‘Don’t Be Born Ugly’ – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY
Yesterday, we ran an essay by Moaaz Muhammad, translated by Osama Hammad, about the legendary Egyptian author Ragaa Elish: “Ragaa Elish vs Society’s Demons.” Today, Osama brings us the preface of Ragaa Elish’s signature Don’t Be Born Ugly.
Don’t Be Born Ugly
By Ragaa Elish
Translated by Osama Hammad
Preface
These pages are about the strangest problem in my life: ugliness. Imagine the weirdest man on earth, the ugliest face you might ever encounter. Be certain that’s me; the forever laughingstock, the forever weird. I’m always the weirdest, the most horrendous, the ugliest.
Ugliness is the notion that dominates my life and feelings. It’s where I start and where I end; it’s the station from where I depart and to which I arrive. Ugliness is the grimy ash that has collected over all the particles, aesthetics, and pleasures in my life, tinting everything a bleak gray. It’s the dark light that beams over every corner of my life, forbidding me from having a transparent, clear sight of things and people.
In these pages, I’ll try to analyze the phenomenon of ugliness as I lived it, since no one has lived ugliness the way I did—no one has felt how horrible and bloody it was like I did.
Ugliness is like a transparent prism of glass; it has multiple surfaces and angles. I’ll try to present a comprehensive panoramic view for each surface and angle of that astounding prism beaming black light in every direction through my life, completely poisoning it and destroying its aesthetics.
I have been close to ugliness more than any other person in this world. I’m so close that I touched it and felt its hot breaths. It’s my bitter friend, with which I lived. It lived inside me, or I lived inside it all my life. Its whims don’t frighten me any longer. The deprivations, torment, and weirdness that plagued each moment of my life couldn’t defeat me anymore. Instead, it supplied me with tremendous energy to fight. Ugliness was my eyes that lost vision, my tense nerves that turned rigid, my cells that aged before their time, and my skin that wrinkled and hung loose.
It was dreadful to discover this from the first moment I perceived the world. I touched the skin of the mythical animal with my delicate finger, and it instilled fear in my heart from the first moment.
I lived moments where ugliness cast a shadow of horrible psychological pain and torture, ruined friendships, devastated hopes. It forced a continued horrible escape from the devilish forces that chased me.
I hated ugliness like no one has before, because I experienced it like no one has before. Ugliness has done things to me that it hasn’t to others; it left me in ruins, in misery, and stripped of my humanity. I examined my problems, and there stood ugliness behind them. Those evil fingers moving the strings of my life.
Sometimes, I imagine ugliness as a series of back-to-back explosions. The odd thing is that it hasn’t destroyed me yet, and I haven’t shattered on the ground. I’m made of a fast-welding substance designed to endure the most devastating impacts and explosions.
What I saw and lived is unbelievable. If someone who could read the future had told me at the beginning of my life that people would reach this level of stupidity, selfishness, and brutality, I would have thought that they just wanted to scare me. But I lived the tragedy myself and encountered everything.
After my long experience in life, I concluded that ugliness is not just a strange phenomenon that elicits people’s laughter and contempt; it’s more like a real disability and has the same destructive impact. I even believe that ugliness is the most horrible disability, and the most painful and destructive to the human soul. No one would have pity, sympathy, or compassion for an ugly person. Ugliness provokes hostile emotions and critical, sarcastic responses in others, which they aggressively direct toward an ugly person to deliberately humiliate them and destroy their spirit.
They stand astonished before a phenomenon they can’t understand. It provokes all feelings of hatred in them, all the tragic bitter fruits to which the ugly person falls victim.
We could say that ugliness is a disability that destroys the ugly person’s life, yet they don’t feel physically disabled in a way that impedes them from fully enjoying life just like others. They just feel an invisible, transparent barrier standing between them and the ability to blend into life. A barrier made by those who harbor hatred and evil toward them just because they are ugly, different human beings.
People with their familiar stupidity turned a phenomenon that could be embarrassing at worst to a profound tragedy. A horrible type of disability, which could be in the same category as other traditional disabilities, with its tragic bloody consequences.
Indeed, it could destroy the human spirit and strip a person off their humanity, which is more dangerous than taking away a sense. It has an even more destructive impact on their life, as people, with their usual stupidity, don’t put ugliness, despite the bloody tragedy it causes, in with traditional categories of disabilities.
I now believe that ugliness is an eternal curse that befalls a human being and sticks to them to the end of their life. An astonishing slow endurance of all life’s miseries and sins. There is no escape or surviving it. It’s a strange portrait in pastel, in which a person lives all their life.
No one in the entire world loves an ugly person, nor has compassion, nor trusts them. He is the first one to be rejected, hated, and tormented. Inside and outside of the frame of regular life, he lives alone, suffers torment alone, and dies alone.
The problem for an ugly person is not that they feel different, but rather it’s that others are lurking around in wait. They blow up any problem to make him feel absolutely desperate and put down his arms. It invites people to hate him and to be his true source of misery.
The problem is the nonstop humiliation. They constantly remind him of his own defects. They find it very unusual if he tries to lead a normal life, controlling his five senses. At that moment, people fall into the strangest contradiction you could imagine. They consider the ugly person a regular human being, but they fiercely disapprove if he lives the life of a normal human being.
People are the root of the problem. It starts with them and circles back to them. If the people were truly filled with human warmth and compassion, as a human being should be, the ugly person’s troubles would end. If we imagine a world of the blind, or a place where the ugly person is living alone, there would be no problem at all. The problem is that there are human eyes glancing at the ugly person with horrifying cruelty, radiating toward them and burning them. It stirs in him all the feelings of imperfection and weirdness. He feels that the world he lives in casts him out, and that it’s better if he pisses off. The ugly human has the right to live in this world, since he possesses all essentials of life and existence inside himself, but people don’t let him. Nature allows it, but the people don’t.
What’s odd is that people punish the ugly person for a crime he didn’t commit. It was committed against him by a demonic unknown power who could have maltreated them the way they did him. Miraculously, and by chance, they escaped. Yet they punish him, all the time, to the end of his life.
What’s more horrendous is the grounds for this extremely harsh sentence. The very shallow parameters they set to measure beauty are the foundation for this funny crime. Beauty in the eyes of these foolish judges is the harmony of the external human shape, regardless of a person’s true inner feelings. If we apply these beauty standards to the great men in the world, men like Beethoven or Toulouse-Lautrec would be ugly.
Ugliness is a problem that can only be solved by recreating life once again, with no mistakes or discrimination. Or at least after seeding compassion and love in the hearts of people, and conditioning them to look objectively with compassion to the ugly person and to acknowledge their right to life and to share this with others.
I’m well aware of how ugliness denied me love, work, and freedom. Eyes were shifting around me with harsh mockery. They always reminded me of the size they had cut for me, which was not my true one. I always hit that transparent, invisible barrier that stood in my way, unable to fully blend into life. They always made me feel I wasn’t a normal human being. I was an outcast, hated by others.
Eyes examine me in a way that makes me flounder. I still, after all these long years I have lived among eyes glaring with hatred, don’t know what they want from me. The sure thing is: they hate me. They look at me with disapproving astonishment. They aim to wound my humanity. The eyes are landmines, warning me not to get closer or touch them. I’m like a black man living among millions of white eyes, turning his life upside down and filling him with hatred and shame. The eyes chew him and spit him in a continued rumination. The black man climbs to the top of society with his hard work. A dignified man in his sixties might be riding a luxurious car, and a white youth stops him and calls him boy.
People agreed to devastate my life, to freeze me in my place. I’m standing there, and didn’t take one step forward. I didn’t fall in love, work, marry, or have children. I’m like a rock in a turbulent ocean.
Now, I feel I have hit rock bottom. The matter went beyond mere astonishment in their eyes to deliberate insolence. Curses, shouts of contempt, and whistles of mockery follow me everywhere I go. They spit on the floor when I approach them, their faces dripping with extreme hatred. In their eyes, I’m accused of all ugly charges; I’m crazy, abnormal, odd, stupid, and ugly. This pushes me to wonder about the meaning of justice and humanity.
I imagine that if I’d met God at a moment of horrible sadness in my life, I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him; what he did to me is an unforgivable crime. If conquerors came to my city, whose heart is dead, I would open its doors before them. I wouldn’t fight them, if only because they bring humiliation and shame to the people I deeply hate.
How could I defend a city that hates me and shamed me forever? A city in which I don’t have a single circle of compassion, a little piece of the sun that rises on its people. The sun doesn’t reach my room. The moon of my city doesn’t dawn on my fields. The little mischievous children pick my flowers and stomp them. I don’t have a woman to love me in my city, a single human being to feel we belong to each other, or a child to carry my name. How could I defend a city in which blood freezes in my veins when I practice the simplest things in its streets, which are filled with extreme hatred and madness? Hatred that is launched from its origin and almost uproots me. Hatred is my daily food.
My real dilemma is the apparent contradiction between my looks and my essence. If they distribute beauty to match a human’s inner feelings, I would have deserved a better look, that’s certain. But the disaster had befallen me to such a degree that sometimes I wish the contradiction didn’t exist, even if it was at the expense of my feelings: even if I had to be crazy, idiotic, or stupid.
I still remember that strange human being who lived next to us. His family was well-off, and he was the oldest among his brothers, who assumed prominent positions in society while he stayed behind for one strange reason: He was ugly and mentally disabled.
The man used to wear a clean galabia under a jacket and went out to take a walk before returning home. He was peaceful, kind, and meek. But they—and I mean everyone, especially the kids—made his daily walk a trip to hell. They insisted on reminding him of his strangeness, and they never let him be. They insisted on picking on him, laughing at him.
His head was big, his eyes protruded, and his shoulders were bowed and fleshy. He lived in a world of silence and darkness, but the minute he poked his head out of the house, he was met with hoots and mocking whistles from kids, while the elders just smiled. They smiled every time, even if they saw him a hundred times.
Behind his back, kids shouted, Barq, Barq. Poor Barq stopped and turned to see who was calling, but the mischievous kids hid quickly in the deep cracks like a group of cockroaches. Barq started walking again and advanced a few steps, but the strange devilish call came from behind, like a sharp knife stabbing his back. Barq, Barq, son of a dog, faggot. Poor Barq stopped and turned, searching with his bulging eyes filled with tears and astonishment, looking for the kids who hid in the ground, quick as roaches.
This is how poor Barq’s walk started and ended. His only pleasure, his only time out of his solitary confinement the madness nature and people imposed on him.
I wasn’t old enough to rationally analyze this terrifying phenomenon, but my feelings always condemned it. It condemned the inhumanity, brutality, and ignorance.
I felt tormented for poor Barq, the man whose peers were respected and feared by the children. I thought it was a horrible abuse of manhood and humanity—not only Barq’s, but everyone’s. When a child abuses the humanity of an older man and humiliates his manhood, it is for no reason but because he is a different human being.
I never had a desire to join the little cockroaches laughing at poor Barq. I had a deep feeling that I would have the same fate. One day, I’d go out for a stroll, and they’d turn my journey into a trip to hell. My intuition was right. Somehow, I’m a slightly different version of Barq. Kids walk behind me shouting, and the adults smile. Everyone takes part in mocking, cursing, and humiliating my dignity. I’m the two-headed man, the Gorilla, the stupid, the mad, the odd one, the dog, the son-of-a-dog, and the whole dog family. How could I be all of them at the same time? I don’t know. I’m only certain about one thing: I’m a human being who is plagued with the disaster of ugliness, and I live among stupid people with sharp tongues who have mercy on no one.
But ugliness isn’t my only crisis. There is also my chronic illness that has lived with me all my life. Suddenly, I’ll feel as though a needle has pierced my eye. At just that moment, I sense that a journey of torture is about to begin. Not a trip in the streets of my city whose heart is dead, among the mad people of my homeland, but a trip inside me. A trip inside my arteries and nerves. Suddenly, the arteries carrying the blood to my eyes constrict; I see a rapid flickering, and I look at everything through a dense fog for more than an hour, in which I wish to die. The constriction phase ends with excessive dilation. When the damned arteries dilate, they don’t go back to their normal size. They dilate more, pressing on all the nearby sensitive nerves, causing me the most horrible, wicked chronic headache any human being on earth could feel. A headache none of the drugs in the world could resolve or even help me endure.
The headache takes over my head. My arteries are fully dilated, pressuring all the surrounding nerves. I feel as if a tank were rolling over my flesh. Hammers strike the bottom of my skull and its delicate bones. I feel an enormous amount of pain, which I have to endure to the end. Not the end of the eight hours, the end of my life. It’s an incurable disease. Water taps opened to the maximum. Nausea fills my insides, and I walk to the nearest sink to empty my stomach. Not just once, but an infinite number of times during the headache episode. My headache ends after eight, ten, or twelve damned hours. My arteries go back to their normal sizes, pouring a reasonable amount of blood into my eyes. Yet I still feel like a large artery in an abnormal state of dilation, and I’ll stay like this for several days. I feel like a boxer who just finished a fight that left him devastated and exhausted, in need of long weeks to go back to normal. I feel drained and hungry but still want to vomit, even though there’s nothing in my stomach. But I have to eat to regain the power I lost, to be ready for the next episode of headache. I live in a constant waiting for this episode, as I live for the upcoming whistle.
I go back to my normal condition after several days. My normal condition is a relative term that doesn’t mean I became a normal human being able to do what I want, or that I can eat any type of food. I’m still sick, and I’ll be sick to the end of my life. My normal condition means that I’m not having an acute episode, but I’m in a recovery period, waiting for a new episode. In the morning, I feel slightly nauseated, and I have a little desire to vomit. I can’t look at the light or the bright, striped colors around me. I can’t eat most types of food that normal people eat; I’m denied them forever.
My sickness is a horrible type of autoimmune disease that only death can heal. It’s an eternal curse I have to endure, along with my ugliness, for the rest of my life.
This is my life, filled with fear, sickness, ugliness, and a permanent sense of humiliation. A life with no love or hope in a future. With no hope of belonging to anyone; a religion, a homeland, or love. It’s not odd, then, that ugliness is the center of my thoughts and the subject of these pages.
Some might think that with all the continuous horrible things I’ve lived and still live, I’m a human being close to collapse. That couldn’t be far from the truth. As I said before, I’m made of a fast-welding substance, designed to endure the most dangerous, devastating explosions. If they want to uproot me, they’ll have to collect all the dynamite in their eyes and blow it up inside me—yet they won’t ever destroy me. I still have hope for the future. Not in the people I live among. These are a lost cause for me. But hope in a different world, of people outside of these borders who are more humane, just, and understanding. I’ll go beyond these walls and try to fix my ugly looks and my sick body. I’m a human being with powerful endurance, who believes that nothing is impossible. Then I’ll set out to compensate myself for the life I lost.
If I can’t do that, I won’t feel sorry if I put an end to my life. I’ll do it with pride and dignity. I didn’t yield like others; I was a rare type of outstanding fighter. I’ll die after I have achieved courage and self-respect, and this is all I could want from life.
Ragaa Muhammad Elish (1932-1979), known as Ragaa Elish, was an Egyptian novelist and short-story writer. There is little information about him or how he looked; some even said he wasn’t a real person. Rajaa was born around 1932, according to some estimations, and died by suicide in 1979 after he shot himself in the head. He self-published a short-story collection, Don’t Be Born Ugly, and a novel, They’re All My Enemies.
Osama Hammad is a literary translator based in Egypt. Holding a Professional Diploma in Media and Audiovisual Translation from the School of Continuing Education at the American University in Cairo. He published several translated short stories and articles in both Arabic and English, as well as collaborative efforts in translating two Arabic books. Osama is a contributor to ArabLit, Boring Books, and the Antonym.
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