Poetry Monday: Amal Rana

Pot Roast and Imperial Justifications

“how come you don’t cover your hair?”
my breath punches out of me in one big gasp
as I pretend not to hear her
“so how come you don’t cover your hair like all the women in your country?”
she asks me again
persistent, insistent, she is unaware that there is any problem with her question
I am slow to answer
trying to sort out what just happened

30 seconds ago
we were talking about our lives as immigrant women
as two South Asian women
she Indian
I Pakistani
we shared the same story of discovering the real underbelly of the Great Canadian Dream
the search for the better life that somehow deflated into disillusionment
she, was an art history professor back in India
my father, a mechanical engineer in Pakistan
she works for a janitorial company cleaning offices
my father could not even get a job in a gas station
too brown
too old
Mohammed was too Muslim sounding a name in a country
where everyone suddenly morphs into Moe to make it easier on those
white canadians who can’t be bothered with the correct pronunciations of our difficult foreign sounding names

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