Resilience and Triumph by Book Project Collective

Author:Book Project Collective [Book Project Collective]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Second Story Press
Published: 2015-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Speaking Through Silence

Silmi Abdullah

Recently, I accompanied my boss to court for a hearing. Our client was a Muslim and of Arab descent. As soon as I walked in, the female judge asked me, “Are you the interpreter?” By no means was I offended to be called the interpreter. But it was interesting that despite three university degrees and nine years of post-secondary education, my hijab and brown skin had, in the judge’s mind, eliminated the possibility of my being the law student/lawyer-to-be. The automatic association with an ethnicity completely different from mine was also noteworthy. This was of course, not the first time I had experienced this.

In my early years of university, I had strangers ask me whether I was waiting for my husband, as they spotted me on the street while I was really waiting for my friends for an evening out. My employer from my summer call centre job asked me what the point of going to university was when I was going to get married, have kids, and quit work anyway. Ever since I arrived in Canada in 1998, and particularly after 9/11, I have repeatedly had narratives of early marriage, oppression, violence, and male misogyny imposed upon my body. My outward appearance continues to render me an empty receptacle, a blank slate for assumptions, prejudices, and myths.

This is a fate that Muslim women are confronted with all too often. We become involuntary tragic heroines of scripts written by others, and often what we call our “own stories” are simply tales of our efforts to negate those scripts, to justify our identities, to explain who we are NOT rather than who we are. For many years, I did the same. Comments that attempted to categorize me, label me, and attack me through stereotypes about my faith angered me. I would try to think of ways to combat such remarks the next time someone made them to me. I would craft arguments so that I could convince others that I was not oppressed, that my hijab was my own spiritual choice, and that my parents never treated me differently than my brother, until I realized the futility of such an exhausting exercise. When I understood the power of actions, and its ability to (mis)represent an entire faith followed by billions of people worldwide, I realized it was time for me to stop speaking. If suicide bombs and honour killings had the power to wrongly symbolize my faith, I realized that the only way I could effectively represent my religion was through actions – through compassion, kindness, love, and generosity – by embodying the values that I have known to be the true markers of my faith. This was also incredibly important for re-asserting my dignity and self-worth as an individual, and as a woman. So, as the activist within me grows more and more passionate, I become increasingly silent, and it is through this silence that I reclaim my identity and rewrite MY story.

Growing up, “freedom,” “feminism,” “progress,” and “modernity” were not terms that I was overtly conscious of.

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