Netflix And Chill

Diversity is the new normal on TV

- Nasri Atallam

When I was 10 years old, I had a predilection wearing bow ties and double-breasted blazers and sitting in my father’s study pretend-reading books about Gertrude Bell. So it will come absolutely no surprise that I didn’t have many friends. The friends I did have lived in the thousands of books my parents had in our London home, in comics like The Beano and on the television I was glued to in my bedroom – I’d somehow managed to convince my mom and dad to let me use months’ worth of pocket money to buy a fourth-hand Sanyo VCR-and-TV combo from an electronics repair shop. I had four channels, and that was my world. Pop culture was still is, in many ways – either my main escape route from realities of life or my surest link to them. And back then ultimate escape route was the cinema down the road.

Around the same time, I also began to realize that though I loved the movies, no one in them or on TV looked like or had a name as confusing as mine – so confusing that I struggled to pronounce it sometimes. So you can imagine my excitement when I started seeing ads for Disney’s m release that year: Aladdin. Here was a big-screen cartooon modelled on Tom Cruise and who was Arab (or the close approximation to one the studio could put together).

So on a rainy Saturday afternoon in November 1993, mum took me to watch the film. As was my habit, I negotiated myself a pick-n-mix, with an emphasis on the cola-flavoured fizzy candy and a large Sprite. And we went into Screen

When I emerged 90 minutes later, I was crushed. I didn’t know the words back then, but I was disappointed by the Orientalism inherent in the storytelling and realized that what I’d just watched was flat-out racism. “It’s barbaric, but hey it’s home”? Not on my watch.