BY AYESHA BİLAL (PSYC/III)
ayesha@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
What are we as a person? Are we our race? Our nationality? There are so many aspects of ourselves that we are defined, identified and considered on the basis of. The color of our skin, the color of our hair, our mother tongue, the clothes we wear, the standard of education we attain, our field of study and our career, our masculinity and femininity, our gender and sexual orientation—I could go on and on, but no one understands us as a person more than we do ourselves: our dreams, desires, beliefs, likes and dislikes, secrets, thoughts and perceptions—those things that really make us an individual person. There is something we are all both guilty of and victim to: an unwitting tendency to make presumptions about someone based on all those things that don’t actually define a person, but nonetheless come to own that person. Like a preset character, we are placed on this earth without a say or a choice in the circumstances or lives we are handed, or any ability to exorcise the associations and preset descriptions that come with them. And just like that, the world sees us not as the person within us, but as the skin we live in.
I recently saw a short first-person documentary called “Catharsis” by Alia Ayman, an up-and-coming Egyptian filmmaker who moved to New York to further her experience and education. The seven-and-a-half-minute-long personal film is intended to be a medium of self-discovery and of uninhibitedly understanding the self for the filmmaker, and a method of attaining peace of mind and a balanced footing in her world, which is torn between her native roots in an eastern, Muslim culture, and the actual person inside her—thoughts, beliefs and characteristics included—that contradicts that culture in so many ways and finds itself more at ease in a foreign, more open-ended western cultural setting where she is freer to explore herself. Maybe this is something many of us can relate to, not even necessarily as a woman, or as a Muslim, or as a native of the eastern part of the world, but just as young adults trying to figure ourselves out before others can do it for us. However, while she is able to shrug off the societal pressures and limitations of the eastern world, she still finds the western world flawed and restrictive in other ways. She sees herself holding back yet again, not being able to shed her skin and have the world see her as the person she is, except where before it was her gender, her clothing, her hairstyle, her career choices and her habits that confined her from breaking out of her cage, now it is her color, nationality, religion, accent and background that have come to identify her. This documentary evoked a thoughtful state of mind in me, because like most children with multicultural backgrounds, I too often found myself frustrated by how the part of me that I actually considered my true self—my ideas, my personal beliefs, my interests, my aspirations and my concerns—didn’t really matter as much to the world as my ethnicity, my background and a “complete” biographical account of myself: where I was born, where I grew up, where my parents were from, etc. And much as in Alia’s case, these identifications frustrated me because that was not who I was. For Alia, it was neither satisfying nor relieving to find herself at physical ease in a world where new things continued to hold her back.
I enjoyed this mere seven-minute self-portrait of a film thoroughly, especially the visual content that beautifully painted the picture while the words told the story, and I highly recommend that everyone see it. We go through our days carelessly and unconsciously labeling people and making generalizations about them, often feeling confident that we know someone as a person just on the basis of how they dress or look. And we all too know a person about whom we would normally have made a generalization based on appearance, except that “when you get to know them, they’re actually a pretty cool person.” How reflective that is of how often we ourselves are guilty of being cursory in our judgments of others. Yet we can all confidently say we have been made to feel a victim of the same kind of judgments by others, and of being understood as something we really are not. Maybe that is the reason people are so detached and segregated; maybe if we were all to begin disregarding surface appearances and identifying people in more personal ways even at first glance, by trying to notice something about them that makes them unique and individual, the effort would go a long way.
Finding a place for yourself in the world is hard enough, and being young and still inexperienced and unaware of all the possibilities doesn’t make it easier. That is why we see so many people conforming to trends, or resorting to racial, religious and other superficial categories to figure people out, because we simply do not know ourselves and the possible selves of others well enough yet. However, if we all make that little bit of effort to humanize every person we meet, we might find our world more colorful and engaging than before, we might find ourselves understanding ourselves better, and hey, if nothing else, we just might acquaint ourselves with some really interesting and impactful characters that we might have missed before.