I started my year by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written collaboratively with Alex Haley. While I was reading, one quote stuck with me:
“Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to, so much so that you don’t want to be around each other?”
As a woman of colour, although not Black, this sentence truly resonated with me.
I was born and raised in Lebanon, and moved to Montreal in 2015. For the longest time, I was not proud of my heritage. At 18 years old, I felt the need to separate myself from the Lebanese community as best I could.
I would get angry when someone pointed out my slight accent when I spoke English. For some reason, I was adamant on rejecting my Lebanese identity — even around other Arabs. If I heard anyone speaking Arabic, I would run the other way to avoid my accent slipping, and “exposing” myself as “one of them.
I always described myself as “anti-racist.” Yet, I was racist towards my own kind.
However, the longer I stayed away from the Arab community, the more I became an outsider to other cultures.
Working at restaurants, customers would ask for my name. When I would give it to them, their smiles would change into grimaces, right before asking: “Christian Arab or Muslim Arab?
Working at call centres, I would answer the phone to an angry client. When my name would be uttered, it was met with a deafening silence — a silence that visible minorities, or anyone with an “ethnic” name, know all too well.
People I thought were my friends would use the term “not like us” behind my back, because I wasn’t of the same ethnicity as them.
In my naive and idealistic brain, I believed all cultures were the same. I believed myself to be accepting of all races, and all humans. So why was I ashamed of my own?
Then October 7, 2023 changed everything.
While the history of the Palestinian plight did not begin on that day, the winds of change began to blow in my own life from then. I do not mean in terms of advocating for a free Palestine, which is something I’ve always believed in. But October 7 was the slap in the face I needed to obliterate every ounce of self-hatred I had. The aftermath of the Al-Aqsa Flood, to be more precise, encouraged me to be protective of the culture I so desperately tried to separate myself from.
A specific event after October 7 pushed me over the edge. I was riding the metro on my way to work, FaceTiming with my mother who still lives in Lebanon. The metro car was nearly empty, with most people wearing headphones and minding their business. No one cared that I was having a conversation in Arabic with my mother — except for one lady, who tapped me on the shoulder and said in French, “Can you speak that language somewhere else?”
I was speechless. My mother’s face fell as my lips started to quiver, trying to find a rebuttal, but I couldn’t. A lump formed in my throat. I wanted to disappear.
That day, the people-pleasing veil of remaining in the “good Arab” category, where my mother tongue wasn’t seen as violent, and I wasn’t seen as a “terrorist,” was finally lifted. I didn’t care anymore about how I came across. Racism doesn’t base itself on facts, but on prejudice — something acquired from adamantly refusing to understand people for who they are, not what we believe them to be. I embraced the accent when I spoke in English or French. I stopped laughing at the racist bomb jokes affiliated with the Middle East. The community I ran away from began calling out to me, and I leaned into my heritage even more.
And then the most beautiful thing happened.
Falling in love with my culture led to me loving myself in ways I had never experienced before. Things I tried to tame at 18, I let flow naturally at 26 and 27. My voluminous, frizzy, curly hair; my big brown eyes; my olive skin; my loud, boisterous laugh — all the parts of me that were deemed “uncivilized” became the best things about me.
My culture is not without its faults. It is not perfect, and its people are flawed. But that’s the beauty of it all — with all its flaws, and with all its challenges, if I were given the choice to be anything in the world, I would still choose to be Lebanese.