The first time I remember hearing my name in a movie was in 1994, in James Cameron’s True Lies. There is a scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger is handcuffed to a chair after being captured by an ambiguous terrorist group and injected with a truth serum by a sinister man named Samir. In a fit of heroism, Arnold confesses to his captor that he will be using him as a human shield while taking out the guards. Then he’ll break the bad guy’s neck. The bewildered Samir suffers this exact fate in roughly 30 seconds of screen time. I was pissed.
It was at that young age that I realized that there was something off about the depiction of the Arab community that I belong to. I started to keep an eye open for characters in movies and on TV who shared my background, but there were so few–and even fewer that were not outright offensive stereotypes. It all got so much worse after 9/11. As a first-generation Lebanese American growing up in the otherwise harmonious melting pot of Queens, it was disturbing to watch people who looked like me show up on screen only to get relentlessly caricatured as villains.
The title character is based on series creator Ramy Youssef, and he captures the experience of being a Muslim American in a way I’ve never seen before. I immediately related to the show’s point of view, from its depiction of family banter and eccentric habits–i.e., loud dinner table conversations, embarrassing uncles whose views of the world are rooted in conspiracy theories–to the double standards against women in Arab culture, illustrated primarily via the parents’ unbalanced treatment of Ramy and his sister Dena (May Calamawy). Ramy, who drifts through life with the relaxed attitude of an expert underachiever, is treated like a prince, while Dena, who is working on her master’s degree full-time, is given the third degree whenever she hangs out with her friends. Her mother badgers her constantly with helicopter parenting and guilt trips.
One of the series’ strongest elements is that it doesn’t flinch from showing Ramy’s flaws. It doesn’t let him off the hook when he attempts to stereotype Arab women as innocent and “pure,” or when he uses his male privilege over his sister to do as he pleases while she feels trapped by her family’s expectations. The show also points out Ramy’s hypocrisy, as in a scene where he refuses to take the drug Molly with a woman he’s been hitting on at a party because his religion forbids it–never mind that he’s been hoping to sleep with her. Ramy throws contradictions like this in the title character’s face frequently, forcing him to confront his own shortcomings.
And maybe Ramy doesn’t have any answers to those big life questions because we’ve never really been able to even ask them before. For so long, we’ve been forced to spend our energy convincing the world that we’re safe and normal and not scary–that we’re just people–that we haven’t had time to explore our full identities as part of the Arab diaspora. I’m not saying that we’ve suddenly entered a period of cultural woke-ness that where Islamophobia no longer exists, how could I, when Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is getting death threats and mosques are targets for gun violence?–but I can say that after decades of enduring countless evil “Samirs” in an ongoing parade of negative Arab stereotypes in pop culture, it seems we’ve reached a point where we can showcase our humanity, our pride, our flaws, and our contradictions in the context of telling our stories.
Finally, we can start asking questions without fearing the answers.