Sports
Yes, come for Qatar but come for everyone else too
“When I get older, I will be stronger, they call me freedom, just like the waving flag” – Wavin’ Flag, K’naan
Believe it or not, it was the culture – the songs, the banters, the colorful jerseys – and not the play itself that got me into the World Cup. At the time, South Africa was hosting, vuvuzelas were in the air, and Pan-Africanism was in its peak shape. Fourteen-year-old me felt alive by the globally felt 2010 S/A-based FIFA world cup ambience for the first time since I had my heart broken by a boy I honestly didn’t care for but whose admiration made me feel like a kween. Then came the unflattering defeat of the Super Eagles by the Argentinian team in a match that was ours for the taking.
The Nigerian men’s team was in a tie with Messi and his rowdy gang; the match was nearing its end, one more minute and the final whistle would be blown. But by some stroke of misfortune, Messi or one of dem Argentinians scored within the space of that one minute. We could have gone on to the next stage and ended our jinxed soccer affair with the Albicelestes if we had held on for that one minute and secured the 1-1 position. I remember standing in the open space of our compound and crying silently, tears and mucus coming out of my face as my mom watched on in the background with pity in her eyes. She knew I was a fragile being, easily susceptible to tears and drama, but she couldn’t understand how, being a girl, I had chosen to dabble in the hypertensive pastime of men. That day, as I silently wept with my mom looking on, I vowed that I would pay no more heed to the World Cup. In keeping with my vow, I turned my attention instead to the UEFA, the English Premier League, La Liga, and even the very niche Bundesliga. Of course, those were still as hypertensive to watch and process but I had little national and ethnic attachment to the players of my favorite teams at the time – Manchester United, Manchester City, and Bayern Munich – so even though I cheered them on, I was not emotionally provoked to the point to tears when they lost matches.
My interest in the FIFA World Cup has been reignited due to the current one going on in Qatar and, again, the reason for my interest has nothing to do with the played matches themselves. It is because of the culture that is being built around the games and their spectators. For this World Cup, it is not all vuvuzelas, African-ish chants, competition about which jersey stands out etc., it is headscarves, music festivals with an influx of African musicians, and ethical controversies. While the bribery of FIFA as well as the overlabor and underpayment of migrant workers are high on the chart of controversies that Qatar has been held up to, the one that has made it to the headlines the most and Twitter as well as the value system and anti-LGBTQ firewalls erected in the nation, even for visiting soccer fans and footballers. One recent incident that has sparked a lot of outbursts is encapsulated in the tweets below:
Credits for Photos: Twitter (usernames included in the captions)
The journalist’s initial tweet about being initially denied into the stadium because of his rainbow t-shirt was followed by a lot of comments condemning the journalist first-named Grant for not being respectful and for being a representative of the Euro-centric double standard displayed by America and European nations who take a moral high ground in the Global South when they have a plethora of societal issues to fix in other ivory towered countries. I agree with this argument, especially considering the level of blissful ignorance or fast-paced forgetfulness that the world displays at the violence happening in American and European societies while they, on the other hand, cover global atrocities with the energy of cheetahs running towards their ostrich preys. It is worth noting, in fact, that two days after the whole debacle with the journalist in Qatar, a Walmart employee in Virginia, US, killed 6 of his co-workers and injured another 6 (Yan et al.). Outside the national space, the news about the journalist has gained more momentum than this yet-another show of white-man-gun-power.
I remember talking about this imbalance of media reportage with a friend at the Doha airport. I had gone on about how the series of injustices in the Middle East are internationally vilified, portrayed as religious extremism and national bigotry at its finest while western societies get a pass for being progressive liberals despite the regular incidents of gun-shooting, religiously motivated assaults, racist treatments of minorities, anti-LGBTQ violence, etc. that take place in these parts of the world. This friend had steadily countered my opinion with the claim that the Middle East is unabashedly open and comfortable in its injustices while the west makes effort to liberalize its structures. I remember thinking to myself after hearing my beloved friend talk, “Open or not open, comfortable or not comfortable, liberal or not liberal, shouldn’t they both be held to the same measure of accountability anytime shit goes down in their places?” Shouldn’t the death of George Floyd in America have led to a level of media outburst that produce some real structural changes to gun policies just as the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran led to a global crackdown and caused the government, however conservative and religiously extremist it is, to shut down the ‘morality police’?
I understand that nothing is ever so simple so I will not try to get at the heart of this hegemonically construed nature of presenting and framing violence and injustices in the awkwardly polarized settings of the Global North and the Global South. Instead, I will hinge a bit on how the anti-LGBTQ actions in Qatar during the ongoing World Cup reveal the absolute inability to separate one form of oppression from another. Just as the dilemmic situation I have painted above shows, the Qatari government and people in maintaining a religiously and ethnically based value system have committed several levels of oppressive actions against the queer community, the migrant folks, and people of other racial and ethnic orientations. In turn, western nations in condemning the actions of the Qataris and trying to take the moral high ground have exposed their own racist, colonial, and capitalistic atrocities. It has also inadvertently (or even consciously) re-enacted ethnic and religious discrimination against Middle Easterners. No one on any side of the divide is justifiable or worth defending, because, as it stands, oppression exists on both sides.
This brings to mind Janet Mock’s stance on queer liberation in her book Redefining Realness. Although the book was dedicated to documenting her journey to being a transgender woman, she explicitly notes that the oppressions she faced on her path to womanhood, identity, and love corresponded with the layered existence she possesses. She, being Hawaiian, black, born to a religious, conservative family, plunged into a diversely configured city like New York, a big believer of vanilla love, an aficionado of fashion and flamboyance, an ambitious careerist, a public figure, etc., could not experience transgender-based oppression outside of these other contexts of existence wrapped around her. Even more, she addresses the transgender exceptionalism and how it is the very privileges she enjoys for being “educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative” has removed her from the community she seeks to be part of and to protect from racial and queer oppressions (Mock). In the introduction of her phenomenal book, she says, “being exceptional isn’t revolutionary, it’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community?” ((Mock). However, the fact that Mock solidarizes with her community in Hawaii and the oppression they had been through at the hands of colonizers and slave empires does not make her overlook the oppression meted against her and her sistas just because of their gender (and sexual) orientations.
Mock’s ethos of critical solidarity goes to show that there is no half-and-half with oppression or the work that needs to be done to get rid of it. To create a value system that is exclusionary in any form or shape is to create space for oppression, ostracization, bias, prejudices, discrimination, and violence. On the flip side, to criticize an oppressive system without tackling the other oppressive layers on which it is founded, even if it means coming at the nations that are doing the criticism in the first place will never amount to anything. In short, come hard for Qatar but also come for America, France, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Finland where patriarchy co-exists with progressiveness, etc. But yes, come for Qatar, come for Qatar, and do not be lenient just because of the oppressions and imperialism they have faced in the past, and still face now. But also, do not come for the country with the subconscious aim to compare them to superior European and American liberal, moral, or ‘tolerant’ standards because there are no standards, no yardsticks, no moral high grounds. There is oppression everywhere every time.
I would like to express the rest of my thoughts about this Mock-inspired rant on the events at the 2022 Qatar-based World Cup in pictures.
Picture the many marginal representations here: He is Italian wearing a jersey with SAVE UKRAINE in front and RESPECT FOR IRANIAN WOMEN at the back and carrying a transgender-inclusive rainbow flag across the field in Qatar. The semiotic significance of this is mind-blowing.
Multiplicities need not be contradictions: You can be Qatari and religious and still be gay as fuck. You can be Nigerian like me, be Christian, and choose to unlearn the homophobia taught by the church. The myth that one’s ethnic, cultural, or religious affiliation prevents one from fully embracing other identities is in the process of being debunked, as proven by Nasser Mohammad.
Epic near kisses at the World Cup: @neche_obor’s captions say it all. Our desire to protest any kind of oppression sharpens our sensibilities to liberatory practices that we have so long taken for granted.