All The Pretty Things
I wear a pink flamingo shower cap to make sure I don’t wet my curls.
I use the soap his mum makes us; a rose-scented pink cuboid that I always take home to my own mum.
My shampoo is sulphate free. It’s made with onions. It’s also pink.
When I step out of the shower, I put hair food. I think it smells like bananas, but everyone keeps saying it’s coconuts.
I use a dropper to coat my chin in argan beard oil.
I stand in front of the mirror for at least half an hour, trying on different facial expressions and movements.
I’m ready to start the day.
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I grew up in a house with a younger sister who needed all the bathroom shelves. Her skincare and haircare products would sit everywhere as she experimented with masks made out of yogurt and egg whites.
She religiously used sugar waxing once a month. In fact, over the last year, she started laser hair removal sessions.
Meanwhile, I was the ‘serious’ sibling. Relatives at random weddings, funerals, birthdays—it didn’t matter—all found it necessary to comment on how beautiful I could be if I tried a little harder. My desire to move away from feminization regularly left me outside the aesthetic realms the women in my family orbit. Often times, that meant I rarely got the gossip as the spontaneity of instant closeness with ‘girls’ in my family was usually lost on me.
I’m the asexual girl. I’m the quasi-boy. I’m the scientist.
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“Do you prefer to be called pretty, beautiful, handsome, sexy, or hot?”
I don’t know, depends on how many different ways you are looking to hurt me.
I am the prettiest boy I know. (My brother gets an honorary mention.)
Handsome makes me feel English. Handsome makes me feel white.
I am still too Brown and too Muslim to think of myself as anything that includes ‘sex’.
Hot is just confusing.
And beautiful holds too many words, moves too many ways.
What I’m trying to say is: hi, my name is Yara. Let’s start there.
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“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.”[1]
I can theorize everything I find beautiful as a terror formation.[2] Home, land, love, family, sex, friendship, water—they all terrify me, and they all have the potential to so easily terrorize me out of the self I precariously balance atop their shaky foundations.
Once, in Tahrir, my dad and I made our way to the very edge, right where Mohamed Mahmoud St. pours its heart into the Square. From there, I could look onto what we had created.
I remember knowing I was in love. I remember thinking it was beautiful.
Today, it snowed. We looked out our window and the trees were covered in white. It was beautiful.
Now, I know it means it’s time to be terrified.
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The first thing Cash, my best friend in college, taught me was that: “hoes don’t get cold.” The idea is you take a couple of shots of vodka right before you go out into Maine winter in shorts and a see-through top and you trust the hoe-ness to keep you warm.
Nowadays, we get ready together, sharing gaudy jackets and coloured pants. Meha holds an impromptu make-up station in our bathroom. My favourites are the glittery eyeshadow and the blue crystal beads.
By the time we’re ready to head out, a couple of us have already asked the question: ‘Are you saying I should wear this because it’s cold or because it looks good?’
My friends are an aesthetic. Red lipstick, sarees, green tattoos, flaming hair, layers masquerading as different outfits, ripped jeans, platform sneakers, Kashmiri shawls, heart-shaped sunglasses, and too-cool-for-school vibes.
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A cyclone of aesthetic labour—turned work because motion, turned economy because transnational—often drags my body along. I move diagonally between the eye and its many arms.
Sometimes, it forcefully removes, forecloses possibilities, and bans spaces.
Other times, I, like histories before me, wield it to make a home, to find community, and to labour (work) in collectivity.
[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, “First Duino Elegy” (1923). Accessed: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/elegy-i/ [2] See: Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (2003), for more on terror formations. Accessed: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/postcol_theory/mbembe_22necropolitics22.pdf
