The night is black. Three in the morning, the stretch of beach on the Turkish side lies in complete darkness. On the horizon, a few small, twinkling lights — Greece.
“Four women! 1, 2, 3, 4! Into the boat! Two men! Take the oars! Go!” the people smugglers hiss, curt, everything has to move fast. Next rubber dinghy!
My sister’s turn. I get pushed aside, a smuggler grabs my arm. “Not you, the boat is full!” My sister disappears into the darkness. I’m scared. For my sister, who can’t swim. For myself.
Suddenly sirens, searchlights, dust churning up, police, border patrol!
For a moment I’m still standing on the shore, trying to make out my sister’s boat — no chance. She’s gone!
I flee with the others into the scrub, into the cover of darkness.
We are separated! From now on I am alone, on the run to Europe. Many kilometers and months through Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey lie behind us. I am eleven years old.
For the next two years I am surrounded by adult strangers. Smugglers, police officers, criminals in an adult prison, other refugees in many official but also makeshift camps. How they exploited their power over me? Try to imagine it! My life hangs by a silk thread during this time.
My escape story involves police brutality and being treated as an adult, robbery, rape and serious violence, humiliation and kidnapping. Can you imagine what it feels like when your father sends word that it would be better if you were dead than to pay that amount of money for your ransom?
I stopped believing in humanity.
Only when I arrive in Hamburg in early 2013 — reunited with my sister — does it become clear: I made it. I survived. Without having spoken a single word of German before, I completed secondary school and a nursing assistant training, I am a qualified nurse. Today I train the next generation myself, have qualified as a practical trainer and am a wound care specialist.
The patients — many of them elderly — know me. They know I avoid chocolate but can’t pass a fruit bowl. My professional path, my expertise, and the dignified, often familial way I treat my patients — and their loving feedback — are the things I’m most proud of, even though they have nothing to do with my online presence, for which most people know me.
I am Najib Faizi, the first Afghan drag queen, 26 years old today. On my social media channels I have built an audience of hundreds of thousands of followers as an activist for the LGBTQ community. I use my influence and my reach — with millions of views — to speak openly about trans, gay and lesbian life and experience, to reach and inform people, to give them courage. Especially in the Afghan communities. Especially in the Iranian communities. Especially in the Pakistani communities.
Can you imagine what my childhood in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban movement, looked like? What it was like to be a small boy who is “somehow different”, who has an obviously feminine side, whose parents tried to beat him straight?
And what is it like today in Germany, in Hamburg? To this day it is a bitter disappointment to me, how open Western society treats people who do not conform to the so-called expected norm.
Here, too, I have to fight. Cannot be who I want to be.
They spit, they hate, they gossip. Open contempt comes at me.
Let me say it plainly: it is not only the Muslim community that treats me with such hatred, such contempt, but also many Germans.
I don’t demand to be loved, or for my way of life to be understood or shared. I have already given up on that. But is there not enough room for you to let me live quietly, on my own terms, in peace? To stop staring at me, humiliating me, degrading me, to stop making my existence a public disturbance?
By what right do some of my fellow staff want to deny me the right to come to work with makeup on? My job performance is not one bit worse for it than anyone else’s.
The makeup carries something symbolic for me. On the one hand, it covers inner and outer wounds — and at the same time it has brought me great joy since I was little, gives me positivity, strength, and confidence!
It matters to me to find myself beautiful and to share that positive feeling about life with my community, no matter what everyone else thinks of it.
I still wake up almost every night soaked in sweat, flinch and have to reassure myself that I am safe. That I am no longer the little boy standing naked and shivering under a prison shower. No longer in handcuffs, exposed to those people. No longer helplessly trying to fend off the hands and the body of that adult. No longer the little boy on whose cheeks, after his father’s belt came down, the blood mingled with the red of the lipstick. You can barely see the scars anymore, but I feel better when the traces of them lie hidden under makeup.
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