In the pretext of offering a mesmerizing experience, museums often end up distorting the history of the objects they curate, justifying colonial plunders and absolving those behind them.
We live heavily curated lives indeed. For those of us from the Global South, this curation means that we have been dominated by very specific colonial and postcolonial narratives. I’ll kick this off by sharing a true story about me getting kicked out of the British Museum in London. For context, some people collect stamps, others collect coins, and I collect passports. You know, just in case one country implodes, it’s good to have backups. I currently hold three passports, Egyptian from my parents’ origin, American via immigration and marriage and British by luck of the geographical coordinates when my mother shoved me out of her body. I aspire to add Australian and Spanish EU passports to my collection, which will be among my top priorities in retirement. I was born in the UK, then moved to Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, Cairo, London, Austin, Texas and now San Francisco, California.
I am British because my parents immigrated to the UK from Egypt and were both medical doctors, filling a skilled labor gap in the UK. So, I am British by sheer circumstance of birth, Egyptian by blood and American by marriage and merit of scholarly achievement. In the 70s, despite their contempt for Brown people, the UK was welcoming newly educated professionals to address their skilled labor shortage.
The vast Empire was reclaiming its subjects. The multi-generational migration journey from the colonies to the United Kingdom, the Arabian Gulf Kingdoms, and North America was traversed by millions of Brown families. Many stayed and became British citizens; most left the Gulf when their contracts were up, but thousands were granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. We are the children and grandchildren of those who braved new shores armed with their advanced degrees and desirable skill sets.
With so much of our daily visual input curated, it is up to us to maintain a healthy level of skepticism and try to maintain our sanity in an increasingly insane world. Intentionally incorporating diverse sources and voices, especially those we adamantly disagree with, into our daily media diets and museum excursions with our own kids or all children in our lives is essential.
London is an incredible city teeming with Brown people from all over the former British Empire and a sprinkling of old-school White Brits. It was thrilling to hop on the Tube or sit at the top front window of a red double-decker bus and explore its diverse restaurants, pubs, flea markets and stunning parks. London museums, with their vast collections of stolen priceless artifacts are on the next level. The British Museum is particularly stuffed with curated colonial loot. I’m generally not a fan of museums. I find them quite dull and associate them with Baba (my father) cutting shopping or eating experiences off to drag us to yet another museum to learn things I didn’t care about wherever we were on holiday.
One day in 1997, while reporting for the Arabic division of BBC World Service radio, the mouthpiece of the Empire, I reluctantly joined a visiting friend who insisted on seeing the fucking British Museum. As we were browsing along, I was pretending to care and put on my best-fascinated face. But I found myself getting angrier by the minute. I must have also been at peak hormonal rage, steeped in premenstrual mood disorder. I overheard a pompous English tour guide leading a Japanese group and droning on and on about how, if it wasn’t for the intrepid British explorers, these treasures would have never seen the light of day. I tried to keep it together, but the more he talked about how cool it was to steal from a country you occupied, the more irritable I got until finally, I totally lost it.
Right in front of an Egyptian mummy and behind a stunning Pharaonic jewelry display, I screamed at the tour guide. “Hey! Fuck you very much, SIR. How would YOU feel if I dug your grandmother out of her grave, cut the rings off her fingers and then put her and her jewels in a display case for the world to ogle in? Those are MY ancestors, and all this does NOT belong here!” Before I could finish my postcolonial soliloquy and fully enjoy the tour guide’s bright red face and the horrified look on the sweet, polite Japanese faces, two security guards arrived and, in their most cordial, calm British manner, gently escorted The Verbal Terrorist and her mortified friend out of the museum.
To this day, I can’t go into a museum anywhere in the West without getting triggered, so I just avoid them. I wish Western museums could include a video installation of me yelling my feelings. Press the button to hear how a Brown person feels about the artifacts you’re enjoying at our finely curated fancy establishment funded by donations from the private collections of rich thieves. But then, on a rational day, I think to myself, that video would perfectly play into their Orientalist ideology. Look at the Crazy Brown Girl, poor thing, she can’t keep her emotions bottled up like us Civilized White People. What a pity.
It is marginally better when Egypt and other countries take ownership of its heritage and make loads of much-needed money parading our ancestors around the world. The King Tut exhibit is a prime example. In 2022, we paid USD 150 for admission for a family of three to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. The grand finale is not actually King Tut, but a hologram of His Royal Highness. I found it quite poetic that the illusion was marketed as reality.
My son was nine, so of course, I felt a deep obligation to pass forward generational family trauma. We must take him to be educated about things he doesn’t care about. I was doing fine, walking through the beautifully curated exhibits, feeling quite smug and proud that all these clueless Americans and various global tourists visiting San Francisco were getting to see the glory of my ancestors. Then I came across this lame attempt at explanation, which falsely claimed a dearth of knowledge about the lives of ancient Egyptian women.
WHAT? Who is “we”? Of course, we do. If by “we”, you mean actual Egyptian women. We know plenty about our magnificent queens, the legacy of female leadership, the artisans, the invention of makeup and wigs, and the role of women of all classes in ancient Egypt. Who wrote this colonial garbage? I was incensed. This is why I don’t bloody go to museums. I thought about throwing another tantrum. But I wanted my kid to have a good memory of the experience and not have to witness his Mama getting dragged out of a museum by American guards who are likely heavily armed and the opposite of polite Brits.
Besides, the British Museum was free, and the DeYoung charged an exorbitant amount for tickets, so I’d better save my outrage for a more appropriate outlet. It also helped that I was not having an overly hormonal day. This was before perimenopause kicked in, so as of 2024, I am actively avoiding all museums for the next ten years.
I snapped a quick photo with my phone and vowed to register my displeasure at this glaring, inaccurate, misogynistic stereotype in writing to the White Man who, in my mind, obviously designed, curated and wrote for the exhibit. Much to my chagrin, I discovered that the multi-million-dollar King Tut exhibit was organized by National Geographic, AEG Exhibitions and Arts and Exhibitions International, with cooperation from the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt.
Egyptians had, in fact, been deeply involved in curating the exhibit, so this misguided statement about the obscurity of knowledge about ancient Egyptian women had presumably been vetted and approved BY EGYPTIANS. Egypt is actively attempting to reclaim our heritage from private collectors around the world who have been showing off their “ethnic” artifact collection to their wealthy community to reflect their status. Despite these efforts by Egypt and many other Global South countries to reclaim our history and culture, we are sadly prone to falling into familiar neocolonial patterns of narratives driven by the West. We are far from immune to mistakes, distortions and perpetuating cultural stereotypes of our own races, genders and religions.
With so much of our daily visual input curated, it is up to us to maintain a healthy level of skepticism and try to maintain our sanity in an increasingly insane world. Intentionally incorporating diverse sources and voices, especially those we adamantly disagree with, into our daily media diets and museum excursions with our own kids or all children in our lives is essential. The notion of objectivity is a lie, and most media organizations, most prominently corporate-driven ones, are complicit in this deception if they are marketing their content as neutral and balanced. As much as news outlets try to just stick to the facts, those facts can be easily distorted, reprioritized and misrepresented merely by the nature of the selective process of a highly demanding, high-pressure news production cycle.
This is particularly pronounced in 24-hour television news, where the demand for information is immediate and, therefore, ripe for distortion. Artificial intelligence presents a formidable challenge to our collective perception of reality. It’s pretty terrifying, but as my tech dude husband reminds me, people were afraid of the internet, fearful of TV and scared of cars when we rode horses. Humans should prioritize the uniquely human emotion of empathy, consume AI-created content with caution and awareness, and, above all, actively seek media created by and for humanity. AI is a useful tool for creativity, but without a clear ability to discern whether a voice is cloned or a video is actually real, we are at higher risk than ever of blurring the line between fact and fiction.
Social media is a giant waste of time for those seeking to enhance their knowledge on their platforms. The mega-profitable companies behind them have played a significant role in democratizing the flow of information, but their algorithms are specifically designed to give you precisely the content and perspectives you prefer while conveniently enhancing their stock prices. That is not how most professional news organizations operate. Independent media, free of corporate or government influence, remain the highest quality sources of news and information. Factual news minimizes inflammatory adjectives, accurately labels editorial content and strives to present all sides of the controversy.
This is what we all deserve, and now, more than ever, we should curate for ourselves. It is increasingly difficult to trust our sources, but there are thousands of independently funded and consumer-funded publications, such as this one you are reading, that strive to be inclusive. They are not alone. Find your local independent magazine, newspaper, radio station or YouTube channel that you have identified as fair and just. Like myself, many of us are global citizens with affinities to multiple continents, nations and cultures. It is up to us to perpetuate a culture of international respect, break existing and future patterns, and practice financial activism by supporting independent content and rejecting corporate greed.
Our children learn from us. Although my 12-year-old son prefers to get his sports news and information from brain-rotting YouTube Shorts (he is not allowed social media for another year), he knows that Mama finds it repulsive and forces him to engage in conversations about current affairs. He sees my daily independent media consumption habits that he rolls his little eyes at, but I know that deep down, these habits will register and that I’m trying my best to raise a media-literate child and hope that we can all try a little harder to make a difference.
Image: “British Museum Egypt 004” by Einsamer Schütze, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
