Devil, Details

One time in my parent’s home in Jeddah, while digitizing our old family photos, I stopped to really look at my parents and their faces. Both he and my mother had the good looks of the young and privileged, the strong features that would aid in their graceful aging in the years to come – prominent cheekbones, jawlines, distinct eyebrows, unobtrusive noses, eyelashes for miles, svelte frames. What beautiful people they were from a relatively objective point of view. 

I envied them this, and once afterwards had a conversation with my father – one of many that we have – that led to a discussion of physical appearances. Being an artist in every sense of the word (he paints, he sketches, he produces art installations and professional photography, he writes, and he mixes all media), it was inevitable that I would be curious (as an adult) about his take on human attractiveness. After all, he is in the business of finding beauty.

This was an online conversation a few months ago, and I was questioning my decision to move to Malaysia and start an independent life, not knowing that it meant I would suffer so greatly in the hands of strangers. After the requisite coaxing from my parent to pack my things and come back home to the cocoon, I prepared to shut down the complaining with a sigh.

“It must be nice to be good-looking. Then I would not have to work so hard to be successful,” I’d said. 

“Who told you that’s all it took?"

“That’s not all it takes, but it certainly helps. People sit up straighter and pay more attention when words come out of a beautiful person. That’s a foot in the door.”

 

“Bah. That’s not why your life is so difficult."

“So easy for you to say. You’re good-looking. People listen to you by default. And then you come from privilege, so they listen even more, so that even if you don’t meet the ‘attractive standards’, you still have it easy going,” I said, because I’m easily wound up about the unfairness of everything in my life.

“Meanwhile,” I continue, “I have to struggle with how I look to other people on top of trying to be good at what I do. It’s not fair. It’s like when rich people tell poor people that money can’t buy happiness."

“Oh you are embarrassing yourself,” my father replied, switching to English now (as he usually does when I’m about to receive a serious lecture). “You may not be a beauty queen or a heiress, but when in your life were you ever ugly and when were you ever poor?” 

This is the part where, had he been a Game of Thrones fan, he would say “You know nothing, you bahsterd.” Except he doesn’t know the difference between GoT and Battlestar Galactica, and he rather enjoys beauty pageants, the old fool.

“You are privileged," he said. "So toil. Work and stop your whining. Toil the land. Clean bathrooms. Do real work. All people are good-looking when they are young, and yet we all end up the same – prunes, shrivelled. Look at me! Old people are like babies: they all look the same. You want to matter? You do real work.” 

My 65-year-old father is a regular Paulo Coelho, who gives vague advice for success disguised in old-people wisdom. But I take it, because it’s all the confirmation I need that I’m doing something right. I grew up not getting praises or nicknames from him that reference my good looks that I presumably inherited from him and my mother. He has never commented on the way I look – never called me pretty or ugly. It was like he didn’t care at all. 

As an artist, he would zoom in on his subjects’ prominent features and describe it in harsh detail. To some, it sounded like ridicule. “Such a big mouth, that one,” he would say, or “Look at the color of his skin,” and “His eyes are so small and slanted they are buried under his cheeks.” 

He is also obsessed by voices and accents, often impersonating people he meets. “Your father is such an asshole,” my aunts would say, rolling their eyes. “He is constantly making fun of people. It always gets him in trouble, and that’s why he’s not well-liked."

But I know what he does with these details. He recreates them through his work. In his incredibly cluttered studio, alone, he whistles songs and hums to himself while his hands madly sketch and imprint brush strokes on canvas and art paper to bring to life the things he remembers about people. He gives their personalities an extra dimension. And afterwards, he looks at them fondly.

A collection of caricatures by my father.

A quick sketch of a storm.

One of my father's calligraphy paintings. "Kun Fayakun – Be and it will Be", a verse from the Qur'an.

I am of course not exempt from this. My bedroom as a teenager had a huge poster of my cartoon self created by my father, with huge spaghetti-curly hair on my head and an even larger nose right smack on the middle of my face. On the bottom, he had written in big, block letters “MY ROOM, MY MESS”. It was my first lesson at passive aggression; when my mother would yell at me for not cleaning my room, I would look at that poster and silently and slightly rearrange my belongings.

The devil in the details, my baba.

The gifts I’ve received from my father are in the multitudes, but this fascination with aesthetics while respecting creation and acknowledging my own personal preferences is the one that most echoes the kind of person he is. Perhaps it is because he is an artist that he is misunderstood, or perhaps it is because he is to some degree just simply socially inept, but he definitely has a different way of absorbing physical appearances.

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The first time my friends Sarah and Dina – sisters who have the exceedingly good looks of mixed ethnicity – met my father, they asked him to teach them to sketch. At a cafe on Tahlia Street, my father deftly sketched Dina within minutes, and the only thing that stood out was her eyes. Big, mesmerizing eyes with so many tiny lines for eyelashes that you couldn’t look away. We were in awe. Sketched Dina was absolutely gorgeous.

“Look at those eyes,” my father said. “Doesn’t Dina get headaches when she uses them? They’re too big for her face. When she gets older, she will have so many eye problems.” And he laughed. 

What an asshole.  

This is an excerpt from a longer essay I am writing about my childhood in Jeddah.