Shaymaa: The fraught relationship between daughter and immigrant mother

Words by Aya Mohamed

How would you describe your relationship with your mother? I honestly have a pretty amazing relationship with my mom at the moment, but watching Shaymaa, a lot of past negative emotions resurfaced.

It reminded me of how volatile her life is and how one day she will not be here. Even if I do know that already. It’s not a movie about loss or grief. It doesn’t give you a solution or a reason. It just describes what most of us go through.

“I miss you mom

I miss the caresses of your gentle hands on me

Life is so cruel without you”

I believe that in immigrant families we get a sense of guilt when we think about this relationship. We feel as if we are supposed to be a certain way as if their love is conditional.

The mother-daughter relationship is such a specific bond that starts even before our birth. For example, women are born with a specific number of eggs in their ovaries, this number can only decline and not increase. This means that when a woman is pregnant with a baby girl, that girl already has those eggs in her body that may one day become a human. Basically, as a little eggs, we were already connected to our mothers and grandmothers.

A study has shown how our bodies hold in trauma, and how this trauma can be passed down generation after generation. And I definitely feel like it is related to the way our bodies have been bonded.

They try to protect us from experiencing that same trauma without understanding that we have a different set of values. When you grow up in a country different from the of one your parents a cultural clash happens. Even if they have always done their best to teach you their traditions. Unfortunately what they call home is a place you never experienced.

If you live in the western world most probably you live in an individualistic society, where the “me, myself and I” is put on top of everything while our mothers come from a collective society and have been raised with the purpose of being useful to the community... family comes before anything even yourself. And that is where the guilt starts.

“I feel you’re angry at me

even if you don’t want me to see it

I hope you’ll forgive me

because I’ll never be who you want me to be”

To be honest with you the first time I watched Shaymaa before they launched it I ended up crying for a good half an hour. “Why am I crying?” I asked myself.

In the movie, there is a beautiful painting of a mother with a baby wrapped up in her arms. I feel like all our moms looked at us in that way... with hope and joy, thinking of a beautiful future for and all the amazing things we will achieve... projecting their dreams onto someone that will grow to have their own.

“I reminisce about the times I told you what I wanted to do in life

And you used to tell me: “it’s a shame, my daughter!”

I feel you’re still by my side

I hope you’ll forgive me.”

The Arab word used for shame is 3eb, which means “inappropriate” or “not acceptable”. It’s a very loaded word. It carries so much misogyny and sexism.

Shaymaa can be any girl that grew up constantly hearing the word “3eb” about anything she did. Her clothes, her make-up, her actions, her non-actions, her freedom...

I have family and friends that explain this relationship with their mother as “not knowing how to make her happy because it feels like everything you do is wrong, and her idea of what’s right is so far from how you see your own life. “

It’s hard to show them that they can trust our way of life and that we know what we are doing.

I believe it is difficult for our parents to understand that we are our own people, with our own dreams, separated from them and that they will have to accept that we will sometimes make choices that they will not approve of.

Follow Aya here.