Avsnitt
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For nearly a year now, whenever I close my eyes I see bloodied Palestinian children covered in dust that used to be concrete. Now, my mind’s eye brings me a new vision. The bright, beautiful face of Marcellus Khalifa Williams, a Black Muslim man who was executed several days ago by the State of Missouri for a crime he did not commit.
In the aftermath of his killing, my feed was flooded with pictures of his poetry, written for the children of Palestine, and his last words, a testimony.
All it takes to become a Muslim is the utterance of a simple statement, a testimony called the shahada.
Ash-hadu anla illaha illa Allah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasool Allah.I bear witness that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
I’ve sat in the mosque a hundred times and heard these words spoken as new Muslims are welcomed into the fold. I’ve heard them in the call to prayer before salah.
I utter them myself during the prayer, a reminder of what I believe and what I declare. God is One. His prophet, Muhammad, is my guide for His teachings.
Would I have put my hopes in God, or in my executors?
All of this to prepare me for the time that these words will matter most. At death.
My biggest fear is that I will be on my deathbed and not manage the shahada. That I will forget the words. That my carelessness in life, my lack of attention, my insufficient faith, will show in what doesn’t come out of my mouth.
In the moments before death, we are reduced to our very core, and what if the testimony isn’t at my core? What if my core is empty?
In Arabic, the shahada is so called because it’s a statement from a witness. I imagine a court, but not the broken courts of our broken criminal justice systems. Not the courts in which America can kill its own Black citizens, nor the ones in which it can veto any statements for the end of occupation, the end of genocide, the end of one massacre after another, after another.
In Arabic, a witness is called a shaheed. This is the same word for martyr.
Marcellus Williams, who wrote poetry for the children of Palestine, is a shaheed, much like the children of Palestine.
Marcellus Williams, in his moments before death, was not reduced, but elevated to his core, a core that was content. A core that praised God and knew it was going home, to God.
Our faith teachers have written volumes about diseases of the heart. About envy. Covetousness. Greed.
In Islam, the original sin, the one that cast the devil out of heaven, is arrogance. The cure to arrogance is humility. The cure to envy and covetousness is contentment.
This is why you will hear the mothers of murdered children in Gaza say, Alhamdulillah between their tears. Alhamdulillah alaa kol haal. All praise be to God in every situation. The same words Marcellus wrote for his final statement.
They mean, I’m hurting, but I still trust you, God. They mean, I’m hurting but you are still worthy of my contentment. You are always worthy. They are the words of a true believer.
I imagine myself in his place, asked for a final statement. I imagine my denial, my refusal. I would have written an essay on my innocence. Would I have put my hopes in God, or in my executors?
In our tradition, when someone dies, we say inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon. To God we belong and to him we return.
Marcellus knew this. We do not belong to the executors. We belong to God.
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If you haven’t already, you can read the details of the ways that the criminal justice system failed Marcellus’ specific case below. Click through the carousel to read.
Marcellus from an earlier interview. Such conviction.
The always eloquent Hanif Abdurraqib on Marcellus and the concept of “innocence”. Click through the carousel to read.
Marcellus’ poem for the children of Palestine.
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If you’re like me, you’ve been following the US election even though you’d rather look away. As a Canadian, I have no vote, and yet, I care more than I’ve ever cared before. It’s hard not to care when American policy affects so much of what happens not just within its own borders, but across the world.
My first thought continues to be Palestine. The killing of Palestinians now not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank. The destruction of whatever little civil infrastructure still exists. The annexing of more and more and more land. This is the first thing on my mind as I watch a speech, a rally, a debate. And last week’s presidential debate was no exception.
Last week, after the presidential debate, I furiously wrote this out on my phone when I found myself unable to sleep.
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The world’s most lethal fighting force
When you promise”the world’s most lethal fighting force”
what I hearisCraters the length of football fieldspregnant with tentsfilled with familieswho fledafter the school was bombedafter the friend’s house was bombedafter their uncle’s house was bombedafter their house was bombed
What I seeisA girl who wakes up to the chaosin the burnt husk of another hospitalshrapnel covering her little faceA girl who asks her doctorin a panicif this is the heaven her mother promised
She is concernedbecause it’s noisyand it’s scary and it still smells like death(the stench is unbearable, you see, and we can’t smell it through our screens,but it is blood and rotting flesh, and raw sewagemixed together with the sharp sting of still-hot metal.)and the dust? The dust is everywhereit cakes her face it lines the beds and the windowsillsit is the remains of every building no longer standing.
Her mother said that if the bombs comethe next time she woke up, she’d be in heavenand her mother has never lied before, but this?this does not seem like heaven
What I see is A father of newborn twinscelebrating new lifeso rare in these partsA father who walks the rubble-filled streets to get his babies’ birth certificates and walks back to find the apartmentwith his wife and babies (those perfect, tiny creatures! 10 fingers! 10 toes!) GoneA blackened hole in its place
What I see is A man abducted off the streets of GazaReturned months laterHis eyeshauntedunable to hide the animal fear of what they’ve endured
When you promisethe world’s most lethal fighting forceI’m not impressed but terrified
But thenyou were never trying to impress mewere you?
Every scenario I’ve described above is real.
The craters are the result of a recently bombed tent camp in Khan Younis, Gaza, where Israel dropped 2000 pound bombs on families sleeping in tents in the middle of the night, killing or burying alive whole families in a matter of seconds on the night of September 10th.
The girl in the hospital asked this doctor if she was in heaven in this clip below.
The father of newborn twins’ story can be found here
And finally, this man. This poor man’s face is haunted, and will haunt me to my dying day.
This poem could have been hundreds of pages long. I’ve left out some of the most indelible images, because I cannot bring myself to write extensively about beheaded babies, pregnant women and their husbands, killed and hung by soldiers on the roof of their house, innocent men taken into torture camps called prisons and raped, hungry dogs eating human remains on the streets.
We need more than a ceasefire. We need an arms embargo. We need unfettered access to aid and health workers. We need a massive influx of everything required to rebuild society in both Gaza and the West Bank, and we need the authority figures who led this charge held to account. Anything less is not justice, and not enough.
Thank you for reading Letters from a Muslim Woman. I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world. A paid subscription is $5 a month and gives you access to my unfinished letters, published every other week, where I share my most tender, unvarnished thoughts on topics like Islamophobia, sincerity and hypocrisy, the visibility in being a visible minority and the pressure to be perfect.
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Let’s chat in the comments:
* Have you been following the US presidential election?
* What are your thoughts on Kamala? Are you conflicted like me?
* Are there statements you’ve heard, political or otherwise, that were meant to impress you but instead terrified you? Tell me about them.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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How to Spot a Girl-Family
I grew up in a family of sisters, the third of four girls. Then my husband and I had two boys. The world looks different when you go from girl-sister to boy-mom.
Today I’m exploring life as a girl-sister through vignettes of my born family. In a later essay, I’ll write about life as a boy-mom.
1- The family that cries together, stays together
When I was pregnant with D, my sister Zeinab was pregnant with his cousin. In the summers, we all spent time at Mama and Baba’s house, piling onto the couches and beds. Someone always walking in or out of the backdoor, in or out of a bathroom, in or out of a conversation.
I had a weepy pregnancy. Come to think of it, I was consistently weepy until I turned 35. Now, at 41, I’ve dried up. Shriveled? There are no more tears. I rage sometimes. I roll my eyes with frustration, but the tears are rare and precious gifts that overlook me. As if to say, there! you wanted to be free of us and now you are. How do you like that?
That summer of the double pregnancy, I walked in one evening to find my other two sisters, Soraya and Aminah discussing open houses. Aminah lived in California. Soraya lived with me in Montreal. Why were they looking at houses? By this point, I’d been in Montreal two years, but my homesickness had not yet abated. I cornered Soraya. Promise me you’re not moving. You have to stay. Promise me. Promise.
And the weeping began.
Soraya was non-committal. Look, I don’t have plans to move, but I can’t promise anything either. She’s always been a vagabond. At 17, she finished high-school a semester early and absconded to Egypt, coming home with loud clothes and a louder voice, all brash comedy. Mid-way through the pandemic, she left me and went to London. My adult life can be charted by a series of repeat incidents of Soraya, leaving.
Mama stopped tidying in the kitchen. Came and sat next to me. Held my heaving shoulders, started the ruqya. But a dam had been breached. The tears were tidal. Sobs wracked my whole body. I couldn’t get over the possibility of Soraya moving back to Ottawa, but if I could block it from my mind, perhaps my tears and I might reach a détente.
The storm of emotion took thirty minutes to pass. By the end, I had the hiccups. Soraya and Aminah watched their every word, careful not to set me off again.
That’s when Zeinab came down from her nap. How were the open houses? she asked brightly and they all leapt to their feet, waving their arms - danger! danger!
Zeinab recoiled, not sure where the attack was coming from.
Noha’s just barely calmed down, Mama told her, recounting the whole ordeal.
To me, Zeinab’s response was the summation of what it means to grow up with sisters. I’ve been crying upstairs for the last 30 minutes. If I’d known, I would have come down so we could cry together.
2- Pregnant and hiding
My sisters and I traded off being pregnant the way you trade off a relay race. Nausea. Food aversions. The smell of flowers delivered to the door by one fiancé sending another to the bathroom to throw up. The sight of chicken. The smell of chicken. The taste of chicken.
Sometimes we didn’t trade off. Sometimes we broke the rules and decided to run the relay together.
Zeinab and I spent hours in Mama and Baba’s walk-in closet, nestled between the hanging clothes, shifting this way and that to make room for our bellies. We didn’t start out in the closet of course, but in the hallway, where the smell of chicken and onions cooking on the stovetop threatened to send us into bouts of gagging.
Step one would be to barricade ourselves in the first place we could find, which was my parents’ master bedroom. Step two would be to notice that the smell was still discernible to our oversensitive olfactory nerves. Step three would be to put another door between us for fortification. Step four would be to wait.
Zeinab’s kids would inevitably find us, needing this or that. Complaining of a brother or a cousin who had hit them, taken their toy, said something mean. Close the door! Close the door! We’d say, in a panic, needing to protect our gag reflexes before we could mediate and send them on their way.
The closet was stuffy, a cocoon of summer heat. The A/C hardly reached us. But we were back in each other’s confidence. The interruptions few and far between. And wasn’t that something like our childhood? Like the nights we’d spent, whispering late, taking turns falling in and out of sleep and waking?
3- Dolls and Pretend
We never bought new Barbies when we were little. Mama would scout garage sales for cast-offs, dolls no longer loved by another little girl within a 6 block radius. We would fight over the blonde ones, but only if their hair hadn’t been chopped off. Someone was always stuck with Christie or Becky.
We had lots of brand new paper-dolls, flimsy cutout cardboard drawings you could dress any way you wanted. For the office. For the park. I have a memory of sleeping over at Tante Lynne’s house, of her buying a new paper-doll for each of me and Soraya. Of eating candy and drinking hot chocolate.
For all the paper-dolls we accumulated, only one entered our collective consciousness: Wishnik.
Aminah, my oldest sister, had invented this name out of thin air. Long after Wishnik the doll was gone, Aminah played pretend as Wishnik the schoolgirl. In the game, she was a naughty student who had to be scolded by a stern teacher named Mrs. Soraya. Soraya was maybe 6 at the time, and there was nothing she loved more than scolding her oldest sister.
Wishnik! You didn’t write your name neatly enough! Wishnik, come back and clean up your desk! Wishnik, why didn’t you finish your homework? Mrs. Soraya’s arms would be folded across her chest, her eye-brow perpetually arched, her lips pursed.
Aminah was game then and she’s game now. She’s always been the sweetest, the smiley-est, the easiest to amuse. I keep saying when I grow up I want to be Aminah, but I’m grown now and I’m still much more snarky than she’s ever been.
4- Thirteen Tangents
Here is a story that has been told repeatedly to illustrate conversational dynamics in the Beshir household. One night over dinner, many moons ago, one of my sisters started to tell us all about something that had happened at school that day. Twenty-five minutes later, Baba quietly interrupted us all to say “thirteen”. We stopped to look at him. Thirteen what? Thirteen is an unlucky number, but we don’t believe in luck? Thirteen servings of bissilla. Thirteen rides to school and back?
Thirteen tangents, Baba told us, since the sister in question had started to tell her story. And we still weren’t at the end. Poor Baba has always been the ragil ghalban in the midst of five female voices, the outnumbered, out-talked, out-storied man.
But Baba is a girl-dad, through and through. He may never have untangled the knots in our hair, but he taught each of us to ride our bikes, and then he took us for long rides along the river. Or he played soccer against us and our friends, one to 7, and dribbled the ball as though it was tied by a dainty little rope to his foot, a dance partner, refusing to leave him. Or he watched hockey with us, and tennis with us, and Columbo and Get Smart with us. Or he bought us secret ice creams at the mall before dinner, secret donuts at Tims on the way home, picking us up late from the bus stop when we had to stay at the library, working on group assignments.
Baba is my inverse identity, a man with a wife and daughters to my woman with a husband and sons. I look to his example when I’m struggling to read a complicated Lego manual, when the boys are yapping my ears off about an obscure Batman villain. I look to Baba’s shrugged shoulders, to his pretend resignation hiding secret delight. He loves every minute. I know this because I do too.
Thank you for reading Letters from a Muslim Woman. I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world. A shoutout to our newest paid subscriber, Karima. Thanks so much for the support, Karima! A paid subscription is $5 a month and gives you access to my unfinished letters, published every other week, and my full archive. If you’re enjoying my perspective and want to support me, consider upgrading to help me spend more time on writing and share a voice that isn’t often heard.
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I’m continuing to share resources about the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing this post from Breaking the Silence Israel, a whistleblower group of former Israeli military officers, about the apathy of Palestinian civilian deaths deemed “collateral damage”. Please click through the carousel and read all the content, then ask why these lives are irrelevant while others matter.
I also wanted to share this haunting poem that has stayed with me.
Let’s chat in the comments:
* Do you have sisters or brothers? Was your family dominated by one or the other? How did it affect the vibe in your house?
* Were you an emotional kid? Are you still emotional? Has your threshold changed as you grew?
* Were you a mama’s boy or a daddy’s girl? How did that manifest for you?
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I am looking at my face in the bathroom mirror at 5:45 on Wednesday morning. The bruise on my right cheekbone is more pronounced than the night before. It gives the impression of contouring, of those fake Kardashian cheekbones I don’t have.
I press on it gingerly, waiting for the feedback of the pain. Will my Nars tinted lotion be enough to cover this? My other hand comes up to the red-brown on my chin. This one whines like a high-frequency radio station, the feedback sharp and sudden. No Nars will cover it.
Riding my bike home from work last week, I miscalculate the height of the curb and go down hard.
My right side takes most of the impact - cheek, chin, knee, both palms for good measure. By the time I untangle myself from the bike, there’s a crowd of 7 or 8 around me. Water bottles are offered, pupils checked. What day is it? Where are you?
Thankfully, I know the answers — there is no concussion. My phone and my glasses, by some miracle, aren’t broken. I call M, who comes to retrieve me and the bike.
The ringing in my opposite ear doesn’t stop for ten minutes. When it does, the sound waves are replaced by waves of pain and pressure. The right side of my jaw may have taken the impact, but the left side is suffering the after-effects, silent but screaming.
At home we apply ice and Advil. Call my mom-in-law for a virtual consult, take down instructions to rest. No chewing, no stretching or yawning. “Think of this like an ankle sprain for your jaw.”
The emergency having passed, I am on to the next worry.
What do you think of when you see a bruised hijabi? Is her husband beating her? Did her dad trap her in a room for refusing to marry a man 20 years her senior?
My mind is filled with snatches of scenes from the procedurals I’ve flipped away from on TV. Brown women with light eyes, poorly wrapped hijabs, and thick accents. Bruises painted on their cheeks at exactly the spot mine sits.
“I fell down the stairs,” the woman on the tv says, unconvincingly. The white detective raises an eyebrow. He cares so much that he stays after her terrorist husband/brother/father until the bad guy slips. By the end of the episode, the woman’s face will have healed. She’ll stop by the precinct to thank her white saviour. She is free. She is in America. What more could she ask?
What do you think of when you see a bruised hijabi? Do you think she might have fallen cycling? Do you ever picture a hijabi cycling? Swimming? Paddling along down a river?
Exhibit one of why I assume the worst:
My father has four daughters. He is a tall Arab man with a beard. Because he has been happily married for 50 years, and he’s a girl dad four times over, he is often surrounded by women.
It has happened more times than I care to admit that we’ll be out and a stranger will say something about my dad and his wives, looking over to me and my sisters.
I have no broken bones, no open wounds. I have no need for a hospital, and if I did I’d have an embarrassing number from which to choose. I stay home and ice my face and rest in the air conditioning. I take multiple paid sick days.
M goes to the grocery store and calls me (perfect reception on our functioning cell phones.) Do I want corn chowder soup? Minestrone? Chicken noodle? I turn down each one — I’m not in the mood, and I have cupboards full of food I can slurp right here at home.
I start with the cherries I love so much - bite through them with my front teeth and gum them up by pressing down on them with the roof of my mouth. I imagine I am woman who’s teeth are gone, and who can’t find her dentures. The juices release. I can swallow the cherries down, nearly whole.
The red skid marks on my cheek fade in 3 days, but my chin takes longer. I search longingly in the mirror. Is my jaw tilted to the right? If that was the case, wouldn’t I feel it? Or is the bruise under my chin swelling on one side, making me lopsided? In the grand scheme of things, my jaw is fine, and yet I can’t look away from the slight asymmetry.
I saw a picture last week of a little girl in Gaza whose jaw had been blown off one side of her face. Two days later, I saw another picture of her, post stitches, a bandage holding things together, and I thought of Picasso. I read an article about doctors performing surgery in rooms so hot, their sweat drips into their open patients. Flies buzz around the operating theater. There is no electricity. There is no anesthetic.
I wonder about our capacity to care. I wonder if I’ve lost you, my reader. If your sympathy is blunted. If you feel as though I’ve taken advantage of your concern for me, a woman on a bike (personal, relatable) to instead give you a lecture about tens of thousands of dead Palestinians (political, not what you signed up for).
Do we still have room in our hearts for this? Are we too tired to hear and read about it? Do we all just want it to go away?
I’m continuing to share resources about Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing an article from the Lancet, one of the world’s foremost medical journals, providing analysis on the death toll in Gaza. The Lancet conservatively estimates that at least 186,000 deaths could be attributable to this conflict. That number accounts for 7-9% of the population of Gaza. Here’s a second article about the Lancet’s analysis.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this, about this unfathomable number, about the fact that it could be so much higher. The news cycle has mostly moved on from Gaza. Even before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump a couple of days ago, there’s been a general fatigue about this war. Coverage is fading. Instead, there is talk of the Presidential Election. Of elections in England and France. All of these are important events. But this is too. This is life and death, for millions of human beings.
As Russia’s attacks on Ukraine have intensified, seeing the way the media covers the news vs. the way they cover the news of Israel’s attacks on Gaza is quite something. Below are only two examples. Note the passive vs. active voice. Note the way horror is expressed for the deaths of Ukrainians, and the way it’s clear who’s committed the attacks.
I won’t relent to the dehumanization of Palestinians. One of my favourite accounts to follow out of Gaza is Mohammed Subeh’s. Subeh is a Palestinian American ER doctor who’s been volunteering in Gaza. His accounts are full of empathy and detail. Please watch him discuss his day to day below.
Let’s chat in the comments:
* This whole essay felt very navel-gazing to me, the point where I thought about not sharing it. The reason is that I know it shows just how much I care what other people think. Do you care what other people think? Do you worry that someone will see something in you and jump to conclusions?
* What do you do with your feelings of privilege? Do you express gratitude and leave it at that? Or does your privilege lead you to a sort of survivor’s guilt? I’m trying to find the balance between these two points for myself and would love to hear how others manage it.
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Update: Several weeks after I published this post, Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner, told the world of the fact that her stepfather had sexually assaulted her, and that after her mother learned this, she continued to live with him until his death. I will point you to this excellent essay about Alice Munro by Brandon that says everything that needs saying about this topic.
Alice Munro, Canadian literary giant, died on May 13th at age 92. This essay is part of the virtual memorial organized by Tara Penry in her honour. Head over to Quiet Reading with Tara Penry in about a week to find a curated page of all the tributes.
In 8th grade, I applied and was accepted into a specialized arts high school for their creative writing program. My acceptance confirmed my identity as a writer. Perhaps even more importantly at the time, it confirmed my identity as someone who belonged.
For the next four years, I took multiple buses across town to get to school, spending two to three hours in transit. I carried a little notebook in my crossbody purse, and a blue fountain pen with which to capture my observations and the snippets of lines I didn’t want to forget.
In 1996, when I started high school, literary works by BIPOC authors were not taking the English-speaking world by storm. I cannot remember a single piece we were given to study that told the story of non-white protagonists. Which isn’t to say that I was bothered by the lack of representation. I wasn’t. Rather than wonder if there were books out there with people whose lives more closely mirrored mine, I fretted about why my life looked nothing like theirs.
The poems and stories I was assigned were steeped in landscape and wildlife. Lines could be dedicated to describing the way a specific flower bloomed. Pages could be given over to explaining the movement of a fawn in the forest, the specific species of trees it passed, the specific treads on the ground it left, the specific shrubs from which it ate. I would reread these passages religiously, trying to drink in the details, to familiarize myself with the plants and animals. To learn enough about a birch and an oak and a maple and a dogwood that I could write my own paragraphs about them.
But what is and what isn’t political? The story of an Irish immigrant from 1880 written in 1980 is not political, because no one still doubts the Irish immigrant’s humanity.
It didn’t work. On my street, there was a canopy of trees, but I hardly paid attention to the species, only to the shade it gave us and the branches I could climb to look out over the neighbourhood.
The plants I knew intimately were the grape leaves my father picked along the forest path that led to the river, down the street from our house. While I couldn’t tell other tree species apart, I would always pride myself on the ability to distinguish a grape leaf from a maple leaf, mainly by the rounded indentation around the stem.
Baba would come home from his walks and bike rides with plastic grocery bags filled to the brim with these foraged leaves. He would boil and salt them, prepare the filling of rice, chopped parsley and ground beef, spicing it with cumin and black peppers. He would spend his evenings wrapping each boiled leaf around the stuffing to make the little fingers of his favourite Egyptian delicacy. Then we would feast, and the taste of Egypt would be there in our dining room in Ottawa.
There were other books, of course, even if they weren’t on my syllabus. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance was published in 1995. It spoke of another country, another set of challenges and difficulties and triumphs. I was wholly unequipped to write about Egypt the way he spoke about India, notwithstanding the fact that he was a master writer and I was just starting out. I, who had spent an accumulated total of 7 months of my life in Egypt, spread over various holidays, couldn’t possibly tell its story.
I wanted only to write CanLit, because CanLit was what I was being assigned at school. That particular aesthetic, that story of “sad small towns… or heartwarming ones… of white-bread literature that was mostly about the past, with its sepia-toned covers, all with the back of a woman’s neck on them.”
CanLit stories weren’t political. They weren’t about immigrants or their children navigating life in the new country. Or, when they were about immigrants, those immigrants came from Scotland and Ireland, and had arrived no later than 1905. If a language other than English was spoken in CanLit, it was Gaelic or Celtic. If an ocean was crossed, it was the Atlantic.
But what is and what isn’t political? The story of an Irish immigrant from 1880 written in 1980 is not political because no one still doubts the Irish immigrant’s humanity. If that story had been told in real time, it would have raised more eyebrows than something written with the benefit of hindsight.
To qualify as apolitical is a luxury, a privilege. Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul laments that “in order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / And in order to hear the birds / The warplanes must be silent.”
In the 10th and 11th grade, I fell down a Jane Urquhart rabbit hole, reading everything of hers I could get my hands on. Truthfully, I didn’t understand a single story. The plots were so sparse, so subtle.
What I did understand was the mood: serious and intense, not about much of anything at all to my 15 year old mind. Page after page where the landscapes described blankets of snow in the wilderness. Action happening beneath the surface, barely perceptible. Thick, lush forests. Characters who hunted or painted or lived in their cottages year round, away from the city.
I read Urquhart with equal parts fascination and dismay. This was what CanLit sounded like, I was certain. But try as I might to emulate it, my heavily researched stories about old artists living in small northern towns fell apart as quickly as I could get them down. Where Urquhart mesmerized with subtlety and minimal action, my imitations did nothing but make me bored and sleepy.
Write what you know, my teachers had told me, but every example we read in class had so little to do with what I knew. Every epic family saga traced back to a farm in the prairies or a small town in Scotland, landscapes and rituals I had never seen, a world assumed to be the default for which I had no reference.
Discouraged, I turned my attention to another giant in Canadian literature, Alice Munro.
Here, I found hope. Munro’s stories, unlike those of Urquhart — or Michael Ondaatje, another writer I was desperate to emulate — were less fussy. For one, I was able to follow the plot without losing myself in the scenery. The prose was elegant but spare. For another, Munro’s characters weren’t all artists and soldiers, or at least, that wasn’t a prerequisite.
Munro’s characters were ordinary people. Teachers, wives, sisters. Their concerns might be their boredom, their families, their expectations for life, their money or lack thereof. Alice’s stories – and I call her Alice not out of a lack of reverence but because she made me feel at home in her words – Alice’s stories were concerned with the mundane and the interior, and what made it human.
I have always loved the way Alice’s writing centers women and the challenges we face. But this is where my double consciousness kicks in. Recently, I reread Runaway, the story of a woman named Carla, navigating life with a controlling, emotionally manipulative husband. So much about Carla spoke to me. Her uncertainty and impulsiveness. Her imperfection. The way she cried constantly. The way she sought connection with animals like Flora, the goat that found a home in her barn.
Despite my love for this story, I hesitated to share it, to make it a part of this essay. Why? Because Muslim women are already perceived to be oppressed by the men in our lives. Because someone might wrongly take my mention of Carla’s struggles as a clue leading back to my own life.
When there are so few examples of a group in the media, each representation holds inordinate weight. No matter how many times I say I am speaking only for myself, if you’ve never seen another Muslim woman, I have just become an avatar, a projection for millions of other people.
Alice wrote the stories of women before women were common protagonists. In fact, it was her writing that normalized us on the page. I don’t know if she struggled with this issue of representation. If she worried that her impulsive characters might make women seem hysterical or irresponsible. If she did, she pushed through to give us rich layering, to give us CanLit that was universal in its specificity. Even if you didn’t live in a small town in Northern Ontario. Even if you were the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, trying to find yourself in a classroom reading assignment.
I am trying to internalize this lesson. To write my reality because of the mess and humanity, not in spite of it. I am trying to widen what CanLit means so that there is room for stories like mine within it too. This is what Alice taught me.
Thank you for reading Letters from a Muslim Woman. I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world. A special shoutout to our newest paid subscribers, Maia Duerr and Samrinder Atwal, Jo Ellen Welsford, and Laila. Thanks so much for the support!
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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe - Visa fler
