ihath

Mohammed sent me an email sharing a short story from his life which reminded me of this story. Thank you Mohammed and here it is.

“Welcome to Canada”, said the immigration officer to me at Montreal airport. “You are now a landed immigrant”, he continued as he stamped my passport. “That means that you have all the rights of a Canadian except voting and nominating yourself for public office, in three years you can apply for a Canadian citizenship and get the full rights of any Canadian”.

I wanted to scream, I wanted to kick something. I wanted to gab the immigration officer by the collar, shake him while blaring in his face: “are you insane?”.

I wasn’t mad at the immigration officer who was processing my papers at the airport upon my first arrival to Canada; Instead, I had just realized the inhumanity of the situation I had left behind.

This was my first hour in a new country that I knew nothing about. I came to a country that I had very little in common with. No shared language, not English nor French. No shared culture or religion. I didn’t know who the prime minister of Canada was, I didn’t know what the capital city was. All I knew about this new country was that Terry Fox was a Canadian who ran coast to coast in order to raise money for cancer after being afflicted with it himself. And I had this image in my head about Canada that included pristine lakes, mountains and nature. I had my Canada tourist guide which I haven’t started reading yet. I just arrived here with a brown official looking paper that says that I was accepted for landed immigrant status and on day one, I am told that I have the full rights, just like all the people born and raised here. “What do you mean? That can’t be”.

I came from a country where I grew up. I had plenty in common with that country, same language (Arabic), same religion (Islam), shared history and an almost identical culture. For 18 years I had lived in Kuwait and in all that time I had no rights. I was a second class human.

I wanted to cry in the immigration office.

Being the demure arab girl that I was back then, I didn’t do any of the things that I wanted to do. Instead, I sat demurely on the chair, staring mostly on the ground to avoid eye contact with the man sitting across the desk according to proper arab customs. When the immigration officer was finished, I smiled shyly, said thank you, collected my papers and left his office. I was also a freaked out by his physical appearance. The immigration officer, whose name I can’t remember, looked eerily similar to my late grandfather in the Czech republic. For some reason, I keep having chance encounters with elderly men that look eerily similar to my late grandfather at monumental turning points in my life. Very spooky.

When you grow up somewhere, you accept the conditions around you as normal, you don’t question them. Then you move somewhere else and see things from a very different perspective.
In Canada, when people hear that I grew up in Kuwait from age 1 till age 19, they find it strange that I don’t consider myself a Kuwaiti. I have to keep explaining that things in Kuwait don’t function the way they do in Canada. In Kuwait, you can never ever become a Kuwaiti doesn’t matter how long you live there, I knew families that have been living there for three generations and still it didn’t matter, they were whatever nationality they came as. This wasn’t just a functions of laws that make it impossible to gain official status, but a whole culture where the local population saw itself as members of exclusive club and others where not welcome to join. Everyday I lived there I was made aware that I didn’t belong and that this was not my country so that I wouldn’t make myself too comfortable.

“Ajanib” which means foreigners in Arabic is what people like me were called. The ajanabi could not speak Arabic with a Kuwaiti accent because he would be looked down upon by Kuwaitis as an imposter. Don’t even try to pretend to be a Kuwaiti.

In the middle east we frequently like to complain about western colonization but we rarely mention the ways in which we colonize ourselves.

The sad fact is that nobody was forcing us to live in Kuwait, we lived there out of our own free will. Despite of the many negatives, we were 100 times better off living in Kuwait than living in our native Iraq. At least in Kuwait if you mind your own business and not interfere with politics you are left alone. Unlike Iraq, Kuwait was a low stress country where most people worried about family, work and personal matters. In Kuwait I was discriminated against because of my father’s nationality but in Iraq I would have been discriminated against because I was alive and breathing. In truth, Kuwait was a safe heaven for many Iraqis, Palestinians and other nationalities, if compared to realities in other countries in the middle east at the time.

So I walked around Montréal knee deep in snow and felt frozen cold no matter how warmly I dressed. I opened my Canada tourist guide and looked for the warmest part in the country and discovered that there is a city where the weather is fairly mild all year long called Vancouver. I came to Montréal because I wanted to study in McGill which is supposed to be the best university in Canada but given that I was convinced that I would die in this weather. I thought I better put survival ahead of education. So I moved to Vancouver and studied in UBC instead which was a good decision indeed.

Turns out that Terry Fox grew up near Vancouver.

There is a way between voice and presence where information flows. In disciplined silence it opens. With wandering talk it closes. .... Rumi