Tears of the silenced

I met Q when we were coursemates at university together. He was a quiet person who mostly kept to himself, and was quite effeminate.

After many assignment groups, study groups and mamak sessions together, he began to open up to us about his conservative family back home, and their concern that he had never had a girlfriend.

The truth is, he had never found himself attracted to girls. He had plenty of friends who were girls. He just had never felt that romantic chemistry with any of them.

He was shy about his friendship with boys, and mostly kept to a close group of friends whom he trusted.

I graduated early and shortly after, accepted a job posting outstation, losing touch with most of my friends from university, including Q.

It came as a surprise to me to learn years later that Q had attempted suicide several times after his own graduation, with the latest incident seeing him spend two nights in the hospital, in a coma.

After some gentle persuasion, Q shared that he was frustrated by his family’s pressure to get married. They had gone as far as to choose a bride and arrange the wedding dates for him. They told him that it was okay to fall in love after getting married, and that marriage and having a family would set him “straight” where his attractions were concerned.

I know many others who succumbed to social and family pressures and gotten married. Some had even gone ahead and had children. Others, well, did not work out and have ended in painful, yet not unexpected, divorce.

In all of them, I see exhaustion - of having to live up to society’s expectations of how a man or a woman should behave, feel and think, in order to be validated. So many of them live double lives - one that they show to the world, and one that they try so hard to suppress inside.

In all of them, I see an unfulfilled longing - to be loved just the way they are. I think that at our core, we all feel this way. The difference is the things that make us unique - and the sad state of the world where some traits are more acceptable than others.

Unfortunately, this has contributed to the growing number of people within our society suffering from various mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, disassociative disorders and most worrying of all, suicide.

Vilifying them really does not help - not when our country needs Malaysians to flourish to be the best version that they can be, so that they can build our economy and contribute towards a developed nation status.

Having a legal system which functions to suppress and oppress freedom of expression - which impedes people from becoming the best versions of themselves - is counter to this goal.

Surah Al-Israa tells us that every human being is born with dignity [17:70] and should be treated as such. Surah Al-Mulk tells us that “Whether one hides it or says it out aloud, Allah knows what is in every heart” [67:13]. Therefore, to Allah is who we must place our faith and trust.

What are we to do, then? In a narration by Aisha, the Prophet said, “Allah is kind and loves kindness. Allah grants for kindness what is not granted for harshness, and rewards nothing else like it” (Sahih Muslim 2593). In a related narration by Jareer, the Prophet said, “He who is deprived of kindness, is deprived of goodness” (Sahih Muslim 2592).

There needs to be more kindness and understanding in the world. This is the core of who we must be as a society.

Abu Hurairah reported that the Prophet said to his people, “You will not enter Paradise until you believe, and you will not believe until you love each other. Shall I show you something that, if you did, you will love each other? - Spread peace between yourselves” (Sahih Muslim 54).

Today, Q lives overseas. After saving up for several years, he enrolled in a postgraduate course in Europe and has not returned to Malaysia since. We keep in touch via social media and I sometimes see photos of his friends, who are almost always all men, on his Instagram. In the photos, he is smiling. I am glad that he is happy.

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MAJIDAH HASHIM is a human rights defender and a divemaster in training. She can be reached via Twitter at @majidahhashim - Mkini