Tracing the lines of identity

Identity is not a singular concept, no matter how much we might wish it to be. It is fluid, porous, and contradictory. I have often wondered how much of it we choose for ourselves, and how much is shaped by the world around us. The assumptions of others, the labels we are given, the places we come from. For me, identity has always been a question without an easy answer. I was born in Gibraltar to a Moroccan mother and an English father, and my early life was a collision of cultures, languages, and expectations. I never felt like I fully belonged to either side.

My father left when I was too young to remember, and I grew up without him in South London, raised by my mother in a quiet kind of isolation. We were Muslim, but not part of a larger Muslim community. We practised, but quietly, without the kind of communal rituals that anchor so many. We did not attend mosque. We did not have many Moroccan connections in London. It often felt like we were just floating, a small family unit adrift in the vast multicultural sea of South London, unnoticed, blending in. But can you truly blend in when the core of who you are is scattered across different worlds, each pulling you in a different direction?

I felt this most acutely in Morocco, where we were labelled "Nus Nus" (half and half). Not fully Moroccan, not fully anything. My inability to speak Arabic fluently marked me as an outsider, even in my mother’s homeland. I remember the stares, the comparisons between me and my brother: "The younger one does not look Moroccan." Those words cut deeply. What does it mean to belong to a place when you do not look like it? When your skin, your features, do not reflect the identity that you carry inside?

In Morocco, I felt the weight of these contradictions. I wanted to fit in, to disappear into the cultural fabric, but I was always reminded of my difference. My skin was too light, my Arabic too clumsy. The culture that should have been mine always felt just out of reach, like a mirage on the horizon, slipping away the closer I approached. I wanted to be Moroccan, fully and unquestionably. But what does that even mean? Is it language? Blood? Appearance? A feeling? The older I get, the more I realise how these questions linger unanswered.

In London, the question of belonging was different. Here, my mixed identity became invisible. I was spared the direct racism that my mother faced regularly. I remember being on the bus with her when a stranger admonished her for speaking Arabic, telling her she should speak English because "we are in England." Her accent, her appearance, her presence marked her as foreign. She was always treated as other, an intruder in the place she called home. I would watch these encounters unfold, always painfully aware that they were not directed at me. Why was my mother seen as the outsider when I was not? Was it because I looked English? Was it because I could pass unnoticed, while she could not?

This is the strange privilege of being "white passing" with an ethnic parent. I could slip through the cracks, avoiding the direct gaze of racism, while the people closest to me bore the full weight of it. But that privilege comes with a strange guilt.

“Go back to your own fucking country."

A neighbour spat these words at my mother one day, his voice seething with entitlement and disdain. And yet, no one ever told me to go back. I was spared, even though I shared her heritage. I began to understand how much of our identity is shaped by the way we are seen by others.

It became even more apparent when I lived in Paris, where people spoke openly about "Muslims" and "Arabs" in front of me, not realising I was both. The assumptions about who I was, based solely on my appearance, created these strange moments of revelation. When I would say, "I am Muslim and part Moroccan," there was always a moment of panic, an awkward backtrack as they tried to reconcile the image they had with the reality. It is in these moments that I began to wonder: How often do we construct identities for others based on our own biases? How often do we flatten entire cultures, entire people, into crude caricatures, never bothering to look beyond the surface?

This is why the word "integration" triggers such a visceral response in me. It has become a kind of code, used not to welcome or embrace, but to demand assimilation. When people speak of "integration," what they often mean is erasure. They mean that Muslims, people of colour, immigrants, must conform to a set of expectations that others are never asked to meet. But integration into what? Whose idea of belonging? Is it possible to integrate while holding on to the nuances of who you are? Or does integration always come at the cost of something else, something vital?

These questions have stayed with me. As I developed my first screenplay, Beneath a Mother’s Feet, I found myself returning to these ideas. My script was shaped by the sensory memories of my childhood: Food, smells, textures, the small, everyday details that ground us in who we are. A Script Editor I worked with recommended The Skin of the Film by Laura Marks, a book that explored intercultural cinema and the ways we experience identity through the senses. Reading it felt like a revelation. I began to realise that my fascination with these sensory details was a way of making sense of my own fractured identity. The smell of lamb tagine, the way my mother chopped onions for shlada, the feel of rubber slippers on tiled floors, these were the things that made me feel Moroccan, even when the larger culture told me I was not.

In the end, identity is not something you can pin down. It shifts, it changes. It is made up of memories, of senses, of the ways we experience the world. I am both Moroccan and English, both insider and outsider, both Muslim and white passing. I am all of these things, and I am none of them entirely. And maybe that is okay. Maybe the act of trying to belong is less about finding a place to fit and more about making peace with the spaces in between.

How do we hold on to these contradictions? How do we make sense of an identity that is never fixed, always shifting? Perhaps the answer is in the details, in the sensory fragments that tether us to something deeper, something more essential. Perhaps it is in the food we eat, the language we speak, the stories we tell. Perhaps it is in the quiet moments, when no one is watching, when we are simply ourselves.