In The Colour of God: A Story of Family and Faith (releasing September 13 from Oneworld Publications), Ayesha S. Chaudhry tells the story of growing up in a fundamentalist Muslim household; of parents who spent most of their lives away from Pakistan; of stealing her mother’s hijabs to wear to school as a five-year-old; of revisiting the beliefs and ideals she was raised with; of failed dreams and heartbreaks, but also of joy and love.

Life-affirming and funny, The Colour of God uncovers surprising answers to questions of faith, belonging, family and liberation, and offers a vision of freedom that isn’t measured in fabric.

Excerpt

Assimilation

The story of covering my hair, my face, my entire body, including my hands, is rooted in my mother’s story. And her story of covering is wrapped up in her relationship with immigration and assimilation. Like the other girls in her hometown in Pakistan, my mother started covering her hair when she was a young child. But for the first few years after immigrating, she and my dad tried to assimilate into a white Canada. My father immigrated in the sixties with a twelfth grade education and a diploma in metallurgy. He worked in construction as a welder and pipe fitter. He ‘brought’ – his words, not mine – my mother to Toronto after marrying her. She was eighteen years old and bewildered by everything she saw. In the winter she was stunned by the extreme cold; in the summer she was horrified at the white bodies lounging in the sun around the swimming pool located in the centre of the apartment complex where she lived. She would peer down from her tiny apartment, dazed and disgusted by the lack of shame. She hated her tiny apartment, she always said it made her feel like an animal in a cage. She missed the courtyards and fresh air of Pakistan. She was terrified of escalators. I inherited that fear from her. To this day, my heart quickens a bit just before stepping on.

But still, under my father’s influence, she tried to assimilate. They both did. Pictures of my parents from the seventies capture the people they were trying to be. My father is sometimes clean-shaven, and other times sports a fashionable trim beard. He looks a bit dodgy in his three-piece, checkered, mustard suits, and handsome in his flared pants and Ray Ban sunglasses. He poses in front of his Mustang, sometimes leaning against it, other times standing behind its open front door. My mother smiles uncertainly in bell-bottoms and a vest, with a kerchief on her head, pushing a stroller in High Park.

These pictures show two young South Asians desperately trying to fit in, to be accepted, to be white. But they were not white, they were brown. And 1970s white Canada did not let them forget it. ‘Paki’ is the only slur they shared with us. Even now, when they say it, I get a sense of how much it hurt them. How it took the wind out of their sails. How it made them want to give up and go back home. And they did both of those things – gave up and tried to go back home.

Many immigrants talk about the ‘Dream of Return’. One day, I’ll go home. I’ll make enough money to go back, back to a country I belong in, to a place that feels like home. But the cruel fact of immigration is that once you leave, you never really have a home. You and the place you leave behind transform, ceaselessly, infinitely, so that when – if – you encounter each other again, you are unrecognisable to one another. When you visit the neighbourhood you grew up in, you wonder, Is this the street our house was on? Or was it the next street over? Are we even in the right area? Your relatives and friends marvel, Is that really you? My god, I didn’t recognise you! But still, the Dream of Return remains strong; it is a dream that those immigrants cling to most desperately who do not find home in the places to which they immigrate, where they become citizens, where they pay taxes, where they have their children, where they lose their children.

I’m talking about immigration out of necessity, out of desperation. A better word for this might be ‘exile’, except it’s not that you’ve been banished from your country of origin, but rather that the sorry state of the nation you’re born into and your own socio-economic class leave you no choice but to try your luck elsewhere if you dare hope for a better future.

Whatever the geopolitics of the region, or the forces of the global capitalist system that led you to find yourself in this position, it does not really matter to you. All that matters is that you would rather stay home, but you know there is no hope for you there. If you want a better future, you must leave. And you must go to a wealthier nation, a nation that is privileged by the global structures of inequality. You leave because you understand the bleak future that lies ahead. And if you’re really lucky, maybe you’ll amass enough wealth to return home and help your parents and siblings and extended family. They’ll need it, because if they stay put – as most of them will – their future will turn out even bleaker than you could have ever imagined. Poverty will destroy your family, it will ravage the bodies of your loved ones, they will fight over scraps, they will die young from preventable diseases, without access to the basic medical attention that might have saved them.

It is these immigrants that hold tight to the Dream of Return. This immigration is not the immigration of the wealthy elite of this world. It is not the immigration of those who hop nations and continents in pursuit of adventure, hobbies, an escape from boredom. Those people never actually immigrate, though in conversation they might stop and ponder with unnecessary profundity, I guess I’m an immigrant, too! These people don’t really think of themselves as immigrants at all; they’re expats. People who always belong somewhere – somewhere else – and always have the luxury to head home, their real home, anytime they so desire.

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About the Author

Ayesha S. Chaudhry was born in Toronto and earned her PhD from New York University. She is a Professor of Gender and Islamic Studies. She teaches at the University of British Columbia and lives in Vancouver.