We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

by Samra Habib

My mother would give birth to two more girls, each of us a year and a half apart. By the time their third daughter was born, family members and neighbours were in mourning. They would drop by unannounced and express their condolences to my parents for having yet another girl. Being parents to daughters meant mounting burdens; it didn’t guarantee the prosperity that having sons did. Boys were free to go out and generate income for the family, whereas girls needed to be sheltered from the dangerous outside world until it was time to pass them on to their new guardians, their husbands. Daughters were additional mouths to feed, and dowries for them had to be accumulated before marriage. My father told the mourning guests to kindly go to hell, and in an act of stubbornness and, perhaps most important, love, named his third daughter Shazadi, meaning “princess.”