The Brooklyn Rail

The cover of Moshtari Hilal’s book is not one that goes unnoticed on the bookshelf: “UGLINESS” in big, bold letters. Beneath the title is Hilal’s self-portrait, embellished with drawn-on lines denoting hair—sideburns, eyebrows, a moustache—and flowers growing over her skin. The sharp bone of her nose boldly articulated, she dares both the viewer and her self-reflection, as she splits into two: look me in the face, pick me up off the shelf. It’s the kind of provocation an artist would make, one who knows her audience intimately. I do just that—I open Ugliness, too curious to keep myself from what might be inside.

What I find in my backward-flipping way of reading an art book, is the name of the cover art, Reconciliation (also the title of the final section in the book). To reconcile means to restore to friendship or harmony, implying that a harmony once existed. This book begins with the moment a particular harmony of self broke apart for Hilal: at age fourteen, she looked at her school pictures in disbelief. That girl wasn’t her, wouldn’t be her when she grew up. She became alien to herself. More telling than the actual images, which are laid out fourteen times over in the book, is that she recognized in herself traits that placed her a category deemed unwanted by society. “We try to maintain distance between ourselves and anything that could be deemed unproductive, indigent, animal, or inept—any and all counterpoints to our modern ideas of how humans should be or behave,” she writes. “At fourteen I learned fourteen times over that I’m ugly.” This swash of dismay, she argues, comes from a place of learned knowledge, a recognition of what isn’t and what is ugly, a dichotomy between pure and evil. Upon seeing the photos, she slotted herself into the latter of these binaries. We fear ugliness because society fears it, and we don’t want to be the thing that society turns its eye away from.

Of the reservoir of literature on aesthetics and self-image, much of which Hilal explicitly references, I am reminded of something a little different: Ted Chiang’s prescient novella, Liking What You See: A Documentary. Published in 2002, it is written in the form of interviews for a documentary on a fictitious procedure that renders its patient unable to sense beauty. The main subject grows up with this procedure, and has it reversed at eighteen. She describes looking in the mirror afterwards: “For a while I was afraid that I was ugly, and any minute the ugliness was going to appear, like a rash or something.” It is the fear of being repugnant, not to ourselves, but to society—a rash.

Hilal’s family came to Germany as refugees from Afghanistan. Her overarching analysis is rooted in post-colonial theory: alienation and the desire for assimilation, a learned hatred that comes from the very natural tendency to imitate those in power. Taking her cue from the likes of Frantz Fanon, Hilal writes of Eurocentric beauty standards and then goes further, pulling from eugenics, mass reproduction, leprosy, and death. Her language mirrors the battlefield. One of her poems ends with the line, “Mother, I am going into battle with blade to cheek, your daughter under my blade.” And later, speaking of the violence imposed by the razor blade, “What resistance, every time it rises again to confront the blade.” She creates cartographic studies and plans of attack against her body. She carves knives across her face. “I will protect you,” she hears a friend say to her nose. Over the course of five loosely themed sections, cultural commentary intermixes with poetry, visual art, and personal and political musings as Hilal moves through time, space, and medium to locate ugliness in every nook she can. A delectable fact of translation: the German word for ugliness, hässlichkeit, contains within it the word for hatred, Hass.

The artwork is disarming; it is what compels me over the textual scaffolding. The photographs are distorted, sometimes obviously so, but otherwise, only questionably and maybe not at all. Page after page, Hilal inserts herself into the history of looking: amongst the ideal facial proportions of the Renaissance, from no hair to covered in hair, part-animal, on social media. The effect is destabilizing. One image, midway through the book, is a cut-out of her face, its entire area covered in delicately pencil-marked hair. The paper face is curled towards the viewer, revealing a sharply contorted shadow against the backdrop. Another shows what appears to be a reference book page, with sketches of Apollo Belvedere, a young chimpanzee, their two skulls, and in the center, a young woman with long sideburns, thick eyebrows, and a prominent, shaded nose. She is labelled “Fig 345.357.” A combination of dysmorphia and adaptation that results in a new visual language. As I flip through, I recognize myself. (It helps that I share some of her distinctiveness: a strong nose and thick, black hair.)

While many might point out that Hilal is magnificent—and some may even go so far as to call her an exotic beauty—this is besides (or precisely) the point. Ultimately, the question is less about objective ugliness and more about how our histories and perceived notions of power are implicated in the language of looking.