Breaking the Ocean by Annahid Dashtgard

Author:Annahid Dashtgard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2019-07-30T13:43:03+00:00

Nine

Protest, Rinse, Repeat

After surviving the threat of Y2K as one millennium ticked over to the next, I relocated to Vancouver for a couple of months to help distribute our Seattle film. We initially set up a documentary video collective called RADAR — a palindromic acronym of our names, Rachel, Annahid, Dima, Annahid, Rachel. Unfortunately, none of us was in a place in our lives where we had the time, energy, or skills to create a successful business. Vancouver was also isolating. As much as I appreciated the oceanic landscape, the city was too racially homogeneous. There were large Persian, Asian, and South Asian populations, but they were largely segregated from the very white downtown core. When I spoke with people working in various organizations about the need for more diverse representation, I was often met with blank stares or silence. In awareness of equity issues, the scene out west was a quarter century behind what I had encountered in the east. I wasn’t willing to be the token brown girl all over again, shaking the tree of homogeneity. I needed to see myself reflected in the people around me, to be part of a community where diversity was celebrated rather than something I had to convince people had merit.

In March, I got a call from the Toronto-based Centre for Social Justice, a well-established NGO, asking if I wanted an educational coordinator position. The chance to be in Toronto was as appealing as the job itself. By spring I found myself planted in Toronto’s west end. If Vancouver was a woman with a beautiful face but little substance, Toronto was all substance with flashes of beauty. The city felt gritty, diverse in every sense of the word, and full of surprises. It was the first place I’d lived where walking any of the downtown streets felt like an adventure — neighbourhood grocery stores, graffiti-covered walls, and cool clothing boutiques. Soon after arriving, I got my hair cut short at Coupe Bizarre, and had my left ear triple-pierced at a downtown studio where the walls were painted a perfect midnight black.

The first time I stepped on the subway I felt my whole body exhale a deep sigh of relief. Here were as many brown and black bodies as white. In some neighbourhoods recent immigrants outnumbered Canadian-born residents; Chinatown was located just a few blocks away from the financial district; Greektown bordered on a Muslim enclave situated beside the city’s largest mosque. Toronto was a working experiment in inclusion. I fell in love, and, more important, I felt safe. It was the first time in my adult life that I felt fully relaxed in public spaces, surrounded by people who looked like me. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was the perfect base for the inclusion work that would, in a decade’s time, become my bread and butter.

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