The Arabic version of the closing song in Lady Oscar tells us: “This is how this girl grew up,” as it narrates Oscar’s story. It goes on to tell of “nights that are filled with secrets.” The night is the secret place for children and their imaginations, in which they create their own worlds and happy moments the way they see fit—not as they are expected to. How many boys, for example, threw away their toys and did the things they liked in the little safe spaces they created for themselves, before having to play the gender roles expected of them the next day?
I want to tap into the happy memories of LGBTIQ people. When we revisit and deconstruct our memories, we do not always have to start from the bad, traumatizing or hurtful places. Sometimes, we could also start from those places that we liked and that left a lingering, positive trace in our memories. We as artists could draw attention to these corners, which remain forgotten or neglected due to the overwhelming challenges and circumstances we face. I love working on space and memory, on how we as kids searched for our difference, created it, lived it and found a way to embody it one way or another, either through a cartoon that we used to watch, or a period of time that we managed to spend on our own, away from the watchful eyes of family and society.
In our societies, we need to pay more attention to children. Such work is completely missing. Once we dedicate more effort to childhood in general, we can also focus more specifically on children who are “different.” At the end of the day, such differences are a reality that parents must accept. They need to understand that queerness or transness will never go away. It is true that addressing children’s issues is very difficult because everyone assumes that we, when we are children, do not know that we are LGBTIQ. While it might be true that we have no knowledge of identities and terminology, we do have a certain level of consciousness about our being “different.”
Of course, society assumes that children understand heterosexuality, religion, cis-men and cis-women, marriage, housework, childbirth, men loving women, all as part of their “human nature.” When it comes to homosexuality, transness and other kinds of difference, children are assumed not to understand anything. These are merely taboos, the reasoning goes, nothing more and nothing less. While children might be a complicated and tough group to reach, the solution is not to pretend that we do not see what they are going through, to ignore them or their problems.
Quite the opposite: Because these topics are sensitive, we need to listen to children, learn more and remember that children do understand a lot.
