With my definitions of Ahmed and Nadia, race is partly the issue because Ahmed, through his own behaviour and the distorting media lens, has been portrayed, fictionalised, characterised as the foreigner. Nadia’s foreignness is all but forgotten as the others try to forget she’s actually a transexoglodyte.
Which would suggest that, in terms of they way they're publicly presented and/or consumed, Big Brother contestants can only define themselves through a single characteristic, or 'gimmick'. Ahmed's archetype is The Foreigner; Nadia's is The (Covert) Transsexual.
Okay, I'm with you so far. What I'm finding difficult to see is how this maps onto Ahmed's specific, individual behaviour being, underneath it all, no worse than Nadia's. Are you suggesting that Nadia repeatedly jeopardised the task by feigning illness, or that Ahmed went around apologetically bridge-building after his outbursts - and Channel 4 airbrushed these modifying factors out?
In my office for example, there is real hatred of Ahmed – someone even said it was outrageous that no producers stepped in to stop him ‘beheading’ the statue considering what was going in the world right now. (for some reason the same person couldn’t fathom that perhaps BB is out of order for creating master/servant guard/prisoner scenarios considering the global ‘situation’ the noo)
Fair enough. In your office, people hate him because he 'insensitively' beheaded a statue - and yeah, that's clearly a case of people superimposing wider prejudices (Muslims Are Barbaric) onto the archetypal Foreigner.
I don't think that fully explains the antipathy toward him. In my office, there's very real contempt for him as a result of his immediate readiness to down tools and say a big 'fuck you' to the entire team, because he couldn't hack being in a subordinate position (although he's apparently happy enough being in a subordinate position to 'authentic' Stupid Straight Men) - and his adherence to a pathetically hypochondrial 'sick role' when it was convincing no-one.
I think there is a connection between his crappy behaviour and the overlaying of stereotypical prejudices: surfing the BB chatrooms, there are plenty of sweepingly right-wing statements on how They come over Here and expect to be carried by the rest of society. Ahmed's trashing of the task certainly fed into those prejudices. I think similar prejudices lurk just beneath the surface in many, and Ahmed's behaviour is likely to invoke a seam of hatred. I do feel, however, that this doesn't lessen the degree to which he is responsible for his own utter selfishness within the house.
It's probably his stupidly misguided sense of pride that's the cherry: he equates shouting (women and queers) down with "straight-talking", and lovingly nurses the most superficial of grudges. He seems unable to look beyond the surface of a disagreement, merely registering that the individual who disagreed with him = bad, and he never gets any support within the house.
And yeah, some degree of recognition that he's capable of acting badly himself would be nice. Just once. |