What Will People Say?

a fraught relationship with femininity

CW: This piece includes the mention of guns.

I am not American, but I know there has recently been a shooting in the US. The very brief mention of guns in this piece is just about my experience at a shooting range in Canada and has nothing to do with any living thing being harmed. If you are uncomfortable, feel free to skip this piece.

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This collage image was created with elements accessed via Canva Pro

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Reputation. Reputation. 

           Log kya kehenge?

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The last time I really felt like myself, there was a gun in my hands.

It was my 24th birthday, and a few friends and I had coincidentally selected the date to go to a shooting range. Something about it was exhilarating- shooting targets in a controlled environment, with the guidance of a licensed professional next to me.

And I was good at it.

The intensity of it pulled me into the moment, and I felt like I was fully present. Present and unburdened by expectations of who I should be, who others have assigned me to be.

It’s been more than a year since I wrote my last poem, and I’m still not sure if I have a another poem left in me. I’ve been living in a state of limbo, disconnected from myself. I feel like dust has settled in my spirit.

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Earlier this year, when

AB

spearheaded and started organizing The UNSPOKEN Collective, she let us all know that she wanted us all to begin with authentic pieces reflecting on our own identities, especially on our experiences with femininity.

I thought long and hard about how to approach the subject. My relationship with my own gender has always been confusing. There have only been a few times in my still young life when I’ve felt truly comfortable in my femininity- when I performed it on my own terms.

So many of us don’t get this opportunity- this opportunity which should be a right. A right that should be a part of our inheritance.

I know all of us get dealt different cards in life, but still, I feel like I’ve received a difficult inheritance.

Sometimes I feel heavy with the grief I’ve had to process, and problems I’ve had to solve on my own. I am tired of being told I am out of line, or taking up too much space, when rightfully upset about the things I can and cannot name. Especially the things I was told that I should not name.

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What will people say?

For the first year of my life, and likely many years to follow, my father spent much of his time and money cheating on my mother.

For some time, he had been coming home drunk in the early hours of the morning. My mother was already aware that he had been frequenting strip clubs, and over the course of about a year, there were several instances when she discovered unopened packets of condoms amongst his belongings. Condoms that he was clearly using outside of the house, with other women. Women he was probably paying, during a time when he was also taking advantage of my mother financially.

A time when he would pretend that he had forgotten his wallet somewhere, when it was time to pay for diapers. What does it mean to be a woman, especially a Muslim woman, with a father like that?

A man who stares at women. A man who was more concerned with indulging his own lust than he was with ensuring that he was responsibly providing for his wife and children.

A man who also encouraged us to be religious, but always for his own benefit. So that he could reap what he had not sown, and use Islamic teachings about the importance of taking care of ones’ parents to attempt to take advantage of us financially.

A largely absent parent, who spoke of us as if we were some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. A man who seemed to believe that as long as he “raised” us to be good Muslim women, his own sins in this lifetime might be exempted, and perhaps some part of his reputation might remain intact, as a man with modest Muslim daughters.

Reputation. Reputation.

His reputation, a thing that seems to be hanging over my head, always.

           Log kya kehenge?

I am disappointed by both him and the court system that failed us. A system that allowed an able-bodied and well-educated person, a parent who was supposed to be a father, get away with paying an amount of child support that wasn’t even enough to cover housing for his children, let alone extend into their actual everyday costs of living

And to those women he cheated with, I don’t have much to say. I just hope that if any of them did not want to be sex workers, that they were able to find their way out.

Being a child in the shadow of a man like that, a man who has created so many messes that I can and cannot name, it felt like relatives were always trying to decipher, was I like some wounded animal in need of rescue? Or were the mistakes I made a sign that I was inevitably going to become some feminine version of him?

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I myself was born and raised in Southern Ontario, but on both sides of my family, most of my relatives are from Pakistan.

These relatives in my family, people who showed up to take care of many of the messes my father has left behind, people I used to look up to, have also left me with a difficult inheritance. I still care about them, but I’m still coming to terms with how they function. How they choose to function.

While the country they grew up in no longer exists as such, many of them were shaped by, and seem to be stuck in, a time and place they still call home. Many of them, raised with ultra-conservative beliefs, beliefs I’m still looking for the vocabulary to describe. Beliefs that seem to be influenced by Wahhabism, Islamic Puritanism, and pervasive cultural expectations that have no basis in Islam at all.

Many cultural shifts have happened in their absence, but home, a place they remember to be untainted by the things they were taught to hate, still exists in their memories, and continues to fuel unrealistic and sometimes impossible expectations.

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on expectations

I am tired, of arguments surrounding rules that do not actually exist.

In the present, I am sick of the insistence that I should dress modestly even when home alone, in an empty house.

And I’m tired of being told that I am sinning by choosing to dress as I wish to, when all the windows are closed, and covered, and there are no men expected to be around.

And I think back to years ago when I decided to have some fun with my appearance. I walked in to a barbershop, and asked for the then iconic Ruby Rose haircut. It took some time for me to work my way up to it. First I had started experimenting with feminine pixie haircuts and then went on to try out less girly styles.

The reaction from some of my family members was ridiculous to say the least. One of my uncles was so upset he would just get angry, look away, and refuse to acknowledge my presence if I was around. I also recall being intensely confronted by another relative who said something about how sometimes, a persons hair could be indicative of their personal beliefs, and with an accusatory tone, they insisted that they didn’t like my hair. I remember they also went as far as to say that I was disrespectfully imitating women who lose hair during treatments for cancer, and that Allah would see it as a sign that I was ungrateful for the hair I had.

I lost a lot of respect for some of my relatives during this time. I was still the same person as I was before. Most of my free time outside of school was spent at home, studying, and here they were, reacting as if they were ready to discard me, because they didn’t like my haircut. Because I wasn’t performing femininity the way they wanted me to.

Sometimes I think about cutting my hair short like that again. I miss it. It was fun. But then I remember how my own relatives essentially bullied me for how I chose to express myself, and I just don’t want to deal with the drama again.

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In an essay titled “The Snake That Eats Itself,” author Kai Cheng Thom very aptly writes,

“The curse of bigotry and moral panic is that it is a paranoid hunger for safety, purity and control that can never be satisfied: It grows and grows until it turns on itself, like a snake eating its own tail. Trans women, intersex women, racialized women – the logic of bigotry says that anyone can be treated as suspect and forced out of the circle of personhood.”

Here, Kai Cheng Thom likens purity culture to a snake that consumes itself. The metaphor deeply resonated with me. I still remember the reactions I garnered from my relatives for my short hair, and it was an unsettling realization, to find that my place in the life I knew was much more conditional than I thought it was.

It was also difficult to reflect on the situation knowing that there were people in the family who were participating in genuinely harmful behaviour, who had never been approached with such harshness.

I remember my father- cheating on my mother, and the many messes that I can and cannot name, and being told that I was not allowed to be upset. That I didn't even have a place in conversations about his harmful behaviour towards anyone- even if it was me. I was told my place was to just forgive.

If moral panic and bigotry can be likened to a snake as Kai Cheng Thom describes, then I would say that I watched in action as the snake slithered past someone who was genuinely perpetuating harmful behaviour, and turned to bare its fangs at me instead.

Sometimes I feel resentful towards those relatives, but mostly I just feel sorry for them. I’ve seen them struggle the few times they’ve realized they might not be living up to their own ideals, and I see the panic set in. Striving for moral superiority, and employing an eat-or-get-eaten mindset, is all fun and games- until they find themselves on the wrong side.

A personal weakness I’ve recently come to confront is that I often have a hard time admitting my faults and past mistakes to others, not because I need to be perfect in anyones’ eyes, but because I am scared. I find myself in a place where I can give grace to others and hold space for them to grow as people. I’m not interested in new resentments. I’m quick to forgive (when appropriate), and try to be considerate of others in conflict. I’m just not used to being offered the same treatment in return. I anticipate being discarded.

I anticipate the snake turning towards me again.

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I’ve always loved being Muslim. Islam is not a cult, but the treatment I was receiving from my family members over my Ruby Rose haircut showed me that in that instance, my family was functioning like a cult.

I’m not bringing these things up to make the Muslim community look bad. I’m just exhausted. I’m tired of not being heard. I’m tired of being spoken at, instead of spoken to. 

It was instances like these that made me realize my family could never be participants in my life to the same extent that I saw others taking an active role in their adult children’s lives. My femininity would always be outside of their preconceptions of what women can and should be. And I cannot expect understanding from them, which feels incredibly unfair considering the amount of understanding I’ve been required to offer them in return for their antics.

Oh how I wish I was born a man, to live less burdened by the expectations of gender.

I know they have to deal with their own set of expectations, but I see the Muslim men in my own family, and how much freer they are in this world to live true to themselves, and how they can still retain some degree of respect from the rest of the family and community whether they choose to stay as religious as their parents, or not.

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what’s next?

Growing up with a dysfunctional family is an experience I feel like I’m always paying the tax on.

Sometimes it’s the time I lost, working through things alone, while others around me seemed to receive more support. Sometimes the tax is the hours I lost experiencing brain-fog and ruminating on the past, as I carried unprocessed experiences with me. Sometimes it’s literally money, the hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on therapy, and courses I’ve had to retake when life got in the way.

I feel like I’m perpetually in a state of healing. It’s exhausting. Sometimes it feels like I’m in a cycle of just fixing myself up before the next unpleasant experience occurs.

I’m tired of coping with immature adults, who become progressively more dramatic if they sense they are being ignored. I’m tired of being in a state of waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I’m tired of bad advice. I’m tired of being told I should just stay busier, invest more effort into my hobbies, and just ignore or cut off the toxic people around me. I don’t entirely want to walk away. I still value and care about many of my relatives, I just want to create a fuller life with more distance between myself and them.

I’ve given myself permission to heal in ways that no one else would. I spent time in therapy. I decided to leave opportunities that would lead to a demanding and fast-paced life behind.

Things aren’t perfect, and I’ll admit, I don’t have all the answers. I find myself in a place where I just need to build. To create.

What does it even mean to heal? The things I’ve read about healing seem to imply it requires some kind of restoration, as if healing is a process of making something whole again, and so, earlier this summer I realized I needed to stop asking myself to name what I am healing from, because at this point, the more important question is, what am I healing to?

What does one heal to, when there is no clear baseline to return to? How do I create a sense of wholeness I was never given space to experience in the first place? What happens next?

What will it look like to create a new life for myself, where I can exist authentically? And what does the road to that place look like?

This is not a cry for help, but a serious question.

If you’ve ever been in a similar position, I would love to hear from someone else who’s actually lived through it.

In the meantime, I’ll push myself back to people and places that make me feel grounded and awake. Maybe back to the shooting range, or perhaps onto something else to shake off the dust that seems to have settled somewhere deep inside me.

To remind my spirit that I am still alive and awake, and there is still so much more to do and see, beautiful and exciting things to look forward to, things that I might not even see coming yet.

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I. S. Bashirah is a multi-award-winning poet and recent alumna of the University of Waterloo. If you’re interested in her work, please consider following her on Substack.