It's often been said that you find out not who or what you think you want but that which you need when you least expect it. I find this to be true, mainly because it happened to me. The name is Khadra Al-Jubeir and I was born in the City of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to a Saudi Arabian father and a Somali immigrant mother. As a Muslim immigrant woman living in the City of Ottawa, Ontario, there are certain things I simply cannot escape. I wear the hijab and traditional clothing, and the Western gaze is always upon me. I mystify them, it seems.
My parents, Mahmoud and Hodan Al-Jubeir moved to Ontario, Canada, in 1995. I was four years old at the time and barely remember anything about Saudi Arabia, though I hold dual Saudi/Canadian citizenship. I've always been proud of my heritage, and the reasons are many. When you're a minority in a world that's constantly putting you down, your best self-defence is to uphold and celebrate that which makes you different. What they try to make you feel bad about is something that repels them because they fear it at an almost cellular level. Use it against them.
In the United States, around the time of the Civil Rights Movement and afterwards, black Americans defied white racism by saying 'black is beautiful.' Although I've never been to the U.S. I studied its history, especially the part about their treatment of African-Americans, and I learned from them. There's a reason why men like Barack Obama and Deval Patrick got elected President of the U.S.A. and Governor of Massachusetts, respectively. In the U.S. black people are outspoken in the face of both interpersonal and systemic racism. In Canada, we're all asleep, blissfully unaware, when it comes to race issues.
As the daughter of an interracial couple, I simply cannot escape racism. I stand five feet eleven inches tall, and like all tall women, I tend to attract the male gaze. My skin is dark bronze, my hair is black and somewhat kinky, and my eyes are brown. In spite of my attempts at dieting, my body remains curvaceous, wide-hipped and big-bottomed. My mom told me to stop fighting my African genes. I jokingly told her that I desperately need a smaller ass. Seriously. I've been mistaken for everything from Puerto Rican to Brazilian and even Moroccan. I always tell people that I am biracial, born of Saudi Arabia, the Heartland of Islam, and Somalia, an indefatigable nation that neither Western colonialism nor Islamism have been able to break. I've been told that I'm too dark by some Arabs and too light by certain Somalis. I always tell them that I am simply the way Allah made me. They tend to grow quiet after that, for in the Holy Quran, the Prophet Mohammed, the Last Messenger of Allah, denounced racism and proclaimed that all men, from the Black to the Arab and the White, and everyone in between, are creations of God and thusly equal. Who can argue with that?
I live in the Kanata area of Ottawa, and it's a very nice, if somewhat pricy, neighborhood. My father works as a branch manager at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce or C.I.B.C. and my mother teaches Arabic and Art History at La Cite Collegiale, a French-language community college in Ottawa. My older brother Djohar is at the University of Ottawa, studying medicine. He recently married a young woman named Madeleine Cartier, a French Canadian woman who converted to Islam a few years before they met. They have a son together, my darling little nephew Nasser.
My sister Jamila is at York University, studying anthropology. She's engaged to a guy named Ibrahim, an architecture student from Morocco. As you can see, my family has done fairly well for itself in Canada. We're fiercely proud of our Muslim faith, and uphold it as best we can. One aspect of my culture I don't much care for is that we're under pressure to get married. My parents always tease me about bringing home a nice young man to introduce them to. My mother in particular is fond of lamenting the fact that her youngest daughter ( that's me ) has always shown zero interest in the opposite sex.
The truth is that I've never been what most guys consider particularly attractive or approachable. I'm a tall, somewhat large woman of color sporting the hijab and a long skirt in a world built to worship pale, skinny girls in revealing outfits. Most of the guys I meet at Muslim community events don't light my fire because I find them boring, dull, and utterly predictable. Sometimes I honestly wondered if there was something wrong with me because, well, I found myself lonely. This world isn't for singles, it's a couples world. Don't believe me? Look at tax forms sometime and notice how biased they are in favor of couples, especially those with offspring. See what I mean? It's a couples world and as a perennially single young woman, I felt the pressure. Especially since a lot of the girls at my school, Carleton University, started getting married and getting pregnant left and right.
I learned to politely decline invitations to bridal showers and baby showers. I was always ' too busy'. I work at a Call Center in downtown Ottawa. The job pays eighteen dollars per hour, and in the summer, I work forty-hour weeks. Since I work from seven in the morning till three in the afternoon, I was usually free but I wasn't about to let my marriage-and-baby-obsessed family and friends find that out. Being single isn't a disease, dammit, so why is everyone hell-bent on curing it? Sheesh! Pardon my French but leave me the fuck alone, eh?
On Tuesdays, my ritual involved going to the Silver City movie theater in Ottawa's east end ( I cannot stand the Kanata movie theater, it sucks ) and catch a movie. Just because I make relatively decent money doesn't mean I like to spend. My rent costs four hundred dollars a month and in this economy, I'm not taking chances. I'm a year away from obtaining my bachelor's degree in business administration from Carleton University, and since I didn't qualify for OSAP, I'm paying for the whole thing myself. With that many burdens on my shoulders, you'll forgive me for being a penny pincher.
Anyways, I went to the theater that day and watched the new Spiderman movie, the one with Jamie Foxx as Electro. Surprisingly, for the noon show, there were very few people in the theater. I figured all the fan guys and gals and the Comic Con types would be there but they weren't. Hmmm. I sat alone in the middle of my row, eating a pizza I bought at the Blair Mall food court because I wasn't about to pay the exorbitant prices that movie theaters charge for the grub. Imagine my surprise when this black dude wearing a sports coat and hat came in just as the previews were ending and for some reason, he got the urge to sit right next to me.
