What does it mean to be ugly? How does a society decide who is and isn’t beautiful? And why are we all so afraid of ugliness anyway? These questions lie at the heart of Ugliness, the debut by Afghanistan-born Berlin author and artist Moshtari Hilal. In Hilal’s genre-crossing book, she brings together elements of memoir, history and theory along with poetry and drawings.
This essayistic tour roves between topics like the beauty salons of Kabul, the American industry of putting makeup on dead people, the antisemitic history of Western nose aesthetics, and the various body pressures that affected the author’s upbringing in Germany. First published in German as Hässlichkeit by Hanser in 2023, the book has just been released by New Vessel Press in ElisabethLauffer’s translation.
Congratulations on your book’s second launch! You draw on a lot of English-language writers or thinkers in the text; were there any that you found particularly inspirational?
I think the most influential person was Mia Mingus, who is a disability justice activist and writer. I came across this speech that she gave at a symposium where she asked two questions: Why are we afraid of ugliness? And what can we learn from ugliness?
These two questions were fundamental for me, because I had been thinking a lot about how we can broaden or diversify or revolutionise beauty standards, and how to create more inclusive ideas of beauty. But then Mia Mingus’s questions led me to look at the flip side and explore more what it means to be ugly – and what is ugliness. I took her questions seriously and tried to respond to them personally myself. Why am I afraid of ugliness, and what I can learn from ugliness? That is how the book started.
So Mingus brought you from the question of beauty to the question of ugliness.
Yes. She also helped me see that there will always be bodies and identities that are so far outside society’s understanding of beauty that they are not even targeted by the beauty-selling industry. I started to consider that I personally was somewhere between the absolute extreme of ugliness and the absolute extreme of beauty. And that I had learned how to imitate and assimilate in order to be as close as possible to the beautiful and desired while trying to distance myself from the ugly – because I was so scared of being “one of them”.
I tried to write about this dynamic where most people are somewhere in between. We learn early on what it means to be treated as ugly in our society. And whenever we recognise symptoms of or similarities with ugliness, we panic, because that is not the life we want. So we do all know that there is this othering, this exploitation, this lack of care and love and rights for the so-called ugly. But we don’t like to talk about it. We prefer to talk about the beautiful – about the ones that we desire.
Ugliness requires hate. And that’s my central argument, I think.
What would you say is the central argument of your book?
It’s much easier in German (laughs), because it has the [title] Hässlichkeit (ugliness), which contains the word Hass (hate). I like to say that in German you have to say Hass in order to pronounce hässlich. To call something ugly is to say that it is worthy of hate, or that it is being hated. Ugliness requires hate. And that’s my central argument, I think. This is a book about power and hate and about how hate can be very influential, crucial even, for the way our systems are built.
Those systems require us to hate vast groups of people in order to justify them being excluded, exploited or worse. Society needs ugliness because it helps to identify those groups. Ugliness, for me, is a question of dehumanisation. I wanted to start a conversation about beauty and ugliness as something that is about personal insecurities and intimate moments with your own body – but then also to link it to bigger questions of dehumanisation and the history of modern science and fascism, and then to go back to someone on TikTok doing a face filter. Because all these things are linked, and it’s very dangerous to think things are superficial when they are not superficial at all.
The book combines personal elements with a great deal of research. How did you decide what to include?
I wanted to write something that was subjective in its approach. I knew that the only thing I could really add to the existing conversation was my approach, as well as my rather specific personal position, which let me bring in some less-discussed symptoms of ugliness.
For instance, my English-language publisher was quite excited about the link I made between me growing up in Germany as an Afghan refugee girl and the antisemitic imagery of the witch, and how I grappled with it. In the end, I think every author – every person – would write a different book about ugliness because our experiences are very intimate and personal, and very much connected to our biography, while also being linked to the broader phenomenon.
It was important to me to make the point that every personal moment can be connected to the bigger histories of oppression – and that the moments we have with ourselves alone in front of the mirror, those moments of self-hate, are fundamentally linked with hate at the structural level. Jumping between personal essay and the more analytical parts of the text allowed me to make that point. I also wanted the book to feel like artistic research, because I’m an artist who writes, not a writer who draws.
There is also some of your own art in the book, much of which has to do with the body.
There were many reasons for that. First of all, the book is about images, and about the context in which the images in our mind get constructed. Sometimes in the research process I would encounter these illustrations from medicine or anatomy, and I didn’t want to reproduce them – nor did I want to reproduce racist imagery. I had to come up with a way to show that all these things have historical roots, so I inserted myself into those illustrations.
I saw it as a process of self-reflection, like I had become a prototype that we can all experiment with and deconstruct: we can deconstruct my insecurities about ugliness until we access the collective history of it. In my work as a visual artist, I have done a lot of self-portraits, so I tried to translate the self-portrait into the logic of the book. When I published the book, some people questioned its authenticity by saying, “You’re not ugly enough to write a critical book about ugliness!”, and pointing out that I still participate in beauty culture.
But I wanted my perspective to be very clear in the book in that I am someone who does participate in certain kinds of beauty rituals and who did have all these teenage episodes that are about imitating and assimilating. I also felt that the self-portraits let me show how sometimes, when you are looking at yourself with self-hate and distortion, you are seeing an exaggeration – a layer of something that is not there. But ugliness is not always about the material reality. It’s also a question of perception, of the roles you think you have to play in a society.
Ugliness is a tool used by societies that are built around exploitation and exclusion.
How does race and colonialism play into that?
Our societies need ugliness because we need a visual code, a visual language that we can recognise on the surface of others in order to know who belongs and who does not belong. So it is quite easily linked to questions of alienation, othering, nationalism, and ideas about race. But it’s also a question of ability and disability. Lots of people are excluded because of ideas about what it means to have a healthy, able body that is efficient and profitable for the system or nation.
Ugliness is a tool used by societies that are built around exploitation and exclusion. It is the language of justification for all that – a way to feel no sympathy or empathy for the Other, to feel disgust or fear instead, which makes it easier to exert power and violence over them. Sometimes people ask me what the solution would be. And I think there is a serious issue with the more inclusive or diverse ideas of beauty, in that we think we can simply extend a broader invitation to beauty.
But then it would not work, because the system requires exclusivity in order to function. Our system is built such that worth, whether in beauty or in wealth, must be exclusive. So the actual thing that we need to grapple with is artificial scarcity – of resources, of care, of rights. If we want a society that does not use beauty or ugliness as tools of power, then we probably need an anti-capitalistic system that doesn’t have this artificial scarcity.
I was interested in your section about the beautification of the dead. What did you find there?
It was so strange for me because I didn’t know about this in reality – I just knew about it from Hollywood films (laughs). I was like, what are they doing putting makeup and outfits on their dead? It was as if people didn’t want to face death but to beautify it, so it wouldn’t feel uncomfortable to face. I think death is the biggest fear that we have around ugliness.
The way you end up turning into waste: you enter the soil and you’re not alive anymore and you have no control over your body at all. So for us to have this cultural practice where we don’t want to let even the dead be ugly – where, even when you’re dead, you have to perform something and be presentable – I found it so grotesque that I had to look into it.
I think death is the biggest fear that we have around ugliness.
What about the role of technology in the beauty/ugliness dynamic? The fact that people are now constantly looking at images of themselves and other people must be having an impact…
Yes. In the end, if you think of beauty as a pose that you feel you have to hold – something you can present in daily life but can’t always live up to – well, at some point, you see that there is more reality behind it. People are complex, vulnerable, organic beings. But in digital media, we get stuck in the performance. It’s easier to maintain the pose without showing anything behind it.
So if you’re only consuming this sort of imagery, you forget what it means and what it looks like to be human. We might forget that all humans have pores, and start to think it’s just us – and maybe our ugly aunt too – who have pores, so we start to villainise the people around us, and we glamorise and uphold people that we only know through images. There is also this idea of making beauty more democratic by making it accessible.
There are step-by-step tutorials for everything on social media, which makes it easier to participate in a way; beauty and care products have never been more accessible. But then, on the other hand, the burden is also higher. If everything is explained to you and made accessible to you, then it’s seen as your fault that you’re still ugly, because you didn’t do all that. Ideologically, though, it is faulty, because in the end there is not really a choice about what you want to become.
And it’s your job to become it, else you’re a failure.
I also tell a story in the book about Kim Kardashian being called the Patient Zero among plastic surgeons. If she’s so artificial – if you can buy every bit of her – then that means you can become her. A “natural” beauty, someone who’s just born beautiful, is more exclusive in the sense of, ‘I’m just born that way, you can’t become me’. But we could become Kim Kardashian.
We just need the money and the discipline to do so. At the moment, it seems the most influential and desirable storyline is that of someone who was ugly and poor and then became beautiful and rich. Someone who was born rich and beautiful, we can’t relate to them. But the transformation is the goal, and this transformation is sold to us as something that is possible – as a promise.
Then anyone who just accepts themselves as they are is considered a loser, because they don’t even want to explore their full potential. The idea of some other you who completely lives out your potential: unless we get rid of that in our imagination, we will never be able to actually accept ourselves.
- Ugliness is available now from New Vessel Press.
