Sabrina Mahfouz: “It feels like you can’t go down all of the avenues available to you”
The writer on being received differently to her siblings, vocabulary coming up short and the interconnectedness of, well, everything
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to writer Sabrina Mahfouz, who is of Egyptian, Guyanese, British and mixed heritage. Sabrina’s book, These Bodies of Water, confronts the meaning behind a job interview in Whitehall, where she was interrogated about her heritage, her politics and her private life, through history, polemic, memoir and poetry. It’s a thought-provoking read that will educate and inspire, and I was excited to hear more of Sabrina’s story. Read it below.
How do you define your racial identity?
I used to say ‘half-Egyptian and lots of other things, including British.’ When I was doing my play, A History of Water In The Middle East, I read a lot of arguments about not using numerical equations to describe your heritage. After that I stopped saying ‘half’ and said ‘part-’Egyptian because that seemed more accurate.
I still find it difficult because I’m as Guyanese as I am Egyptian, but I never say the Guyanese part because I don’t have a huge connection to that. Guyana is such a mixed-up place itself – that part of my heritage has another five or six parts, like Amerindian, West African and South Asian.
None of it is accurate, I’m just choosing whatever feels right at that moment. Ultimately, everybody is mixed in some way. If we’re looking to widen and add nuance to our identities, nothing can move forward until we stop having to put ourselves in measurements of halves and quarters.
You’ve previously lived in Cairo – how has your sense of self changed over time and space?
Even when I was in Cairo, I was kind of a tourist. I didn’t know the things that people who lived there for most of their lives knew. Egypt is one of the countries that English people feel like they have quite a significant claim over. A lot of them have been there, studied it or feel some kind of connection to it, so there’s an immediate sense of me having to justify my own connection. It’s very strange. You don’t get that when you’re in Egypt, I felt more comfortable being mixed there.
Did you ever speak to your family about your mixed heritage?
We used to talk about it all the time. Both my siblings are quite connected with Egypt – my brother lived there for a while and looks more of what people would expect a half-Egyptian person to look like. He got more racial comments at school and was more aware of that side of things. I didn’t have that.
We were always talking about how horrible but interesting it was that two people who have exactly the same heritage can appear so differently to people and be received differently in society based on that. That always made me quite aware of my privilege.
My sister spent more time with the Guyanese side of the family, so she identifies much more with that. It’s just interesting that when you have so many avenues to go down, it feels like you can’t go down all of them. People tend to align with the one that is most resonant with them, either for their whole life or at different moments in their lives.
So was Guyanese culture not a strong connection for you?
I wasn’t really aware of it when I was a kid. It was just all going on concurrently, depending on which family members you were visiting. I just thought that was normal until I was embarrassingly old, that one grandad’s house would have different music, foods and religious connotations to another’s.
Over the years, two elements of my perception of mixedness have come from other people’s projections – indulgent and shame. When you take part in a cultural event or practice, you think people are looking at you. Why? Because you think people are going to judge you for not being enough of one thing to be there, like “how dare you indulge this side of yourself because not everyone can do that?” There’s this sense of shame, ‘why should you be able to have four or five celebrations? Choose one and be happy.’ It can make you ask why you deserve to have these multitudes in your life.
It’s strange, the expectations that people have seemed to absorb from various judgements they’ve heard from other people. Ultimately, it must stem from a white supremacist, colonialist viewpoint of mixedness being shameful or suspicious. I love seeing people celebrating being mixed now.
How has your mixedness impacted your work?
I would imagine that being of so many mixes has enabled me to have a wider view on what’s possible, in good ways and bad ways, like how people meet in terms of movement and migration. There’s often quite traumatic stories linked to migration. It’s made me very aware of the interconnectedness of everything, which is hopefully quite obvious in my work which tries to find links between personal stories and the historical backdrops of those things, as well as the current and historical political element.
Nothing happens in a bubble, everything is affecting everybody and there are far-reaching consequences to everything, which can be good or bad. It’s given me a lot of oscillation in both life and work.
Have you ever felt any stereotypes of what it means to be mixed? How do you want the conversation to change?
I certainly never use the term mixed-race because when I was growing up that was heavily used for mixed-Black and white heritage people. Whilst that might not be accurate, I still didn’t use it. I’ve always said ‘mixed-heritage,’ ‘mixed-background’, ‘mixed-ethnicity’… I just try to put ‘mixed’ in there without the word ‘race.’
I think people of other mixes should be able to have another term that they’re happy to use, but these terms aren’t particularly helpful other than trying to find people who feel similar to you. Anything that’s got mixed in I would hope would bring people together. Going forwards, we should recognise that there’s so much range within this experience.
I don’t know what the best language is to use, none of them feel great. Any vocabulary that we try to assign to anything to do with racial identities is always going to come up short because it's made up anyway. It’s hard when you’re trying to put a solid articulation onto something that’s conceptual and changes all the time. You're never gonna get a term that sticks around and accurately describes how people see themselves or other people.
What’s one of the best things about being mixed for you?
Being able to experience fun in different cultures and all the friends that come into your life because of cultures and experiences is amazing. I feel like a lot of people in the UK have spent a lot of time and effort trying to connect with the holistic version of their life. Having such a mixed background, that was always a given.
Can you sum up being mixed in a word?
Oscillation. I mean it in a mostly positive way but it also covers the things that aren’t so positive as well. It implies movement. I feel like my life has been so full of movement.
Get your copy of These Bodies of Water here. Next week I’ll be talking to actress Ana Yi Puig, who you’ll have seen in Senior Year and the Gossip Girl reboot. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox on Monday.
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Mixed Messages is a weekly exploration of the mixed-race experience, from me, Isabella Silvers. My mom is Punjabi (by way of East Africa) and my dad is white British, but finding my place between these two cultures hasn’t always been easy. That’s why I started Mixed Messages, where each week I’ll speak to a prominent mixed voice to delve into what it really feels like to be mixed.