I think the well-being of the international Black community would be much improved if Black men and Black women simply learned to communicate with one another. My name is Dhakiyah Falak Dawson. I was born and raised in the City of Ottawa, Province of Ontario. The only daughter of an immigrant mother originally from the City of Mogadishu in the nation of Somalia. Oh, and I'm bisexual. What I'm about to tell you is deeply confidential information. I could lose my head for this. Psych! I'm just messing with you. This tale took place during my sophomore year at Carleton University, shortly after I decided to get serious with my boyfriend Amir Abdul-Hamid. A little background info about myself before we get to the important stuff, if you please.
The life of a young Black woman in Canada is never easy. Seriously. We all got stereotypes about ourselves which we must face daily. I stand six feet tall, slim but curvy where it counts, with medium brown skin and long Black hair. People say I resemble the African-American singer Alicia Keys, only with tennis champion Serena Williams booty. I don't take these statements as a compliment because I am my own woman. I am Dhakiyah, not some amalgamation of Black female celebrities from America. Anyhow, where was I? Most of my life, I grew up hearing negative things about Black men, especially the ones from the Muslim world. My mother, Atifah Falak emigrated from the nation of Somalia when she was twenty, and pregnant with me. She gave birth at Ottawa's Civic Hospital on the first day of February 1988. Making me as Canadian as maple syrup.
My mother left my father Ahmed Falak in Somalia because he was a control freak and an abusive guy. Shortly after she arrived in Canada, my mother met Eric Dawson, a handsome Irish accountant originally from the City of Galway, Ireland. Fast forward a few years and they got married. My mother took Dawson's family name, and gave birth to twin daughters, Isabel and Soraya. My mother renounced her Islamic faith and embraced Catholicism, Eric Dawson's religion. To Somali folks living in the Confederation of Canada as well as Somalia, a Somali woman converting to Christianity to marry a white guy would seem scandalous. However, my mother did it because she loved Eric and also because she was fed up with the controlling men of the Muslim world. Thus, I was brought up Catholic. Growing up, I often heard my mother warning me never to marry a Somali guy. According to her, Somali guys were all abusive and controlling. They claimed to be following Islam by asserting their control over Somali women but my mother thought it was all bullshit. By some miracle my mother was spared the nightmare of female genital mutilation, but she knew countless Somali women who suffered that grisly fate. That's why my mother fled to Canada, where she married a white guy and became a Canadian citizen. While I was horrified by the nightmarish situation of women in Somalia, I refused to believe that all men from that country were monsters hell-bent on controlling the women in their lives. That seemed like an overly easy classification to me. There had to be some exceptions to that rule.
Living in the City of Ottawa, I attend a Catholic school and had mostly white friends. My mother was friends with several African women who defied their families and social customs by marrying white males in the Confederation of Canada. Most of my mother's female friends came from continental Africa and had non-Black husbands. I found it funny that my mother detested my friend Adam's father Joel McCain, a Jamaican-born and Ottawa-based corporate lawyer who married a white policewoman from Orleans. Apparently, Black women with white husbands couldn't stand Black men with white wives. These two interracial couples simply did NOT get along. White men with Black wives still bristled at the sight of Black men with white wives. The sheer hypocrisy of people in interracial relationships boggles the mind. Seriously. It's a good thing that I was never into white guys because I would have ended up exactly like my mother. The last thing I wanted to be was one of those bitter Black women who worshiped whiteness and loathed their own race. In spite of my parents best efforts, I grew up with nothing but love for my African brothers and sisters.
When I came to Carleton University, I finally felt free. Even though my parents were only an hour away in the Ottawa suburb of Barrhaven, I felt like I could do anything. I opted to live in a small apartment near the Saint Laurent Mall, twenty minutes from the Carleton University campus. I chose to study business administration at Carleton because I grew up in a mostly English environment. Most of the French Canadian brats coming out of the many high schools in the City of Ottawa opted for the University of Ottawa, a fully bilingual school. Some went to La Cite Collegiale, an exclusive French college in the town of Orleans, Ontario. I always found French Canadians to be whiners so I didn't want to study at a school full of them. The Canadian government gives a ton of money to the Province of Quebec every year because they're always threatening to separate from the rest of Canada. If you ask me, Canada is better off without Quebec. Anyhow, I digress. Where was I?
