During a student exchange programme in the United States, Fatma Ahmed Sherif and her Libyan peers discovered that their American hosts knew virtually nothing about Libya (EP 11).
When asked about daily life back home — transportation, infrastructure, the basics — the Libyans realised the Americans had no frame of reference. Libya was a blank. No mental image, no context, no assumptions to correct. Just nothing.
They told the Americans that Libyans needed a camel riding license to get around. The Americans believed them.
The joke spread among the Libyan exchange students. It became a running bit — how far could they push it? The answer: quite far. The absence of any competing information meant that whatever they said became the truth.
On the surface, this is a comedy story — exchange students having fun at the expense of American geographic illiteracy. But it captures something sharper: the experience of coming from a country that the world has not bothered to learn about. When your homeland is invisible, you can fill in the blanks with anything. The camel license is funny. The ignorance behind it is not.
It also demonstrates a specific coping mechanism of the diaspora: turning invisibility into a game. If they are going to know nothing about you, you might as well control the narrative — even if the narrative is absurd.