Welcome Home by Najwa Zebian

Author:Najwa Zebian [Zebian, Najwa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

I read this poem at multiple events to address the importance of looking beneath a person’s surface. Beneath the labels. At the time, I still wore my hijab, the traditional headdress worn by many women who embrace the Muslim faith. It’s worthy to note that not all Muslim women wear it, and that there are different beliefs among those who identify with the faith on the obligatory aspect of it.

At the time I wrote this poem, I had already self-published my first two books, Mind Platter and The Nectar of Pain. I was well aware that what the world celebrated about me was my resilience and strength as a visibly Muslim woman who writes well. Even though my writing had absolutely nothing to do with religion or culture, multiple news articles and reviews referred to me as an immigrant Muslim woman who wrote about her journey from Lebanon to Canada, which was not even close to reality. My parents got married in Canada, had five children, decided to move to Lebanon, and that’s where I was born. I was a Canadian citizen weeks after I was born, and I’d visited my family in Canada multiple times. My older siblings made their way back to Canada one after the other while I stayed with my dad and multiple relatives in Lebanon until my sixteenth birthday. At that point, every member of my family, except for my married sister, was in Canada. I came to visit, and shortly after, the war broke out in Lebanon, so I stayed in Canada. The point is not to run away from labels. The point is to say That is not my story. You don’t get to take what I look like and use that to tell the story you think it means about me. I tell my story. Was I an immigrant? Absolutely. Everywhere I went. Even when I lived in Lebanon. Because I never felt the true feeling of home. Was I Muslim? Yes. But why did that have to be part of my title? Why did that have to be more important than what I was actually doing?

When I wrote this poem, I was trying so hard to show everyone around me that I was experiencing pain. The pain of not being seen—really seen. I was hiding years of searching for home. I was hiding how out of place I felt. I was hiding how humiliated and emotionally debilitated I was to have experienced sexual harassment and power abuse. As I read this poem, I was standing on stage, screaming without screaming: HEAR ME. See me. Believe me. See past my labels. See past what you see with your eyes. Let your heart see me.

I would always get asked to speak at events and in classrooms, and the topic always somehow ended up being religion, culture, or the hijab. And I wanted to say There is more to me.

I was changing. My beliefs were changing.

And I was more than a Muslim woman who wore the hijab and happened to have the ability to write.

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