RAMY & shame

Ramy cleaning the mosque to Abdel Halim Hafiz’ Ahwak is one of the most beautiful scenes in the whole two season series, to me. I am not from an Arabic family that is Muslim, but I am from an Indian family that was dedicatedly Christian. I’m not familiar enough with practices of Islam to talk at length correctly about them, but this post on vulture highlights the practice of Wudu (not the scene I’m talking about, but in the same season/phase that we see Ramy in): https://www.vulture.com/2019/05/ramy-hulu-wudu-mosque-scene.html

The religious cleansing, the act of something like labor to absolve yourself of whatever your sin was, is a feeling I am familiar with. While religion might have twisted it into something ugly full of shame, I think that the accountability and ask to change is transformative. You face disgust with yourself, verbalize it, and then express your guilt before the divine and/or someone further along their path in the area you’re struggling with, who helps with their connection to God/the divine. I love the fact you can learn from the experience and are given a simple task to how to cleanse yourself from the guilt, how to ease your conscience of sin. — but the concept of sin is one I don’t accept as naively as I used to, and that unlearning and failing and adjustment is what RAMY displays for us.

It’s such a refreshing scene. It’s one of the first where we see and start admiring Ramy’s dedication to the truth, honesty, and doing the right thing. It shows how he and many of us navigte morality, having grown up ascribing or still ascribing to some truths about how to behave, in accountability with the divine and with one another. That practice itself not a bad thing (Good Place vibes: “What We Owe To Each Other.”), and I don’t think RAMY is trying to say that it’s a good or a bad thing.

But the problem is after this cathartic scene, where we feel hope that Ramy is self aware and can change, we see this is actually a participation in an addict’s cycle.

Throughout the first and some of the second season, a lot of us just want to tell Ramy, as we long to be told, “Calm down! You’re okay! Yes you do some things that are toxic, that need some therapy, but relax.” His friends repeatedly tell him this, gently and also dryly. Contrast that to how we long to react to him at the end of Season 2 — well, we don’t have to, because he gets told, “Fuck you, Ramy. You hurt people.” And he deserves that 100%.

How does that happen? To shift from “Be easy on yourself” to “fuck you and rot with over your actions.”

& that’s where the addiction comes in. Ramy’s addicted to a lot of things: sex, sugar, etc. but I think he’s mostly addicted to his shame and his need to alleviate that, to prove that he is a good person.

It’s what oppressive religion looks like on the inside. Someone can seem free on the outside — they have sex freely, they take drugs, they go about their life with what seems like freedom and different than cloistered communities who don’t look at women, don’t drink, don’t take drugs — but if the insides are the same, if the shame is still there, if you have to keep proving yourself and yet all you do is never good enough, then the same thing happens: you start doing fucked up things in secret, places for your shadows to come out.

One of RAMY’s concerns is the problem of shame. Not guilt. Guilt can be informative, guilt is proof you can start shifting, guilt is a teacher. Guilt is a pathway to redemption — that moment when he’s cleaning the mosque, cleansing himself, setting intensions.

Shame, though, is what makes him agonize over whether or not to take that pill, whether he should be eating something, whether he should be sleeping with someone he’s attracted to or should find a good Muslim girl or….end up fucking a married woman from the mosque.

I relate a lot to Ramy. I’ve done and said too much to assure that my intentions are good, that I’m a good person, that I don’t want to lie or decieve. But there are times where I do exactly those things and find a way to negotiate my morality to allow it. And sometimes the reasons I did it were valid, and sometimes the reasons were not.

My touchy conscience, like many of ours, comes from a lot of things: being told I am depraved from birth by religion; being told I am inherently evil, illegal by the patriarchy and by white supremacy; being constantly told I am culpable and ill-intentioned by adults in my life who I looked to to help build my sense of self.

I admire Ramy Youssef’s ability to throw all bets in with the direction of this character. Ramy in the beginning just wants to do the right thing. And no matter how much he does the wrong thing, he insists that he was just trying to do the right thing. Impact is ignored in lieu of intention, when truly both need to be given stage time.

I love RAMY because it shows perfectly how some people do the most unnecessary bullshit to ease our unnecessarily touchy consciences, a skill I have perfected and truly dislike, and that doing so doesn’t make you a good person. It keeps your eyes on you. It mostly can make you annoying. It actually can make you harmful.

I sound brutal towards myself, and that unkind talk itself is a symptom of shame. Yet erring towards letting my bullshit slide is just another illusion, no matter how much I understand its origins in trauma or things beyond my control. There are a lot of hurt people who don’t hurt other people.

What is the answer? I’m not sure. I think it starts with both honesty & kindness towards self.

I’m excited for season 3 to see what Ramy Youssef has to say the answer is.

I think the first step, though, is learning how to look outside of yourself, truly focus outside of yourself. The core is perhaps to heal shame. And when shame is something that religion as an institution benefits off of, it by nature and necessary of survival, has instilled deep shame into its followers, as soon as they are born sometimes.

What does it look like to believe in the divine and absolve shame? I think it comes into connection with what the divine actually is. It’s why, for me, I shifted from God/Jesus to a wider understanding of the divine.

Maybe it isn’t the divine for some people, but RAMY speaks to those of us who had God and pondering our sin in our lives more than pretty much any other influence. Absolving shame looks like believing in the redemption that the divine offers and believing that the divine loves you unconditionally and sees you as you are and supports your journey and aligns you into doing that which is good for yourself & community. And I believe that’s the heart of spirituality, religion, “believing in God, like for real,” as Ramy says.