Every year, CBC’s Canada Reads asks a panel of well-known Canadians to argue for one book the whole country should read. In 2020, the winner was a memoir by a queer Muslim woman who grew up in Pakistan and found herself in Toronto. Actor Amanda Brugel championed it, and the book was Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here.
That’s a big deal, and it’s worth sitting with for a moment. A book about a queer Ahmadi Muslim woman’s search for herself was chosen, in a public debate on national radio and television, as the book Canadians most needed to read. It also won a Lambda Literary Award, and the bibliography rates it Great, its highest rating.
The story starts in Pakistan. Habib grows up without any model for the life she’ll eventually want. Her mother has devoted herself to being a dutiful, devout wife, and her father is protective to the point of discouraging adventure. The family also has to hide that they’re Ahmadi, a minority Muslim community that faces persecution from extremists in Pakistan. As the threats grow, they leave for Canada, where they face a new set of financial and cultural struggles.
Then Habib learns that her mother has arranged her marriage. She buries her feminist, spirited side again, until she can’t anymore. Her search for herself eventually takes her to Tokyo, where she comes to accept her sexuality, and back to Toronto. There she finds a queer-inclusive mosque in the same neighbourhood where she saw her first drag show. That’s one of the loveliest details in the book: faith and queerness, side by side on the same city streets.
The heart of the memoir is the discovery that the parts of her identity aren’t as incompatible as she was taught. People like her have always existed, as the title says. In the book’s words, “the world just wasn’t ready for them yet.”
Habib is also a photographer. She’s known for a portrait series of queer Muslims around the world, and you can feel a photographer’s eye in how she writes, especially in the way she notices faces, rooms and light.
This is for Canadian readers, obviously. If you followed Canada Reads in 2020, you may already have strong feelings about it. It’s also for queer people of faith who’ve been told they have to choose, for immigrant readers who know what it means to rebuild a life in a new country, and for anyone who loves a coming-of-age memoir that takes you across continents.
Toronto readers will get an extra layer, since much of the second half happens in neighbourhoods they’ll recognize.
The comment section is open. Did you follow Canada Reads that year? Have you ever had to keep parts of yourself separate, and did they eventually come together? And which memoir do you think every Canadian should read?
Full details are on the We Have Always Been Here entry in the Lesbian Bibliography.