Hello, everybody. My name is Alimah Al-Wahid and I'm a young Black woman living in the City of Ottawa, Province of Ontario. My father Mohammed Al-Wahid is Somali and my mother Atifah is Tunisian, so I guess I'm mixed race but I consider myself Black rather than biracial. I stand five feet eleven inches tall, slim and fit, with light brown skin, light brown eyes and long curly Black hair. A lot of people wonder if I'm Hispanic or something but I always tell them that I am one hundred percent African. Why do I consider myself Black? Simply because that's how I see myself. Black is beautiful. Black is powerful. Black is magnificent. Biracial is just...ugh. Not that there's something wrong with that.
I was born in the City of Calgary, Province of Alberta, and consider myself a proud Canadian. These days, I attend Carleton University in the south end of Ottawa. I'm in the business administration program at the Sprott School of Business. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about hijab-wearing Somali girls like myself. Some people think we're dumb, simplistic and submissive. Others think we've got something to hide. Almost all of them forget that underneath the cultural and religious differences, we're normal women. I'm here to set the record straight once and for all. I'm twenty years old. I believe in having fun whenever I can. If you don't like it, you can kiss my truly fabulous Somali ass. It's my life!
Right now, I'm lying in bed next to this handsome Haitian stud named Pierre Lafortune. He is oh so dreamy. Picture this, if you will. A six-foot-four, muscular and well-built young Black man with smooth chocolate skin, curly Black hair and light brown eyes. Pierre was born in Quartier Morin, a small town in Northern Haiti, and raised in the City of Calgary, Province of Alberta. He recently transferred to Carleton University from the University of Alberta. My fellow Albertan doesn't much care for the province of Ontario and I can't really blame him. The so-called City of Ottawa is really a small town with not much in the way of entertainment whereas Calgary is a really fun town. I ought to know because I vacation there every damn year. My father Mohammed Al-Wahid is a Constable with the Albertan Provincial Police. My mother Atifah Warsama Al-Wahid is a regional manager at New Wave Book Store. We do alright for ourselves. Just another racially diverse Canadian family trying to achieve the North American dream while remaining true to our respective cultures and faith. That's all.
I was so thrilled to meet a fellow Albertan in the City of Ottawa. My sexy boyfriend Pierre is really cute and he's so good to me. A lot of Somali girls in Ottawa won't date men who aren't Somali and they definitely don't go for guys who aren't Muslim. Me? I'm not like that. If Muslim guys can date or even marry any woman they want, then I say that as a Muslim woman I can do the same thing. My boyfriend is Christian and I am a Muslim woman. Get over it. There is this high-profile Arab-American female city in the States who's married to a Jewish-American congressman. They have a brat together. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton officiated at their wedding himself. Muslim men the world over got mad because this Arab-American lady did the unthinkable. She married a man who wasn't Muslim and didn't make him convert to Islam. Big fucking deal. Muslim men have enjoyed the double standard in our religion for far too long. They don't own us. We can do whatever we want. Especially since we're living in the Western world now. We live by North American and European laws which really favor women, instead of the phallocentric doctrines of Sharia Law, which treat men like kings and women like slaves.
