To say I have an obsessive relationship with television would be to undersell the truth. As far back as I can remember, I was glued to a screen. As a child I would race home from school to catch the latest episode of Power Rangers or Dragon Ball Z, mimicking the moves and exaggerated American accents to regurgitate with my friends the next day. At night I would sneak out of bed to steal some alone time with Who’s Line Is It Anyway?, gripping my hands over my mouth to stop myself cackling loudly enough to awaken my parents.
Television was a portal, and I imagined myself as every one of these characters living big lives. I wanted to be Goku and the Blue Power Ranger. I wanted to be as funny as Ryan Stiles and Wayne Brady. Soon it was The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and my friends and I practising our best “pshhh” handshakes. It didn’t matter that none of these characters were Muslim or Arab. To me they were all moulds I could squeeze myself into, superhero suits I could pull on to feel powerful in. On TV I saw all the things I could become.
But somewhere along the way that began to change, and the world in front of me began to narrow. At the age of 11, I woke up to my parents watching in horror as footage of the September 11 attacks played endlessly. At school my teacher wheeled in a television set and we watched it all day, asking ourselves why this would happen, who was behind it. It didn’t take long before our screens were plastered with images of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, mixed in with out-of-context footage of Palestinian celebrations. Even at that age, I understood that we were entering into a strange new world, one that I felt ill-prepared for.
Overnight, my community went from invisibility to hyper-visibility, our identities and beliefs caricatured in an endless loop. Suddenly, we were the suits that others wore to feel powerful: terror experts, politicians, shock-jocks, racially ambiguous Hollywood actors. Except we weren’t superheroes, we were supervillains.
My love for TV didn’t abate, but I became acutely aware that the stories I was consuming weren’t meant for me, and that my own experience would never be truly reflected. I entered journalism to try to fix these harmful narratives, but at times the tide felt overwhelming. If it wasn’t the terrorist, it was the war-stricken child. If it wasn’t the angry Muslim, it was the oppressed and downtrodden one. But these were still caricatures, two dimensional versions of ourselves presented through pain and trauma. Where was our nuance, our quirk, the things that made us truly human?
After the 15 March attacks in Christchurch, a lot of my colleagues in the media looked inwards, examining the ways in which they had played a role in proliferating harmful narratives. We began seeing Muslims on TV, young and old, talking about their lives. For many it was the first time they had heard Muslims speaking for themselves, particularly ones with New Zealand accents and familiar backstories. It was a fundamental shift in narrative, but one rooted in grief. A retroactive attempt at fixing what had already been lost.
The country was beginning to see us for the first time, but not on our terms. We had been seen now in our pain, but we deserved to also be seen in our joy.
Two years ago, I had a conversation with award-winning producer and director Ahmed Osman that would chart us both on a new course. We had both spent our lives waiting to see our own stories come to life, ones that reflected the true colour and madness of our wonderful community. Why weren’t any of the Muslims on TV funny? Where was the mosque politics and the gossip uncles we tried to avoid during Friday prayers? Where were the Muslim students arguing politics while trying to court potential spouses at the campus marriage talks? Where were the converts trying to navigate cultural expectations, the westernised youth sneaking out to parties after prayers and the clumsy government informants hiding in plain sight?
If we couldn’t see ourselves represented on TV in the ways we wanted, then maybe we should do something about it. We hatched a plan for a show that would centre our community, and nearly two years later we are close to bringing it to reality. Miles From Nowhere, a comedy about identity, surveillance and the Muslim community, is about to start production thanks to funding from NZ On Air, in partnership with Gibson Group and Sky Originals NZ. Ahmed and I, alongside Australian comedian Aamer Rahman, have launched a production company, Homegrown Pictures, aiming to bring many more stories to the screen that centre immigrant and refugee narratives.
It feels surreal, but it also feels like a shift is finally happening. Suddenly there’s Ramy, a mesmerising portrayal of Arab-American millennials, Man Like Mobeen, an invitation into Birmingham’s Muslim community, Mo, a dive into life as an undocumented Palestinian refugee in the US. We are finally seeing real Muslims on our screens.
We’re not alone. Chinese-American films like The Farewell and Korean-American stories like Minari are celebrating rich immigrant experiences. Here in New Zealand, Pax Assadi is telling his story as a Baha’i New Zealander on another Sky Originals NZ production, Raised By Refugees, and Roseanne Liang’s Creamerie is giving us license to see ourselves in wildly imaginative stories that shed the baggage of “representation” politics. Something is in the air. A window wedged opened and in came the breeze.
Like so many of our immigrant peers, Ahmed and I grew up with a thirst for rich stories. I glued myself to the TV in the quiet of night. He talks about skipping classes to go to the movies, a place where he found wonder and purpose.
Today, we have been given the opportunity to carry ourselves and our communities to the screen and show the world what they have been missing all this time.
Mohamed Hassan is an award-winning journalist, poet and essayist from Cairo and Auckland.
