Biography of a Face

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There is a barely perceptible exclamation point carved into my cheek. This is a natural mark, and when I was a child I pretended that it meant that I was special, to be thus marked without needing first to be wounded and scarred. I was further convinced of the fact by the (seemingly, to me) singular circumstances of my birth: that I was a twin given to an aging mother of 42 years, that I was born on the first day of Eid, such that the Muslim world entire celebrated my arrival. That I was a breach birth that did not involve a scalpel, and that my mother survived despite the stacked odds, the feet-first maneuvers, the jaundice, the gestational hypertension.

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That I survived past those first few weeks in an incubator, a sickly infant who escaped the womb long before it was safe, and long before I was equipped. “Bent sab3a”, it was lamented, and the nurse, trying to prepare my mother for the inevitable, told her that we were dying. My mother, in later years and in retelling the story, would never have a kind word to say about that nurse, despite the good intentions that birthed those dire predictions. My mother was never able to separate the harbingers of bad news from the bad news they brought, a skill that those of us born in the Middle East have yet to perfect, for it requires a detachment we are incapable of sustaining, a concern for the factual we have not been taught to value.

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My eyes are heavy-lidded, so that at times I catch myself looking bored when I am not, lethargic and uninterested in the happenings of the world around me. I cultivate this, for in America I have learned that a certain small sense of aloofness, coupled with perceived boredom, are good things. Turn more on of the aloofness, and people will translate it into confidence. Turn more on of the boredom, and wise is what you will appear to be. There are accessories that can maintain both illusions – crisp, ironed clothing in grayscale colors for the former, a book translated from another language for the latter. But in a pinch, my heavy-liddedness alone will do, and for it I have to thank my father, its genetic benefactor.

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My skin is wheat-colored, as we Egyptians call those many shades of brown we perceive between the black man to our south, and the white man of our aspiration. All of the wheat of the world could not compete in the diversity of its hues with one school district in Cairo, yet we Egyptians still use that label, pretending conformity and homogeneity, our middle names.

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My skin stretches between a high forehead, and short neck that I share with my twin brother. The high forehead was made higher by years of girlhood in which my mother, like every Egyptian mother of my generation, pulled my hair back into the regulation ponytail. And I and my school hopscotch friends would go home with tension headaches from the full day of tautness which we could not, were not allowed to, relieve.

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My chin is nondescript, barely there.

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My skin has been lighter in the past few years of my immigration. Those who say that the same sun rises everywhere do not know of its favoritism, how unevenly it bestows its attention upon the poles of the world. Though I engineer my summer costumes to maximize exposure, my skin darkens for barely a day before rebelling against me again, jaundiced and seemingly unashamed at its inauthenticity. My skin will not take to this Western sun. Everything here is dulled; my tan, my happiness, and for some solace, my sorrow too.

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There is a wrinkle, right at the corner of my mouth. It is newly born, a smile line that used to be impermanent, fleeting, turned into an ever-present marker of the years. I need no longer smile nor frown for the crease to appear, for the years, even if there have been only 26 of them, have begun to etch permanence into my face.

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My sisters will study this visage when I am home on my almost-annual pilgrimage, and will think of the husband who is yet to materialize, of the children I am not having, of my life lived incomplete. They will look to my smile lines and think of that quickly-approaching, almost-deserved label: spinster. I will look at them, at their worry lines, at the signs of their frustration at a life half-lived, though it be filled with husbands who demand feeding and attention, and children whose feet patter all day and all night. I will wonder if I have succeeded in escaping my fate, or if I’ve simply exchanged it for another, not at all kinder one, to be meted out in exile.

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In moments of optimism about our own lives, we will secretly rejoice at the worry we see in the others’ faces, at escaping their woe. In moments of pessimism about our lives, the frown lines in the faces before us will transform themselves into laugh lines, traces of past happinesses we will think ourselves agnostics of, happinesses we will forget ever having had once before. In moments of clarity about our lives, we will see the same face, reflected in each other, with its high forehead, its nondescript chin, the only differences the wear and tear of the fleeting Western sun on one, and the chemical burn of Fair & Lovely on the other. We will recognize that the universality we perceive in these moments of clarity is a prison, and we will distract ourselves with our children, with our blogs few people read, with music, with gossip, with friends, with volunteering, and with anything that will stave off our own piercing penetration into truth.

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