Toronto Canada is one fascinating place.
Having spent a very eventful few weeks there recently, I just recently got the time to process, and finally got the time to sit my ass down on in front of computer to write about it. I could go on for days about all the crazy mind-bending shit that went down in Canadia. (Hence this being “Part I”). However, I recently began thinking about the subject of women of color and feminism after reading “The Or vs. the And”, a post to the ridiculously awesome blog Racalicious.
Back to Toronto, Canada. I’m a born-and-bred Pacific Northwest/American chick, so being on the East side of Canada was still a culture shock. For one, it has one of the highest South Asian populations of any city in North America. Second, I’m related to about half of the Indians there (just kidding. sort of). I met more aunts, uncles, cousins once and twice removed, nieces and nephews than I can remember, and walking around was like literally being in a (cleaner, less insane) India. It was like a crash course: American/Canadian Desi 101, maximum exposure to Indian culture.
In retrospect, this was both positive and negative. Positive in that I got to meet a great many of my kin. Negative in that I realized my views regarding women, politics and so on were not the norm among my own people. For example: I had a conversation with a few other Indian ladies one night. We got to talking about the role of women in the Indian family (Not as dry as it may sound…trust me.) As expected, things got pretty heated.
According to a few, desi women were basically required to submit to their husbands leadership. i.e, whatever he says goes and a female can only “negotiate”. Not only that, women shouldn’t really work and if they do, they’re not raising their kids right. In their view, women are neither needed or should really have an active life outside of the home. And apparently they thought that Islam could justify all of the above. Oh, and lest I forget to mention: all of the women in question hold college degrees from India!
I was pretty shocked. Mainly because I didn’t expect educated women to think this way, and that they would be spewing the same old bullshit used by (some) South Asian and Muslim men to justify lording over their wives. It’s a disservice not only to Muslim women trying to work and make their way in a world that doesn’t approve them already, and to those men who’ve freed their minds from patriarchial ideology. And worse yet, it does a disservice to Islam, by misconstruing passages of the Qur’an and theological dictates–to justify oppression that does not exist within the religion. Regardless, it made me pretty sad. But I began to think: why?
Part of the answer, lies in the location itself. Like I mentioned before, Canada is a pretty diverse place. Where my fam lives you see nothing but Muslim, South Asian, and African people. White people are indeed the minority. It’s akin to living in a bubble: being surrounded by your own people is like a barrier: it insulates you from the outside Western world, and it keeps old modes of thought IN. Living in Seattle, my fam didn’t have that luxury. We point-blank HAD to deal with all sorts of non-Muslim, non Indian, non-ourselves people on a daily basis. No one was around to tell us to not step outside the bounds of conservative desi culture. That didn’t mean that we weren’t respectful of culture, but we simply weren’t immersed in it completely.
Anyway, its an interesting world out there, even within United States and Canada, where we find that where one lives, the environment has a huge impact on ideology and worldview. In sum, your ‘hood makes you who you are…for better or worse.
Ground Zero
Posted in Uncategorized with tags political commentary-domestic on March 28, 2009 by SultanaI went to New York City for the first time yesterday. While walking around Manhattan, I made a very important stop: Ground Zero.
The former site of the World Trade Center is a place that can be summed up in the following sentence:
It wasn’t the presence of something…it is a loss made conspicuous by absence.
I never saw the twin towers in person. I did, however, watch them fall to the ground live on TV on September 11th , 2001, a heap of rubble and nearly 3,000 lives lost.
9/11 was probably the first and only tragedy in living memory that was shared live by millions of people in the US and abroad. Its memory is something that we all share in common. Our reactions to the event, however, diverged greatly.
I began college in 2003. I studied political science, and did so because of the effect that the 9/11 tragedy had on my life. I wanted to know why, and how something like the attacks could have happened. Most of all, I wanted to know how I, an American Muslim, became an enemy in my own country overnight. I thirsted for answers, and quickly realized that unless I spoke on behalf of the Muslim community, no one else around me would.
I never believed that something like September 11 was about “good” and “evil”. No doubt the act was horrific and murderous beyond belief. But it was an inherently political act. As I would learn, it was the confluence of factors, decades of geopolitics, the consequences of the action of men within our own government and those abroad.
History runs along a continuum. Unremarkable events and decisions, economic cycles, periodic natural disasters, the predictable rise and fall of power. But every now and then, history turns upon a moment—a day—a single event. And, as if another fork was taken in a diverging road, everything afterwards is forever changed. September 11th was one of those days. The World Trade Center attack was that event.
The emptiness at Ground Zero was unnerving. I stood at the historic 18th century cemetery across from the site, where a sycamore tree had miraculously fallen and shielded the church and attached graveyard, and wondered how life might’ve been had the towers not fallen.
But, as always, life goes on. Past is prologue, and the future lies ahead unwritten. Only time will tell.
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