‘Ramy’ w/ Nader Helmy & Basil Seif
Full Transcript of Technicolor Theatre podcast: Season 2, Episode 5
In this episode of Technicolor Theatre, filmmaker Aditya Joshi, artist-inventor-technologist Nader Helmy and data scientist Basil Seif discuss their experiences with 9/11, performative activism, and the scarily accurate Egyptian representation in Ramy’s “Strawberries” (Season 1, Episode 4).
The episode aired on August 31, 2020 under the podcast’s previous name, Token Theatre, and can be found here. Full transcript (below) was captured by Madelyn Gee.
Aditya Joshi: Hello, and welcome to Token Theatre, a Mediaversity podcast about representation on film. My name is Aditya Joshi and joining me today, now that they finished googling “nice boobs” on their compact desktop computer, are Basil Seif and Nader Helmy. What’s up guys?
Nader Helmy: Hey, how’s it going?
Basil Seif: I’m doing great. You actually just caught me closing my “nice boobs” tab on my computer. Huge shout out.
Aditya: When I was growing up, I wished I had a computer to Google “nice boobs” on. Me and my siblings all slept in the same room with no computer. Today, Basil, Nader, and I will be talking about season one episode four of Ramy called “Strawberries” otherwise known as the 9/11 episode.
Ramy is in school as a kid when 9/11 happens and he’s also trying to figure out how to jerk off. So if you haven’t seen the episode, go watch the episode. We’ll be diving deep into it. It’s only 25 minutes so spoilers will abound. Before we get into the episode though, Nader and Basil, why don’t you guys introduce yourselves to the audience and talk a little bit about how you identify.
Nader: Yeah, so my name is Nader Helmy. I’m a 25-year-old Egyptian American writer and artist. My day job is as a technologist and I’ve been living here my whole life.
Basil: Yeah, I’m, my name is Basil Seif. Most people call me Basil. I’m an Egyptian American. My family’s actually Christian. I don’t really kind of relate as much to the sort of Muslim representation in Ramy. But obviously, I know a ton of Muslim people from Egypt and have a ton of Muslim friends. It’s really cool to see a lot of that stuff represented. I’m kind of just a schmuck. I’m working on my voice memos right now. I don’t do as many podcasts as Aditya and Nader. So just trying to figure it out over here. I sometimes like to write stand-up bits on my Notes tab on my phone. That’s pretty much the extent of my creative career. I’m just kind of happy to be here, you know?
Aditya: I’m thrilled to have you both on. I’ve talked to you both independently a little bit about Ramy in the year or two since it came out. I know that you two have talked extensively about it as Egyptian Americans. What was it like the first time that y’all watched Ramy, and in particular, watched this 9/11 episode?
Nader: I just remember thinking, I’ve never seen anything like this on screen before. There were so many specific cultural moments that I’d never seen even attempted on screen. Basil and I talked about this and we were so excited because it felt like we finally got that concept of representation. It’s so elusive, until you actually see yourself on screen and you realize what you’ve been missing that entire time that you take it for granted. You grew up with white stories, American stories, Western stories, and you take that for granted. That’s the default and you never question it. Until you know…even Aditya, you’re kind of posing the question of what we should talk about on Token Theatre, spurred this whole kind of journey for me to explore Egyptian representation in cinema and on TV. I found that there was a real lack of a canon and Ramy felt like maybe the start of something new in that regard.
Basil: Well, I remember distinctly around this episode watching Ramy and texting my sister and almost laughing and crying and being like, “I think Ramy has been spying on us for the last 25 years. I think Ramy Youssef has been tailing us and I think this is like a Truman Show situation.” I just didn’t really fully grasp the power of representation and media until watching this. I remember when Master of None came out and seeing how excited you were Aditya and being like, “This is really cool.” But almost in the back of my head cynically being like, “Are they overdoing it a bit? Aziz is amazing, but is Master of None really that good?”
Then I remember watching Ramy and just being like, “Holy f***.” Just getting chills with every little thing. It’s like what Nader said, it’s like the tiny little minutiae that I would watch. I’d be like, “These little cultural touch points that meant so much to me in my life … I can’t believe that other people were having these experiences too and I just didn’t know.” It was like a very unifying thing. I remember I texted Nader, my parents. my sister. I didn’t know, I wanted to tell the world about it. It was crazy.
Aditya: I find that that’s something that has proven to be somewhat of a constant when I’ve talked to people. Especially with Asian Americans, people from the African diaspora and African Americans are the first thing that you see that really represents you that reminds you that your experiences are interesting and valid. You can do the equivalent of like a Louis and just do your own version of that. It’ll be just as acclaimed and just as interesting as Louis. Nader, you said something about a lack of existing canon, I think that really stuck with me.
I find myself in the same way that Basil was excited for me with Master of None, I find myself super thrilled for my Middle Eastern and Muslim friends about Ramy and super thrilled for my Black friends with Insecure and Atlanta. As a group, we are starting to build this kind of indie auteur-y television canon. I think Ramy is the latest and greatest entry to that. I’m super excited to talk about it a little bit more in depth, you guys.
Nader: I couldn’t agree more. The reason that it’s worth talking about is because it’s such a landmark. I would say that I had mixed feelings about the show when I first watched it. I have mixed feelings about the show now when I watch it, but it’s still a really valuable piece of media. It’s totally changed the game. It’s, at least in my circles, something that was talked about by everybody. I talked to other people and they went, “What’s Ramy?” That’s kind of crazy to me just because of how important it was to my family, my friends, all that kind of thing. Especially people our age.
I gotta say, as a Muslim and an Egyptian the show hit different. Everything felt very crafted for my experience. I rewatched some episodes and I kept a list of all the small moments that I’d never seen on screen before. But like, just an example, right? The way that immigrant parents overshare with strangers, just the tiny ways that they do that. The way that you have to pack extra bags for your relatives when you’re going to the homeland.
Basil: I remember literally having a panic attack when I watched that s***. For context in Ramy, there’s a scene where he goes to Egypt and his parents pack him eight bags of essential things he has to bring. I’ve never been to Egypt without three bags a person ever. I used to go every summer. It’s like, if you’re not packing three bags, you don’t care about your family. It’s crazy. I was just like, “Holy s***.”
Aditya: You probably have like two or three bags of things to give and then those bags are full on the way back with things you’ve received. You feel like a smuggler or you’ve worked in industry.
Nader: We used to joke that my grandma was for sure on the blacklist for immigration to the country because one time she flew in with 100 pigeons, hammema. It was a suitcase filled with 100 pigeons. You know, just regular Tuesday things.
Basil: I remember one time my uncle packed us three entire checked luggage size bags of mangoes on the way home. Three full bags. Then we had to stand there in the immigration line just stoic and just be like, “Yeah, we don’t have anything.”
Aditya: No produce or no live animals to report. Just 100 pigeons and two suitcases.
Basil: It’s unbelievable.
Aditya: In this 9/11 episode Ramy has this internal crisis where he’s like, “Are my parents terrorists?” I think it’s s*** like this that makes us wonder if your parents will smuggle 100 pigeons into the country, who say they won’t smuggle more s*** into the country that you don’t know about. You know what I mean?
Nader: Yeah, what are they really up to?
Aditya: That scrappy immigrant mentality. Like why do we use walkie-talkies instead of phones? That s*** was hilarious to me. We didn’t have walkie-talkies, but there’s a line …. And we can shift a little bit into talking about the themes of the episode, but there’s a line early on in this episode where Ramy’s mom gives him the walkie-talkie. It’s like, “I cannot afford for you to be like everyone else,” which I thought was such an interesting and honest representation of what I’m sure to be Egyptian American, but I think to be any kind of immigrant American. Not even just like, “I can’t afford it” but rather, “Stop comparing yourself. You’re not like all the other kids.”
Whether you can go to sleepovers, whether you get a phone or when you get a Nintendo like any of those things that feel monumental to you as a child and in hindsight are pretty inconsequential. The argument against them most of the time was like, “I don’t care what Jim has. You’re my son, and you’re not going to get those things yet, because I don’t think you need them.”
Nader: I remember I wrote that down too. The idea of “we can’t afford for you to be like other people” because I almost wish that during my life in my childhood that the characters were as eloquent about the situation that we were in. Just to capture that. If there’s one kind of dialogue-related gripe I have with Ramy is that the characters to me always say the right thing. Even if I know that growing up, my family probably wouldn’t have the language all the time for those things. That’s one incongruity I find. It’s almost like remembering childhood memories and sort of rewriting it the way that we do when you’re an adult and fill in the blanks. That’s kind of how I feel sometimes watching Ramy.
It almost feels like revisionist history in a really interesting way. But it’s playing on all these themes that are the exact same themes that I grew up with. I have no problem with it and it’s like, really rich in that way. Growing up Egyptian and American I feel like a contradiction. That’s so much of what this show is about, to me anyway. It is sort of dealing with that contradiction and saying, “What happens when you don’t fit neatly into either pile? What does that look like?” I think Ramy has a different answer for what that looks like every episode or especially if you look at the arc throughout Season 1 and Season 2. It’s really rich for that reason because that conflict is never going to be resolved. As a person, it’s something you have to sit with for your whole life. So I think it makes for really juicy fodder for American television.
Aditya: I think our answers to that also change constantly, right? I think any given week if someone had asked me, “How Indian are you?” Even other Indians are like, “So how Indian are you really?” or I’ll ask people that. I feel like my answer to that changes on a day by day, week by week basis depending on if I listen to Bollywood music that week, talked to my grandmother, or just small things that change your perception and you’re never really going to find that equilibrium that you’re searching for. I think this episode does a really good job of portraying that in particular.
Nader: Yeah, totally. I think what’s interesting is … I’m curious to hear your opinion about this too Basil. The episode you framed as the 9/11 episode, which it is. But what I like about it is that it hides that fact. I mean, it’s an episode called Strawberries, right? It cleverly teases you with a story about young Ramy dealing with his sexual urges. Then you slowly and then very quickly realize that something horrible has happened.
What I enjoy about that, in retrospect, is that it works not only on a narrative level to kind of loop you in, but it also puts you in the actual position of a young Arab American growing up during 9/11. You’re confused, you’re unaware, you don’t have the context. Then suddenly, you’re thrust into the middle of a conflict that’s so much bigger than yourself, you have no real stake in it and that affects your life. I really liked how it worked on that double level where by the time it happens, you feel almost that same panic that Ramy is feeling.
Basil: Totally. I think the genius of this episode is that it’s a reflection of the show as a whole. Ramy is about discovering identity and figuring out who you are. The genius in starting an episode about the isolation of not knowing who you are, and the isolation that’s further because of something like 9/11 with something as isolating as his sexual discovery, masturbation and being on message boards and being like, “How do I masturbate?” It’s so crazy how well those things intertwine. Ramy has this unbelievable ability in 25-minute episodes to tackle six or seven really, really complex, different, but very intertwining themes in a really effortless way. In this episode alone, he tackles post colonialism, neoliberalism, sexual discovery, terrorism, identity, xenophobia, all these things. Even anti-Semitism with the uncle. There’s a little snippet where they’re watching 9/11 and you kind of hear him talking about all of the jewelers in the diamond district right there and that anti-Semitism rings so true to me because how many how many racist anti-Semitic uncles do we have?
He just does it in such a consumable way and it’s just like a little thing here, a little thing here, a little thing here, but it’s so perfectly crafted. The other thing I love about this episode is … I don’t know if either of you remember watching it for the first time, but I remember watching it for the first time and I guess being slow on the uptake of thinking, “Okay, he’s jerking off in a stall.” That familiar feeling of you’re doing something that you know is wrong when you’re younger, and then walking outside and the world looks like it’s ending. And you’re like, “All of this because I was just jerking off to like my mom’s magazine?” It does this unbelievable job of taking the shame that he feels about masturbation and applying it to the shame of being feeling Muslim, feeling left out and feeling like this brown stranger in a white world. Chef’s kiss Ramy, it’s so well done.
Aditya: I think you’re right, Basil. Like a lesser show would have … maybe not a lesser show, but a different show would have taken each of those small things that you mentioned and blown them up into 45 minute episodes. I think to Nader’s point earlier, the reason that Ramy rings so true to the general immigrant experience is because we don’t do those things. We don’t have three hour conversations with our parents about neoliberalism and the post-colonial mess in the Middle East. The fact that it exists and the reality of dealing with your family being overseas … Obviously, my experience with India is much different, but the same kind of small nuances.
The reality of that being your everyday life is that it’s not a huge thing that you think about all the time. It is just little snippets that populate the texture of the story that you’re actually living in. What’s great about this, from the way it’s framed is, I frame it as the 9/11 episode, you’re right. But in reality, it’s the “learning to masturbate” episode and 9/11 as a backdrop. The climactic moment — pardon my pun here — is not when he comes to terms with what 9/11 is, or what his parents’ relationship to Osama bin Laden may or may not be. It’s when he actually figures out how to masturbate and 9/11 puts a new perspective on all of that for him, which is really interesting.
Another thing that rings so true to the way that I feel like I experienced 9/11 was that I was the only brown person in my town growing up. There was no nuance that we’re having here with like, “Oh, Nader is an Egyptian American Muslim. Basil’s an Egyptian American Christian. I’m an Indian American Hindu.” There’s none of that nuancing. It’s just like, “Oh, you’re a brown person whose parents have an accent and whose grandparents really have an accent?” You’re the
target of all the questions and the thoughts that we have around us now. That was something that I really wanted to talk about with you guys. Because I had this awful, in hindsight, excuse mechanism. Basil, I’m sure you had this too. They’re like, “Oh, you’re a Muslim. You’re a terrorist, whatever.” I’m like, “Guys, no,” in the same way that Ramy does when he’s walking down the street. You know my parents, and for me it was like, “No, I’m Hindu. See the elephant on the wall? You guys, come on.” It’s a different thing. In hindsight it is so gross, but I think we all did what we could to distance ourselves from that action, even though we were all so young when it actually happened, much younger than Ramy in this episode.
Basil: Yeah, I think that it was a little different from me. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot. When you texted us that this was the episode that you wanted to talk about, I really did a lot of reflecting on what my experience was of 9/11. I’m in an interesting position, because I’m a pretty white-passing Egyptian American. Apart from my name, it’s easy for me to get by as a white person. A lot of the xenophobia post 9/11 that I saw was from seeing how people interacted with my parents. My mom has an accent, she’s also pretty white-passing, but my dad and my sister aren’t white-passing. Seeing the way that the world interacted with them and almost feeling a little bit of white guilt. Then when I would try to separate myself I’d be like, “Why am I doing this? Am I trying to get further away from the rest of my family?” I think that there was a lot of privilege, but also just weird white-passing guilt that I had about dealing with that stuff in that way.
I think that the part that really got me right after the attack happens in the episode is when Ramy’s dad goes outside and puts the American flag up and it’s just like, “Man, my mom was buying every American flag thing she could from like 2001 to 2005.” Putting it in the garden to say “We are Americans” and then getting weird looks from people and it’s like, “What are you trying to prove? What are you trying to do?” The kind of spirit of trying to persevere through the pain. It was so familiar in a pretty devastating way. I had to pause it for a second and be like, “Ugh, I forgot that this was even a thing that happened that I had to go through and that our family had to go through.”
Nader: I thought about this too, “What do I remember about 9/11 and what was my experience of it?” Some of it is universal, right? Watching TV, the sense of fear and dread. But I feel honestly as a Muslim and as an Egyptian, that sense of fear was laced with something a little bit different than I think your average American. We’re constantly on the phone with folks back home. That’s a big part of it. We’re the liaisons for American and at that point, you have to remember America was the land of opportunity in a kind of untainted way. You can argue, point to examples of why that’s not true, and why the American Empire was already faltering. But if you just look at it on the surface as just your average person living in a third world country, America was it. It really started to disrupt that feeling for the first time. Fast forward to 2020, it’s almost like a complete reverse. This passport means nothing anymore and that kind of thing.
I was weary of trying to go back again, and do that revisionist history thing where I talked about all this. That I was kind of deconstructing colonialism as a child. I wasn’t. But I do remember that we didn’t know much, but we knew that we all had to perform that specific kind of patriotism. I don’t even think it’s explicit. I don’t think my parents told me I had to. I think it was just self evident. I don’t think I had to be pressured or bullied by anybody or have some kind of traumatic experience that triggered it. I think it was the whole moment and I can say that in retrospect. It felt unique and different. Now I see it’s been this big social shift and how people deal with us in this country. You’re right Aditya, there’s no nuance at that point. It was just like, “Are you brown?” It’s remarkable, because I feel like the media gives us the … Amongst, social movements as well. It gives us the language to actually describe what’s going on. It gives us language to describe it’s full nuance, but we didn’t have that language, which is what made it so difficult and what made it so memorable.
Aditya: There are a couple of things in there that I thought were really interesting, but I want to talk about this performance thing you’re talking about. I’ve talked in other podcast episodes with people about the idea of performing for the masses. I think that there’s a really unique performance that Ramy’s parents do. I think again, to your point Nader, I don’t want to say this is an explicit cause and effect thing that caused my parents to act a certain way. I don’t know that. I think it would be disingenuous to say that.
I do think that there was certainly a high bar of patriotism that you had to show. It was a burden of proof that other people didn’t have. By being brown, by having a funny name, by being a Muslim, any of those things that mark you is a little bit different. It’s not just people like us. Latinos have this, Black people have this too — prove that you are grateful to be in the American Empire. Show us that you came here for a reason and what is that reason? It’s a burden of patriotism, it’s a burden of performance. It’s where the model minority myth comes from. All of this stems from this idea that we have to prove that we’re worthy of being here and that we’re happy to be here.
I remember specifically, I think it was right after 9/11, my parents got citizenship in like 2002 or 2003. I played the Star Spangled Banner at a party that they had for the citizenship thing. They were studying for the tests and all of this nonsense. I remember thinking at the time, “I wonder if my neighbors know all the facts?” We’re learning this stuff in history class, but like the same way that parents forget how to do math, I imagined that they forget history. I wonder if they know all the things that my parents now know by being citizens now and becoming citizens post 9/11. There’s so many things you could probably draw from that. My dad plays golf. Was that like a result of wanting to fit in? I don’t know, maybe it was just because he likes golf. But maybe it was like, “I should join a country club so I can hang out with my white co-workers and do golf things.” I think there’s so many things that we can draw, not necessarily explicitly from 9/11, but
just from that burden of proving that you’re like a white American or you’re just like any white person.
Nader: As the child of immigrants, you play this translator role which I think is done in subtle ways throughout Ramy and I really appreciate it. It’s Ramy and his sister, the ways that they push their parents and they do it out of love. Whatever kind of social mores or whatever values your parents have internalized, sometimes they can be out of whack. In order to succeed in the world, to move through the West, to move through America in a way that is gonna bring success, without even knowing it you’re thrust into that role of being a translator. Both a literal translator and a sort of cultural translator to make sure that your family survives that assimilation project. You’re the arbiter of that. You’re the keeper to that. I never really thought about how big of a burden that was until I grew up. It hasn’t gone away. That responsibility still exists, but now I have language for it. Now I have all this other stuff that I can sort of conceptualize around it but wow, what another crazy thing with this country sort of thrust upon us, right.
Aditya: I’m curious, Basil and Nader, both of you. Basil, I have met your parents a few times. But how much was that translator role a central part of both of you growing up? My parents are … Basil, you have met my dad. Super Western, their accents are basically gone. I feel like they would be white-passing if it wasn’t for their skin color. I’m curious what your experience was like for both of you growing up in that role?
Basil: My dad actually was born in Cairo and then lived in London for the first five years of his life. So he actually doesn’t have an accent really. It’s funny. My mom and I are white-passing, like I said before, but he’s pretty brown. He’s got a brown name, his name is Fasif. When he goes to the hospital he works at and a Southern white person from Texas is like, “Oh, I want a good Christian person working on my medical cases” and stuff. He has to deal with that. My mom has a pretty thick accent. They’re both pretty Western. But I think that, talking a little bit about what you said Nader and continuing that point, I thought that the whole walkie-talkie scene was really poignant for specifically what you’d said, being the cultural and literal translator for your parents. I love the line that Ramy’s mom says where she goes, “It’s a walkie-talkie. You walk and you talk, that’s what you do.” You as the immigrant son or daughter, are the person who is left to fill in the holes of the nuance and say, “This is what this actually means in the context of this culture, Mom and Dad, and you’re not picking up on this.”
As a six- or seven-year-old during 9/11, who obviously does not have the language to explain to you how I’m feeling but also translate these things for you, have to deal with the murkiness of that, not knowing what side to be on and who to say what to who, essentially. I thought the walkie-talkie was a really poignant way to kind of deliver that message. The other interesting thing about it too, is the imagery of walkie-talkie is subversive. It’s both things. When he gets the walkie-talkie message in the classroom, it’s like, “Oh, are you kind of like a double agent?” That’s kind of how you feel in America, you’re kind of a double agent. You feel like you want to be Egyptian. I remember growing up and being like, “Why did I move to America? I just want to be with my cousins speaking Arabic and eating tamiya.” Just running around and doing shit. But then sometimes you’re with your American classmates, and you’re like, “Man, I wish that my parents would let me have a computer. I wish that my parents would let me stay up late and play Xbox with my friends.” It’s kind of being stuck in the middle there. I thought that walkie-talkie part was a really good way to say that.
Nader: To answer your question about parents, my parents were I think almost the reverse. My father has been in this country for several decades now but my father has kind of an accent. He’s very traditional in his values. He comes across as though he’s been in this country not as long as he has actually. He actually has a deep, deep understanding and reverence for this country. I think that doesn’t always come across when he’s dealing with other people. I constantly see people — sort of, little pockets of xenophobia pop out or they jump out when they talk to my father. My mother wears hijab and she came to the U.S. after my father but has way less of an accent, is more sort of assimilated in that kind of way. She’s more white passing. My mother plays the translator role in a different way. When I’m not there and when we were not there as children, my mother also has to fill in, like Basil said, the blanks around the cultural things. My mother’s doing that sort of constantly. She’s doing that as a survival mechanism. She’s been doing it for ages.
I think growing up with that, there’s no way to really be neutral or opt out of that. You have to find your role within that ecosystem of characters within your family, neighborhood, and community. I would go to Egypt every single summer. I would see my relatives, friends and family. That was a big part of my life. I almost felt like I had two lives. I remember at a very young age, I told a friend. This is really groundbreaking for me, because I never even exposed my American friends to that life at all. I remember telling my American friend, “I have two sides of my life, and they’re never gonna meet. They’re separated by distance, but also by culture. My friends are different, the things I like, the music I like is different over there.” I remember just fully accepting these things will never come together.
I think that was profound for me. I think since I’ve moved past that, it’s all one confusing mess now. But I’m able to even take that leap, because I was able at a young age to realize that duality and how difficult that duality is to balance when you come to the U.S. Like Basil said, your job is to be a double agent, your job is to code switch. Your job is to do that and not to get very meta, but I feel like the show itself also code switches in the sense that it doesn’t hold your hand and then tell you, “Hey, now we’re going to introduce this concept.” There’s occasional moments where a character will say something in Arabic and then state it in English. Then I’m like, “Okay, we don’t talk like that. He’s doing that for the narrative.” But besides that, I have to say it’s like the show itself, its language, its visual language and its actual dialogue is code switching in a way that is seamless. I’m finding myself constantly tracking it. It’s so interesting to gauge that.
Basil: That’s actually something I really wanted to talk about was the way that the show takes care of the Arabic dialogue. I remember watching this episode particularly for the first time and just also hearing the Egyptian dialect on a Hulu show. We’re hearing like the hard “guhs” and everything. I think it’s really interesting. When we get the Osama speech, and his guy is on the walkie-talkie. You can hear it’s not the Egyptian dialect. That’s the level of care … Every time I hear the Arabic dialect on TV, it’s switching between all these different things. They obviously just got six people who know how to speak Arabic and don’t even know how to speak the same dialect just because they’re doing a one-off terrorist scene.
The other thing that you touched on Nader is I don’t know if this is his intention, but it almost feels like he’s getting off on making white people uncomfortable in kind of an amusing way. For me at least I’m like, “Man, y’all have made us feel uncomfortable for a long time. Now it’s your turn. Now it’s your turn to watch Ramy masturbate after talking to Osama bin Laden about the colonialism of strawberries.” He doesn’t give any easy points to his characters. I was actually listening to an interview that he gave. He was saying that one of the shows that he got the most inspiration from is It’s Always Sunny, which I thought was really interesting. That show doesn’t try to paint their characters as lightweight, easy. They’re like, “These guys are shitheads. They’re gonna make shithead decisions and we don’t want to coddle them.”
I think that that part of the show is really hard for a lot of white people to watch. I think it resonated for me a lot because it’s speaking to the whole immigrant experience of you really have to learn these small lessons step by step. Coming here as a young kid or living here as a young kid and being your own translator, you have to learn a lot of those lessons by yourself. Your parents don’t teach you a lot of the norms because they don’t know them yet. Filling in the blanks for yourself at a young age is something that I had to learn how to be good at. I was not very good at it. I’m probably still not that good at it. But it is still a burden.
Aditya: There are a couple things you said in there, like the idea of the shades of brown. Sid and I just wrote a screenplay about this and I’ve mentioned this before, it’s about the different facets of the Indian American community. The Muslim facet, the Hindu facet, poor, rich, like whatever. We always see these immigrant communities as a monolith. Nader, I’m really curious to know how you feel this plays into your work. I feel like there are a couple obligations, notably that you feel as a creator of color, who is trying to either write scripts, perform content or whatever. One question you ask yourself, like Basil said, “How much do you explain? Are you unapologetically of your culture?”
There’s a thing that Sid and I have in some screenplays, but not others where … A very basic example, we will write naan in the scene description and then put bread in parentheses. It’s like, “How much are you going to explain for your audience?” Two, to the Always Sunny point, are your characters allowed to be unlikable or do you have an obligation as someone who is representing a very lightly represented group to make those characters like the most lovable and respected people? People of color don’t always get the benefit of being nuanced, unlikable and shitheads. We talked about Louis really briefly earlier. You’re allowed to have a million white guys on TV and to have one that’s like Louis. But if there are two Egyptian guys on TV, is it okay to have one that’s like Louis? Is it okay to make people that aren’t upstanding model minority Muslims on television if we’re still trying to shape the reality of what people think about as Muslim Americans?
Then the third thing that goes along with that is, “Is it okay to make something edgy and that may not necessarily work?” Ramy takes a lot of risks that really could have backfired. I’ve talked about this with people before in the podcast, if you make one bad show about an Egyptian American, that’s it, sorry. No more shows about an Egyptian American. I’m curious Nader in particular, how you feel this plays into the work that you create, do you find yourself under these obligations? Because it seems like Ramy has subverted them so well.
Nader: It’s a really interesting point. I’ll just contextualize it and what Basil just said as well, because it triggered something for me that I never really thought about it that way that we sat through Superbad and American Pie and every possible permutation of that story. So why not Ramy? Why not explore all the deviancy and all that nonconformity? I think the show is obsessed with sex. I’m not a Puritan by any stretch of the imagination. But I found myself feeling uncomfortable, just how much the show is sort of fixated on this. We talked about this, but the way that even the whole 9/11 story is couched in a story about sexual repression. So much of the show is about that, and I struggle with that for a really long time. Why does this have to be? It’s a landmark. It’s super important, but why does it have to be so heavy on this? It feels like a rebellious streak, if I have to be honest. It feels like a little bit of some intentional pushback that Ramy is doing it. He’s kind of saying, “Well, we have to grow up with this conflict of feeling like we couldn’t access this part of the American experience. So now that we’re here, now that we’ve arrived, now that we’re on Hulu, it’s going to be all up in your face and it is 24/7.”
I think the way that Ramy has affected my work is that Ramy opened the floodgates. I think it’s time for more stories, more diverse voices, more perspectives. Ramy kind of said this as well. He was asked, I think after season one basically, “Your show doesn’t represent the entire Muslim experience.” There’s a lot of experiences around being Black and Muslim, a woman and Muslim. You’re either just barely touching on these things in the first season or not at all. Ramy essentially was like, “Yeah, you’re right. And I’m not the person to do that.” He’s like, “I want to give the mic to people who can tell their own stories.” I really resonate with that. I also think it’s a slight cop out because there is responsibility there. I feel what Ramy has done for my kind of my voice is that I feel less pressure to say I’m here. I exist, because there’s now another cultural touchstone. I like that, like you were talking about, that new canon. I like that there’s starting to be something that people can hook onto and that there’s a common language there. I feel less
pressure as a creator to embody every aspect of the the Muslim experience or embody every aspect of the Egyptian experience or the Arab experience.
Instead, I can just lean into what I know and what I care about. What’s interesting to me, and the natural outcome of that will be a story probably that Ramy couldn’t tell. Something that’s a little bit different. I like that, because I can take my own risks, and they’re definitely not going to be the same risks that Ramy took. I find myself scratching my head at his risks sometimes, and going “Why?” But I have to respect it, because it’s the exact same thing that I would want as a creator. That freedom to be able to actually express yourself in that way, and to listen to your own voice. I’m really grateful for it in terms of, it’s made so much more possible. I mentioned this briefly, but I couldn’t imagine this show coming out when I was a kid. There’s just no way. No way culturally, but just there’s no way that the media and people would be ready to even consume that. Think about the context that you have for just the Muslim experience. I think in 2020 or 2018, whenever the show first came out, it’s significantly more than when 9/11 happened. When 9/11 happened, that was so many Americans’ introduction to Islam. Talk about not having context. You’re stuck in this bubble and you have to live through the difficult period, humanize yourself and be resilient in that way that immigrants always are. You come out on the other end and people go, “Oh, these are real people.” Which sounds very basic, but it’s almost like it takes that long just to get the, “Okay, I’m a full human. I can tell the full human spectrum of stories.”
Aditya: Part of what makes the show so great is that the honesty of Ramy’s experience resonates off the screen and you can feel it. I don’t think the show would work if you tried to do too many things to too many people. The fact that like, I agree, it’s like a little uncomfortably sexual a lot. But I think that maybe Ramy is just uncomfortably sexual. Telling that truth in the story is what makes the story work. He wrote and directed this episode and I think that it feels so innately personal for that reason and because he’s taking those risks. I want to dive a little bit into one of those risks and particularly Basil mentioned it earlier, the whole like, Osama bin Laden thing.
Basil: Let’s get into it.
Aditya: Basil, I’m gonna throw it to you. What were you thinking when you saw Osama on screen? Did you find that tool effective? I really did but I want to know what you think.
Basil: This Osama scene fucked me all the way up. It really did. I grew up eating strawberries in Egypt without knowing the history of this. I was thinking about how essentially the U.S. has pillaged Egypt and a lot of other countries, brought all the opportunity to the U.S. and then forced our hand to move here to try to assimilate and then make us feel shitty about it when we can’t all the way assimilate or we don’t have the tools to do it. It would be genius if it wasn’t so horrible. The other thing that I thought about a lot was … I don’t know if y’all have seen Ramy’s stand up? Basically the climax of that was, “9/11 essentially made me a better Muslim. It made me be closer to God and closer to my Muslim faith. Did Osama win?” I think he revisits that in this episode because I remember watching and being like, “Man, Osama’s really got a point here, dude. We’re really made to feel like fools in the U.S. sometimes. We get fucked and Egypt is getting fuckeded by the U.S. Osama is making some really good points.” Then it goes to the whole humanity of Ramy’s friend’s mom. I can’t remember the friend’s name right now who died and you kind of end up with not a full answer of how Ramy feels. He’s just like, “I’m not a killer,” but he’s still grappling with a lot of these things. I’m still grappling with those things because I’m not even Muslim. But do I think Osama kinda had a point? I am not trying to create a political firestorm for you, Aditya. Nader, I’m sure you have a ton of feelings about it but I can go on for like a day and a half about the Osama scene. It is banana land.
Nader: Yeah. Well, to clarify, you meant Osama in the scene was making some points, right Basil?
Basil: Right.
Aditya: Just in case security is listening.
Basil: I don’t know man. I’ve had a lot of time to really radicalize during corona, so.
Nader: The scene with Osama is unreal. I remember I texted Basil right after I watched it. I was like, “I’m gonna remember this scene probably forever.” It is very eloquent, what’s going on. He is making a lot of points and he’s speaking a lot of truth. For the first maybe, let’s say 70 to 80% of that. It’s only when the heel turn happens where it turns vengeful and violent that Ramy goes, “Oh no, I have to distance myself from that.” He can empathize with the part of the conversation that’s about Egypt and about the exploitation of Egypt. He understands that but Ramy as an Egyptian American, the cultural capital of America — and once that gets attacked Ramy is like, “No.” To me, that’s Ramy succumbing to the same kind of consumerism that Osama is lamenting. That American idea of you just want your strawberries. Ramy gets out of this difficult moral dilemma not by dealing with it but by having the fantasy of the American woman on the magazine in his room. That allows him to literally get off right and to escape the situation via climax.
It is wild, because he gives you the dilemma. Then I think, consciously, there’s no solution there. Ramy detaches. Ramy gets distracted. Ramy finds a way to cope. I think what that is is the same thing that we see when Ramy goes to Egypt. The disconnect between Ramy thinking about Egypt, being a diaspora kid. To be an immigrant is to kind of be constantly nostalgic for something that may not even really exist. He’s constantly romanticizing it. The consequences are that the way that he sticks up for his beliefs, the way that he stands by his beliefs, is so different from somebody who’s Egyptian or who was actually living in Egypt. Someone who’s actually living in the Middle East and has lived experience of dealing with war, dealing with the consequences of American imperialism. Very directly, you have to confront your own identity, because it’s built on sand. It’s built on something that’s not sturdy, it’s not there. It kind of upends the whole thing, which is such an interesting theme that I feel the show keeps coming back to.
Aditya: Well, it’s that thing you said Nader, there are two lines in there that are really poetic. One was like, “your perception is built on sand,” which I think is really great. I also think the other thing is, you kind of set this nostalgia for a place that may not exist. I think for me, it’s like nostalgia for a place I’ve never really known. It’s like I have nostalgia for the India of Bollywood movies. The India of my parents’ pictures. I feel differently now having lived there for five months. Before I moved there, I think I had imagined India this really particular way and I had a nostalgia and longing for that. Then moving there, now I have different nostalgia and different memories, but I feel like they’re much more rooted and grounded in what the actuality of being an Indian person is.
To Basil’s point, I was in India during a time of political turmoil. Muslim registration like CIA, all these things that were happening, the Kashmir issue is flaring up again. It’s almost like going out there and meeting people there during that time. You would think that it would be a thing on people’s minds. But in reality, it’s the equivalent of going to a party with people and trying to bring up George Floyd. It’s just like, it’s not going to happen. People are like, “No, I know it sucks. What can we do about it? “Let’s post Instagram pictures about like, ‘Fuck Modi’.” Let’s do all this stuff. In reality, we’re not gonna engage with the issue. This is like a whole separate thing, but we are much more radicalized about issues in the old world than we are about issues in the new world. To Ramy’s point about the revolution he is like, “The revolution guys! The revolution,” and they’re like, “No, we’re living the revolution.” It sucks to be there.
Nader, we did Debate in high school and I remember in particular researching things like [muffled] or researching for debates we used to have in international relations. I radicalized myself in the way that Osama in this episode attempts to radicalize me. I’m like, “Yo, fuck the U.S. Fuck colonialism. Fuck all of this. I’m gonna make arguments about how the U.S. has no moral jurisdiction to be working internationally in the world.” All these things that Osama kind of says to Ramy, and it’s like, I don’t know that people who do not occupy both those worlds could ever have that radicalization. I think it always feels weird to me when like a white person who spent generations here is like, “Yo, fuck U.S. colonialism.” I’m like, “Yeah, brother, but like, why?”
Basil: It is an integral part of your identity, so.
Aditya: When you go abroad again, and you try to espouse that stuff. The people in India that I know are obsessed with the NBA and blasting Juice WRLD. They are still loving that American cultural soft power. Probably wouldn’t … At least in India, because it has been relatively untouched by American imperialism. They’re not British. They wouldn’t trade the American influence, even though I think we as people who are not actually living there are like, “Yo, get out of our homeland. America, stay here. India, do India things so that India can be Bollywood, and America can be like the way that I know America now.” But these things are becoming unmistakably interlinked and we’re getting Bollywood episodes of American musical television. We’re getting Ramy on TV, Egyptian restaurants in every corner and naan at Trader Joe’s, like we’re getting all of these things. It’s like a really unmistakable melt that goes both ways.
Nader: I felt like the Egypt episodes at the end of the season were a really good complement to the 9/11 episode. The whole idea of when you discover the truth about American history and American imperialism, it feels like this kind of dirty little secret.You are radicalized, and you’re radicalized by your environment and that kind of thing. Then it doesn’t neatly translate when you go abroad. I remember, his cousin at one point said … He’s talking about all the things that they’re going through and the revolution. When he’s talking with his family and Ramy, he says, “Don’t bother talking politics with this generation. This entire generation suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. They love this shit.” That is extremely, extremely resonant. Because I think we share more with the youth in our homeland than the older generation. It’s almost like we’re connected by that line of call it activism, call it sort of progressivism, whatever it is. Just that belief in freedom from oppression and empire. You’re dealing with family members who have never had to confront the contradiction. It’s like living here, having a fantasy of Egypt and then never going there. I could just live out my fantasy my entire life and build all new facets to this fantasy and it gets more and more convoluted as the time goes on. Until you kind of confront the incongruity.
Aditya: Our radicalism is influenced and driven by this really perverse pleasure almost that we take and align with the underdog in the U.S. It’s like we say POC, when really we should mean like Black Indigenous, because we as POC have a much different experience than the Black people in this country. I think we as immigrant children like to be like, “Yo, we’re one of the people fighting the system.” That radicalizes us, especially if the three of us were politically engaged, think about these things often and engage with the media in this way. I had this really reckoning that I have not fully processed or I guess really fully had about my family in India. My grandparents aren’t conservative. They are not necessarily voting BJP and trying to get the Muslims out. They are like your well-meaning liberal white people here. They’ve got their setup, they’re chillin, they don’t deal with the everyday realities of the poverty and the famine in India. They don’t have to deal with the political indignities of being Muslim, being sick or living in Kashmir. They’re super comfortable.
You can see why then that the people that we know in the homeland are not radicalized for the same reason that our friends growing up in Minneapolis, Dallas or Kansas City weren’t radicalized because they have it all. It’s so weird to think about coming from a place where we almost were like that. Not every immigrant, Middle Eastern immigrant or Indian immigrant is like this. I think for us it’s like, we have this comfortable life when we go back there, and then coming here and being radicalized by the notion that there’s unfairness being heaped upon our relatives there. When in reality, my family at least is getting the positive cultural impact of music, film, sport, and literature. Like you said Nader, really in congress with the way that we feel about American imperialism and the way that we feel about about class discrimination, racial discrimination and injustice. It’s something that this Osama Bin Laden, to drive back to that initial conversation starter, really drove me down.
Basil: We kind of go to the homeland or however you want to say it and kind of expect an entire country of allies that were essentially fighting on behalf of. Our Egyptian or Indian brothers and sisters. Then we go and we realize that they are actually trying to subvert us and trying to undermine us. It’s as easy as hearing Ramy’s aunt talk about Susan Sarandon behead Trump, “Susan Sarandon loves Trump. I love Susan Sarandon. Am I going to disagree with Susan Sarandon?” You almost feel like because you see both of these cultures in completely different lights, you just realize that the things that you’re coping with politically and identity-wise on a day to day basis are really not the same things that go on in Egypt. Like what Nader said, it’s a foundation of sand. You cling to an idea of a place that you do not know and it’s very destabilizing.
Nader: I just wanted to point out that the experience of the white liberal and the person living in the homeland are super connected. I think the one distinction worth making is, one of them is truly like a colonizer’s mindset and one of them is called perspective of the colonized. It’s so funny how that plays out in such a similar way. I think it’s still a distinction worth making. I’m on the side of the colonized. You are very much explaining and justifying why you exist the way that you do. You’ve created all these social, cultural and political reasons to ally with the colonizer, because it gives you capital. It gives you a semblance that things are actually okay. Because if you were to deal with the actual sort of trauma of colonization, it’s such a big can of worms.
The other thing that I wanted to touch on, because the concept that the immigrant experience is filled with indignity, shame and humiliation. We touched on that a little bit, but what I found is that the show is making commentary that being a displaced person, you’re dealing with the image of yourself being brought down or dealing with people who don’t see you for who you are, Especially post-9/11 with Farouk putting up the the flag and all that. Also, you see throughout the episode Ramy’s mom, Maysa, being super lonely and almost embarrassingly earnest in the way that she tries to connect with other people. She can’t do that because she has that cultural barrier.
I felt so sad watching that because it’s the existence of so many people. I would say a silent majority of immigrants who when they come here and maybe they’re able to survive, but they’re not able to thrive beyond that initial stage of just like, “We’re living in this country and we’re doing okay.” As a child of immigrants, you inherit so much of that humiliation. You inherit that shame. If anything, our feisty reaction to the world is almost a reaction to that. It’s a reaction to our parents having to suffer the indignity of being a displaced person.
Basil: I wanted to also talk a little bit about some of the other characters Nader that you brought up. The episodes with the mom hit home really, really hard. I think a lot of immigrant women go through that experience of feeling not understood, especially once they kind of are relegated to being stay at home moms in a country that they don’t know with people that they don’t understand on pretty fundamental levels. It reminded me a lot of my mom and the loneliness she feels. I think a lot of that has been really exacerbated by coronavirus and feeling like she doesn’t know how to handle the situation and she doesn’t have a support system to deal with a lot of this stuff is pretty gutting.
I think that similarly, the Dena episodes, as someone who has has a younger sister who has had to deal with a lot of the misogyny of Egypt and a lot of the misogyny of our family that still lives in Egypt and the way that women are typically portrayed and thought of was really interesting. I had a lot of long conversations with my sister Maxine about the way that, when we were growing up, I experienced a lot of favoritism being the male of the family that I didn’t really realize. You see that in these episodes and it’s not fully acknowledged in a way that I think is really interesting. The show is from Ramy’s vantage point to an extent. He puts the burden on the viewer to really parse that misogyny by yourself, which is what I had to do in my own life as an Egyptian American man with a sister and a mother, not really realizing that a lot of those things existed until later in life and having to really confront them with my sister and feel the shame of not realizing it in the moment.
Aditya: I say my parents are super liberal and super Western. I did not have that many restrictions growing up as compared to my other immigrant child friends. I wonder if part of that was driven by the fact that it’s me and a brother. I’m glad you brought that up because I think that there are so many … Hala is a good example of a movie that’s come out recently in the last year that focuses on a Muslim girl growing up in the U.S. and dealing with that. She’s Pakistani, but I think that there’s overlap with Egyptian culture and with Indian culture there. I hope we get to see more of that about perspective.
Nader: Just to expand on that, Basil, I definitely agree with the sentiment of wanting to see more stories about the other kind of characters. I think the starting point when you talk about what’s post-Ramy. Post Ramy is great. We have opened the floodgates and what else can we do now? What other stories can we tell? What other perspectives can we get? I think the show is at its best when it’s not focused on Ramy. Not even just from the character perspective, but even like some of the best episodes, like the 9/11 episode. It’s decentering Ramy. He’s there. But it’s about the larger experience. I think, whether that’s in terms of content or in terms of character, the episodes that focus on things beyond Ramy to me are when the show really shines.
Aditya: I’m glad you brought up all that to transition into what I think will be our final question, because the question I end every episode with is how it affects your art. And we already talked about that a bit, which I’m glad about. The question I have for the both of you is, what do you think the lasting legacy of Ramy is? Not just this episode, but like Ramy as a TV show. What do you hope it might be?
Basil: I have to admit that when you both were talking about the stakes of Ramy earlier, I got chills, because you really realize the risk of putting a 27-year-old pretty unknown Egyptian kid, essentially in charge of this next decade or so of Egyptian American content. Like I said earlier, I really hope that this allows a lot of female voices, a lot of new diverse voices, I’d love to see that. Ramy kind of tackles this a little bit. But I’d love to talk more about Black Arabs, the experience of being a Black Arab and anti-Blackness in the Arab world. Getting these nuanced, complex understandings of the American experience and the American immigrant experience is sacred to me.
Nader: I want to add that the legacy of Ramy for me goes back to the journey I started on with this podcast episode, which is trying to research and trying to recall when I felt represented in the media, and that for me was a really cool experience. But ultimately, the outcome is I’ve found bits and pieces of myself in a lot of different media. I’ve never seen my actual experience on screen. What I really hope the lasting legacy of Ramy is that background is a given and that having this in the culture is going to allow us to kind of go even further. I hope that it’s not a one off. I hope that it’s not relegated just to the actors on the show. I hope that it’s something that actually translates to other creators that look like us, that talk like us, that come from the same background. This is something I didn’t realize that I actually liked about the legacy of Ramy but actually through talking through this episode. I think the unlikeability of Ramy, I think is going to be one of the biggest lasting legacies of this show.
It’s something that all my friends talk about. It’s such a big centerpiece when talking about this show. It’s hard to avoid it for a show, like I said, that is so worth it. So worth watching. So worth talking about x, y, z. It has such an unlikable protagonist. What an interesting contradiction and what a fruitful place to start a conversation. I actually think that the way that Ramy as a protagonist will open up the floodgates for other more diverse kinds of leading men, leading women, leading nonbinary people. Their experience can be as complex and as contradictory as Ramy’s. We’re going to start to be able to explore that now that we have the baseline and a common language. I’m really excited about that, the sky’s the limit.
Aditya: Thank you guys so much for being on the show. Really appreciate it.
Basil: This was awesome.
Nader: Yeah, thank you very much.
Aditya: You’ve been listening to Token Theatre, a podcast or representation on film. We are proud to be part of Mediaversityreviews.com, a website dedicated to film criticism that takes diversity into account. Today’s guests are Nader Helmy and Basil Seif. You can find Nader on Instagram (@imartsy) and Basil (@add_some_basil). We spoke about season one episode four of Ramy entitled Strawberries which is now streaming on Hulu. My name is Aditya Joshi (@aditya.mov) on Instagram. Our producer is Amanda Llewellyn.Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll catch you next week for the season finale of Token Theatre.
Mediaversity Reviews is a project that grades TV & films on gender, race, LGBTQ, disability, and more. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to join the conversation!
