Old Rivers, New Pathways

Mariam Pirbhai’s Isolated Incident begins in an angry mind. It’s a mind that is constricted—by hatred, by feelings of helplessness, by repeated phrases and ideas that seem alien to the mind, as if their acceptance isn’t an easy or natural fit. This is the mind of hate. This is the mind of patriarchy. This is the mind of white supremacy. It is through this violent world view that the novel presents its cataclysmic event: the vandalization of a local mosque in Toronto’s Rexdale neighbourhood. At the scene, it is clear that this is not an instance of silly teenage vandalism. The presence of a burnt Quran and a letter threatening a future attack are evidence of a targeted hate crime. Despite the evidence, the police and the local imam, Ishaq-bhai, treat it as an isolated incident (hence the novel’s title), choosing to take no further action towards preventing a future attack. The possibility of a future attack is not the only thing that challenges the classification of the event as an “isolated incident.” Through the narration of the individual experiences of those in the community following the attack, Isolated Incident demonstrates the way in which the Islamophobia that motivated the mosque attack manifests in everyday encounters and microaggressions that are supported by institutional attitudes and narratives.

Using the third-person, Isolated Incident is told through the alternating perspectives of five characters whose bonds with one another are transformed following the incident: Kashif, a second-generation Pakistani youth who finds purpose and community by volunteering at the local Islamic Community Center; Kauthar, Kashif’s mother, who struggles with the shame of her husband leaving her for a white Canadian woman while dealing with mouth cancer; Arubah, also of Pakistani descent, a hardworking university student who struggles to express her religious and political convictions; Arubah’s best friend, Marisol, an outspoken, queer, Lebanese-Guatemalan woman, whose confidence and intelligence Arubah admires; and Frank, a white police officer who, following the news that he is in remission from cancer, tries to find his place in a world that seems to have moved on without him.

Through the narration of the individual experiences of those in the community following the attack, Isolated Incident demonstrates the way in which the Islamophobia that motivated the mosque attack manifests in everyday encounters and microaggressions that are supported by institutional attitudes and narratives.

The inclusion of various perspectives has two crucial effects: firstly, it counters the narrow-mindedness of the white supremacist perspective that opens the narrative, the very real perspective that drives hate both in the novel and the real world. Secondly, it emphasizes the diversity of the diasporic Muslim experience. With the exception of Frank, all of these characters come from Muslim backgrounds but have distinct relationships with their cultural heritage. For example, while Arubah and Marisol are both second-generation Muslim women, Arubah is more traditional than her friend, choosing to wear the hijab and spend time with the older Muslim women at the community centre. At times, for Arubah, her friend’s more lax relationship with their shared heritage can create a seemingly unbridgeable void between the two. After Arubah is assaulted by a group of teenagers who attempt to pull off her hijab, she hesitates to tell Marisol, fearing that her friend would be unsympathetic: “She just assumed Marisol would be the type to say I told you so. She didn’t want to feel like this was a price she had to pay for wearing a hijab, bringing attention to herself.” Although Arubah’s judgment of her friend’s values can seem unfair, it is less proof of Arubah’s self-righteousness and is instead evidence of Arubah’s struggle to define her own relationship to her cultural heritage. Arubah fears that an adoption of too many Canadian customs will dishonour the memory of her father, who passed away when she was ten years old. As a result, she finds herself oversubscribing to ideals that create barriers in her relationships, not just with her friend but with others in the community as well. While the novel emphasizes the importance of Arubah maintaining her connection to her cultural heritage, it also shows how her ideas about what it means to honour her heritage and her past can be a roadblock to her growth. This tension, between one’s ingrained beliefs and their future growth, presents a challenge to all of the novel’s central characters. By overcoming it, Pirbhai suggests, they can begin to take action against the oppressive structures of settler-colonialism, Islamophobia, and heteropatriarchy in the Canadian setting.

Set in the contemporary Greater Toronto Area, the novel traces and maps the landscape, paying attention to the roads, waterways, and municipalities that are the veins and organs of southern Ontario. Pirbhai’s naming of familiar Toronto areas works to localize the experiences of her characters, creating ties between them and the physical landscape that makes up their home. Early in the novel, when Frank decides to mitigate his loneliness by taking a drive, he leaves his home in Etobicoke and exits onto the 427. As he drives, he notices an “attractive woman” whose “brown face and jet-black hair” remind Frank of Kashif, whom he had met earlier in the day. Frank assumes her ethnicity as a result of this recognition, and then imagines that the stranger “would speed past him to head west to Mississauga or Milton—the new Little Indias.” When the woman does not turn west, he again attempts to guess her route: “The woman stayed in her lane, which meant she was probably heading north or maybe even east, which was also populated by all kinds of minorities—Indian, Chinese, Caribbean, Iranian.” Frank’s desire to identify this stranger’s destination by her ties to certain communities reveals his complicated feelings towards the changing landscape of his “homeland.” For Frank, a white Canadian who feels increasingly uncertain of his place in his own life—at one point, considering the possibility that he may have to go into early retirement following his medical leave, he recalls that the force “was already overrun by a new wave of recruits”—identifying this woman’s destination is a way of placing and fixing the other, so as to delineate his place from theirs. While Frank’s ideas betray an uninterrogated prejudice, his observation of Toronto’s various ethnoburbs offers a view of what Pirbhai has previously identified as the “quintessentially migrant, hybrid space” of Toronto. Frank’s observations serve a double purpose, one of which is to reveal his own biases, and the other to undermine the notion that the home of nonwhite ethnic communities are necessarily located in a non-Canadian elsewhere.

Frank’s observations serve a double purpose, one of which is to reveal his own biases, and the other to undermine the notion that the home of nonwhite ethnic communities are necessarily located in a non-Canadian elsewhere.

Pirbhai, who is a scholar of postcolonialism and migration, examined these powerful ideas about geography and Canadian diasporic identity in a chapter for the 2015 edition of The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, titled “South Asian Canadian ‘Geographies of Voice’: Flagging New Critical Mappings.” There, she argued that the belief in an “impermeable division between Canada and its diasporic ‘elsewheres’” has resulted in a limited view of South Asian geographies, as well as South Asian identities. The maintenance of this division, through the production of narratives that attach the histories of Canada’s diasporas in locations outside of Canada, has the effect of reproducing “tired old multiculturalist paradigms predicated on a dominant Euro-Canadian mainstream and its marginalized racial and cultural others.” Not only does the perpetuation of these old paradigms displace nonwhite Canadians, but the false notion of their inherent alienness is also the source of racist hate. Pirbhai articulates this in Isolated Incident when Kashif, remembering the words “Go home” sprayed on the mosque walls, wonders: “[If] this place wasn’t home for someone like him, born at the Toronto General, then what was? He’d never set foot in Pakistan! Where was he supposed to go!”

Pirbhai’s attention to Toronto’s geography also functions to highlight the intersections of Canada’s various diasporas and Indigenous populations. This is initially made evident in the quotes included in the novel’s epigraph, which are excerpted from poems by the late Urdu poet and writer Fahima Riaz, and the nineteenth century Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson. These excerpts express a deep connection between individual and land, both evoking a river that the speaker is in harmonious communication with. These shared themes gesture to the shared concerns of the respective poets’ ethnic backgrounds. The figure of the river is also an important motif in Isolated Incident. In the novel, rivers symbolize sources of history, represent strength, and are the site of solidarity. Although Pirbhai references several rivers including Pakistan’s Ravi and Indus, as well as Guatemala’s San Juan, it is Ontario’s Grand River that takes on the most significance. For Frank, whose family has lived in the Kitchener area for many generations, the river is “where his memories ran deepest.” The river is also the site of a land dispute between the Six Nations of the Grand River and the settlers who have made their home there. It is also where, at the end of the novel, the various narrative voices converge: in the final scene, Kashif, Arubah, Marisol and Frank canoe along the river, where they are incidentally accompanied by the singing of a group taking a river walk. Pirbhai offers this final moment as an image of what solidarity between Canada’s various ethnic groups and minorities can look like. With each of the primary characters acting as representations of Muslim-Canadian, female, queer, and Euro-Canadian perspectives, and the river walk representing an Indigenous perspective, Pirbhai presents her final thesis: in the face of the deeply-rooted, systemic violence of settler-colonialism and heteropatriarchy, individual acts of communion and solidarity have the power to effect change and move towards a decolonial future. Just as a river has the power to shape the landscape and change the sea into which it pours, Pirbhai suggests, small actions can lead to significant change.