The wet polyester fabric conforming to my body’s shape is beginning to shift and I can’t do anything about it right now. There’s no time. My tight swimsuit is designed to be a second skin during university swim meets, but sometimes it fails because I’m not a rectangle and the lotion I put on before the meet is slippery on my body after warm-ups. The bottom of my swimsuit is moving, collecting from both ends, shimmying and bundling its way inwards, revealing more of my cheeks. Anticipating the cue from Mr. Starter, I disregard the moving swimsuit fabric to focus on what’s important: getting ready to take my full gargoyle form on the block. Meanwhile, both ends of the fabric continue to wedge into my butt with each tiny movement, like baby seals nestling into their mother’s blubber for warmth. Once both sides are completely strung between my cheeks, they settle in like the rest of my body, bracing for what’s to come. My body and swimsuit are locked in.
“Take your mark,” Mr. Starter says with his humidified mustache pressed against a square, hand-held microphone.
Bending over, I round my back and take my starting position. I curl my brown fingers and neon blue painted tips tightly over the edge of the block, feel excess water droplets dripping off my slimy body, and prepare to quickly plunge myself forward. The crowd behind me sits still, respectfully silencing themselves to intently watch me and my opponents secure for launch between taut, red lane lines. Settling into my proper position, I signal to my upstairs tornado that my body will handle everything from here. Everything is under control. Then, I slightly stiffen up, bracing with thrill and fear, preparing for the surge of icy pool water and adrenaline as soon as I hear the beep.
Wait. You lost focus. Keep thinking about me in my skin-tight swimsuit—its edges now burrowed into my butt. It’s what the crowd is actually thinking about… right? My ass? My body?
I often try to keep the crowd ambiguous at their set distance. But sometimes, scanning too closely forces me to discern human features and make out particular faces. Brown complexion and eyes like mine send a wave of heavy shame through me. Other shades sexualize and minimize, reducing me to just an “exposed body.”
It always bothers me—the crowd’s effortless ability to seamlessly swap opinions, depending on mood or setting, day or decade. To twist and diminish my body, clothed in my competition swimsuit, until I’m no longer a human but just an object, or, worse, a threat. My best races are when the crowd remains a sea of blurred, blank faces, viewing me and evaluating my choices however they please.
My younger self wants to turn around on the blocks and yell, “Forget about what I’m wearing! Watch how fast I can swim!” I desperately hope the crowd will zero in on my powerful breaststroke catch and swift cut as I drive my body forward through the water. But ultimately, I have no control over what they will remember, my swimsuit bundling into my asshole or how quickly I swim one hundred yards of breaststroke. It’s their choice.
Succumbing to the fear and pressure of establishing my worth within their bounds will sink me to the bottom of the pool. I don’t have time for extra drag.
***
Like most kids growing up, I was confused about the world and my place in it. I teeter-tottered between my Palestinian roots and a White label and struggled to make sense of it all. As I grew older, I didn’t see many other brown girls swimming and that pushed me further into a confusing spiral.
“How does your husband allow your daughters to swim?” an Arab mom asked mine in the stands during a swim practice when I was ten years old, peering down at my sister and I in our swimsuits.
My ten-year-old body, in a swimsuit. At that age, I had such a primeval understanding and innocent lack of awareness of my young body. I was taking up space but didn’t realize the impact of that, or that it would come with a deadline. I didn’t understand the implications that would arise when my brown skin was exposed more than what my regular clothes showed. I just wanted to race other kids, swim breaststroke, and inhale artificial-cheese nachos at swim meets with my cousins.
***
I started swimming when I was six to be like my sister and cousins on the swim team. At my first try-out, to get on the team I had to successfully get myself from one end of the pool to the other—twenty-five yards. I secured my goggles, suctioning them around my eyes so chlorinated water wouldn’t seep in and burn them, and slid myself into the deep end of the pool. My new tie-dye Speedo one-piece was a mix of my favourite colours. When you’re six, a favourite colour is not just a favourite colour. Like choosing the blue piece every time I played a board game, my colourful swimsuit was my guarantee that I would make it to the other end of the pool. It was the edge that gave me giddy confidence.
Pushing off the wall and finding my first breath, I remember seeing my mom. Her cheering, galloping, and waving made it seem like she was performing a dance routine for the people in the stands. She wanted this for me. To give me more opportunities than what she had when she was a kid. My mom signed me up for swimming and gave me her full support.
My dad did the same. By the time I was in high school, we had established a routine of training together. After long days of morning lifts, school, swim practice, dinner, and homework, I would change into shorts and a t-shirt and make my way down to our living room, which doubled as a weight room. There he would coach me and my younger brother, pushing us through lifts, plyometric exercises, and other circuits.
Due to circumstances, both my parents had had their time in athletics cut short. But they encouraged my siblings and me to take our athletics and education as far as we could. They make their decisions as a team, and while I’m incredibly grateful, it digs at me that there are other Arab girls who don’t receive the same support and opportunities. I see the ways our communities hold back and isolate our kids in the name of honour and tradition.
***
“As if I’m not involved in raising my children!” That night, after the Arab mom’s question, we drove home from practice in silence. While I don’t blame the other mother for her question, it did make me aware of what my brown body signified to the world around me.
***
My parents tried to instill a balance between our Arab roots and American living. When my siblings and I were in elementary and middle school, our mom and dad hired an Arabic language tutor who came to our home every Sunday for a few years. Ms. B would spend an hour with each of us, teaching us how to read and write Arabic for forty-five minutes and deen (the Muslim “way of life”) for the last fifteen. I mastered reading and writing but never caught on to actually speaking and understanding the language fluently. I could write and read a whole paragraph but wouldn’t have a clue what it meant without Ms. B’s help.
Having to skip my lessons for swim meets every other weekend probably contributed to that. Ms. B was often angry with me about this. She believed my swimming got in the way of my learning and that it was wrong of me to be doing it anyway.
“Every time you put on a swimsuit, that sin goes on your left shoulder and it will weigh you down on judgement day,” she once told me. I blushed, feeling foggy anger. The word “3ieb” (shame) played in my head, a word that’s been thrown at me before, used indiscriminately against Arab women who confront the latent misogyny in our culture.
Growing up, my parents never imposed a conservative version of Islam upon us. They gave us the freedom to craft and own that part of ourselves as we wished. But was wearing a swimsuit 3ieb? Did I have to choose between being a Muslim and being a swimmer?
Once I got to the collegiate level, I would have nine to ten pool practices every week with two to three weightlifting sessions for the duration of each six-month-long season. That added up to a heavy-ass left shoulder.
***
One off-season Tuesday evening during my freshman year of high school, my club coach pulled me out of practice to discuss my breaststroke flip turn. He had me watch another swimmer and take note of their speed into and off the wall. I struggled with this. I’d often get stuck on the wall, zoning in too hard on each technical step that made up the perfect flip turn. But I knew I needed to hit fast forward on my steps if I wanted to beat my personal best times.
While observing the other swimmer, I noticed a watery-red puddle forming on the pool deck around my soggy feet near my coach’s gym shoes. Panic crescendoed in my chest as I tried to figure out what to do, my eyes making it visible to my coach that my focus was hijacked. He raised his voice a notch in an attempt to bring me back. “Damn it!” I whisper-yelled in my head, hoping my coach wouldn’t look down. It wasn’t the first time my tampon had failed me at swim practice. I quickly shimmied the water with my bare feet, spreading it thin to make the colour disappear.
Tampons and I have a love-hate relationship. While they aren’t always foolproof, they have helped me achieve a college swimming scholarship. The one time they ever truly held me back was my first time trying to put one in at age eleven when I got my period during a swim meet.
“Tell him I can’t swim,” I cried to my older sister, Anisa.
She was nervous because her one-hundred-yard butterfly event was coming up, but patient with me as I panicked over whether I should drop out of the meet or try harder to shove the tampon in. We blocked the bottom of the stall with our swim bags so no one could see my naked body splayed across a Scooby Doo beach towel on the bathroom floor. Anisa talked me through it as I dunked the tampon in our massive Vaseline jar for easier insertion. It wouldn't budge. She tried it herself, coating the tampon in more Vaseline and attempting to insert it for me. But my panic was locking me up; there was no way it was going in. After struggling for half an hour, we called it quits and told my coach to take me out of the meet.
Exhausted and angry from the ordeal, sweat and tears dribbled down my face. I thought about how one of my cousins had not attended this meet because she was on her period. Her mom wouldn’t allow her to wear tampons.
“I don’t get it. Why won’t Auntie just let her use a tampon so she doesn’t miss the meet?” I had asked my mom the night before. Why was this tool—a small disposable wad of cotton with the sole function of absorbing blood, aiding my ability to move freely with no setbacks just as the boys on my team do—shameful and wrong? We just wanted to swim.
My mom’s thorny shrug to my question told me there was no use asking why. This is just the way things are. I knew this was the case for other Arab girls too. They missed meets and practices because their parents believed inserting a tampon into their vagina would be haram and cause them to lose their virginity.
While Arabs have a strong sense of unconditional love and support when it comes to family, an abundance of complexities arises when we let worry, reputation, and outdated tradition get in the way. Of course, it’s not unique to Arab culture; you see it in the western world too. Control and submission are masked—in subtle and overt ways—as protection and respect.
It was bigger than me at that time, my anger and confusion at these oppressive control tactics in the name of honour or reputation.
***
Mr. Starter is holding us a few seconds longer than I would’ve liked. To avoid my legs from shaking, I subtly shift my start position. I tighten my grip on the front edge of the block—that has always made me feel stronger for some reason, as if gripping harder would make my reaction time off the blocks faster, so that as soon as Mr. Starter sends us off, I would push off harder and fly farther than my opponents.
On the blocks, my body and mind are in agreement, and my thoughts are pleasantly random. I’m not drowning in nerves. Instead, I wonder where my family and I will grab dinner after the meet.
***
Swimming is a fiercely mental sport but my mind wasn’t always kind to me. At most practices and meets you’re left alone to your thoughts. Vulnerable silences engulf you underwater as, lap after lap, water rushes past the top of your head, the tip of your nose, over your mouth then shoulders, past your hips and through your legs to the ends of your toes. When negative thoughts would take over at meets, I’d experience heightened anxiety, causing my muscles to lock up, making it feel like I had thirty-pound kettlebells attached to my forearms and ankles. As if something was dragging me to the bottom of the pool, my limbs would get numb and heavy as I tried to frantically keep pace, grasping for control while seconds ticked past a time record I had worked years for. I could never shake the anxiety once it spilled through me.
Learning how to build my mental strength and perform under pressure took time. One of my uncles, a state-level wrestler in high school, taught me how to relax in those high-pressure moments. He showed me how to breathe and trust that my body is capable and knows what it needs to do. Because if my body didn’t communicate nicely with my mind, they would shut each other down. Peak performances occur when my body and mind communicate peacefully.
Breaking streamline to take your first stroke is all about trust, confidence, and belief in your body: that it knows what it's doing, that you know what you're doing, and that you’re going to do it to the best of your ability. I wasn’t going to let the noises and judgements of the outside world get in the way of all the good swimming brought me.
For my mind, the pool became a time to process, grieve, build confidence, tap into pain as fuel, release anger, tune out, spin through scenarios. I would feel both lost and free with myself, in control and completely out of it. Jumping in, I’d turn off the noise and release the craziness building up from life above water.
For my body, the pool became a familiar place to move freely without judgement, harness my independence, reap the fruits of discipline and consistency, respect and accept my battles with control.
Athletes know it best—the secret world you discover when you’re pushed beyond what you believed were your limits. My body and mind working in tandem became my secret world and safe haven beneath the pool surface. I was lucky to discover swimming’s secrets and angry at how I could’ve easily missed out on them.
***
What I am wearing? Am I on my period? That’s beside the point of what I’m here to do, right? These thoughts have been living in me since the Arab mom’s question in the stands, and I struggle to reject them some days. I’ve been conditioned to notice these questions, believe them, and fear discussing them.
My skin-tight swimsuit is serving its purpose. It’s designed to hug my body and cause as little drag as possible. When I’m out there sweeping and pulling my body, technically shaping and shifting my strong muscles, each angle and detail matters so I can move faster and maintain speed. How silly to disregard my athletic ability and focus on my appearance.
***
One Sunday, Ms. B got up to go to the restroom while I continued to work on our lesson. She paused, looking down at her chair.
“Ahhh, oh no!” Her face was flushed, she was embarrassed. A tiny pool of red seeped into the seat cushion.
I assured her that it was okay—we could wash the detachable cushion. Then, I hurried upstairs to my mom’s bathroom to grab her a pad. She thanked me, set the cushion to the side and hurried into the bathroom, telling me to continue writing the paragraph in Arabic. But while she was gone, I couldn't focus.
I pictured the time my watery blood had dribbled down my leg onto the pool deck, and how embarrassed I’d felt when it happened to me. I could empathize with the embarrassment Ms. B was feeling and it made me feel close to her for a second, both of us experiencing this very human moment. Shedding, bleeding. Our bodies are the same, I thought. But I had to come to terms with the fact that she would disagree because of my choice to swim.
***
Steadying my shaky left leg, I exhale quickly out of my mouth, releasing nerves while waiting for Mr. Starter’s cue. Inhaling, I try to pump up my excitement, telling myself the brisk competition pool will help my muscles tap in as soon as I break the surface. “You’re ready to race,” I repeat to myself, building myself up.
Every time I get up on the blocks, I work to resist the 3ieb shadow that creeps over what I’ve built: my broad brown shoulders, my long muscular legs, my resilient mind.
3ieb had put up barriers and threatened to deteriorate the relationship between my mind and body. 3ieb is shame disguised as love. 3ieb would've never let me earn my wins—of being half a second away from an Olympic Trial cut, or of lifting my body above a pull-up bar with a forty-five-pound plate between my legs. Swimming is my mom’s and then my pushback; it is my way of fighting the judgements and limitations placed on girls and women that were seared into my mind at too young an age.
Swimming has allowed me to be free and powerful. I can feel it in my body when I walk onto the pool deck. Focusing on my swimsuit and not my skill? You’re missing the point. An Arab, Muslim girl wearing a swimsuit isn’t haram or 3ieb. It’s powerful.
It’s a “screw you” to the misogyny that continues to grip Arab culture, to the misplaced attention and relentless policing of our bodies and a disregard for our power and achievements, to the anger and confusion I felt too young, to the unfortunate guilt I feel for calling this out and bringing it to the surface, feeling as if the rebellion is more dishonorable than the repression itself. My body in a swimsuit is powerful. I love my body, I’m proud of my body. And the only way our community can change is by replacing 3ieb with love.
Mr. Starter finally presses the button on the side of his hand-held microphone, setting off a loud beep paired with a white strobe.
Whipping my hands forward into a streamline and forcefully pushing through my legs and feet, I fly off the block, slicing the surface of the water and snapping my body into a form it has perfected over the last sixteen years.
