We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir (utgåvan 2019)

I decided to read/listen to this book when it was chosen as the winner of the 2020 Canada Reads competition. My pick of the books on the short list was Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is, I still think, better than this one but I did find this book very interesting.

Habib was raised in Lahore, Pakistan as part of the Ahmadi sect (which I had never heard of until this book). Members of this sect were quite often threatened and abused by Muslims of other sects. The situation became so dire that the family applied to enter Canada as refugees. Canada was relatively safe but Samra was often bullied at school. While she was still young she entered into an arranged marriage with a cousin who had come to Canada with Samra's family. She eventually told her family that she did not want to become a traditional Muslim wife and the marriage was dissolved, but Samra was treated as an outcast in her mosque. She moved in with a male friend from high school which was equally as shocking to her family. So Samra and the friend got married which made the situation marginally better. However, Samra was realizing that she was attracted to women and she started referring to herself as queer. She didn't come out to her parents for some time and when she did they didn't accept her sexuality immediately. Because of her love for them eventually they made amends. Samra also found a Muslim mosque that accepted queer folk as members which helped her. Samra also learned to accept herself as she worked on a photography project documenting other Queer Muslims. She said in an interview on CBC that writing this book was key to understanding herself better. Hopefully it will also be of benefit to other youth dealing with their sexuality. ( )

Habib was born in Pakistan and spent her early years in Lahore. As a member of the Ahmadis, a sect within Islam but one persecuted by other Moslems, she faced injury and even death. Eventually her family moved to Canada for safety reasons and settled in Toronto. Habib's parents organized her marriage when she was a child and she married the man when she was 16 years old. As he indicated that he believed a husband must beat his wife in order to control her, Samra rebelled and the marriage was dissolved.

It took many years until she accepted the fact she was gay and much of the volume is the trials she went through until she came to that point. Her relationship with her family who were very devout Muslims takes up important portions of the book.

Based on her descriptions of life in Pakistan, I cannot say I have any urge to go there. A reading of this volume does give the read a chance at understanding some of the power of Islam. Despite the negative treatment she experienced because of her religion, she still loved it as it provided her with comfort and support.

This was the winner of the 2020 Canada Reads. ( )

As a young girl in Pakistan, Samra Habib faced discrimination because her family belonged to the Ahmadi sect, which is deemed heretical by many other Muslims. When she was a teenager in Canada, Habib faced discrimination for being a refugee, a Muslim, and a South Asian woman. All of these experiences, together with an upbringing by deeply religious parents, meant that Habib internalised a lot of negative messages about gender, sexuality, and her body. Following a disastrous marriage at 16 to a first cousin, and a second failed marriage a few years later, Habib came to an understanding of herself as a queer feminist and over several years learned out to reconcile those aspects of her identity with her Muslim faith.

This is a very necessary memoir, conveying the kind of experiences which are rarely foregrounded in mainstream conversations. Yet there's something about Habib's style of writing which prevents We Have Always Been Here from having as much as impact as I think it could have. Perhaps a side-effect of her training as a journalist, Habib is slightly distant from her own story. We are told about, rather than shown, some major moments in her life; some of her family members and most of her romantic partners remain blurry figures on the periphery of the narrative. Fair enough. There is no requirement for a memoir writer to gut themselves on the page, let alone the people in their life. But I think the book could have been effective even within certain boundaries if Habib hadn't frequently deployed the glossy, homogenised jargon I think of TherapySpeak (you know, everyone's Living Their Truth in order to Be Their Authentic Self). ( )

**Canada Reads 2020 #3**

Samra is a religious refugee from Pakistan who relocated with her family to Canada in her childhood and grew up wrestling with the tensions between her religious identity and sexual orientation. In this book, she describes that journey and how she was able to reconcile the two in a way that feels like home to her.

The story in this memoir is extraordinary; it is too bad, IMO, that the method of telling it is often so dry. The author is a journalist, and writes in a journalistic style, so it makes sense, but there is often a noticeable distance between the story and the telling of it that blunts its impact.

It's still an extremely good book, and I'm excited to see it defended on CR, and proud that this author made Canada her home. ( )