We Have Always Been Here

featuring, the best author photo I have ever seen

I finished this book lying in our hammock in the sun and it was dreamy.

This memoir begins in Pakistan, where the author was born, and ends with her embracing her fullest identity as a queer Muslim activist in Toronto. Memoirs are typically my favourite non-fiction style to learn more about the world and about how people experience it, and this one did not disappoint. I also love a rebel. Samra Habib is a cool bad ass lady and I like her (her author photo, as an example!)

In her twenties she begins to travel the world, alone as well as with friends or lovers, and this opens up a whole new way that she begins to learn about herself and who she is.

We also read about her discovery of a queer-friendly mosque, and the way this brought her back to her own faith community. I was moved by how she still connects with Islam, even though it was used in so many ways to discriminate against her- as a girl and woman, as a minority in the Islam faith, as a brown person in Canada, as a queer person. I also loved her descriptions of connecting with the liturgy (for lack of a better word- I’m sure in Islam it might be called something different) of the faith. Familiarity with the prayers and songs of the faith of my childhood has been a really beautiful way that I connect with God now, as an adult. I believe recognizing these things in common between faiths could be very powerful for humanizing people we think are so different from us.

The last element of this memoir that resonated with me was how Habib’s relationship with her parents evolved as she became an adult. Her parents’ open-mindedness surprised me at first, as it did for Habib as well, but she writes that, at least about her mom, she shouldn’t have been surprised. She remembers “Never in my life had I caught her saying anything remotely homophobic or transphobic. And she wouldn’t have, because to her, being hateful in any way goes against her religious beliefs. This was a woman who would recite the motto of the Ahmadiyya (a denomination of Islam) community- Love for all, hatred for none- whenever someone directed an Islamophobic remark at us on the street.”

What a beautiful image of a woman truly living her faith, and how she shared it with her daughter. Thank you Samra Habib for an inspiring memoir.