Speaking out
A Muslim poet gets political
BY Misha Warbanski
Photography by Roger Aziz
For Sofia Baig, putting on a Muslim headscarf for the first time was a political statement. She was 13 years old and the Twin Towers had just come crashing down. Raised in a secular suburban Quebec household by a Pakistani father and a Chinese-Spanish mother, Baig went to a private Catholic school in Montreal. She didn’t even know how to pray. But, she recalls, wearing the hijab just felt right—even if her parents didn’t like the idea.
“The world had already put me into a category that I knew nothing about. You’re forced in this little box and you’re like, ‘Who am I?’ ” Baig explains. “And on top of that, being mixed, being diversely mixed, you’re already so confused about who you are.”
As the climate for Muslims changed for the worse, Baig found her interests evolving. Once an active member in the school choir, she started finding her own voice, writing and performing poetry. Today, as a spoken-word artist and Concordia University student, she finds herself focused on countering the fear of Islam that’s become rampant in Quebec and around the world.
“Some people have this image of a Muslim girl as being very quiet or shy and there’s an extreme of thinking we’re oppressed,” she says. “And so I think when they see someone speaking out in general it seems strange. It doesn’t match their stereotype. I imagine they’re like, why is this random girl wearing a hijab standing there screaming out political poetry?”
Baig says she was somewhat surprised by the attention she’s been getting since she started performing two years ago at a local Muslim organization’s monthly poetry readings.
Most of the attention was positive, and in 2006 she was part of the tour Hip Hop 4 Islam that played in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. She went on to tour in the U.S. and appeared on CNN. More recently, Baig has started working on an album.
The climate for Muslims hasn’t improved, and in Quebec it has gotten worse. This fall, the Taylor-Bouchard Commission launched a series of public hearings on how to “reasonably accommodate” immigrants while protecting Quebec’s French culture. In September, the Quebec Council for the Status of Women called for the province to ban employees of public institutions from wearing “visible religious symbols,” including the Muslim hijab and the Jewish kippa.
Identifying as proudly Canadian and Québécois, Baig says she finds the state of affairs in the province troubling. “It’s not about the hijab. It’s about what they think the hijab symbolizes—and that is Islam. And they think Islam is a threat,” explains Baig. “It’s out of ignorance, and when they see these terrorists blowing up buildings, that scares people. That scares the hell out of me, as a human being. My presence should ease people’s minds.”
“I’m standing up there publicly and denouncing all these other things,” says Baig. “Why are you still looking at me as if I’m oppressed, or that my daddy told me to put this scarf on?”
