By OMER AZIZ
PHOTO/Hanna Barczyk
In the summer of 2007, I was 17 and suppressing all thoughts of the future. I was facing my last year of high school and had no prospects. College might have been the logical next step, but I had always been a lousy student. Earlier that year, my father had taken a black marker to my report card, circled all the poor grades and written, “WHY?”
I had no answer for him, but I was suddenly aware that an even bigger question hung over my life: With my schooling coming to an end, who — or what — would I become?
My Toronto suburb was made up of working- and middle-class immigrants from Pakistan, like my parents, as well as from India, the Middle East and the West Indies. Most had come to Canada after the immigration laws were liberalized in the 1970s. They settled in places like Scarborough and Mississauga, towns where Hindus, Muslims and Christians, blacks and whites, lived side by side — an idealized portrait of the Canadian mosaic.
Beneath this veneer of multiculturalism, however, was a darker reality. That summer, for the first time, I began to look closely at the world around me, and what I saw were brown boys and girls condemned to a dangerous aimlessness. We were bounded by the neighborhood, defined by it, chained to our circumstances and chained to the invisible norms that told us we ought to know our place.
All of us children of immigrants were hopelessly lost. I do not mean “lost” in the upper-class aspirational sense of being on a journey of self-discovery, but lost in the very physical sense of not knowing who we were and where we came from. The schools could not tell us. Our parents could not tell us. The streets tried to tell us, but those answers posed their own problems.
We tried to compensate for our lack of purpose by sagging our pants and tilting our hats. We rapped Jay-Z and Nas lyrics like they were verses from our respective holy books. We were desperately trying to signal that we, too, had power — even if that power was a fantasy.
It was worse for the girls, especially the Muslim ones. They faced the same struggles we did, while also living in complete terror of their fathers. Misogyny told them they were inferior to boys and should be married. They lied to protect themselves. That year, a teenager in my neighborhood named Aqsa Parvez was murdered by her father and brother for running away from home and wearing “Western” clothes.
When aimlessness meets alienation, violence is certain. Before I picked up a serious book, I knew boys who had stabbed other kids or had themselves been stabbed. Before I started high school, a boy four years older than I was killed when someone smashed a hammer through his skull. Before I graduated from high school, a childhood friend died in a car accident while fleeing from the police. I knew who had a gun, who had knives, how to say hello to them, when and how to run. Enormous mental resources went into navigating this world — and this was just one world; the others, of the mosque and the home, were equally complex, equally hazardous.
That summer, I had an epiphany: If I continued to do poorly in school, what lay ahead was either the street or, if I was lucky, the factory. And this made me afraid — unutterably afraid. I belatedly understood that my fate was connected to the boys on my block, that the kids who dropped out, the kids who got arranged marriages, the kids who fled to the mosque and came out with long beards, the kids who mocked the smart students, were all doomed, because they, and I, did not have the luxury of a second chance.
Throughout my adolescence, multiple people tried to tell me that I had “potential.” It was a word I did not trust. What does it mean to say this to a brown boy who doesn’t know any lawyers or engineers? Guidance counselors would show me pamphlets with white faces in white coats or white faces in dark suits, and they would ask me what I wanted to do. I had no answer, because these professionals were not real people but mirages.
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