Criticism: Ugly, Because We Are (A Review of Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal)

By Benjamin Ray Allee

In cycle 6 of America’s Next Top Model, originally aired in 2006, one contestant, Joanie, opts to have four teeth removed. 

Throughout the show’s season, comments are made about Joanie’s smile and one particular “snaggletooth”, which she admits makes her hesitant to grin. After Joanie has advanced in the season, the showrunners offer her a dental makeover, free of charge. 

Free, if you don’t count four teeth extracted over 12+ hours at the dentist’s office. I wonder: does that seem free? Necessary? Chosen? Was Joanie not beautiful to begin with? These are difficult questions to answer, but I found a few possible responses—and perhaps some respite—in similar stories of beauty, revulsion, and pain from Afghani artist Moshtari Hilal’s newly-translated Ugliness: a multi-genre book exploring Otherization, the unattractive, and beauty norms through the author’s personal narratives, visual art, poetry, and cultural analysis. 

Both dreamy and grounded, expansive and constrained, Ugliness makes for a conceptual puzzle that will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural critique of aesthetics—or, perhaps more relatably, to anyone who’s looked at their yearbook photo and wondered not only why they looked so bad back then, but why they’re worried about how they looked to begin with. A quick definition of “ugliness” shows up early on (emphasizing how in the book’s original German, the term’s root word is häss, or “hate”), but Hilal’s main focus—and achievement—is in expanding that definition throughout the book’s following five parts. Within these parts, there is a sense of gradual expansion that I can’t help but call Ugliness’s best ambition. 

We begin with an introduction to ugliness as an active force of repulsion in “Hate”, part one, but we don’t really see what that force looks like until Hilal examines aesthetic norms of the nose and face in “Nasal Analysis”, part two. Then, we explore the apparent beastliness of the human body in “Wolf-Girl,” and end our tour of aesthetics by reckoning with “The Undead”, a bewildering and wildly impressive meditation on cultural norms surrounding death and disease—easily my favorite of the bunch. 

Through this expanding, gradually refocused lens, Hilal crafts a strange photonegative of all that ugliness entails, what causes it, and how it fails us—a much fuller definition than we began with. Inevitably, though, some gaps are left unfilled. 

Hilal brushes against a few ripe subtopics that I wish were more fully explored, such as photography and video as tools in the reinforcement of beauty standards, or the many (if not infinite) ways our forms and aesthetics are commodified, to grotesque ends. Conversely, perhaps too much time is spent analyzing analysis, summarizing the works of philosophers and historians like Heather Widdows and Gretchen E. Henderson where excerpts of their work alone might have better framed Hilal’s original verse and prose. When her original work is given enough room to breathe, though, Ugliness is utterly beautiful.

A section titled “Chronology of Hairiness” was a standout, in which Hilal expertly balances a decades-long narrative of her own experiences with body hair, photography of herself riding a shaggy-haired donkey as a child, a review of historical and academic takes on body hair and gender, and finally, these haunting stanzas: 

I could never love a man 

with less hair on his body 

than I allow to grow 

on my cheeks… 

He takes a finger 

and brushes my shameful strands 

aside for me, like curtains 

He takes a finger 

and traces a word for me. 

By the time I reached Ugliness’s final part, “Reconciliation” (apt foil to “Hate”), I was more than curious about how the book would tie its tangled threads. How it would respond to its own implicit calls for a solution to the “terrible loneliness” Hilal felt after another large-nosed girl she knew got a nose job, or to the pain caused by the “[l]ittle gashes bleeding down [her] legs” whenever she shaved. 

The answer to the problems of ugliness, Hilal concludes, is not its erasure as a concept, but rather the acceptance of ugliness and beauty as social and individual realities:

“The more I learn about ugliness, the more I become reconciled to it.” 

So, too, are we to face this thing—though it feels like pulling teeth—and, in a way, accept it. By acknowledging what we find ugly, we can release it from our aesthetic expectations, and gain, somehow, a power to “dismantle the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness.” Just as Hilal eschews boundaries between fact and fiction, lyric and prose, history and living memory, word and image, and asks us to see the spaces in between, we are to dismantle beauty and ugliness in favor of…something else entirely. 

But what? And how? Hilal’s answer feels a little open-ended, but one alternative she presents is “magnificence”, a term coined by activist Mia Mingus, which emphasizes the value of the experience earned by our bodies, not our appearance. While I’m not sure such a term would be a worthy alternative to all our uses of “beauty”…I can think of one place it might apply. 

My wife and I finished that season of America’s Next Top Model recently, but even now, I can’t get the show’s condemnations of Joanie’s “snaggletooth” out of my head. And I can’t help but wonder what a world like the one Hilal proposes—in which we have somehow performed the impossible task of reconciling that which we hate with that which we are—would have said to Joanie instead. What Joanie would have said back. 

My hope, and perhaps Hilal’s, is that that conversation might have sounded something like one of Ugliness’s final stanzas, from a section titled “Negated Beauty”: 

I am ugly, because I am. 

I am beautiful, because I am.

Benjamin Ray Allee’s work appears or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, BULL, Roi Fainéant, and other journals. He lives with his wife in Athens, Georgia where he works as a professional copywriter, is writing a novel or two, and contributes articles to The Writing Cooperative, Counter Arts, and Fanfare.