Firm Roots
Who are we, really?
Art by: Tara Hejazi // THE UNDERGROUND
“Who are you?” is a loaded question to me, one that, no matter how many times it is thrust upon my conscience, I still have a hard time giving people a sufficient answer. I could just say my name—that holds more history than anything, a garden that flourishes from the mouth and rolls petals down my tongue. Pluck the flowers, and you will learn it is my grandmother’s name, the kind I have watered and twisted into grass knots into nicknames, and then into nothing, and then back into itself, patted down into the soil until you dig deeper, beyond government, and see that it is something pretty, if you handle it right.
“Who are you?” and I will tell you I am a writer. I will not neglect, in that pride that flickers on and off inside of me like a light switch, that I’m published at that. You can learn about me in between the lines of my work, by asking me questions about my favourite novels, tracing me back to the bookcases where I have plucked my intelligence from Shakespeare, my existentialism from Plath, and my insanity from Poe. I can’t tell you about the black authors. I can’t tell you that I like to think more often about love than revolution.
“Where are you from?” is a question that strips me of all semblance of comprehending my identity. If I’m feeling confident, I can tell you about every relationship I’ve had to the land. I can tell you my bones and my bare skin rest on the coastal, beachy banks of Nova Scotia, or, if you want it specific, boxed away behind the window of a gray-wallpaper hospital room in Yarmouth. I can tell you I have petroleum rippling around in my lungs and wildfire smoke billowing out from my voice because I grew up in Alberta; it’s the only place I know, and maybe you’ll get to laugh with me, and the sound will be like laminating me onto stereotype, like the western end is a second skin. Since coming to Toronto for university—the place you remember in faraway dreams as the airport pit stops at night waiting for flights to France or as the cracking white lines on the wrinkled postcards you suddenly jumped into at seventeen—I just think of myself as Canadian. These days, I become less proud of it, but that is what I am, and I hold out my passport and show it to you. It should be easy. I am not indigenous to the land, but I have the roots of oppression.
I stand inside my townhouse in my first year of university, staring into the faces of people who, for the first time, are not predominantly white.
“Where are you from, really?” they ask.
Being born in Canada is a disguise, one that seems to be implicitly understood among all immigrants as being such. The pigment of your skin, the sound of your voice, and the mannerisms and attitudes you display are all something to remark on as being detached from North America. The remark tears into the soil like a shovel, and my roots are bared for the world to see. Is it bad that I feel shame when I think about it? Is it bad that I myself become the question, hunched over into a question mark?
I am eleven years old, standing inside the traditional house in East Africa, and my feet aren’t solid on the ground. And yet, the flashing smiles that were meant to be taken as reassurance, as kindness and welcoming, open and everywhere, snag their teeth in defiance of my insecurities, pulling me taut into the realisation that “this is home." My roots are on Comoros Islands; my roots are the ocean breezes; my name is detangled and accented with tongues I do not recognize; and my tongue is too clumsy to make sense of. I spent the summer on that island, too young to understand that an identity could’ve been culminating across those weeks. Instead, I am pushed on wobbling feet through the flurries of weddings and relatives speaking in cloying voices and squinting, disappointed stares. They try speaking and then singing, and only a few words hang in the air to see. The uprooting, getting onto the plane, and going back were not difficult. It became difficult again when I had to explain my variation of being a black woman, the kind who seeded Comorian in her French often without realising it and had the roots stretching into her heart without any want for resistance or fear.
If being black is a part of my roots, I don’t know what that means. I don’t fit in with black people—I can’t really talk about my culture or about my parents without a disconnect that makes me seem like a stranger to my own family. I find no power in slurs just because I’m allowed to say them—I feel like a slave master spitting on difference. I was often told, growing up, that I acted "white." This was a "good thing," either said in mockery by people like me or in the approving gazes of the people who aren’t. What is being “white”? It felt nonsensical to imagine being mild-mannered, gazing up through my eyelashes, and not taking up space were seen less as polite or introverted tendencies and more as conditioning that I was not loud or aggressive, and held my slang curled tightly in my throat like a fist, and this made me the “model black girl," one of the “good ones." For being “one of the good ones," I was still barked at no matter where I went to “go back to my country." I still needed to work twice as hard for everything, as if making up for my roots—everything ingrained in me was seen as secondary or inferior. I used to feel scared and ashamed, despite the injustices I was learning about when I was growing up, about being branded as "white." Now I just feel angry, because slowly, I am beginning not to hate my disposition.
I fit in with black people in the ways that matter, in a community that stands against labels and embraces history. I am part of a culture of activism. I can laugh with them about needing to get good grades in school so our parents don’t disown us. I can go on for hours about the similarities and differences of our traditional foods, dances, and weddings. I take pride in being raised on Whitney Houston, Tupac, Nina Simone, and Lauryn Hill. I take pride in the others that come out of the woodwork. My roots are defiance in the face of the rhetoric that tries to teach me shame. My roots are the bits of braids that stick out of my extensions. In some ways, my roots are embedded in pride for the struggle against injustice and the unique ways black people have known those struggles, regardless of how they’re viewed or where they’re raised.
“What are your roots?” is a loaded question. There is so much to tell as I learn about myself at the same time. My roots are moments of confidently pronouncing in the language I am still trying to reclaim, of an island people risen from the ashes of colonialism. My roots are the moments of unity I find in multiculturalism, the fleeting conversations between the RIA transfer agent and I, the histories extracted from flashes of my passport, and moments of trading French between each other. My roots are processing my country of birth and dismantling its flaws little by little in acknowledgment of the harm and identity crises it causes. My roots are the people who ground me and pat me into the earth, where we all rightfully and without question, belong. They slide flowers into my hair, and they tell me that I am not one thing, that I am not one spot at a time. My garden stretches beyond, interspersed with the legacies I manifest, the legacies I chance, and the legacies I carry.
In the question of who I am, I have so much time and space.
