A ROOM WITH A POINT OF VIEW

THE PLACE IN WHICH I FIT WILL NOT EXIST UNTIL I MAKE IT

Omer Aziz. Image credit: AMR JAYOUSI.

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

An old school friend and I were exchanging notes on our kids. Make that venting in a safe space.

Someone who “gets” you and is non-judgemental is such a gift, enabling each of us to resume our duties as loving mothers after letting off steam periodically.

During one such chat, I mentioned a study that was being written about those days – we’re talking 20 years or so ago. A teenager’s brain was not developed enough emotionally, according to the study. Emotional intelligence reached maturity only by the age of 19 or 20, it said.

“Rubbish!” said my friend. “We were once teenagers, too, and I don’t recall having such angst over every small thing.”

And then, wise woman that she is, she paused. “But then, to be fair, we weren’t in conflicting zones day in and day out,” she observed.

She had nailed it with that.

Growing up, we didn’t experience widely different realms at home and at school. We didn’t have to be one person at school and then leave that persona behind to put on another at home. One was, more or less, a reflection of the other.

We enjoyed the comfort of a largely homogenous world. Most of our classmates came from similar homes. Yes, there were a few kids who came from super rich families but we were largely, and blissfully, unaware of such disparity. And yes, there were cultural differences, but that just added to the fun. Most importantly, we were all kids of educated middle-class professionals. Similar backgrounds, similar aspirations.

Of course, nostalgia casts a sepia-tinted glow over the past, blurring sharp barbs and the resulting hurt, but by and large, it was a safe, familiar world.

“I don’t think we realize to what extent being the child of first-generation immigrants impacts our kids,” said my friend.

We agreed that there have to have been a multitude of situations our children navigated that “our way of doing things” didn’t equip them for.

I was reminded of that long-ago exchange reading Brown Boy by Omer Aziz.

A clear-eyed, uncompromising look at identity, family, religion, race and class in a book that eloquently describes the process of creating an identity that fuses where he’s from, how he’s viewed and who he knows himself to be.

Despite being innocent of any wrongdoing, I could not understand why I still felt guilty.

Aziz was visiting Israel with his fellow students at Yale law school. He was the only one pulled aside for interrogation.

His realization that “the examined life – from the eyes of a brown boy – is a long trial: a crucible, or a crusade, set at the bloodied border between East and West” was formed during his childhood.

Growing up in Scarborough, Ontario, aka “Scartown”, formerly infamous as “Scarberia”, Aziz struggles to find his place as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim. The child who prayed to Allah to make him a rapper is terrified of his father’s disappointment and anger at a poor report card.

There are also rules governing his social life. Dada said, “The woman you marry, make sure she does a blood test and an IQ test., otherwise you will be unhappy.”

He becomes aware only much later his parents were also navigating a new world, after the double life takes a toll, after he suffers from anxiety attacks and, witnessing the violence and despair in the world around him, succumbs to apathy and rage.

And that’s just it, isn’t it? Newcomer parents so absorbed in making a living, in providing the basic necessities, that they don’t have the luxury of really listening to how a child’s day at school was.

“All good? Great.” Or, “You had a bad day? Don’t complain to your teacher, no one likes a whiner.”

Even after the family moves to Mississauga, Aziz is aware of the pressures youth from his community function under. He writes of Aqsa Parvez, a girl who lived down the street from them. A girl he never met but whose name is seared in his mind – the victim of the so-called honour killing. He writes of the police officer who visits his school, asking anyone who had anything to do with the Toronto 18 – boys involved in a terror plot – to come forward with information. His best friend is killed in a police car chase.

He sees no future for himself until he spots Obama making a speech on television. Barack Hussein Obama. Maybe education really was his ticket out of this downward spiral?

His quest leads him to prestigious universities across the world. From Queen’s University in Ontario to Sciences Po in Paris, and from Cambridge to Yale. He smokes cigarillos and reads Albert Camus where he finds these words:

Brown Boy by Omer Aziz is published by Scribner Canada, $37.

Being able to be alone in one room in Paris for a year teaches a man more than a hundred literary salons and forty years’ experience of ‘Parisian life’.

When fellow Pakistanis, very privileged Pakistanis, are the ones who evoke shame in his parents at the graduation ceremony at Yale, he reminds himself to the words of James Baldwin. “The place in which I fit will not exist until I make it.”

Aziz returns to Canada and finds work in the highest office in the land – the PMO. As foreign policy advisor in Justin Trudeau’s government, he works directly for Chrystia Freeland, then the foreign minister.

It is a heady period, until he begins to notice the subtle and the not-so-subtle othering. Being excluded, ignored and silenced. “We often speak of racism as though it is a purely emotional phenomenon, but racism manifests itself in the body, and the body responds to it like a disease,” he writes.

Weaving together a powerful personal narrative with lessons from books and the friendships that move him, Aziz poses a question he couldn’t have asked in his youth when he longed to belong: Was assimilation ever really an option?

It is a book that parents and their young adult children should read. Because sometimes, a “sulking” teen is not sulking at all, nor being difficult – he or she is crying out for help in understanding the dualities they are dealing with in a world they’ve been thrust into.