— This builds on what i wrote for The Qatari Student and strays away from Neha Vora. I just talk about my personal experience.–
Attending a British school in the Middle East was a bit of a weird experience. At some moments I would feel like I stood out because I could not speak perfect English like some of my friends at school could. Then I would come home and sit with my cousins who spoke perfect Arabic, and I would get the same feeling of standing out (in a bad way). Since my cousins were, well, family, I was not too concerned about impressing them or losing them as friends. However, at school, I made it my life’s purpose to impress them by becoming like them. This did not make them like me any more by the way.
At the young, vulnerable, and plain stupid, age ofย 10, I became what Qataris and many Arabs call a chicken nugget. A chicken nugget – sometimes even called a McChicken – describes someone that is westernized, and is ‘brown on the outside but white on the inside’, so basically whitewashed Arabs. While I disagree with bullying, I do believe in bullying chicken nuggets. This is because I was one. I remember feeling embarassed about things that were actually normally. The main thing, which was discussed in my previous blog, was being embarassed of the way I speak and my thick accent when speaking English. To counter this, I would try to speak in an American accent, a bad one. I also found my culture to be embarassing and I viewed myself, my people, and my culture through an orientalist lense. To illustrate this better, an example of when I was 9 years old talking to one of my American classmates, shows how I would shy away from my culture. I was explaining to my classmate what we do in Eid, and I described it by saying that we would usually sit on the floor and eat rice with meat using our hands. I immediately regretted that when I saw her horrified expression. Apparently, sitting on the floor and eating with your hands is ‘dirty’, at least to her it was. This greatly affected me and after that, I never mentioned this part of our culture to anyone, in fear of them also finding it weird and dirty.
I realised later on, when I turned 15, that I had an inferiority complex. I believed that the West and Western society was superior. I believed that we had to be like them, especially if we wanted to advance and modernize. Obviously, I now realise that westernization does not equal modernization, but I genuinely believed that they (the West) were better than us, all of us, not just Arabs. I’m not sure if this idea was engrained in me because of the environment at my school, being surrounded by western students and teachers, or if it was the movies, tv shows, and songs I watched or listened to, or if it was a combination of all of my surroundings. Around the age of 14 / 15, I started to actually take pride in my identity as an Arab. I took pride in my language and my culture. While I am not perfect or fluent in Arabic – mainly fusha which is formal arabic, I can speak fluently in my dialect – that does not stop me from being prideful in my language. I have actually been trying to strengthen my Arabic by reading more books and exploring my culture in different ways besides reading, such as talking to the elderly in my family and watching more Arab media. I’m glad I grew out of that phase, and that I’m starting to love my identity.