Like what you see? I asked the short, stocky blonde-haired and green-eyed, decidedly butch gal I'd seen eyeballing me since I walked the Eaton Center that afternoon. Sorry about that ma'am, she said shyly, her butch swagger faltering for a moment. I looked her up and down, taking in the short, spiky blonde hair, the tattoos and the myriad piercings. The gal didn't look a day over nineteen. Don't be sorry cutie pie, I said, smiling. The butch chick hesitated, then smiled bashfully. I'm Maymuna but my friends call me May, I said, extending my hand for her to shake. Good to meet you I'm Dawn but my friends call me DJ, she said, shaking my hand. And that's how it all began.
When most people see a six-foot-tall, statuesque Black woman walking around downtown Toronto in a long skirt and hijab, they make all kinds of assumptions. I've heard them all. They assume I'm super conservative. They assume I'm weird. Oh, and some of them, oddly enough, fetishize me. They seldom see me as a person, my skin color and religion make them overlook the basic fact that I'm human. Seriously, women who wear the hijab aren't another subspecies of humanity. We're like women from anywhere and everywhere, really. We work, we live, we love, we die, and experience all the wonderful and horrible things that happen in between. So why do I get stared at daily in Canada's most racially diverse and populous town?
My full name is Maymuna Ibrahim and I was born in the City of Edmonton, Alberta, to Somali immigrant parents. January 31, 1985, I first came into the world. My folks, Aden and Mona Ibrahim moved to Alberta from Somalia in the early 1980s. They quietly instilled a lot of ambition in me. My dad was a university professor in the City of Mogadishu, Somalia, but he became a security guard to feed his family once he moved to Canada. My mother was a nurse back home but she ended up working as a grocery store clerk. All to take care of me and my younger brother Yousef. It was really important to them that I make something out of my life. I hold a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Calgary, and I spent four years in Montreal, Quebec, while earning an MBA from McGill University.
I'm part of the new breed of visible minority, a second-generation immigrant lady who's more educated than the average white person living in Canada. I enjoyed my time at McGill and found the City of Montreal marvelous and beautiful, but I had to leave it. You see, I couldn't stomach the mindset of Quebecers, especially since they're talking about banning the hijab and other religious symbols. That's how I ended up in the City of Toronto, Ontario. I always found metropolitan Toronto too wild and too damn big and loud for my liking, and coming from Calgary that's really saying something. Still, got to go where the jobs are, you know? That's how I ended up working for the Canadian Revenue Agency.
The position is that of account manager and it pays twenty two dollars an hour. The shifts are eight-hour long. Not bad, but as a young woman with an MBA, part of me felt like I should be doing more. In this crappy economy where even white university graduates end up working at Tim Horton's to pay their rent, I guess I should count myself lucky. I live in a nice two-bedroom apartment in a ten-story building about ten minutes from downtown. Rent is twelve hundred a month and sometimes I can barely afford groceries afterwards but it's worth it. I want to live on the power side. Dammit, I've earned it!