Black Writers Matter

by Whitney French

  Parents couldn’t understand. Friends couldn’t relate. The thought sung in my head all throughout grade school. A melody that I felt only other first-generation Somali-Canadian Muslim girls could really hear. I was so many adjectives and so few verbs.

  I walk out of the stall and toward the sinks. I force myself to look up into the mirror and I have a hard time processing what I see. I look thin, then round. Bottom half matryoshka doll, top half Betty Spaghetti. My silhouette against the backdrop of the cold, blue, metal stalls, instead of the warm, cream wall tiles in my home bathroom, looks unnatural. If I walk out that door people will think I’ve been starved just because they’ve never been introduced to my head sitting on my neck; they are only familiar with my face surrounded by the rippling clouds of my scarf.

  I didn’t look prettier with or without it. But people would continue to tell me one way or the other for the rest of my life.

  The door swings open and I flinch, sure that for a slight second I’ve been exposed to all the school. Indian girls from another class walk in, smile, and don’t say a thing to me. They continue to talk about the boys they like who refuse to dance. I eye their beautiful waist-long hair as I run a finger through my puffy and dry curls. I fooled myself into expecting a Rapunzel-like mane to cascade down as I pulled away my scarf, but instead my hair stood still in its place, unmoved by my decision to set it free. I’ve been duped, exchanged one burden for another.

  I had never met my hair. I didn’t know how it behaved in the wild. Would it bounce if I danced to the music? Would it fall in front of my face and block me from seeing what others were saying? During Ramadan a few years later, my mother lets me relax my hair. Chunks of it fell off within days. It was the first time I truly saw the hijab as a blessing.

  The girls leave. I smooth out the scarf, hover it above my head, and set it down like a crown. I fasten the pin and let out a sigh doused in disappointment and relief.

  I wasn’t sure if I was taking a step forward or backward. I just knew in that moment that I was not my hijab, but I also was not the absence of my hijab.

  I open the door and walk out into the dance to join my friends. Jeans, silver top, and scarf.

  I couldn’t say if I was happy with my choice, but I was thrilled to discover that I had one.

  In Chayo’s Cab

  An Interview with Chayo Moses Nywello

  — Whitney French —

  This is an edited conversation with Chayo Moses Nywello, a former cab driver based in Terrace, British Columbia. He was asked about his work and his experiences being a Sudanese immigrant and what it means to be a Black man in Canada.

  Could you tell me a bit about your personal experience being a taxi cab driver?

  It was bittersweet being a taxi cab driver, it’s hard to tell if people are laughing or crying. Except the Irish: they are very clear, they are very black and white, very expressive. The same way they feel inside, you can see them express it. But I am existing in a culture that is grey. It is difficult to read the emotion. You just lean back and watch. Then you can learn and pick up. I was very humble to learn and I had to accept that I am a man with enough patience to understand. All the human race is born by Blacks; the whites didn’t fall from sky, they were born by Blacks.

  They need to stop fooling around.

  I don’t drive cab anymore. It was too much. I took on this job to get to know the community, the other part of community I did not know. I come across so many people as a taxi driver: doctors, scientists, drug dealers, different organized crime network, businessman, ordinary citizens.

  Point to point. Through all this I got to know the multicultural make-up of this nation. I got to do all that I like to do. [Now I am] a driver by shuttle, all the Europeans who come for the skiing, all parts of the world, even Australians who come to ski. Business [people], wildlife photographers, frontier ski[er], I deal with many, many people; the only people I don’t like are people those who are drunk.

  So that’s good.

  Yes, please elaborate about the new position you have and how it is different than driving cab.

  Because my [new] service [is] from airport to hotel or business place to business place, I book people for wedding, these are the people I deal with, mostly business classes. It is good; as a people person, I like to deal with them. I do expediting for WestJet and Air Canada; when customers lose luggage, the next day I deliver.

  It is a good thing to be humble to different people. I respect who they are. I have to respect people and their opinion, but I still have the courage to tell the truth and say this is where I stand in life, especially in my personal life. That is their personal life; that is where they stand. I cannot shame them. I did not create you. Freedom of choice. I am humble to do all this work.

  There is a negative and positive. They are reciprocal in relations or social interaction, but to be specific, it made me to think because what is funny to me may not be funny to you. Most of my experience as a taxi cab driver is trouble: drunk people who do not listen.

  Do you have a story about people in your cab that you are willing to share?

  One day I picked up a most wanted guy from Port Nelson who wanted to escape to the United States, to get an exit to Prince Rupert Port through Alaska. Based on what he told me, he had a Russian girlfriend that was a spy. Prime Minister Steven Harper was kicking out spies; “Do you think the Canadian government would book me and kill me for my Russian girlfriend?”

  As a cab driver, you must be a person with patience.

  I’m also an ex-military person and I worked for the un, so I know some things. Former President Dick Cheney was in Smithers. How do you know all of this? Yes I know these things, because I am human being in the community.

  I told him to pay me cash up front.

  On the radio, they say we have a problem. “Yes, I know.”

  When you take on the job there is a conviction that you may be in danger. Like the soldier who says, “I am going to die,” but it’s their conviction. That I am of the National Defense, so it is their conviction that makes them go into death, they do not turn their back on it. So there’s a liable of death in my job.

  We left the liquor store. He wants to use the washroom. The rcmp they come, I look at him, I turn my head to the right to point that he is in the station, a silent communication. He took off, from the bathroom station. Husky.

  So the rcmp went back into the car and took off. They communicated on the radio, they know where we were going, Prince Rupert. You see where I took you [Whitney] to Kitsumkalum, that saw mill there, that’s where I saw the hitchhiker.

  “Are you a good man? Can we pick up the hitchhiker?”

  “I don’t mind to pick him up, Chayo.”

  The hitchhiker downloaded the illegal music and sells them for like three dollars or five dollars, so we hit the road to Prince Rupert. Almost one hour and thirty minutes of driving. He asks, “Can I drink?” so all of them were having fun drinking a beer, shouting, shouting, everything coming out of his mouth. On the other side, the rcmp with three trucks were waiting for us. It was the rcmp from Terrace that told the rcmp in Prince Rupert, so before the road could branch off. Prince Rupert is a port, it’s water. It’s the end of Highway 16. So the rcmp is smart enough, they wait for us at the turn off. There was a chance that we could go to the Port Edward.

  So we went there. The rcmp were waiting as soon as we arrived, everything turned off, what is called ‘ghost car,’ it is just a civilian car, on my other side was the two trucks. The truck on the right pulled from where it was from on the edge of the road, into the land to block me.

  Yes, I said to myself, we are coming to the end of the problem. They turned around, they went behind me and we are blocked. rcmp truck on the right, front, back, and left; the only place to go is the water. The rcmp jumped out of the truck while it is still running. Right away I stop, park the car, th
ey grab the guy and handcuff him. It was peaceful without blood or incident.

  “Did he pay you?”

  “Yes, before we left Terrace.”

  “Ok, good! Who’s he?”

  “A hitchhiker.”

  It was a funny story because there was no blood and no death. If it went wrong it could have been a chaotic problem. The same, life is life. When you go on the road, it is a part of the daily. Anything can happen. With the shuttle business, there’s no bad experience. These are high business-class people.

  Living in Terrace, bc, it is likely different than back home, but you mentioned that there are similarities as well?

  What is relevant to where I was born and Terrace? It reminds me of countryside life, the farm where I was brought up. We milked the cows, then we take off and go to school in the morning, we come back in the afternoon, we go fishing to the river Nile side, around 5:30 a.m., we go diving in the water, swimming, we come follow the cows home. Use smoke to keep away the flies, we tie them down, dinner, we go to storytelling with Grandmother, the younger ones go to sleep, the older ones go to music until 11 p.m.

  We go to fishing and go to hunting. On my Facebook, there’s a lot of pictures of fishing and hunting, it’s most enjoyable. And the nature, mountains, green, ocean. That is why I love it. It’s both; you have city life too. Big city, it’s stressful and full of traffic jams. You get on the road, your time is controlled by being behind the wheel, your heart is beating to get to the work on time, and then, the time you get home and dinner, you turn on the tv for a short time. City life with all this traffic and headache is no good for me. I had this experience in Egypt. It’s no good. I would have to park by the roadside to catch the high-speed train, when I go to Vancouver or Calgary. I said no. Here I can drive, I am not worried about traffic or stress. I can go fishing.

  I go to Skeena River, Kalum River, and the other small creeks. If it is a beautiful sunny day, I go to the ocean, waterfront near Prince Rupert. In front of the blue, blue water. If you don’t want to be in the community, you can go to the bush, away from the pollution. There is a difference between dealing with people but also dealing with nature and the wildlife. I like to be in the bushes. It is good for me.

  Do you wish to share a bit more about your upbringing?

  I was born to a religious, conservative, agricultural family. These times I was brought up in, it was inclusive not exclusive. There’s a nice switch, to liberalism. [It] is a bright idea. This system is excluded the more you have segregation. An in-group and an out-group. When the in-group gives you room, there’s room for everybody, all the nations of the world, that’s why I switched over [from conservative politics]. I found a lot of contradictions.

  There are people in Canada who have the right to voice an opinion, and people who do not. It is deception and delusion. Those rights come from the Charter, from the United Nations. And it is a lie. Every day you see this hypocrisy. I have rights, free thinking, but Chayo…you should not have said all of this. My skin colour makes me an enemy. Push that under the carpet in the name of anti-war. I cannot go and talk about injustice of another if there is injustice here in my own home. But injustice has been used as a mechanism of survival for the particular group of people in power and at the same time they say there is injustice in another nation. I have to clean up my house before I go to clean up someone else’s house—if they are ok for me to clean it. If not, it’s their loss.

  PhD holders are taxi drivers; a man who have no fear to speak the truth is true. New immigrants with bright ideas are true, but they do not want that contribution in Western civilization. They put them aside and hide the bright ideas. The good and the worst part of this country is going to be stalled. You remember we talk around this table, you can’t see the problems because you were born from inside the cultural blanket and that blinds you. Something needs to be fixed.

  You cannot pray for rain and don’t want to deal with mud.

  Can you, in as much detail you feel comfortable, share your first few weeks coming to Canada?

  In June 2006, I arrived in Canada. I flew from Egypt to Frankfort Airport for four hours watching World Cup on tv, then I flew to Vancouver, then to Smithers. When I arrived, I was picked up at the area. It reminded me of some areas in Ethiopia. My sponsor picked me up and I went home. The weather, even on June 14th, it was too cold for me. I spent four days in that house and after that I got my own place in downtown Smithers. Two people—one for a honeymoon and one for wedding at the lumberyard—helped. I took over that job, but then I took over as a truck driver for a furniture place.

  But at the Smithers lumber yard, all the time they see me, many times in a day, they kind of stopped, [to look at me looking] at the Hudson’s Bay Mountain. She has been observing me stopping and looking up, I said, there was something I used to see on the tv in Africa, it is called snow.

  “One day, it will come down here to this ground.”

  “Why does it come from the mountain, down to the ground,” I asked.

  “It is a natural process,” she said. “In October or November the weather starts to get cold, the tree leaves turn yellow, and the weather gets colder and colder and colder, and in some areas the snow will come on the ground. There is something called frost and you will see it on the ground. You will see it coming down, down, down, until you see the snow on the ground.”

  I said “Good. But I want to see the snow up there on the mountain.”

  “We will take you there up one day on the weekend and touch it with your own hand.”

  “Yes, I’m ready for it.”

  So one day we went up the Hudson Bay Mountain, the road goes like this, zigzag, Feena and Inere, her husband is a radio technician. We are going to park the car and walk. Oh, ok, we go. We walk all the way. I could not wait to lay down and fall down like this. So it was in July, two week after arriving. Emery got the snowball when it is fresh and we throw it at each other. But it was cold up on the mountain. We spent a good time up there and now I am relaxed. I was anxious to see it. At last, I touched the snow. I sent pictures to Africa, sent this to Mommy. This is what we see. But I was waiting to see it on the ground.

  It occupied my mind, this is what is going on in my head all the time. Around three in the morning, it was heavy, the weather felt heavy, then I [went inside the] house, to keep warm. I got up and looked through the window, I can see the snow and I went crazy. I was anxious to call back home, but I didn’t want to wake them up. I sat at the window to look at the snow. We bought a shovel the other day.

  “How do you like it, Moses?”

  “I love it!”

  “There is something we do here. It’s called snow angel.”

  “Oh, ok.”

  Is there anything else you would wish to share for the interview?

  Your title is accurate. People younger and older who are lost because their culture has been crushed and social order has been destroyed, this chaos, they become prey.

  There is no social order to protect them, they look at themselves as inferior, even their life don’t matter any more, we can go deep with this human psychology.

  So now I’m going to put a little bit of conclusion on the topic. The reality is, you cannot destroy the race; you can try hard, but in the end it is a mutual destruction. This was tried in Egypt and Northern Libya.

  We are witnessing the backfiring. To be reminded that our thoughts matter, our inventions matter. We do not believe that we are inferior. We believe in mutual respect. The moment you believe them is the moment your life doesn’t matter to you. It is a world, in this universe, it doesn’t matter what power they possess, human is human. We will say enough is enough.

  Thank you for this title. He who decides to be an enemy to Blacks…good luck. It will catch up to you.

  Blacks are productive.

  Uninterrupted

  — Méshama Rose Eyob-Austin �
�

  I have frequented a total of four schools during my ten years of education and I have yet to find an environment where race wasn’t an issue. My first elementary school was where a classmate introduced me to racism. She found it amusing to tell me I looked like poop. I did not know how to deal with that so I told her she looked like a toilet bowl. It’s a funny story to tell now, but the fact is I was dealing with a racist seven year old who knew she was doing something wrong but didn’t know what and I already had an automatic self-defence mechanism in place to respond. By the age of seven I had been to more conferences than I could count, had attended numerous lectures, and had listened to countless conversations between my parents and their friends about race and racism, and still when it came to that moment where I found myself facing racism, I didn’t know what to do.

  Since then, most of my encounters with racism have been a little less obvious. In fact, they were only obvious to me because either I or a friend was experiencing them. An example of this would be my music class at school, where all the students with ‘attitude’ were given the same instrument to play and restricted to one tiny room while the rest of the class played together in the main room. Not surprisingly, all those students were kids of colour. In fact, the only students of colour in that main room were myself and a boy who, like me, only whispered about two words during class. Although most of the white kids in the main room with me didn’t think about it in that way, they nevertheless had full access to the teacher who invested her time into nurturing their minds with the beauty of music, whereas she left those five children of colour to come to class feeling unwanted. It was also common practice to have at least one of the five kicked out of class during the short fifty-one-minute period. To know that I should consider myself privileged to be treated equally to my white peers and that this privilege could easily be taken away, was a burden. I often endured teasing from my friends, who would say I got preferential treatment because our teacher considered me to be the ‘whitest’ of the Black people in our class. I understood where they were coming from. After all, my teacher must’ve thought it was out of the ordinary to have a Black child whose parents were actively involved in her school life and maintained communication with her teachers, and I’m sure this was reflected in her behaviour towards me. This is not to say that Black children do not have present parents. Rather, white teachers treat Black students wrongly with the assumption that they have an absent or uninterested parent who does not take notice of their school life.