SEEKING FREEDOM: UNVEILED AGENCIES AND SUBJECTIVITIES

The killing of Aqsa Parvez was used to raise questions about the national belonging of Muslims, the status of Canadian society, and Canada’s official commitment to the policy of multiculturalism. As one article that explores the meaning of Aqsa Parvez’s murder puts it, the murder pointed to “a sign that that loathsome and barbaric practice of Muslim ‘honour killings’ is making its way from South Asia and the Middle East to Canada” (National Post 2007).

This fear that Muslim immigrants would import gender violence to Canada masked the reality of its occurrence in Canadian society, helping further per-petuate the image of a harmonious, gender- equal, and antiracist Canadian nation- state (Olwan 2013). As an article published in the conservative Cana-dian newspaper the National Post put it in an editorial posted a few days after Aqsa’s murder:

Since 9/11, Western societies have begun to closely scrutinize the toxic cul-tural practices of unassimilated Muslims in Europe and elsewhere. These practices include not only honour killings, but also anti- Semitism, support for terrorism, misogyny, forced veilings and forced marriages. Several high- profile conservative columnists—some of whom appear on these pages—

have been particularly vigorous about highlighting these pathologies. And so when a young Muslim girl gets killed by her father, there is a natural ten-dency to see it as an indicator that Canadian Muslims are about to follow the radicalized path of militant, unassimilated co- religionists in Paris, London, and Stockholm. (Kay 2007)

Painting a grim picture of Muslims as racists with terroristic desires, such articles reproduced the idea that Muslims constitute an internalized and

per-petual threat for Western nation- states. This article served to retrench the idea that Muslim communities in Canada are following a prescribed path toward

“radicalized” militancy and exclusion, a path that has already been paved by their fellow “co- religionists” who now live in and frequently terrorize major European cities.

Such editorials contributed to creating and sustaining a hostile environ-ment in which Muslim immigrants were viewed as risky investenviron-ments for the nation- state. It is this type of logic that, when taken to its full extent, casts the policy of multiculturalism as a failing or failed project. In this way, Aqsa’s story serves an internal and regulatory function. Here Aqsa’s death becomes a cautionary tale, a warning that the continued adoption of multiculturalism as a state policy ultimately harms racialized and immigrant women and, more significantly, damages an otherwise healthy and nonviolent Canadian society and state. Critiques of multiculturalism for its supposed tolerance toward bad cultural behavior is not new, and, as Sara R. Farris has shown in her impor-tant work on the rise of feminist nationalism in multicultural European states,

“gender equality is presented as a pillar of the western European nation, and the declaration of respect for women’s rights has been turned into a condition for settlement” (2017, 14).

In accounts of Aqsa’s murder, the failure of multiculturalism as a state policy is exemplified in its tolerance of migrants who adhere too rigidly to cultural practices such as veiling, which is considered harmful to girls and women and inhibiting of their right to equality and freedom.¹⁰ This is why various articles about Aqsa’s murder reduced Aqsa’s struggles with her family to veiling and her desire to dress in Western clothing. The hijab or head covering was referenced regularly to instill the point that Aqsa’s struggles were both cultural and religious. In one article, Aqsa’s murder was referred to as the “Canadian hijab case” (Reuters 2007). To further establish this murder as a case of culturalized violence, stories gathered from Aqsa’s friends at school emphasized her pursuit of life interests that clashed with her family’s religious identity and social norms. These personal testimo-nies played an instrumental role in constructing Aqsa’s life in a way that rendered it legible to mainstream Canadian society. Two of Aqsa’s friends, Dominiqua Holmes- Thompson (who was sixteen at the time of Aqsa’s mur-der) and Natalie Rance (who was fourteen at the time), for example, dis-cussed the fears that Aqsa experienced in her family life and attributed them to her desire to show off her beauty in ways that contradicted her family’s values. Their accounts led Michelle Henry and Bob Mitchell (2007) of the Star to surmise that “vivacious and outgoing, Parvez wanted to dress like a Western woman in tight- fitting clothes and show off her long, dark hair by

removing her hijab.” Reflected in mainstream media, the friends’ powerful words granted the Canadian public a privileged and arguably accurate view into Aqsa’s life.

These personal and intimate—and thus truthful—depictions of Aqsa were quickly elevated to the level of testimony. Their frequent citations evidence the public’s investment in a particular truth discourse that seizes on Muslim girls and women and their bodies as sites of contestation and resistance. As various scholars have argued, the power of testimony rests in its ability to find receptive audiences who can affirm the truths on which its claims are founded. For a testimony to be successful, it must be able to “find recognition from those others who will register and witness its truth” (Whitlock 2007, 79).

By narrating Aqsa’s life and her death in a way that corroborates prevailing assumptions about immigrant life in Canada in general, and Muslim girls in particular, the interviews with Aqsa’s friends accrued value and played a sig-nificant—if not singular—role in the “framing of death of Aqsa Parvez as a question of culture versus domestic violence, and as the exercise of freedom through ‘normal’ Western dress codes and behavior versus the imposition of the hijab” (Haque 2010, 86).

Accounts such as those discussed above exemplify the media’s preoccupa-tion with stories that emphasize individual struggles against communal odds and cultural backlash. The implied audience of these narratives is empathetic to stories of young women who make provocative and nonconformist choices that place them at odds with religious or cultural collectivities. More impor-tantly, these narratives appeal to audiences’ notions of agency and subjectiv-ity, concepts associated with the idea of unfettered or free choice. Through this lens, Aqsa’s subjectivity is articulated through its refusal to adhere to her family’s cultural expectations. Thus, Aqsa’s unveiling efforts enact a form of what Saba Mahmood refers to as “positive freedom” (2011, 11). In her study of the Egyptian women’s mosque movement, Mahmood argues that liberal theorists conceptualize freedom as the “absence of external obstacles to self- guided choice and action” (11). Through this paradigm, agency is actualized when a subject can challenge “cultural” dictates, when she makes choices that contradict practices considered traditional and thus abnormal. As Mahmood states, positive freedom “is understood as the capacity to realize an autono-mous will, one generally fashioned in accord with the dictates of ‘universal reason’ or ‘self- interest,’ and hence unencumbered by the weight of custom, transcendental will, and tradition” (11). Aqsa enacts this free will by refusing to fashion her body through veiling. In the eyes of Canadian society, nonveil-ing becomes the main act through which Aqsa becomes recognized as an agential, independent, and nonconforming citizen/subject.¹¹

At the heart of this configuration is the young migrant girl whose agency, while tentative, makes possible the reconstitution of migrant communities. In insisting on placing Aqsa’s bodily and sartorial choices in a framework that highlights her individuality, prevailing depictions of her life gesture toward Aqsa’s capacity to become like “us,” to be Canadian. This desire to belong is emphasized by Canadian media in order to show the disjuncture between Aqsa’s choice and her family’s condemnation. While this framing lauds Aqsa’s integration in Canadian society, it also signals the dangers entailed in this quest for young Muslim women whose bodies become the sites on which the battles between modernity and tradition are constantly articulated and fought. As Leti Volpp notes in her work on gender violence and cultural dif-ference, such ideas about Muslim migrants and Western society “presumes a host society of the West that is progressive, democratic, civilized, and femi-nist, in contrast to immigrants—in Europe and in the United States after 9/11, most especially Muslim immigrants—as backward, barbaric, primitive, and misogynist” (2011, 92).

The frequency and pervasiveness of such ideas is not particularly new or unusual. In the 2005 case of the “honor killing” of Hatun Sürücü, an immi-grant of Turkish origin, German media also underscored Hatun’s successful integration into German society by lauding her life choices and her ostensibly open expressions of sexuality and her embrace of freedom. This was evidenced in her dating of a German man, her navel piercing, and her modern and West-ernized clothing. Such acts signaled Hatun’s assimilation into German soci-ety and her escape from her culture, narratives that parallel the depictions of Aqsa’s integration and provide a rationale for her murder. In her detailed analysis of this coverage, Weber notes that “the figure of Sürücü exists in an uneasy space . . . where she has become ‘German’ but can only have done so by removing herself from Turkish culture and, by doing so, condemns herself to death” (2013, 65). Aqsa Parvez similarly occupies an uneasy space in mul-ticultural Canada, a space where her body is simultaneously familiarized and estranged, remembered and forgotten, always caught in between a competing set of discourses that she can neither confront in life nor contest in death.

Drawing on the emotionally charged and politically vexed investments and meanings embedded in the bodies of young girls and women, stories such as the ones discussed above have the potential to both separate and bind audiences across moral and ideological divides (Galusca 2012). These stories gain particular meaning and appeal when they are centered on young girls whose bodies become sites for imaginative—but not actual—integration fan-tasies and desires. Though invested in the bodily and the physical, their power rests in their ability to conceal the material conditions of gender violence and

the embrace of fantasies of freedom. In her analysis of the representation of girlhood and victimhood in Canadian media’s coverage of another so- called honor crime that claimed the lives of three young racialized women, known as the Shafia murders, Jiwani shows how dominant representations often portray young women like Aqsa by downplaying “the structural reality of their loca-tion as marginalized and minoritized [girls] within a dominant host society that values whiteness” (2014, 30). In other words, such narratives gain their traction and appeal due to their ability to underplay or conceal the hierarchi-cal values of worth and beauty embedded in a dominant society in which whiteness is prized.

Rather than an analysis of the systemic violence of migration and racism and the struggles that Aqsa may have encountered because of her cultural and racial differences, what is repeatedly emphasized is Aqsa’s desire to become one with Canadian society. As Jiwani states, Aqsa and girls like her capture our imaginations because “these young women showed the promise, if not the actuality, of being/becoming like us” (2014, 30). This powerful promise relies on its ability to foreclose troubling discursive, material, and historical gaps that have the potential to unsettle rescue visions embedded in multicultural integrative myths. Thus, while it is important to dislodge the various domi-nant discourses that make Aqsa’s life knowable to Canadian and international audiences, it is equally crucial that we attend to the type of work such knowl-edge performs when it crosses—or when it is made to cross—transnational borders and is converged with settler colonial logics.