the melodrama; my mother’s white silk dressing gown floated around her as if she were a deity carried by clouds (albeit ones crackling with lightning), and she had all the fiery passion of an Almodóvar heroine. Her thunderous roar eventually subsided as she came to realise that I had no clue what the true function of a condom was, and she sat on the bed in a funerary pose, huddling away from me like someone who had just suffered a Dementor’s kiss. I tried to nuzzle my way back into the nest, but as I lay my head on her lap, she brushed me off, and told me to go to my room.
It was at this moment that I had the tragic realisation that the bond between us was not sacred. I became aware of my capacity to transgress; until this point, the idea of anything restricting our love was utterly alien. Something I said had revealed boundaries to what I believed was a boundless love. As I lay in my bed that evening – my twin brother Ramy sleeping soundly on the bed next to me – the weight of this overwhelmed me, and I wept so hard that I was eventually exhausted.
How could anything I do upset Mama? Are there things happening in my brain and body that might cause her to reject me? It felt like the purity of our bond was stained for ever. My mother was the light and love of my life, so the idea that there could be something other than love between us filled me with a terror that has endured till this day. In all honesty, I think it governs pretty much everything I do.
Following ‘Mama-condom-gate’, I made it my immediate mission to repair any fissures between us. My strategies ranged from the sweet and charming to the dangerous and really quite alarming.
The first tactic was to remind my mother how cherubic I was, to eradicate any notion of me as at all transgressive. Mama always lay my and Ramy’s pyjamas on our beds following our evening showers – here was the perfect opportunity to intervene. And so, every night for the week that followed, I beat her to this, as a way to dazzle her with the sanctity of my little heart. And I was victorious. When Mama witnessed my act of complete ‘selflessness’, she was so moved that she cried with joy, and rewarded me with one of my favourite activities – the aeroplane game. This involved Mama lying on the floor and putting her feet up in the air so my tummy could rest on them, allowing me to fly above her while gazing into her mahogany eyes. RESULT. But as the week dragged on, the novelty wore off (on her side, anyway), and Mama grew frustrated with the number of creases caused by my unfolding techniques. Mama, you see, was an aesthetic perfectionist – you might even say an aesthetic dictator. My parents’ finances were precarious during my early childhood, and so the need to maintain an external image of aesthetic perfection was paramount. Mama has an odd sense of priority; she was more upset when I once wore socks that had holes in them to school than the time I got attacked by a neighbour’s very toothy dog. And so, when Mama realised that our expensive pyjamas had developed wrinkles, she told me to stop putting out the clothes because I kept getting it wrong. POOP. Wrong. I’m wrong. Will she ever see me as right again?
Playing Mama at her own game was a poor tactic – why attempt to do something that she could always do better than me? If ‘Mama-condom-gate’ had robbed me of my childhood innocence, then I needed to remind her that I was still only a child.
Early one night, I was playing in the pool that we shared with all the houses in our compound. It was a characteristically unremarkable evening. My brother and I were sinking toy ships in the water – probably inspired by the same early-millennium morbidity that led to the murder of millions of Sims on PCs – and our new nanny was supervising us nearby, so relaxed in the autumn Bahrani heat that she was snoring. Knowing that my mother would be arriving home at any second, I decided to scream for her. I can’t with clarity remember my precise thought process, but something about the embryonic feeling of being submerged in water stimulated my idea. I knew what I had to do. And so I screamed ‘Mama!’ at the top of my lungs, over and over and over again. My brother watched me, totally bemused, and soon enough, behind the corrugated-iron fence surrounding the pool, I saw the legs of my mother, restricted by the mauve pencil skirt she wore to the hospital where she worked as a translator, sprinting towards the gate, until she burst through, panting in front of me with the frail regality of a Hitchcock victim. When my mother saw me treading water, smiling widely because she was home from work, she slumped onto a deckchair and bundled me up, kissing me all over my face, even though I was soaking wet.
Later that evening, I went to find Mama in her bedroom, hoping to rekindle the lost innocence of our evening nap, but she was in a deep sleep. The mascara stains down her face told me she had been crying. When our nanny saw that I had sneaked myself in, she escorted me out, explaining that my mother needed to rest. ‘You made her think you were drowning earlier, Amrou. She was terrified. You need to let her rest now.’
And so for the second time that week, I stayed up all night and cried in a frenzy of self-loathing. I was certain I hadn’t intended my mother to think I was on the edge of death – or did I? Am I that cruel? No, I’m just a kid! But I had engineered a scenario that would result in her running to me. I was just excited to see her, that’s all. I miss Mama all the time.
In the weeks that followed, I interpreted any evasiveness from my mother as her thinking I was fucked-up for my poolside act of emotional manipulation. She felt further away from me than ever, and I yearned for a time before my purity was called into question. One evening after school, a day during which I ached to be reunited with her, Mama spent hours gossiping with friends on the phone. I watched her as she glided around the kitchen, delicately holding out a Marlboro Red cigarette. I was so envious of her friends on the end of the line, who had the privilege of being audience to
