One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

On the cover of Nevermind, the naked baby in the pool has been blacked out by a government censor’s marker; on the cover of In Utero, only the angel’s head and wings are visible. Such was the experience of consuming culture throughout my adolescence, a tiring cat-and-mouse of books and films smuggled into the country from abroad at great personal risk, of magazines held up to the light bulb in the hopes of seeing through the black ink, of this impotent rage at some anonymous government hack who was deciding what was too dangerous for me to hear, to watch, to read. (I learned later that the chief government censor during those years was the mother of one of my closest friends—just the sweetest woman.) Brought up this way, I held on to the thought that elsewhere, in the part of the world where these books and films and songs that so shaped my life were made, things were different. The mind outlines better than it shades. England, Canada, the United States, the West, these places—or rather ideas of places—became in my imagination the negative space of all I despised about the Middle East: the repression, the sheer docility expected of everyone on all matters political or social, the gaggle of idiot Dear Leaders whose embellished jawlines were plastered on most every vertical public surface.