A few weekends ago, a friend showed me a short film she made and asked for feedback. Among other things, I mentioned how I felt that all the F-bombs in the film fell flat. The delivery was lousy. I couldn’t buy that the character (read: actress) would actually talk like that. “Well, it’s because you’re Muslim,” my friend said dismissively. My friend and I, we could’ve had a constructive discussion about the nature of “fuck” in cinema — why I don’t use it in my scripts and why I think most non-professional actors, especially here in South-East Asia, can’t deliver it convincingly. But we never did because in her eyes, at least at that point, I was not a person; I was just Muslim. More often than not, “Where are you from” is less about curiosity and more about prompting for a label. Understanding through labelling is easy, precisely because you’re outsourcing your thinking — the only prerequisite for actual learning — to someone whose thought-process you have no insight into. The problem with where-are-you-from-as-prompt-for-label as opposed to other prompts like “What do you do?” and “Do you live around here?”, is that while you have a choice over where you live and what you do for a living, at least on some level, your place of birth is completely outside of your control. Al Ibrahim (@failedimitator) breaks down what underlies the seemingly innocent question, "Where are you from?" Read more - 🔗 in bio #whereimfrom #whereimreallyfrom #whereareyoufrom #questions #otherexpats #expats #expatsmalaysia #blackexpats #african #africans #nigeria #nigerians #malaysia #kualalumpur #blogpost #blog #newblogpost #bauchi #melanin #melaninfeed (at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
