Harry and Meghan (and Jerry and Taeta)

Over the past week I’ve sat down with my parents in our living room and watched Harry and Meghan share their story with the world on Netflix. I came into this documentary being totally on Harry and Meghan’s side; who wouldn’t be on their side? Two stylish, young lovers who found each other across the world and strengthened their love despite all odds.

As I watched them cry and saw pictures of them smiling and hugging flashing across the screen, their sweet fair-skinned children toddling around the backyard of their $14.7 million home in Montecito, I grew to resent them. I didn’t expect my resentment to bubble to the surface, but it did, slowly, up and up and up. I resented that they didn’t have to care about the racist history of the British family until it hurt their feelings personally. I resented the two young parents for not having to work hard, to get to stay home in their beautiful mansion with their sweet children all day. I resented that they could sell their story for $100 million to Netflix.

I had to laugh at their texts, signed off with “Love Wins.” It is so powerful to see Love Winning for these two rich, heterosexual, beautiful people. I’m not trying to erase Meghan’s race or how the UK tabloids shredded her to pieces, accusing her of starting a race war and Harry of being a race traitor. I could relate to the racism. I imagine it was all very painful for Meghan, but I can’t help but feel angry at her and her husband because of their wealth and the way they capitalized off the “commonwealth” for years. Now they profit from the commonwealth through graciously sharing their story.

At least they had the generosity to share their personal texts, emails, and thoughts about their lives. It is a wonderful documentary for nosey people. As a mental health counselor, I am a very nosey person.

*

When my grandmother emigrated to Canada with her family in the 1980s, she discovered the joy that is reality television, specifically Jerry Springer. I imagine her in her tiny apartment, her teenage children sitting by her on the stained couch, all of them drinking tea and dipping Maria cookies into their milky tea, watching Jerry Springer stir the pot on national television. Or maybe she was alone, peeling clove after clove of garlic witnessing Americans display the worst parts of their lives on technicolor T.V.

It’s kind of ironic for a family of Egyptians to end up in the commonwealth of Canada. Egypt was colonized by Britain from 1882 to 1954. My grandmother was born in 1940, so she spent her first fourteen years under British rule, but I wonder what that meant for her. She thought Westerners were very cold people with their pale skin and unseasoned potatoes.

Once I sat in an American’s house while I watched their family eat dinner around me. They ordered take out from Buca di Beppo, plated the glistening and buttery pastas at the table, and did not offer me a plate. I snuck to their pantry and ate a granola bar and returned to the table hungry and still hoping they’d offer me a bite of penne san remo.

When I told my mom about my no-dinner-date with this American family, I kept asking why they didn’t offer me anything, half-joking and half-angry, she turned and said “They’re German, right? German and American?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s why. They’re cold people.” I thought about that quietly, and mom continued on, “You’re so used to people treating you like family because Egyptians are much warmer. They’re not being rude, they’re just white. They don’t act like us.”

My mom remembers watching princess Diana and Charles get married on live television on July 29, 1981. She says Diana is a reason so many women in the eighties styled their hair out in short, bouncy blowouts. In Harry and Meghan, they show a video of Diana placing his hand over a paparazzi camera and begging them to leave her children alone.

“It’s really a small price to pay for being rich,” my mom says, “Just don’t read the tabloids.” At first, I argued with that. Who would want their whole life broadcast to the nation? Who would want lies written about them constantly? As the documentary went on, I started to agree with my mom’s harsh sentiment; I wouldn’t read the tabloids either.

I felt jealous that the Duke and Duchess could spend all their time playing ball and baking fresh bread with their cherubic faced children in Montecito. I contrast that image with my grandfather working overnight at shirt-making factories in Canada with an Egyptian law degree buried in the desert. I think about him bringing pie slices home to his family when there were leftovers at the bakery he cashiered at. Harry and Meghan don’t have to work 9 to 5.

My grandmother worked too, alternatively stuffing envelopes for companies and grape leaves for her home catering business. Imagine women shouting in Arabic to each other and laughing loudly as they stuff envelopes around a conference table in an office building. It sounds like such a pointless job in the technological age, but this was the 1990s. I wonder what went into the envelopes anyway. My mom talks about the price of the job being constant papercuts.

Then she comes back from work and watches Americans give each other black eyes on Jerry Springer with her flat feet curled under her legs, a cup of black tea in her soft hands. Was she shocked silent at how much the Westerners were willing to share of themselves on television? Or did she laugh, unable to peel her eyes away from the trainwreck of relationships on T.V.?

My grandma was very private about her personal life and instilled that same value in her children. I wonder if it was untrustworthiness in others or just a self-imposed loyalty to her family. If given the option, my grandparents would never sell their stories to Netflix. They valued privacy too much; they could never be like Harry and Meghan. They are so far away from Harry and Meghan; they might as well be on different planets. Their gigantic mansion in Montecito is light years away from their postmark sized apartment in Mississauga.

*

Thirty-two years after my grandmother first watched Jerry egg people on, I watch Harry and Meghan— or H and M as they lovingly refer to each other— share their personal lives on Netflix. I relay the new information I learn about H and M to my fiancé on our nightly phone call.

“I kind of hate these people,” he says.

“Do you think they—?”

“No,” he says. I laugh. “I don’t think about these people.”

“Wait, let me finish,” I say, “Do you think Charles—?”

“No,” he says. I laugh harder the second time.

“They didn’t care about the colonization or the racism until it hurt their feelings. They didn’t care when they were making money off the colonization,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. I felt silly for not thinking of that earlier— my fiancé is a very intelligent person. My thoughts were skirting around it, but there weren’t words to attach to the odd discomfort I felt watching them.

*

Winston Churchill visited Egypt in the last decade of its British colonization and intersected with my family’s history when he went to their dairy farm and ate the cheese they produced there. He believed Egyptians were inferior and cowardly. He didn’t think we could govern ourselves due to our lack of intelligence.

This idea is echoed today when people advocate for taking artifacts out of Egypt and putting them in British and American museums, thinking that we won’t be able to take care of our ancestral relics. The idea that westerners are more entitled to our history and accessing it than we are, besides we are barbaric and would destroy the artifacts anyway.

Western entitlement to Egyptian history is displayed by Elizabeth Taylor and Jada Pinkett Smith as they pretend to be Cleopatra in the theatre. Why can’t an Egyptian play Cleopatra? Are we not entitled to tell our own stories? Is it that we don’t want to tell our stories?

So much of our story has been stripped of us. We are cautious on the stage of the world, not wanting to let the foreigners in, even if they want to help. Coptic Popes have historically rejected the United States offered intercession to help end violence against and protect the Coptic people from the oppressive majority. The message is the same for every Egyptian: Don’t interfere in our family business. It’s none of your business.

To lay yourself bare for the world to dissect is to disgrace yourself, your family, and your culture. My entire life I’ve been pushed to conceal my feelings from the outside world, to ensure my inner world remains inner, and that what takes place between my loved ones should stay within the walls of our home. Watching Harry and Meghan lay it all out on television was an invitation for the world to mock them, to walk all over them, to muddy up their soft and luxurious clothing. The stains will never come out.

And I admit, my parents and I had a field day mocking them as we watched their documentary. We did British accents, discussed their richness, sneered at them through the screen. We had fun, we laughed a lot.

*

Jerry Springer was born in London during the Second World War. His family was made up of refugees (like all four of my grandparents) fleeing the Holocaust, but so many of his family members were killed. He settled in Queens (like my father when his family first emigrated from Egypt) and earned a law degree from Northwestern University (the college I’m getting my master’s from). Before he became a prolific trash tv host, he was mayor of Cincinnati.

As it turns out, Jerry, Meghan, and I are all going to be Northwestern alumni. Go Wildcats!

*

There is empowerment and freedom in sharing your story. In my teenage years I went from oversharing and rubbing my wounds raw for others to learning vigorous restraint to striking a balance between vulnerability and boundaries.

I need to process my experiences and feelings out loud or on paper. I don’t want to hide behind my brain in rationalizing everything I do, I want to feel, but it’s something I need to learn how to do. I am not somebody who is easily in touch with their emotions.

I read Meghan’s New York Times article “The Losses We Share” and felt touched by the line she wrote “[New Yorkers] love in the city, we cry in the street, our emotions and stories there for anybody to see.” While I doubt her taxi driver said these words to her, I am drawn to people who so willingly share their stories like this. I am drawn to people doing anything loudly and emotionally, but at the same time I am repulsed by the courage and vulnerability this takes.

I am too calculating to be like the New Yorker. I scowl in public so people won’t take to me, I shield my inner, gooey parts with rigid edges and hardness. I don’t like being watched, but I always feel as though all eyes are on me. Margaret Atwood says,

“…Pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

Yes, I am a Russian nesting doll of a person. A person within my person watching me perform. I am both the audience and the performer. How do we break free of this prison of being watched? Is it scary to think that everybody is too self-absorbed to notice that I’m having a story of my own?

What would it mean if nobody cared about the story you had to tell anyway? I believe somebody cares enough to listen, to not judge, to not laugh, to hold a space big enough to contain every little part.

A part of me feels an intense and searing regret when I think about my grandmother. I wish I had been capable of knowing her more, of being able to hear her story in her native language and learn every detail. I wish I could have been her constant voyeur, perched on her shoulder or in her pocket, learning her story so deeply that we could be melded into one.