Role Models

“Role Models is an autobiographical essay and chapter from a longer work called My Father Doesn’t Smile. It is part male dissection table and an ongoing experiment in tracing masculinity through silence, failure, and badly timed jokes. It began as a literary project about my father’s quiet influence on me but turned into a sociological safari through Arab manhood: men who love, ghost, overthink, and quote films on dating apps.

At its core, it’s a search for a new language for men, one that can hold both fragility and pride without sounding like a TED Talk. I write about awkwardness, fatherhood, friendship, and the eternal struggle of Arab men trying to ‘open up’ while still pretending not to care.

I’m now looking to collaborate with artists, filmmakers, illustrators, and sound designers who want to stretch this project beyond the page. Think hybrid essays, short video pieces, or even meme-level philosophical meditations on manhood.

If you’ve ever tried to explain your feelings to a man and failed miserably, you are one click away from submitting the application to collaborate on this.”

Email address: ahmadnageeb.k@gmail.com
Phone number: +201015517261

My cousin Hamasa and I were once trying to draw a pie chart of the reasons behind his anxiety. We both agreed that our uncle Mostafa would take the largest slice. Maybe seventy percent, if we were being generous. The man was practically a one-man trauma factory.

Mostafa wasn’t just any uncle. He was the family’s longest-running horror franchise. He arrived late to the family, was a surprise baby to my grandparents, and then grew up surrounded by women who adored him too much, too early. When my mother and aunt got married, he treated their husbands like kidnappers who had stolen his two favorite toys. It makes sense in hindsight, our family doesn’t really produce villains; we just spoil men until they turn into one.

My mother always said he was a “sensitive child.” In Egyptian families, that’s a polite way of saying psychopath in progress. The story everyone tells is that at my mother’s engagement party, little Mostafa, six years old, full suit, shiny shoes, sat in my father’s chair beside the bride and refused to move. Everyone laughed. I don’t think that this was the first time someone mistook control for charm in this family.

By the time I was born, Mostafa had already perfected the art of psychological warfare. He’d steal my toys and say it was “for my own good,” like some twisted life coach. When I cried, my mother would just sigh, “You know how your uncle is, I told you not to bring them here,” she’d say with the same tone people use when it rains during a picnic.

My grandmother’s house smelled like cardamom, boiled herbs, and unresolved issues. She led a mosque circle that was less about religion and more like a rural version of group therapy. They’d talk about God, yes, but also about whose son’s hernia operation went wrong and whose cousin was cursed with a missing testicle. I learned more about anatomy from that mosque than from school.

Mostafa hated those gatherings. He hated noise, women, and anything that reminded him of not being in charge. He wasn’t religious, but he ran the house like a temple where he was both the god and the victim.

Sometimes, when he was in a good mood, he’d let me watch him play video games. I’d get the prestigious role of pressing the “fire” button while he controlled everything else. If I got too excited and asked to play, he’d smirk. That kind of smirk that brands itself into your nervous system and says “Next time.” There was never a next time. 

My cousins had it worse. He once locked them out on the balcony and told them they were orphans now. Another time, he farted, blamed it on one of them, and demanded a confession. “A real man admits his mistakes,” he said, as if flatulence was a moral compass. Egyptians don’t call that mental illness. They call it the devil playing with your head.

Years later, me and Hamasa would still talk about Mostafa like he was a myth, part ogre, part uncle, part unpaid therapist. “You know,” Hamasa said once, “I think he shaped all of us.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Hamasa was five years younger, the family’s youngest and most forgiven. He got away with almost everything. I’d give him ideas and he’d execute them, and I’d get the satisfaction of watching chaos unfold without consequence. When I left Egypt for Vietnam, I realized how much I had been performing for him — the role of the worldly older brother, the one who left. I worried he’d inherit our family’s silence.

He didn’t. Or maybe he did, but he got very skilled at disguising his anxiety into laughter.

When I came back, I saw how close he and my father had become, and I liked it. I liked that my father had finally made a friend I actually knew. Sometimes, though, I was jealous of their ease — the way they laughed, the way my father asked about his short film like it was the most important thing in the world. He never did that for my films, though he once sent me money for a festival ticket from Saigon to Czech. By then, Parkinson’s had already stolen parts of his mind, and I didn’t dare ask him why the sudden interest.

A couple of months after his passing, Hamasa told me about the day they all drove me to the airport. “When we came back,” he said, “your dad was quiet for a while. Then he looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to be your friend now.’”

I wish he had said that to me.

After all, I told myself that I know he loved me more than anything in this world. I just wished he could’ve come back to his old stern self for one moment — so I could scream at him, and confront him, and maybe get the fight we both deserved. Sometimes love just stays unfinished, like sentences he started and never got to finish on his deathbed, and like me telling him that I love him, but never really knowing if it ever made it to the island in his mind that no one but him could sail to.