
“There are among us some that are righteous, and some the contrary: we follow divergent paths,” — Quran, the Unseen Beings, 29:11
I am not consistently safe, even by my words to God. Unlike my mother’s recent lurid love for Allah, swiftly prompting our home for a certain order and holier presence, I’m unsure of how things get any better by following orders and remembering faith in every other utterance of mine, mainly, to void anything unholy even if it cannot be seen. But that love for God and fear of unspeakable things seeps through chaotic sources of solace, echoes of trembling Quranic recitations swindling around the apartment always managing to sober me up or alert me to my senses of luck and faith. And in my mother’s eyes and in her spirit, she firmly believes that my luck and faith are dwindling with the unspeakable — demons and other unseen beings. Whether they are hanging over trees, or peering out after sunset prayers, or within portraits featuring eyes, she says, “you are with tha shaytaan.” pointing her chubby index finger right at me. Her eyes wide open: “My spirit knows.”
My days are not particularly ruined when my mother belts out, “READ YOUR DUAS, NAAYA,” every other morning as I approach the front door. And when I follow suit, quickly whispering to what sounds like sharp breaths, my Arabic supplications supposedly protect and seal me from evil and other crap that I won’t see coming. My day is to be blessed. I’ll still miss three or four busses on the Jane strip, trip, and run into unfriendly neighbours staring at me for some snitch shit to run back to my mother or general gossip. Bad luck. Nothing smoothly goes my way or makes me feel secure. Still, I say Alhamdulilah.
She has the natural sense of a mother’s intuition. She’s a tough, short woman who walks with her shoulders first and chin up. Whenever she talks, she puffs up with prideful purpose like a prophetic mission. And whenever I ask her “hooyo, what makes you say that?” in response to her declarations between homely order, procedure or straight up force-fed facts, she says, “I know because I pray. I know because I see.”
My mother and I don’t talk often. When we exchange words, it is with a direct purpose. Chores, religious duties, favours, paperwork. Anything outside of that is strictly cautionary advice that either spooks me or leaves me wayward into my tiring twenties trying to reclaim my youth. Her vision of my heaven-sent potential is all about protecting the good Muslim girl who whirls crepes and prepares shaa to eventually marry a good Muslim man.
“I don’t need you to be like those girls jus like how I don’t need my sons to be like tha gang’eestr.” my mother scowled. I was seventeen and she said that girls who wear revealing clothes want to be “eyed” and have lost the righteous path entirely. Or boys that loiter, wager and get obnoxiously high on the corner. To her, it was all the same if it wasn’t holy. But I, along with my brothers, wore our long Islamic dresses, attended our Quran classes and did everything to appease the atmosphere and all we have ever known against blaring, daily sirens, shootings and buzzing news of midnight stabbing across South Side Jane.
It was no secret how the neighbourhood kids lived on a backdrop of bad influence stemming from low-income situations and traditional big city displacements. The chances of going astray are high and convenient on Jane Streets’ corners. Swarms of men marking territories, fine-tuned misogynistic whistling and chirping, the surveillance state, the flicks, dabs, and slick pusha antics all harmonically becoming a natural order, examples of what not to grow into for my siblings and me. I couldn’t show my hair or my wrists and my brothers couldn’t get certain hairstyles that fade or twist in fear that my mother’s children would turn and grow into deviants rather than kids who may just want to express themselves in multitudes of Blackness. My mother instilled that booming music, drugs, sex will only bring us further from God and closer to the sweltering blazes of hellfire. She did everything to get us to feel made for heaven with sweet recitations from tiny stereos manufactured from Saudi and pens that readout verses for me like LeapFrog. We were needing and fiending to live up to heaven, far from beings we cannot see.
After coming home from elementary school, my mother reveals to me that she knows everything that I do and everywhere I go. She called it ‘the spirit’. At first, I thought she was playing, especially when she deepened her voice, widened her eyes and told my brothers and I that our jig was up. And from time to time, I revisit that daunting memory because my mother still makes hints of predictions surrounding my friends’ businesses, or my inner circle’s drama, or even when I started dating women, all during my late teens to twenties, she whispered timidly all respectively: “your friend has a bad, bad boyfriend,” “She will move back in with her hooya,” “Macaanto, can I ask you someting? Are you dating a woman?” And each instance, she was on the nose. My mother will no longer call it a spirit today, but she sees, hears, and feels her environments and the people within them. She assures, “yeah I have a feeling. Feeling. When am asking you the question then yes, you do this, you go that, you say yes. But I feel it. I feel it. God give me. God give me that feeling.”
I explore the lush pockets of trails and streams within the area that my family has lived in and out of for twenty-five years. At five, I walked ahead of my father and my brother on a walk through the Upwood Greenbelt, several trails including Black Creek, passed the retirement home’s open field, to eagerly stick my chubby hands in the grass to ravage for four-leaf clovers, shadowed by forestry. I insisted that they existed and that they were for me to collect — only to have lost a clover I believed to have four leaves. “Bullshit,” my brother told me.
These woods became a hallmark for escaping regular routines between Quran lessons, schoolwork and praying for simply enjoying the earth until my father told us we weren’t allowed in those parts anymore. “Drug dealers,” he said sternly to my brother and I at ages ten and twelve respectively. “Danger.”
All meeting at some point, the Upwood Greenbelt, Humber River and Black Creek trails were behind or below the massive residential houses that sport beiges and peachy bricks — far from bustling, major interactions. I have lived in the northwest end of Toronto nearly all my life and as a unit, my family and I always returned to our government housing slot whenever we abandoned it for my mother’s spur of the moment moves to Egypt, Somalia and UAE. In our returns to Upwood, the towering firetruck-red co-op building stuck out like an eye-sore and a thin-walled three-bedroom apartment full of hallmarks praising Allah is tucked within; here remains the same against the hurling street chaos and my mother’s pious pleas, and odes to what she knows.
“That Day, the dominion as of right and truth, shall be wholly for the Most Merciful: it will be a Day of dire difficulty for the Misbelievers,” — Quran, the Criterion, 25:26
My mother grimaces, “…when you grow up, guys, you going more out right? No one is staying with me so you have a distance, I can’t feel anything. When you come close to me, then I feel.” I start to ponder all the times she’s got up and left to another city without a word to us, or dropped us off at a neighbour’s, or the amount of silence between us each time. Hard truths are rooted and strained into stillness, re-emerging into a reclaimed youth; my mother sings a high-pitched tune to the apartment for the first time. Xasan Adan Samatar’s ballads from his prime soothes over the apartment’s soundscape as the strings pluck aggressively to his running vocals. In recent years, my mother had let go of her preaching voice and her spirit; the dim-lit apartment now ruffled in the sounds of my father’s snoring mid-day, or the late-night video game sound effects, or my mother herself humming to ivory ouds and brazen synth-waves off of cheap Yamahas that have supported the local Somali music scene since the civil war in 1991.
She’s selective with her clutching digs of truth, prediction and or feelings as she typically waits for her own concerns or for someone to ask her for specifics. Still, she outbursts in the middle of the night, “CLOSE THA WASHROOM DOORS,” every other night.
“Jinns stay everywhere ‘s the garbage place. Washrooms. The washrooms is good to close. If the washrooms open, sometimes they coming the kitchen. I hear the nose. Dosh dosh dosh. The spoon ‘n floor. Cause washrooms open. That’s why I say you to let’s close the washroom, guys.”
The unseen beings or jinns to many Muslims, including my mother, are real and truthful to them. Their origins predate Islam as many cultures, religions and belief systems try to grasp them to terms. In the Quran, they are described to be a “smokeless” “mixture of fire” beings invisible to the naked eye. They are known to be either Muslim or non-Muslim, good or evil, mirror human societies or have human companions that can be mediums to an extent or unknowingly present. Jinns are also known to meddle in human affairs and within Quranic text have eavesdropped on the angels working on the lowest heavens to pass along informative predictions to psychics. When I first learned of their existence, I thought, “was it a jinn’s voice telling her all along?” but she persists and persists that it is merely a feeling.
“Did I not tell you that I know the secrets of heaven and earth, and I know what ye reveal and what ye conceal?” — Quran, the Cow, 2:33
Jinns at its root definition is “to conceal” and many a time I felt that as hidden they were, they were causing a commotion in my home and life as major factors as to why I wasn’t as expressive or openly curious during my youth. All my mother wanted to do was to conceal me, affection, vulnerability and the hard truth with the way that I love, like loving women was wrong, sinful, and in everyone’s eyes: deviant.
I knew early on how to be still and silent about the things that truly moved me like homophobia and Islamophobia. Kept it pushing and never thought much of it until my mother asked me if I had started seeing women casually. Always like a whisper, like nobody else was supposed to hear that she was secretly at peace with just asking a lesbian momentarily if it’s true. Then, she’ll just be engaging in homophobic tirades with her neighbour during pride month, symbols, and the presence of cheering LGBT folks in their dazzling rainbows, shade, glitter skin, and drag.
I found serenity during my twenties with reclaiming myself as a lesbian despite my mother still clinging onto the hopes that I am bisexual so that I marry a man and the community whispers about me being a dyke can be laid to rest. So much serenity, at least, within myself that I started to revisit the creeks I fondly have memories in my neighbourhood. There are three main areas that lead to Black Creek, the main creek outside my home: Maple Leaf Drive, Queens Drive, and Blackstone. I walk home through either one of the first two ways to get home. Each path, excluding Blackstone, has a bridge over the gushing rivers. Maple Leaf Drive, however, has an open field prior to getting to the bridge unlike Queens Drive and its widespread road. I like to walk in the middle of Queens Drive when there are no cars passing by late at night. I do not rush myself. I do not feel myself going anywhere or fearing anything at all. Just roaming on a single, earthly plane between creeks I once confided in as a child for joyful memories and embracing whatever felt dear to me best. I have concealed this from my parents, turned off my phone and let them think I’m still running late on the bluelight bus, possibly fucking off and running up the shaytaan’s trail. My love and choices make me the unnatural Somali girl.
The twists and turns of the creeks that moat my home have brought me comfort as much as it has brought my mother worry. Rumours that jinns hang off trees jolt most Muslims at night as they walk under them. And the trees in my ends bend and curl in all directions so that their branches sporting strange and unfamiliar positions. But I have always felt safe besides the looming omens on my mother’s breath. I am surrounded by what I am not totally sure of. Do I have to take it up with God if this is the world He left me to?
Nature spots had my back. More than everyday walls and droning streets could ever hold me down. But matter dwindles, sort of like safety. The creeks used to be lush — but now and even during the summer, piles of garbage are more noticeable than the greenery. It’s hard to even see the trails the community kids and I used to make back in the early 2000’s. But that didn’t cease random moments witnessing over the course of ten years, white boys sneaking into the creek on our way home from school or hearing screams combined with laughter on random summer days. My father reminisces: “In the summertime and in the fall, before we didn’t have the securit’. But that time after 10 PM, people are bringing their drinks and their smoke. Sometimes their voices are loud.” Even with the new additions and security hires, my father witnessed small groups of three to four jumping over the fence and into the creek. Meanwhile, I’ve seen a single living room chair with its back facing the river and I felt something I couldn’t explain. I chose to leave it.
But what doesn’t help is that these trails connect with an unseen and unchecked deviance; the thrashing, leftover lawn chairs that hauntingly stack over branches, and cans scattered against the patchy grasses. The known crime planted onto earth and the unknown activities that take place triggers my superstition, instincts, feelings as well as my mother’s. But the truth in this matter does not exist outside of what has been seen.
“For we are going to bring down on the people of this township a Punishment from heaven, because they have been wickedly rebellious.” — Quran, the Spider, 29:34
On November 18, 2018 around 3 AM, I was sobering up from an energetic, drunken night at my friend’s crib in the east end. I dragged my feet towards my red building, my home and passing the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I heard hollering. A mix of men and women’s voices overlapping each other and there was no one out there. No lights besides the street lamps guarding over my remaining rationality.
“Shit, the fuck?” I murmured. I paused in my steps to focus my hearing. I peered over to my right, checked my surroundings and found nothing there. I turned to the smaller walkway to get to my lobby only to hear bursts of yelling, music, laughter and horrid screaming. A piercing shrill. I began to pick up the pace, tightened my grasp, shuffling and on the search for my keys as the soundscape of the late-night creek was solidifying deep in the pit of my stomach that truthfully and instinctively something odd and sinister was taking place.
“Always, I feel there. I don’t like to walk there. I feel heavy. I feel ‘maybe someone come in front of you, maybe someone come in front of you’ and I didn’t see anybody.” my mother shared, agreeing with me that there is a weird, hovering feeling and presence around those parts late at night. “But when I read the Quran, I don’t see anything. I don’t hear anything. I don’t feel anything.”
Shrilling sounds harbouring in the late nightly depths of Black Creek have since shaken me to dwell on my own intuitions. But what I heard is simply what I heard. That within itself disturbs me thoroughly because I am left to ask myself “what now?”
My mother tiredly sits in front of me, her eyes barely open. She’s tethered on her God-gifted instincts to support her predictions; times she knew how her reality unravels before her, lifted her, and transported her. She knows when she will run into a specific person without a schedule, when my friends get into some trouble without looking at my facial expressions for some signals, or when a presence hovers over. On the other side of unmounted truth, sometimes silence, the unspoken, and the unexplainable have been buried for comfort zones to remain intact for secure minds and better hearts. Maybe I’ll recite a little supplication for myself without my mother reminding me to do so. Feelings outside of sights and hearings deserve a fortune’s worth of validation. Still, I shudder with uncertainty when omens arise, and silence weighs in on things I don’t hold down as hard truths. Like the concrete roads over the dwindling greenery that surrounds my building, I can feel what I see. But whispers of another world within our own fly over my head. Even when jinns supposedly shake up our peace, possessing folks of all ages and overripen their vocal cords, sending herds of folk-telling women to keep generations protected. That is only what they are sure of. And I envy that.
A jinn supposedly approached me in a dream. He appeared as an unrecognizable man with skin smooth and rich like mahogany and a voice that booms existential weight. In the dream, I knew he was a jinn. Though I saw him as a man and I feel what I see, I certainly didn’t feel what I saw or dreamt. I asked him involuntarily without a lick of hesitation, “what religion do you practice?”
“Islam. I am a Muslim.”
And the conversation was over.
“Truth has now arrived, and Falsehood perished: for Falsehood is, by its nature, bound to perish.” — Quran, the Night Journey, 15:18
