I grew up the girl who turned dark caramel under the sun faster than everyone else. The girl with the untamed hair, from middle school to high school. I cried for straighteners, tried various chemical formulas, burnt my hair and chopped it off more times than I want to remember. I faced the looks of hopeless and nasty hairdressers. I vowed for decades not to step back into a salon (I noted once that my triangular haircut looked like an Egyptian pyramid). It took three decades to meet another Farah. When someone called my name, our name, the voice didn’t hail at me. A regular John or Jennifer day, yet for me, it was quite new.
Farah means joy in Arabic. A language I don’t speak, nor understand. My father, a North African Arab with the coolest Afro hair in his younger days, and my mother, a green-eyed blonde white woman with translucent porcelain skin, decided the name fit me. I’ve always been called Farah. It was only when I started traveling, to the Anglo-American world, and the Middle East, that my name seemed to run away from me faster than my native nationality. “But where are you really from?” my fellow Frenchmen always asked me. I no longer owned my name. It became, Fah-RAH, Fay-rah, or whatever people wanted it to be. My response oscillated between the pleasant smile and a simple reply, “Like Sarah but with an F.” Everyone knows a Sarah.
One of the most unpleasant encounters arose when Lebanese acquaintances tried to teach me how to pronounce my name – Farrrrahhh. Naturally I can’t roll my Rs, my native language is French. Exhaling an H was easier. They giggled. It made me profoundly uncomfortable. Imagine if a stranger tried to teach your own name, then mocked you for it.
Ironically, it was in the Middle East, the place of a fantasised family lineage, where I felt the most foreign. A first job in Lebanon led me to others in the region, to places I was immediately judged, because my name is Farah, not Aurélie or Christine. The unsolicited pronunciation lessons quickly turned to inquisitive exchanges. If my father is Arab, why don’t I speak Arabic? Am I ashamed of my ancestry? It then shifted to religion, and marital status. The list continued, revealing oddities I was apparently privy to, questions I had never considered relevant. My normalcy became someone else’s definition of suspicious deviancy. Some preached to me Panarabism and Islam like I was some lost cause. While I nodded, I quietly convoked the great Roman Empire and the Punic Wars too. Was their all-encompassing symbolic narrative more significant than mine?
Until the Beirut days and the subsequent deep unease, I had only encountered the names of two abstract Farahs. The first, Farah Dhiba, later Pahlavi, Impress of Iran, possessed a glorious beauty. I believe my mother kept her in a romantic pantheon-like secret garden of greatly admired women, which included Lady Diana and Grace Kelly.
The second Farah carried more visible scars. It was a province from Afghanistan. We “met” in October 2001. I was a teenager then, shaken by 9/11 like the rest of the world. I had just left high school when a classmate told us. He was always first on everything: bootlegged alcohol, concert tickets, designer knock-outs, the cool stuff. I saw the first images, unreal and hypnotic, in a souvlaki joint in northern Paris. The atmosphere was tense, confusing, a slipping sensation of witnessing a historical event mixed with the anxiety of what laid ahead. I still went to the party despite my friend telling me not to. The following day, I took the metro. A bearded man with the olive skin of my father sat in front of me. He opened a mini-Coran. No one entered the carriage. People were afraid of him. I stayed.
Two weeks later, I sat in the living room, in front of the TV. What I was seeing didn’t make a lot of sense. Climax had been built for weeks. The outrage, the unbearable grief, required a wrathful answer. Usama Ben Laden. Talibans. Caves of Bora-Bora, which, for a French girl, had evoked the far-away atolls of Polynesia more than a range of arid footages. On the t.v. screen, there were green lights beaming from an absurd video game. Then, the news anchor showed a map. My father’s spaghetti bowl stood in the middle, but I managed to get closer. “Farah” it read. The U.S.-led NATO coalition had first engaged in Farah province. In the next few days, the name would be everywhere, commentators rushing to offer expert opinions. They had no clue, nobody did. The important thing was to strike back. The cognitive dissonance reached high peaks. My name, happy and cheerful, became a place of caustic coordinates and destruction. It no longer embraced mysterious corridors of Persian palaces pre-1979. It was all tints of lapis against dusty villages. A new mission to empower Afghan women through tanks and democracy. It would begin in Farah.
***
My parents and friends didn’t roll their Rs either, my H is a silent one, it doesn’t linger in a sigh. So was I guilty of not embracing a language, a culture I was never exposed to in my childhood? Were there some hidden feelings buried? Should I be religiously listening to Um Kalthoum?
In South Sudan, a colleague from the Nuer tribe asked me about my background. “French-Tunisian,” I replied, having internalized a full disclosure to prevent yet another really from (“I’m fakely from France,” I did once reply). “Oh, I’m so sorry” he said. “Why sorry?” I stood puzzled; my head barely reached the height of his shoulders. “You’re half, a half is never whole.” It wasn’t delivered in the usual light and informal tones of our everyday exchanges. It was heavy. At night, when the heat of the Nilotic town of Malakal cooled slightly, I reflected on these words. When it came to bicultural issues, identity, and so much more, I have yet to hear any more true.
Over the years, depending on the places I visited and lived in, I was considered either too French, or not enough. In Somalia, they expected to see a man; for them Farah is a masculine gender. In the U.S., I wondered at first if I identified with being a woman of color in the race debates and spectrum, and I faced another self-imposed usurper syndrome: Is it about skin complexion? Am I white-passing? Is it about racism and exclusion? A census exercise in the United Kingdom left me restless. I felt inadequate in either of my birth countries, out of place and exhausted finding ways to fit in. It turned to an impossible game, one I could never win, one I eventually stopped being defensive about. (No, but where are you really from? Again and again.)
As interlocutors projected their own views on biculturalism, education, religion, and identity, I realized that I was either their mirror or canvas, it wasn’t entirely personal. They blamed my father for not effectively transmitting his culture to me (how dare they?). I can only hope to share, in turn, the same unbounded kindness and love as I received from him if or when my time comes to nurture a child.
Do I need to pick a side? Most of the time, no (before I change my mind). I tick a box I am fully comfortable with: mixed race, other. I have two passports, I cherish them both, equally. I may not always do a good job in defining my identity, in words that other people may agree with, but these matters are complex. I love my natural curly hair. I enrich it with henna. Some people will never understand, and persist in correcting my name. Their intrusion is no longer my concern.
“You have a beautiful name, my sister is called Farah!” A woman told me a few years ago in a remote part of Abyan governorate in southern Yemen. I was in her village to lead an initiative promoting income-generating opportunities for disadvantaged women. It included an entire assembly of veiled, mostly frail, ladies, sitting on a straw mat under the shade of a tree by mud-constructed houses. “I hope she is nicer than me! And smarter!” I replied, and, with the help of a translator, we laughed.
For more than a month now, helicopters fly low for most of the afternoon and night overhead my New York City apartment. The marchers calling for racial equality walk by my block. Their echo – “Black lives matter, justice now!” – resonates loud but still not clear or loud enough for many silent ears who prefer to wait for the dust to settle. Despite some attempt (“we are in this together,” a COVID-19 era trash and uncertainty), there is a we which is not exactly a we because there is a they, too. This we is formed by people who felt never good enough for the they, no matter what the we did in life. The we, is one of an impossible joy. We chant that equality is one because equality isn’t a favor, it isn’t a half. Equality is being whole.
