We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

by Samra Habib

Teachers, I was starting to learn, were my biggest champions. They rooted for me, and I dreaded letting them down. The bullies started being cruel to me only when the teachers looked away, so all I had to do was keep their eyes on me, the immigrant kid exceeding expectations.

My aspirations didn’t have to be to get married and have children; finding myself through exploring the unknown was a much more worthy ambition.

Why had I never given myself permission to marvel at my body and appreciate how resilient it had been? How it had gently carried me through pain and trauma, and how for years I hid it under layers of shame. Because my femininity had often been exploited by others, used as justification for controlling and monitoring me, I didn’t want it to be looked at or acknowledged. Now, looking at myself as if for the first time, I understood how showing off my curves could allow me to take back the power from those who had stripped me of it. My body could be a source of joy and pride. It was for me and for me alone.

being queer, I learned, is so much more than who you sleep with. It’s who you are, whether that means rejecting traditional gender roles or embracing non-normative identities and politics.

My mother pulled various tomes off the shelves—books about disasters of all kinds, heartbreaks so catastrophic they put mine in perspective. “Jaan, it helps to find solace in the larger universe, especially when your internal world isn’t hospitable,” she said, hoping that the advice would stick. “Sometimes that is how you come back to yourself.”

“Our safety, our survival, is routinely threatened in the name of some hypothetical greater safety that does not include us,” she told me. “What they are trying to keep safe is white supremacy, what they are trying to protect is their own power.”