Ariish Wol’s life story reads like a collision between a high-fashion fairytale and a horror film.
Two years ago, she walked into a modelling agency in her native Canada and what followed was the fantasy millions of girls dream of. Ariish secured her first job within weeks – a shoot for Vogue Italia in London – and by the end of the year was working with Molly Goddard and Thierry Mugler. Since then, she has been photographed for Dazed & Confused and British Vogue, among others, in a professional ascent she describes as ‘too good to be true’.
But the truth was that even success couldn’t obscure the emotional and physical pain that had characterised her childhood. Born in South Sudan, Ariish, now 24, fled civil war for Canada with her family when she was three and once there, was granted refugee status and eventually citizenship.
Her troubles, however, were far from over. Over the course of our Zoom interview, Ariish – who now lives in London – talks openly about the scars that have been left from being a victim of sexual abuse both in her infancy and when she was in Canada, and how she is still processing these hugely traumatic events today. Twice, she breaks down in tears over the course of our interview.
‘It has taken me years to understand that I’m not bad or dirty or broken in some way,’ she says, turning her face away from the camera during the moments when her voice starts to wobble. ‘I only understood that what happened to me was bad when I went to primary school and they taught us what rape and molestation was. But it has taken me years to fully understand that it wasn’t my fault, because that’s what happens when abuse occurs in early childhood – it feels like it is part of you in some complicated way.’
Whether what happened next was a consequence of her deeply troubled early years or an unhappy coincidence is still up for medical debate. At 12, Ariish had a fit that left her writhing on the ground – in her South Sudanese community she was deemed to have the devil in her. At 14, she was diagnosed with epilepsy by a Canadian doctor, and over the last decade she has suffered from epileptic fits every three to six months; fits that usually occur in a period when she has been dreaming about or replaying the events from a childhood that still causes her so much pain.
‘The medications don’t really help,’ she says. ‘I was on three different types of drugs but none stabilised my condition, but I realised what does help is doing a lot of writing and drawing, so I read poems that comfort my soul and as I reflect on my childhood experiences I find being able to sketch it out and write it down and then read it helps me process what happened.’
In what feels like far too many life-changing events for such a young person, Ariish also fell pregnant in 2017. Single at the time, she made the difficult decision to give her daughter up for an open adoption shortly after her first birthday – after extensive research she chose a Canadian family with whom she is still in regular touch today.
‘I knew I had to do it after the first time I had a fit when I was alone with her in the house. I came around from it and realised I didn’t want her to grow up at such a young age and be forced to care for me all on her own. I wanted her to experience life as a normal child, not as the daughter of an epileptic.’
While saying goodbye to your baby must be an indescribably difficult experience, when Ariish talks about this open adoption there is lightness to her tone and her expression that is in stark contrast to her body language when she discusses her own childhood, so I am not surprised when she presses the point that adoption can be a good thing and that it needs to be viewed as such, both to help the birth parents and the children.
‘Even though I don’t claim to be a mom now, I am still connected to her - she knows who I am and I think about her all the time,’ she says. ‘I’m very close with the family - we have grown to have a strong relationship and when they adopted her they said they feel as if they gained me as a daughter as well. The problem is when people think of adoption they think of foster care, but it can be a really good and life-saving thing. Why put a child through traumatic emotions when you can give them to a family who will love and care for them?’
Indeed. Watching this brave young woman talk about the parts of London she loves – Brixton, mostly – and the friends she has made here, I think about how easy it would have been for her to remain one of the many beautiful but story-less models we see in fashion shoots. Ariish seems to be aware that revealing these very personal details about her life could both serve to make her more famous and create professional problems for her. Over the course of this conversation, she does note that she is concerned producers will be wary of working with an epileptic but mostly I got the impression that her career hadn’t really been a factor in deciding whether or not to tell her story.
‘If I get through to just one young woman or man with epilepsy who is struggling then I will be pleased,’ she says. ‘In my [South Sudanese] community they told me I had the devil in me. They said that only a devil child would have fits like I did and for a long time I believed them - but that is so so wrong. Even westerners have so little understanding of epilepsy, but it’s a medical condition and should be treated as one, and the more we talk about it, the less sinister it will seem.’
Ariish’s success – happily, it appears – has allowed her to become entirely independent of her family. She no longer speaks to her mother and I can see that her rapid ascent to the top of the fashion industry has helped her quieten the voices that told her she was ugly from her earliest years.
‘I was always an outcast in my family long before I got epilepsy, which has a lot to do with colourism,’ she says. ‘There is a lot of colourism in the black African community and I was the darkest woman in my family. My mother would always say to me “You have to bleach - it’s ok for a man to be this colour but not a woman”. I think this shame about my skin tone really impacted a lot of my decisions in life.’
The fashion industry doesn’t exactly have an unblemished record on this front either but since the Black Lives Matter movement last summer there has been a shift towards using models of all skin tones on the catwalks and in fashion shoots. Ariish says this change has had a powerful impact on her career, while noting that dark-skinned women are rarely used in plus-size shoots, or as older models or in more commercial campaigns.
Nonetheless her affection for this country – which represents a clean slate in a young life with too many storylines – is clear and she hopes to make London her permanent home. Her dreams are lofty and filled with age-appropriate ambitions that include walking for Versace and appearing on the cover of British Vogue. But alongside them, she hopes to set up a charity for young people with epilepsy and to continue fighting abuse and colourism in her community – and, step by step I suppose, move past that extraordinarily painful childhood.
I said goodbye hoping they all come true: if anyone deserves the fairy-tale ending, it’s Ariish.
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