I would be naïve to say that I am not the color of my skin, the God that I pray to and the clothes that I wear. The way I see it, these features are like feelings, some we choose to feel, some we don’t control. What defines a person are not the feelings, it is the way they react to those feelings. If I had a penny for every time someone quoted the movie Mean Girls when they met me, I’d probably have more than a few dollars by now. “You’re African…? But you’re white…” To be honest, it doesn’t really bother me at this point, and I usually laugh off the joke. But, whenever I introduce myself to someone I can feel their confusion, how is my skin so white when I come from Morocco, or how I’m a Muslim wearing a short dress. There’s an uncertainty when it comes to which box I should be placed in. Stereotypes, whether we like to admit it or not, are a very big part of our identity. To believe that it is possible to completely avoid them and that they do not affect one’s life would be cheating one’s self. It doesn’t mean that it should be the only thing that defines us. Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, there is a big danger of having a single story, one thing that people will remember and recognize as a symbol for a culture, but stereotypes, like everything else in life do change. They need effort, and time, a lot of time. I didn’t fit in a box long before I left my hometown. Officially I grew up in Casablanca, a beautiful city (yes, I’m biased) on the Moroccan coast, but unofficially I grew up in a limbo where many cultures meet and run away simultaneously. I was raised by an open-minded religious family, spoke Arabic and French at home, went to a Spanish school and held a US passport. When I was old enough to start deciding who I was, and who I wanted to be, the journey turned to be a little bit more complicated than I would have imagined. As great as this multiculturality may sound, it confused me. Where I come from, girls go to college to get a better husband and parents simply tend to have more faith in their son's potential success than in their daughter's. The reason why I have the opportunity to write for a newspaper across the world from my hometown is because I have a father that drew me connecting boxes and gave me lego castles that showed me what I could become. While most Arab fathers long for a son, mine begged for a daughter. And maybe so it is that he inspired me to want to be an “outside of the box” person. For a long time I thought of identity as a box, somewhere I would step into and that would be it. Now it seems to me that people are lego games with different colorful boxes that somehow add up to the image that they show. It’s so much easier to fit in a box, to be fully something and completely not something, but I don’t think that’s possible. People can be given the exact same box with similar characteristics, and still end up being very different people. Thing is, from the outside, a box always looks the same. It’s not until we open it, and people agree to come in that they realize that although similar from the outside, boxes are very different from the inside. Growing up in an open-minded Muslim country is almost more complicated than growing up in a completely close-minded or a very open-minded one. Weirdly it wasn’t the stereotypes that strangers held upon me that bothered me the most, or confused me about the path I wanted to direct myself into, it was more the ones of my own people, and even maybe the ones that are embedded in me. The lines between the appropriate and inappropriate are very blurry and the stereotypes range. There appears to be a need to embody the traditional and modern, almost like a double agent. The feeling of cheating on one or both parties seems to settle, and the more I grew up the more complicated it was to keep up with this sort of double life. I blame fate for the color of my skin, history and destiny for the God that I pray to and society for the size of my waist and the length of my hair, but it is me who embodies fate, history and society. All the above are given to me, but they are malleable, it is somehow up to me to decide what to do with it. This article was written by Ilham Farah. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Blackheart