I'm over representation politics (and you should be too)

Unfinished letter #24

Let’s first address the elephant in the room. I know what it looks like, reading a piece with this title in a publication called Letters from a Muslim Woman. I promise I am not Candace Owens-ing this.

Over the years, I’ve gotten really excited about people who represent ‘the first’ or ‘the only’. When Barack Obama became the first Black president in 2008, I believed in the whole change agenda, not only for America but for who would run the halls of power. I believed that America could maybe turn the corner on empire and embrace cooperation. That the long moral arc of the universe was finally bending toward justice.

By the time Mary Simon became the first Indigenous person to hold the office of Governor General in Canada in 2021, my cynicism had hardened.

A favourite article on representation, one I’ve come back to repeatedly, is a 2014 NPR piece about Shonda Rhymes, the creator of creator of hit shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and Bridgerton.

The article, by culture critic Linda Holmes, is about an evening where Holmes hosted Rhymes at the Natural History Museum in front of an audience of 550 fans.

Rhymes’ answer to an audience question on how the landscape has changed for “African-Americans on television” lodged itself into my brain, crystallizing my understanding of the power of diversity in representation.

“On shows with Only One (only one woman, only one black character, only one Asian person, only one gay character), that's when the Only One is required to be about nothing except that characteristic. She said her hope was in part that just by having more than Only One on her shows, she gave those characters room to develop and to have other things about them be important. She hopes that — and here's the rub — by consciously increasing diversity overall she makes the race of each character less limiting, less defining.”

Reading this, something clicked. Rhymes and others like her were doing the work to move the needle on characters belonging to certain underrepresented groups in American media. 10 years on, Black characters, especially, are not entirely defined by their Blackness.

For Muslim and Arab media representation, we are still in the Only One phase. Shows like Ramy and Mo are starting to make a dent here, but it’s still early days.

Holmes’ article focused on diversity and representation, while lamenting the focus on these very issues. In discussing Rhymes’ position in the television industry, Holmes addressed the catch-22 of the representation conversation.

“Shonda Rhimes, really, is the Only One. She's certainly the Only One at that level. That's why this keeps coming up for her… You discuss it and spend all your time on it and let it become the only thing about you and let other people set the agenda every time they characterize you: You lose.

But you don't respond, don't say what you think, don't share what you know, don't fire back when you're minimized or put down or mischaracterized: You lose.”

Not to compare myself to Rhymes, but this is my thinking when it comes to my writing on Letters. I am happy to spend my time discussing my identity, while also trying to not have it be the only thing about me. Happy to be the stand-in for “strong, independent Muslim woman”, while also just being Noha, the girl who loves cycling and mango-strawberry-avocado-smoothies and staying up way too late to binge watch prestige tv. I suppose I am trying to have it both ways.

In the 13 years between Barack Obama’s “first” and Mary Simon’s “first”, my thoughts about representation solidified and then hardened before eventually cracking under their own weight.

Perhaps what started me questioning the value I placed on representation was Obama and the drones. Here was America’s first Black president, a man who made me believe in the audacity of hope after the atrocious Bush years and the disastrous war in Iraq.