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MENA or SWANA This is a resource post explaining the words MENA and SWANA. What do they mean? MENA = Middle East and North Africa. Image description: screenshot from Google top results for "mena meaning". MENA the word is an English language acronym referring to regions of Middle East and North Africa. The countries referred to most often include: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Israel, Egypt, Afghanistan, Cyprus, Libya, Sudan, and with some more countries sometimes included.   MENA does not refer to one country only, nor does it refer to countries or regions with only ONE religion or ethnicity, as there are many different religions and ethnicities in these regions. As you can see from the Google result image, MENA as a word has been prominently used by the west. However, MENA as a term has also b een adopted by us folks from and connected to these regions to refer to ou...

  Image description: Supervillains clockwise from top left, Iron Man 1 (2008), The Boys TV (2020),  Batman vs. Superman Dawn of Justice (2016), and  Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). Please note the frequent use of Yellow Filter. Muslim Supervillains: A tired stereotype in the superhero genre. - I realised I haven't yet written about British Muslim actor, activist and all round great person, Riz Ahmed , appearing in a superhero movie. Of course as soon as I thought about his character in Venom (2018), I remembered that Ahmed is playing a supervillain, a bad guy; which is a typecast all too common for Muslim and MENA actors. So I decided to list all the times Muslim and Muslim background actors (also referred to as SWANA and/or MENA, which stands for South West Asia and North Africa, and Middle East and North Africa) have been given the role of 'supervillain' in live action superhero movies. Spoiler: it's a lot.  It's also more times than any Muslim actors have appeared...

Image description: fictional character Naqib in Amazon Prime’s show The Boys. (Is the fire in the background an excuse to use racist Yellow Filter to show how exotic he is? Hmm.) WHY NAQIB SUCKS . -    This was the first post here on my blog back in Dec 2020, and as I've just added the same post to my new tumblr account , I've done some very minor edits and added links to my other posts. And I'm going to keep talking about Naqib in The Boys, because nobody else does.  So, without further ado: - I was a big fan of The Boys season 1; I love superheroes, I love deconstructing a genre. Sure, it has its problems, but overall I enjoyed season 1 and thought the show had potential. (That’ll learn me for being hopeful!) When season 1 ended with this big build up of mostly nameless brown and background characters as Muslim terrorists (deep sigh) we the audience are left thinking this one Muslim character, Naqib , whose superpower is to blow himself up repeatedly (insert...