“You’re going to be wearing hijab this year,” my mother told me the summer before sixth grade, and I just about keeled over and died.
My hands flew to my hair - luxurious, wavy, buttermilk blonde spilling down to my elbows - and gripped it protectively, as if wearing hijab meant losing it entirely. With how limp and damaged my mother’s hair was after years of tight headscarves and itchy undercaps, It might as well have.
My mother was not someone I considered beautiful, especially not when compared to the beach-blonde and blue-eyed girls I went to school with. She’s short and heavy-set, distinctly un-American weight pooling at her hips, with dark skin and knobbly hands and an accent thicker than the soupy summer air. Most unflattering of all were her fashion choices - long skirts and maxi dresses in patterns foreign enough to make an American call the police about an anti-white hate crime; eyesore chiffon hijabs pinned tight at the throat; the whole ensemble topped off with an ancient denim jacket as if that would help sell her as an assimilated American woman. My mother epitomized all I hated about Pakistanis: they were shamefully exotic, unassimilated, perpetually judged by prying American eyes.
I was blonde and Scandinavian-pale, as American as they came. Unlike my mother, who always drew stares and off-color comments, I fit right into the sea of white, light-eyed blondes that populated our city. I was free of the curse of being visibly ethnic - but now my mother’s asking me to wear hijab? To announce to the world that I’m Pakistani and Muslim? To willingly subject myself to discrimination? To throw away the safety of my ethnic ambiguity, just to become a little closer to my religion?
I begged and wailed until my voice was hoarse, but my mother wouldn’t budge. Hijab was the next step of my emergence into adulthood as a Muslim woman, and there was no getting around it. The first day I wore hijab in public - an ugly, slippery maroon scrap that my mother had pinned too tight around my skull - I bitterly thought to myself: Mother, you have no idea what you’ve just cost me.
Buttermilk blonde curls disappeared behind cotton layers, and my confidence promptly followed suit. I was ugly as hell. All my ethnic features were highlighted by the patterned scarves and ill-fitting ankle skirts that’d become my new wardrobe, screaming “I’m nonwhite!” to anyone who spared a glance. Whatever semblance of white privilege remained via my pale skin and light eyes was immediately extinguished by the elephant in the room: That girl covers her hair. That girl covers her skin. That girl looks like a caricature of a terrorist’s trophy wife that stepped right out of a CNN broadcast. My whole life prior to hijab was spent as a white girl in a white’s world - and now I was anything but.
“You’re not in that country anymore,” a white boy told me as we watched a documentary about Iran in seventh-grade English class, “you don’t need to wear that on your head.”
“Oh, you’re wearing that today,” a white girl said with a strained, faked, smile, gesturing to my hijab. It was the first time she’d seen me wear it to school.: “It looks, uh... nice?”
“What do you think about the modesty laws in Saudi Arabia?” yet another white boy inquired, cornering me by the playground swingset. He moved his finger in circles around his head, miming a hijab. “Because, you know, you wear that.”
By the end of middle school, I’d stopped socializing with white people. Nothing good ever came of hanging around them, and they increasingly avoided me, anyway; if I wanted to get gawked at like a zoo animal for my lack of belief in Jesus / nonwhite facial features / non-culturallly-Christian holidays / ethnic last name, I’d join the fucking circus. But distance from white Americans wasn’t the only distance that crept into my life.
I began to think: what was to blame for my perpetual state of alienation if not my Pakistani parents? Their insistence I present myself as visibly nonwhite and visibly Muslim? Their heritage and culture had brought me nothing but insecurity and grief, and in a subconscious struggle to free myself from everything that barred me from the privilege of being white - inside and out - I rejected our culture. I stopped speaking our language, stopped wearing our clothes, stopped participating in our religious rituals and festivities, became a pedantic critic of everything that wasn’t culturally Christian - as if I could self-loathe my way to being perceived as white again. If I just hated being Pakistani enough, worshipped white culture enough, maybe I’d re-gain all the white privilege I’d lost.
Refusing to speak Urdu became forgetting how to speak it entirely. Rejecting religion became forgetting its nuances entirely. Born of my own self-hatred, I’d cornered myself into a haunting liminal space: I couldn’t assimilate into American culture no matter how many Western dishes I tried or how many jeans I bought (because of my face, my faith, my accent, my loved ones, my worldview), nor could I reconnect to the culture I’d blamed and hated for so long (because of the words I’d forgotten, the songs I’d forgotten, the foods I’d forgotten, the experiences I’d forgotten). There was nothing left, no culture I belonged to. I was defined by the void I’d crafted for myself, built deep into my chest like a pacemaker. I’d fucked up.
On nights where I cried myself to sleep because I couldn’t remember the Urdu word for “more”, I cursed my hijab. I rued that day, the summer before sixth grade, where my mom had made the decision for me to cover my hair. Trying to run away from all the things that alienated me within American society, catalyzed and emphasized by that dreaded hijab, had left me cultureless. Stateless. This racial-cultural identity crisis could’ve been averted, I thought bitterly, if I hadn’t had to wear hijab. If I’d had the opportunity to organically find balance between my native culture and my society’s culture, instead of feeling compelled to flee from my ethnic identity like a hand flinching away from an open flame, maybe I’d be more content with myself. How ironic, I mused between sobs, that the hijab - designed to connect a woman to her culture & religion - had led me so far away from it. Hadn’t the creators known to account for teenage girls facing discrimination because of their headscarves & consequently hating their ethnoreligious backgrounds? What a horrible oversight.
“Why do you wear that thing on your head?”
“What’s the point of the headdress?”
“Why do you cover your hair?”
(I have no idea. I hate it. I hate what it’s done to me and my identity. I hate how wearing
it feels like putting a target on my back that reads “I’m nonwhite and un-American! Come harass me!” I hate who I’ve become in response to wearing it.)
I stayed silent. I had no answer for them. Every morning, I looked into the mirror and cursed that day, the summer before sixth grade, that’d ruined the trajectory of my own self-love.
White people were only good for off-color comments and faked politeness, I’d discovered, so naturally, I gravitated towards other people of color. By the tail-end of middle school, my social circle consisted of ethnic minorities - I spoke only to them in class, sat only with them at lunch, invited only them to my house. In my friendships with them was newfound solace. The window-side cafeteria table, populated by Asian-Americans and African immigrants, was my home during the fall semester of eighth grade. Our conversations would vary, from gossip to fandom to schoolwork, but inevitably come back to our commonalities - the complex and all-consuming minority experience that we could just barely verbalize as emergent tweens.
“Lingala’s alphabet is pronounced differently from the English one,” one friend said during a lunchtime discussion about languages. She was Congolese, with dark skin and tight braids that trailed across the table as she leaned towards me. “I think we use the French alphabet?”
“Oh! The Arabic alphabet is different too!” I scrambled for a pen and wrote out the alphabet for her.
“The letters are so swirly,” she marveled.
“Urdu uses the same alphabet as Arabic does,” I elaborated, “but there are some extra letters for unique sounds, and no vowel markings. I’m not sure what the other letters are, exactly - I think there’s a “cha” and a “pa”?”
“I think everyone here is bilingual,” another friend piped up, adjusting the thick-rimmed glasses slipping down her wide nose. “We both speak Lingala,” she nodded to the Congolese girl, “Maria speaks Urdu, I’m pretty sure those two speak Chinese...”
“Imagine being monolingual,” I said, grinning. “How embarrassing. White people suck.”
“Um...?” A brown girl who’d overheard my quip from a table over shot me a dirty glance. The implied accusation was obvious in the unimpressed quirk of her lips. It’s not cute for a white person to dunk on other whites. Do you think you’re gonna fit in with actual racial minorities because you’re self-hating?
“She’s Pakistani, back off,” my Congolese friend warned. The girl considered me for a few moments - taking in my thick brows, my square cheekbones, my tall nose, my full lips, my slight accent, elevated to prominence by my hijab - and conceded. Even if you’re blonde and green-eyed, I could hear her thinking, you’re obviously not benefitting from white privilege. You’re as South Asian as they come.
As she turned back to her own table, apparently satisfied, I thought to myself: She never would’ve believed me if I weren’t a hijabi.
In the months that followed, that isolated incident morphed into a pattern I noticed over and over again. The hijab could speak. When my mom and I went grocery shopping, and older Muslim ladies hobbled over to us to say salaam and mashaAllah and mubarak, I knew that they’d been called over by our hijabs. If my mom and I hadn’t worn our headscarves and maxi dresses on those days, they wouldn’t have come to us; they wouldn’t have registered us as one of their own. When we went out to eat, two hijabis crowded into a little restaurant booth, the wait staff always took care to ask us whether we wanted meat and alcohol in our food. Had we let our hair run free, they wouldn’t have noticed; wouldn’t have had the visual signal that these two women likely have religious dietary restrictions. When we strolled about at the airport and bewildered Arab women ran up to us, asking for help with directions and scheduling, I knew that they saw us as a safe space. Had we presented ourselves like any other assimilated brown family, those women couldn’t have known that we were their biggest allies in this foreign country. They couldn’t have known that we might’ve spoken Arabic - and even if we didn’t, that the inherent solidarity between us as Muslim women would ensure we help them on their way regardless.
Salaam-swapping in the Target produce section, alcohol-free pina coladas, garbled cross-linguistic conversations about terminals and departure times - all of it was fleeting, yet monumental. Our hijabs - my hijab - let others know who I was, more comprehensively than any other symbol could. For every derisive comment it solicited, it let a Muslim woman know that she was not alone. For every sideways glance it drew, it emphasized that I lived according to my faith and not according to assimilationist ideals. For each instance it alienated me from my American peers, it connected me to my marginalized brethren. Muslim sees Muslim, nonwhite sees nonwhite - the hijab communicated what blonde hair and Western clothing failed to.
I looked at my mom, cotton shawl clasped tight at her throat, and suddenly, she didn’t seem so ugly to me anymore. What was so unsightly about broadcasting your identity to all who dared to look, bright and immutable and strong?
I couldn’t forgive my hijab for costing me my cultural identity and the safety of privilege - not yet. But, as eighth grade turned to freshman fall, I began to appreciate it in a new light. Maybe hijab wasn’t about loss. Maybe the connections it forged were an act of creation.
“Why do you cover your hair?” someone asked.
(Because my mom wants me to. Because I want to. Because it alienates me from society, but maybe that’s not always unwelcome. Because I can see the light at the end of the tunnel - the myriad of purported benefits - and it’s so close I can taste it. Because I want to grow to love my hijab after a lifetime’s worth of hating it. Because I’m beginning to look back on that day, the summer before sixth grade, with appreciation instead of sorrow.)
“Ask me again later,” I responded, “I’m still figuring it out.”
I stayed in that state of limbo - half-hating my hijab and half-loving it - through the remainder of eighth grade. Conclusive, satisfactory answers about who I was in relation to my hijab were just a hair’s breadth away - I was so close to realizing my full truth, yet all the soul-searching in the world yielded nothing. Day after day, I yearned for the answers, itched for the complete knowledge of who I was, and was infuriatingly left hanging again and again. Only when post-middle school summer waxed into chilly autumn nights did the final pieces of the hijab puzzle come into focus.
Those long, inviting nights were often home to even longer house parties. On a particularly quiet evening, a brief smattering of family friends and I - all of us South Asian - were lounging in a basement living room with the lights dimmed low, when the conversation careened from casual to cuttingly personal.
One of my friends, dark-skinned and curly-haired, started us off. “Beauty standards suck,” she groaned from where she lay splayed out on the couch. “America is so racist.”
“As if South Asians aren’t racist too,” another friend piped up, impossibly dark eyes scrunched in exasperation.
“Everyone is racist,” the curly-haired friend conceded. “People are never satisfied. You straighten your hair? They want you to lighten your skin next. You wear American clothing? They push for skimpier crop tops and shorts next. You put on mascara? They’re asking for lipstick and cheek contour next. You give in to social pressure a little bit, and you’re sucked downstream ‘til your own reflection is unrecognizable.”
“Shit,” I said, bewildered at the bitterness in her tone, “who hurt you?”
“Would you like a list?” the dark-eyed friend asked joylessly. “I swear, some Americans will look at you and start mentally ticking boxes on a list. Brown skin? Minus ten points. Curly hair? Minus five points. Accent? Minus five points at least. Eccentric or exotic fashion sense? Weird name? Chubby body? Big nose? Political opinions? Minus, minus, minus - your worth just keeps lowering and lowering in their eyes.”
“Hijab, minus a thousand points,” I said. The other two sighed in agreement.
“I’m so lucky I’m not a hijabi,” one said, tugging appreciatively at her long ringlets of hair. “I think I would pass away. Or get killed. Maybe both. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Thank God my parents aren’t that conservative,” the other praised, hand clasped over her heart and eyes screwed shut. I laugh along with her dramatics, but my mind was reeling.
Even when the topic shifted from hijab to school and dating lives, I couldn’t stop mulling over the exchange. Did hijab really detract a thousand points from my worth? Did hijab really make me unlucky and pitiable? If wearing hijab was this awful curse that made me less than worthless in society’s eyes, why didn’t it feel that way? Why didn’t I mind it the way I used to? Why didn’t I seem to be affected by the torrential pull of social pressure the way my non-hijabi friends were?
I thought back to the summer before sixth grade, the day where everything changed, the day where I marked myself as an anomaly to the universe. And that was it, wasn’t it? I was so anomalous - so deliberately and fundamentally against what society expected of me - that I’d grown immune to what it wanted. Who could shame me for my face or body or accent when I dressed the way I did, proclaiming “I’m Muslim and different and proud of who I am” with every step I took? So what if I’m big-nosed and flat-chested - I’m a hijabi, you can already tell I don’t care about what society expects me to be like. Hijab had become a means for me to assert myself to the world. It announced to all who came near: “This is me, flaws and all. I don’t change for anyone, and live only for myself. If you like what you see here, join me - if what I represent is not for you, then leave.”
Once again, I found that my hijab spoke louder than my own voice ever could. It minimized the relevance of my appearance and multiplied the importance of my thoughts, mind, and personality instead. The superficial parts of me - like appearance and accent, which beauty standards endlessly clamored to change - no longer held weight. Gone were the days of constant insecurity and identitylessness that’d defined early middle school. Now, there was only apathy towards fitting in, disdain for the goose-chase of conformity: liberation.
Our conversation ended when my two friends passed out on the sticky leather couch - but I stayed up late into the night, thinking. I remembered the fleeting moments in public bathrooms, where other girls would compliment me on the color and styling of my hijab. I reflected on every hijabi woman I knew and felt blinded by the brilliance of their character and moral fortitude. I was surrounded by allies, I realized. The people around me, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, recognized what my hijab was trying to communicate - maybe even before I had. For years, I thought that the hijab’s sole duty was to say: “I am Muslim.” How far from the truth that had been. I knew better, now. The hijab said: “I’m different just like you, and you can find solidarity in me.” The hijab said: “I am my own person, and I will define myself however I see fit.” The hijab said: “I’m Muslim, but I am so much more, too.” I’ve carried that realization with me, close to my chest like a treasured amulet, ever since.
“Why do you cover your hair?” someone asks.
(I think back to the summer before sixth grade, and find nothing but joy in the memory. I finally know the answer.)
“To let people know who I am.”
