In order to unpack the culture and power of costumes that I saw in Ms. Marvel, I had to go back to Riz Ahmed’s article in The Guardian on being “Typecast as a Terrorist”. I was quite drawn to costume concepts of shapeshifting, outgrowing and adopting. After digging in a little deeper into the ripple effects of Ms. Marvel, I came across an article from the Los Angeles Times on utilizing her character during the latest election cycle. Bearing in mind the powerful impact of our costumes, whether we are superheroes or not, I will explore the concept of different ‘costumes’ and the connections between them in my blogpost.

 

***

 

 

For me, there is something so insidiously naked about not having a costume. An identity. A story. An aura or a concept. An invisible cloud that makes the orbit around one and differentiates the boundary between the self and the other, as some might say more eloquently. As an invisible curtain that thickens and vanishes when needed, a costume provides all of the above enumerated crumbs of our identity bread. We need costumes to portray our identities. Sometimes, these costumes are our facial expressions, and sometimes, they are our skin tones or our clothes (or the lack thereof).

 

Riz Ahmed, in his “Typecast as a Terrorist” article in The Guardian, discusses his childhood through the lens of a costume of a ‘Paki’, which later shifted to an often condescending label of a ‘Muslim’ (excerpt from The Guardian).

“Since I was a teenager I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general (…) ‘Paki’, a label we wore with swagger in the Brit-Asian youth and gang culture of the 1990s. The next time I found myself as helplessly cornered, it was in a windowless room at Luton airport (…) and I was now labelled a Muslim.”

This points to a fact I failed to mention in the previous paragraph. Many times we don’t choose the costumes we wear. They depend on the context we find ourselves in and on the people observing us with all their biases and preconceived notions of what our costumes should be representing. I would dare say that the number of times we don’t get to choose what costumes we wear increases if we don’t belong to the mainstream culture of the society we live in. Paki. Muslim. Man. Young. Ethnic. British accent guy. Pilot from “Rogue One”. Actor. Son of a Pakistani family. Intellectual. Artist. All of this in a Western society seems like Riz should have all of his costumes ready at all times, just in case.

 

In my opinion, a good example of this is the brave and battled Kamila from Marvel’s “Ms. Marvel” series. She is the first Muslim female heroine of a brand that inspires millions across the globe. The impact of her story echoes and has a ripple effect across cultures. This is why her ‘costume’ of a Pakistani girl growing up and living in Jersey City is so fascinating to observe as her heroine story unravels.

Riz Ahmed describes his life as a continuous juggling act between his two cultures and his job as an actor where he sharpens the craft of shapeshifting and takes the best of both worlds. Kamila has no such opportunity as a young Muslim American girl who is just starting to develop her identity in the world she finds herself in, surrounded by strong but righteous family values of an immigrant family, the pious Muslim community that appears archaic to the world she lives in, American friends who don’t quite grasp her difference, and Muslim friends who have much stronger opinions based on things she is yet to fully understand. This is quite a handful for a young girl trying to carve her spot under the sun. She has to be Kamila – the obedient daughter, Kamila – the good mosque-attending Muslim girl, Kamila – the regular teenager in the States, Kamila – the good student, etc. The number of costumes she chooses to put on cannot compare to the ones she has pinned on her by the mere fact that she has to juggle two cultures on a daily basis.

 

In this juggling we can find outgrowing. Outgrowing, in other words, represents moving on from the questioning phase to the acceptance phase. Kamila’s friend, Kiki, outwardly accepted Islam as a large part of her identity. She is, therefore, able to defend it. Her costume, in a way, is her hijab. Kamila, on the other hand, needs to embark on a superhero journey to discover what side she wants to absorb and abide by. Riz Ahmed chose to channel the struggle through his work to be able to morph the best aspects of both of his cultures and sculpture them throughout his professional and personal life. Kudos to him. And kudos to Kamila for being able to question. Many are not given that chance. Or worse, even if the chance is there, they are too compliant or afraid of their own depths to explore it further.

 

In Islam, did God not say that it is okay to question? One needs to find grounds where true inner beliefs are planted. That comes only with thorough questioning. In this process, some beliefs are outgrown and others are adopted. At times, one side is taken. At other times, a hybrid is made. This is why the culture of costumes is fascinating to me as it becomes a live entity in this discussion. What I hope many young people learn and draw from Kamila’s superhero story is that multiple costumes, or identities, have beauty to them. It can be highly advantageous to have multiple cultures to draw from when constructing these identities.

 

I remember reading one of Amitav Gosh’s books where he says that each language has a culture to it and these cultures allow us to examine the same problem in different ways. This is one explicit advantage of belonging to many cultures that enrich the costume we construct as we grow. It also increases the wardrobe of our costumes. And having more is always good in my opinion; having the choice is gold in the time where everything else is made barren and uniform, normalized and flattened out by the mainstream culture.

 

Ultimately, why are costumes important?

In short, costumes are important because of their potentially powerful impact. Kamila’s costume, both the literal and the inner one, represent a whole subset of people. She is a young Pakistani girl growing up in the States. She belongs to the second generation of Muslim immigrants as a subset of the American population. This is why she can be utilized as a catch-all representation of an entire group of people in a particular society, for example. Clearly, this is a generalization. However, from an outsider perspective, the significance of her costume gives her the necessary legitimacy to represent a certain group of people and, more importantly, influence them.

 

Given that she is a superhero at the end of the day, her ‘costume’ is no longer her own. In the American context, Kamila represents a plurality of Muslim immigrants. She can, therefore, be used to transfer particular messages to the people she represents. One example picked up by Los Angeles Times was the US election period last year where she was portrayed as going from door to door and educating her own community on the benefits of voting.

 

Kamila going from door to door during the election period.

 

Kamila encouraging her community to vote.

 

From the pictures above we can infer that our costumes, our identities, are not just our own many times. They change shape and form. They outgrow certain ideals. Their meaning changes in different contexts. They lose that meaning in other contexts and disappear in history. Or they gain on significance at particular points in time, since they can be used to reach an entire group of people. They then outgrow individuals and represent ideas. This is why the politics and the impact of costumes is fascinating. Ms. Marvel and Riz Ahmed are two examples that represent the morphing nature of costumes that have a powerful impact on many communities across the globe.

It is worth noting that with great power comes great responsibility as well.

 

 

Sources:

Ahmed, Riz; “Typecast as a terrorist” (The Guardian)

Wilson, Willow; “Ms. Marvel – No Normal” (comic book excerpt, Vol. 1)

Hill, Libby; “Ms. Marvel Urges Americans to Vote” (Los Angeles Times)