Read till the end: What happened to this Pakistani immigrant kid

In the summer of 2007, I was 17 and suppressing all thoughts of the future. I was facing my last year of high school and had no prospects. College might have been the logical next step, but I had always been a lousy student. Earlier that year, my father had taken a black marker to my report card, circled all the poor grades and written, “WHY?”

I had no answer for him, but I was suddenly aware that an even bigger question hung over my life: With my schooling coming to an end, who — or what — would I become?

My Toronto suburb was made up of working and middle-class immigrants from Pakistan, like my parents, as well as from India, the Middle East and the West Indies.

Most had come to Canada after the immigration laws were liberalised in the 1970s. They settled in places like Scarborough and Mississauga, towns where Hindus, Muslims and Christians, blacks and whites, lived side by side — an idealised portrait of the Canadian mosaic.

Beneath this veneer of multiculturalism, however, was a darker reality. That summer, for the first time, I began to look closely at the world around me, and what I saw were brown boys and girls condemned to a dangerous aimlessness.

We were bounded by the neighbourhood, defined by it, chained to our circumstances and chained to the invisible norms that told us we ought to know our place.

All of us children of immigrants were hopelessly lost. I do not mean “lost” in the upper-class aspirational sense of being on a journey of self-discovery, but lost in the very physical sense of not knowing who we were and where we came from.

The schools could not tell us. Our parents could not tell us. The streets tried to tell us, but those answers posed their own problems.

Aimlessness, alienation

We tried to compensate for our lack of purpose by sagging our pants and tilting our hats.

We rapped Jay-Z and Nas lyrics like they were verses from our respective holy books. We were desperately trying to signal that we, too, had power — even if that power was a fantasy.

It was worse for the girls, especially the Muslim ones. They faced the same struggles we did, while also living in complete terror of their fathers. Misogyny told them they were inferior to boys and should be married. They lied to protect themselves.

That year, a teenager in my neighbourhood named Aqsa Parvez was murdered by her father and brother for running away from home and wearing “western” clothes.

When aimlessness meets alienation, violence is certain. Before I picked up a serious book, I knew boys who had stabbed other children or had themselves been stabbed.

Before I started high school, a boy four years older than I was killed when someone smashed a hammer through his skull.

Before I graduated from high school, a childhood friend died in a car accident while fleeing from the police. I knew who had a gun, who had knives, how to say hello to them, when and how to run.

Complex, hazardous world

Enormous mental resources went into navigating this world — and this was just one world; the others were equally complex, equally hazardous.

That summer, I had an epiphany: If I continued to do poorly in school, what lay ahead was either the street or, if I was lucky, the factory. And this made me afraid — unutterably afraid.

I belatedly understood that my fate was connected to the boys on my block, that the children who dropped out, the children who got arranged marriages, the children who fled to the mosque and came out with long beards, the children who mocked the smart students, were all doomed, because they — and I — did not have the luxury of a second chance.

Throughout my adolescence, multiple people tried to tell me that I had “potential”. It was a word I did not trust.

What does it mean to say this to a brown boy who doesn’t know any lawyers or engineers?

Guidance counsellors would show me pamphlets with white faces in white coats or white faces in dark suits, and they would ask me what I wanted to do.

No answer

I had no answer, because these professionals were not real people but mirages.

My parents could offer no guidance. My life was completely alien to theirs — the distance that separated us was greater than the distance that separated Canada from Pakistan. The language I spoke, the beliefs I professed, the way I walked, all changed the minute I walked out of the door.

Here is the basic conundrum a child of immigrants faces as he goes through school.

Until now, he has safely assumed the identity provided to him by his family, but as he encounters innocent white faces, he is confronted with an interrogation about who he really is.

Friends might inquire about the smelly food he eats at lunch, or teachers may wonder how “your people” do things.

And the child, because he is a child, feels ashamed of his parents, his culture, his language.

He begins to lie about who he is.

He is now one person at home, another at school, and another at the mosque or temple.

This disfigures his sense of reality, and he will soon become confused, then frustrated and perhaps even angry.

He has never been taught his history and does not know his origins. He will have to transcend his ignorance, or drown in it.

I now recognised my constraints, but how could I escape them? I turned to education to purchase my freedom.

That autumn, I sat at the front of the class and studied late into the night. When I was done, I read anything I could get my hands on — economics, foreign affairs, fiction. I was afraid that if I put down a book for even a minute, the hounds would be waiting.

Slowly, my grades began to creep up and I went from rotting at the bottom of the class to scoring at the top. The year ended with a scholarship to a good university and I felt, for the first time, that I might not be a failure.

The only problem was that when I got to the university, I instantly saw how far behind I was. My classmates had been born into a world with private tutors and parents who had planned their successes.

I did not envy this privilege, because I, too, was privileged — I had seen how life was actually lived, what it meant to strive twice as hard and be accepted as half as good. The only quality I envied was how naturally my peers took up space in elite rooms, how they expected the world to accept them on their own terms.

The library became my safe space. I wanted nothing less than to break down my character and let the temple of knowledge reconstruct it until I was someone who knew about himself and the world.

Invisible Man

During freshmen week, while my classmates were getting trashed, I was reading Invisible Man: “All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.”

I read this paragraph and when I came to its most powerful line — “I am nobody but myself” — the earth shook under me.

Who am I? Where did I come from? Who were my ancestors and what did they believe in? If I could not answer these questions, I would never answer that other question that troubled me: Where did I belong?

That day, nearly a decade ago, I became conscious that I was not born ex nihilo in the forgotten suburbs, but had a history that was as real as the skin on my body. I was linked to an honourable past, even if I did not know the content of that past.

I was not a “Paki”, not a terrorist. My people, too, had produced poets and philosophers and scientists. Their land had been plundered, its resources extracted to fuel an Industrial Revolution a continent away.

I learned that I had a context and that the brown boys and girls back home had contexts as well. And I have been reading and writing ever since — not simply to survive, but to carve out my own tenuous place on this unsteady earth.

— New York Times News Service

Omer Aziz just graduated from Yale Law School.

[Here's his profile from Yale: Omer Aziz is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School Class of 2017 and is a freelance journalist. He is interested in human rights and the nexus between technology and national security. He also has an interest in international politics, particularly political happenings in the Middle East, South Asia, and China. Omer completed his B.A. in Political Studies from Queen's University in Canada, and received his MPhil in International Relations with High Distinction from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar and Pitt Scholar. He also studied in Paris at Sciences Po, for half a year.]