I tolerate beaches, I do not love them. This is only one of many ways I sit outside the popular Home and Away-mythologising of Australia as a waterside paradise of fit white bodies becoming an acceptable shade of light brown.

Among my Lebanese family, I was alone in feeling this way. On Sundays we would often go on a long drive to Wollongong beach in a caravan of cars, to dive or be hurled into the ocean. I’m not sure why we went so far from our home in Liverpool, in Sydney’s south-west. All I know is I hated it: the amount of time it took to fill Eskies with food and drink, for everyone to get ready, the hours in traffic that felt like forever in the heat, the flies, the BO, squished and sweating in the back of a Holden Commodore with half a dozen cousins.

I hated it up until the moment water enveloped my body, and it seemed like any cost could be borne to feel this bliss.

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Other days we would go to Cronulla, too; specifically, to Gunnamatta Bay, where people loved to jump off the boardwalk into the tidal “bath”, and where I would often stand, trembling, trying to work up the courage for the leap. Once or twice I was brave. More often, I would be thrown, associating the drop and the wet with terror, just like the first time I went swimming, when an uncle who thought survival was the best teacher pushed me into the deep end of a pool. He was wrong, and his daughter had to save me while he watched, disappointed and disapproving.

By 2005, thankfully, my uncles and aunties had gone through one of their many furious fights, and so the summer trips to Cronulla had stopped well before the infamous racist riots that are now indelibly associated with that place.

I for one was glad to leave the beach trips behind, as every brush there with the flaunted masculine ideal heightened my self-loathing. As much as I loved the sensation of cool submersion, I had even then an awful self-consciousness about my body, how unsuitable it was, not as thin or as muscly as my brother and cousins, nor as smooth and hairless as the white bodies I saw all around me, and on TV. Even among the boys in my family, I was particularly hairy, and obstinately so as they all quickly took to waxing their hard chests.

I didn’t want to be seen as caring at all, which was code for weak, so I stayed a soft gangly kid haunted by a nameless anxiety that wore many masks in the sea: a slimy something touching my leg, a pale blob bobbing nearby (jellyfish or plastic bag?), the beautiful boys and girls who stirred a desire I would fear for a decade to come, a deceptive shape in the dark water, the water itself turning from friend to foe, overcoming my clumsy attempts to stay afloat with relentless crushing waves.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cronulla Beach in Sydney. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

After the Cronulla riots, I didn’t go to an Australian beach for several years. Not because I was afraid of Anglo dickheads acting up – if that were the case, I’d never leave the house – but because neither I nor my friends could drive, which meant it was too much of an effort, and even if we could, we had too many insecurities about our bodies.

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I remember when this changed: I was in Rome, staying in a hostel by the water. I was alone, most of the people didn’t speak English, and I had no clear plan of action, so I headed for the sparkling blue I could see outside my window. By this time, if I did go swimming, I would wear a shirt more often than not, accompanied always by a lingering sense of shame, the way it would stick to me, the way it made me stand out all over again.

Everywhere I looked I saw hairy olive-skinned people of various shapes and sizes at ease, laughing, playing.

Here there were no ugly connotations to the strip of sand, no history to be wary of – familial or national (that I knew of) – and the sea was so clear I could see my toes. I took my shirt off, letting the sun hit my furry chest, and felt at ease for the first time. I waded into the calm dazzle of it, but only up to my waist, where I could tentatively float.

It took leaving Australia to discover the possibility of the beach as a place where I could love myself. It remains only a possibility, one I can’t always actualise, but this summer things are slowly changing for the better, and I find myself thinking often of the boardwalk at Gunnamatta Bay in Cronulla, which seemed so daunting to me all those years ago, and wondering what it would feel like to leap off it without fear.

Omar Sakr is the author of the forthcoming book The Lost Arabs, to be published in May 2019.



