We Have Always Been Here - Samra Habib - Part 1 of 4

2020 Reading Challenge - Day 201

July 21, 2020

Book 56 - We Have Always Been Here
Samra Habib
 Part 1 - pages 1-42
Reading Time - 60 minutes

I was actually reading this book at the same time as I was reading portions of Dallaire's book. Habib's book was my evening reading and part of a BIPOC book club that my partner and I joined on Facebook. It was a fairly "light" book compared to Dallaire's and I found echoes of my own life in its pages. Samra Habib, a Pakistani-Canadian, emigrated to Canada with her family as a child. She eventually came out as queer to her family and documents her own struggles with finding a place of belonging. An excellent book and an easy read.

The first two chapters document Samra's early childhood in Lahore, Pakistan where here family was moderately well-to-do. Her father was an engineer and built houses which sold for a good profit. The family belonged to a Muslim sect (Ahmadi)and experienced persecution from mainstream Muslims.

Reading about her early life in Lahore was like getting a window into a different world, one where women are valued only for their fertility, beauty and purity. And while women in the West tend to have more freedoms and rights, I wonder if we too are not often more valued for our beauty, subservience and politeness. Familiar as I am with the Christian tradition, the Bible does tend to emphasize those aspects of a "good woman" or a "good wife"... and it's not that  far off from the Muslim tradition as narrated by Samra. We just fool ourselves into thinking that we have handled it... but when the shit hits the fan, those deeply held prejudices still surface.